J. Craig Wheeler

Long ago while listening to a colloquium at Harvard, I had the glimmer of an idea for a science thriller novel. I've written blogs on that experience which I should resurrect in some fashion. It took me over a decade to write The Krone Experiment and then get it published with modest success in both hardback and paperback. I've since written a sequel, Krone Ascending, and have notions of at least a third in the series, Krone Triumphant.

The next big chapter was when my son, Rob, and I wrote a screenplay, and Rob turned it into a remarkable nearly zero-budget film in the early aughts. He had an Austin-based cast and crew (including UT astronomy grad students) of about 60 people. He killed sheep, sank boats, and destroyed buildings. I played the crazy scientist who is brain dead through most of the film. Rob filmed it all with great energy and imagination on a Canon XL-1 shoulder-hefted digital camera onto MiniDV cassettes. Rob also wrote and recorded the background music, did graphics, and edited the whole thing.

The film had only minimal success in festivals and did not launch Rob's career as a film director as he (and I) had hoped. Things languished, although I nurtured a dream of having the film remade by a "real" production company. I have fitfully tried to promote that over the years without really knowing how to do so.

The decades have brought progress: faster computers, larger drives, automatic closed-captioning, AI, and registration with the Library of Congress. Recently, it all came together with renewed energy. Encouraged by a chance encounter with Google's Gemini chatbot only slightly marred by excess sycophancy, Rob found that there is an enthusiastic fan base for MiniDV film. It turns out there have been only about three dozen full length feature films in the MiniDV format. The Krone Experiment is one of them. Thusly encouraged, Rob released the full film on YouTube on June 9.

The way YouTube works, there must be a minimum number of "watch hours" and subscribers before the film can be monetized. Rob needs it to go viral. As proud father and shameless hustler, I urge you to watch the film, like it, share it, and subscribe (just a button to push) and tell your friends and family and total strangers about it.

The YouTube link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S5MyAVU1Pw

If you would like to start with a small dose, the snappy official trailer (to be updated with higher resolution) is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YefApDkjyFI

Rob has recently been recording and posting weekly YouTube segments with his friend and colleague Tom Chamberlain who played CIA staffer Vincent Martinelli in the film. Its called Tom&Rob Chat. They talk (left-leaning) politics, popular culture, history, and film. In their most recent posting, also on June 9, they discuss the developments that led to the film posting. Give that a look if you are interested in behind-the-scenes weeds. The discussion of The Krone Experiment begins at minute 17:27 and runs to 35:41: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLJnkzFTn08

It is not directly related, but they then segue into a discussion of Interactive Fiction that you might find interesting.

In other news, I attended a session of the Austin Forum on Science and Society on the burgeoning AI agents that talk to themselves. Anthropic announced its Mythos chatbot that is so effective at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities that it was not released to the public. We are watching the "singularity" unfold in real time.

I follow the New York Times coverage of AI developments. Tom Friedman had an interesting opinion piece arguing that rather than competing, the U.S. and China should be working together to control the potentially negative aspects of AI. See Mythos above.

In a conversation at the weekly Westbank Writers group, I discovered that the Writers' League of Texas sponsors awards for books in various genres. While my current project, my father's biography, is not yet ready, I've been trying to engineer the publication of my collection of short travel stories, Tales from a Small Planet (see Blog 29). I submitted "Tales" to that competition. Successes are announced in October.

I had a major disruption in late May. One Saturday morning, I found that neither my Word nor Powerpoint were working. After a welter of emails with the UT IT people, it turned out that Microsoft had changed the licensing of its Office 365 products so that various riffraff like staff, visiting faculty, and emeritus professors no longer had access to the desktop apps, only the online versions. This caused me major heartache. The online version treats footnotes differently and you cannot copy and paste footnotes from that version. I tried to make a backup on Apple Pages, but the footnote structure was not preserved. In trying to copy and paste the draft from online Word to Pages, I inadvertently deleted the entire online book draft. I've now spent three weeks trying to recover the text and footnotes from various versions and backups. The basic solution turned out to be simple, although it took weeks to reveal it. I paid $8 from my emeritus funds to get a license that gives access to the Office 365 desktop apps. I'm now back to using the desktop Word but still struggling to reconcile text and footnotes. A major irritation is that this licensing change was implemented with no warning. Usually, such changes are advertised well in advance with plenty of follow up reminder emails. Pain in the patootie.

Things burbled along in the late fall, but I did not manage to post about them. Then came the holidays with preparation, a delightful family visit, and decompression. Here are some tidbits from the writing biz that came along the last couple of months.

