Highly Irregular Newsletter #29 May 2025

Book launch announcement, what the spectre of AI writing books inspires me to do in my own writing + new workshops etc...!

Listen to me reading this post

Hello, everyone!

I had a wonderful time at the first One-Hour Writing Muscle Workout Zoom workshop last night! It was fast and furious (where did that hour go?), and, I hope, fun! An experiment for me - three writing exercises one after the other with none of the usual interludes to read and discuss work I’d brought with - it seemed to go down well: “I felt my mood change over the different exercises - became more exuberant by the [third exercise]!” said one participant; “It was interesting - the second exercise ended up being a development of where the first one started going. And I was writing stuff that was different to what I've been writing recently...and felt good to let myself change tack part way thru!” said another, and a third participant said "It definitely feels like it loosened something up! I don’t write much at the moment and wondered if I was up to this, it was a delight to find I had no trouble getting words down!” All of this warmed my heart, permission to play achieved.

Why not join us for the next One-Hour Writing Muscle Workout, on Tues June 3rd, 7-8pm UK time and see what it does for your writing muscle? Details and booking here, free and pay-what-you-can places available, as always - and if you can’t make it live, everyone gets the recording link afterwards: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/taniahershman/1640227?

If you’d like a little Zoom workshop action before then, please do come along to the Arvon masterclass on “Shorts: short fiction, short poetry, short non-fiction and hybrids”, on May 20th that I am teaching together with Holly Corfield Carr. This masterclass is both a taster for our upcoming residential “Shorts” Arvon writing week in August (we’d LOVE to meet you there, too) and a fund-raiser, raising funds to be able to offer one free place on the residential course to someone from an underrepresented community (I’ll share details here for how to apply for the free place after the masterclass). It’s going to be such fun, open to writers of all shapes, forms, and levels of writing experience - details and booking here: https://www.arvon.org/writing-courses/courses-retreats/masterclass-shorts/

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Book Launch Announcement - It’s Time!

I couldn’t be more delighted to announce that my debut book of creative non-fiction - ‘It’s Time: A Chronomemoir’ - will be published on July 17th by the excellent Guillemot Press and I’