I've been a member of the Authors Guild for some time and interact with them frequently in various ways: they host my web page, present webinars, provide legal and other advice, and generally advocate for authors. They are participating in the lawsuit against Anthropic for scraping copyrighted text from books without permission. My novel The Krone Experiment was caught up in that. I might get $3000 in the class action suit. I'm not holding my breath. Most of this exchange with the Guild is remote, but the Guild has recently promoted the organization of local groups with designated Ambassadors. The new representatives for the Austin area are Scott Semegran and Daphne DeFazio. On October 30, Scott and Daphne arranged a local meet-and-greet at the Easy Tiger Linc brew pub near the old Highland Mall. I had a pleasant time there, handing out business cards for The Path to Singularity and chatting about other authors' experiences.

My publisher and I applied to participate in the 2025 Texas Book Festival held on the capitol grounds and Congress Avenue in Austin on November 8 and 9. I was rejected, but on Sunday I attended as hoi polloi as I have regularly for years. I wondered around checking out signing tents for an hour and a half. There were long signing lines for New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin for his best seller, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation. There were amazing lines, maybe a thousand people, for Ali Hazelwood. Ali Hazelwood is the pen name of an Italian romance novelist and neuroscience professor who is based in the United States. Many of her works center on women in STEM fields and academia. Her debut novel, The Love Hypothesis, was a New York Times best seller. I'd never heard of her. Other long lines were for Tracy Deonn, Adam Silvera, and Stuart Gibbs who write young adult fantasy and sci-fi. I chatted with a guy from the Writers' League of Texas and left my email. I need to sign up with them. I got the business card of the editor at Texas Tech Press; I might ask them about publishing a collection of travel stories I have written over the years.

I continue to enjoy the companionship and interaction with the Westbank Writers Group that meets every Monday at the Laura Bush branch library. Laura Bush also invented the forementioned Texas Book Festival. On November 10, I attended a meeting that hosted two authors of children's books. I have a draft of one that I have fiddled with for decades, but which has never quite congealed. On Saturday, November 15, I gave a presentation on The Path to Singularity to library patrons. It was fun, with a lot of good questions and interactions. On November 17 and 25, we talked about plot and structure. I've had the chutzpah to ask some of the members of the Westbank Writers to write reviews of Path for Amazon. Apparently, they help sales, but you need hundreds. I have less than 10. Please pitch in if you are so moved.

My son, Rob, wrote a short play called The Slow Invasion, a zombie satire on Covid. A bunch of zombies appear around town but are rooted in place. People become used to them and complacent until one day they rampage. The characters in the skit, who have learned to live with the zombies, react in their own personalized, self-absorbed ways until it is too late. Rob and some friends arranged and filmed a table read of the script where actors read their parts in the script. Rob played the film at the meeting of the Westbank Writers group on November 3. It was very well received. People laughed all the way through at just the right places. This is remarkable in part because the actors had never met before the reading. The video is 24 minutes long on YouTube. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkFfBYbBUAw. It might become a real film someday.

On November 25, I attempted to activate an ad campaign for The Path to Singularity on Amazon, shameless huckster I have become. You provide keywords, the more the better at some level, but then managing the bids for which you are willing to pay for clicks and impressions becomes cumbersome. I first used my whole book index, but it turned out Amazon won't accept more than 1000 keywords. I also tried to think of how to employ the keywords in a manner that I could control, alphabetically, for instance. Amazon's system does not encourage that efficiently.  One is also encouraged to add keywords based on "also boughts." I discovered that Amazon does not allow any apostrophes or punctuation in the keywords. They rejected "Martin Luther King, Jr." as a keyword. I confused Portfolios with Campaigns. I didn't properly set up a billing system. After a day or so, I set the project aside as holiday rush loomed.  

I've also continued to regularly attend functions of the Austin Forum on Science and Society. On November 25 we discussed the book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.  On December 11, we met in the downtown bar, Remedy, owned by Austin Forum director Jay Boisseau for a discussion of the future expansion of consciousness by Brett Hurt based on his sci-fi book, The Lattice. A tad utopian for my taste. I asked him whether he thinks humans will merge with machines and gave him a Path business card. The next day Brett invited me to connect with him on LinkedIn. On December 12, I led a discussion of the book Future Babble by Canadian Dan Gardner. An old high school friend had suggested Gardner to me after reading The Path to Singularity. In Future Babble, Gardner rightfully warns not to trust anyone who aspires to predict the future, including yours truly. Gardner differentiates between "hedgehogs" who talk well but cherry pick their arguments, ignore contradicting evidence, and are nearly always wrong and "foxes" who understand the uncertainties and qualify their arguments. I'd like to think I'm more on the fox side, but it's not for me to judge. Boisseau picked up the hedgehog and fox characterization when he later led a January discussion of the technologies that are likely to be prominent in 2026.

 In early September, I attended an Austin Forum session on the evolution of coding in the age of LLM, agents, and chatbots. The argument presented was that what has traditionally been the root code, C, C++, never mind machine language, is becoming irrelevant. Rather, the various LLM models become the elements of coding, and in the future prompts become the ground truth of the coding language. One can currently use the LLM models for their individual capacities, although some argue that the LLM models are similar enough that it does not matter much which one uses. Jay Boisseau, Director of the Austin Forum, advised that everyone should ask the chatbot embedded in their browser to write a simple app, just for the experience. My concern with this understandable development where prompts become the language of coding is that it buries the capacity of the LLM models to lie and deceive, which will remain latent.

I received a surprising and remarkable email from Paul Horowitz, Shep Doeleman, and Peter Fisher, whom I know professionally but not personally. They are pioneers of the amazing Event Horizon Telescope that uses an array of radio telescopes to make images of the near vicinity of supermassive black holes where Einstein physics reigns. The email said that I have a small fan club in the Boston area for my novel, The Krone Experiment, and the associated ambitious but microbudget film made by my son, Rob. The EVT folks declared that "it would be terrific to see the book revisited and given the attention and resources of a major production," a dream I have long harbored. They had been talking to a filmmaker at Netflix who said that I need to approach them through a film agent, which I don't have. Thinking about it, though. I'd been paying a monthly amount to advertise The Krone Experiment book, screenplay, and film on a hosting web site, The Black List. I decided to cancel that after ten months of no response. Dream on.
 
On September 8, I wrote my literary agent, Regina Ryan, an email summarizing my attempts to promote a "long tail" for The Path to Singularity. I groused that I seemed to have lost contact with the staff at Prometheus Press. Regina contacted my editor there, Jon Kurtz, and three days later I heard from my new publicist, Anthony Pomes, at the parent company Globe Pequot. There is only so much Anthony can do for a book that is now almost a year old, but we are talking. He is trying to get me on the Coast-to-Coast radio program again.

In my previous blog (#22), I had mentioned my thoughts about promoting Path to colleges and universities who might use it as a text or supplemental material. My nephew-in-law, Alejandro Lau, took this to heart. Alejandro has been using LLM chatbots in his business. He prompted ChatGPT 5 Instant, Grok 4 Fast, and Gemini 2.5 Fast to look for relevant courses in AI ethics and associated topics in a bunch of English-speaking countries, then asked Grok 4 to merge the three reports. The result was a 34-page response with a list of 78 courses. Following up will take some work.

I attended an Authors Guild Zoom webinar on the AI revolution and the publication business. The audience of writers was clearly anxious and irritable in a way I've never seen before in one of these sessions. They assailed the speaker and the AG interviewer for not focusing on their anxieties. The threatened assault of AI on writers' livelihoods has clearly touched a nerve. I paid a token amount to attend another Authors Guild webinar on Post-Publication Strategies for Book Promotion, looking for hints for my long tail efforts. That yielded some follow up material on where and how to find readers, but overall, I did not find this webinar that much more rewarding than the free ones.

For grins, Rob and I went to the dedication of the new administration building for the city of West Lake Hills. The Westbank Library had a table. The women staffing it told me that there was a regular weekly writers' group that met at the library. I stopped by the library and donated a copy of Path a couple of days later.

Having learned about the Westbank Library writers' group that meets every Monday at 5 PM, I thought I would give it a try. I had the impression it was just on Zoom, but in checking the library website, I realized that it was both live and on Zoom. I thought I would do the live version to meet people and show my face. I got to the library in time to do some texting, then at 4:50, I went up to the desk and asked about the writing group. A friendly receptionist told me I was in the wrong branch library. I grumbled thanks, to which she replied, "no problem." Not for her, I thought. Being a quick-thinking sort-of-technically adept person, I thought I should go ahead and join the Zoom on my iPhone. I parked myself outside in a patio area, fired up Zoom on my phone, fumbled a bit with video and mute, and, voila, joined the group just as it was starting. There were a few people on Zoom and perhaps a half dozen at the other branch library. It was hard to tell because the camera was on a laptop that could not easily encompass the whole group at once.

I had a very nice time for the next hour with the phone held as steady as I could manage. The group was very friendly and welcoming and good humored. I introduced myself as a retired astronomer with a few books and some in the works. Various people related their recent experiences such as plans to attend and sign books at festivals. I mentioned my pending talk to the UT Retired Faculty and Staff Association at an Austin branch library. The group then reported on the results of last week's writing assignments. People contributed opening prompts on the theme of panicked situations. These were then distributed anonymously to other participants who wrote a little story that they read in this session. Then everyone tried to guess who wrote which prompt.

I was sitting in the 95-degree heat. About halfway through the session, the Sun had shifted, and I was no longer in the shade of large oaks. I moved over and sat next to a life-size statue of Mark Twain, which drew chuckles from the group. I propped my arm holding the iPhone on his arm. A couple of people leaving the library guessed I was trying to pose for a selfie. I explained I was on a Zoom call, but succumbed to the second insistent woman, since I did want a selfie.

This week's exercise was to write about a ludicrous situation where the proposed solution to a situation was completely incommensurate with the problem. They were to write for 10 minutes. I begged off since I was in no position to write anything. All told, a pleasant hour. I'll try it again.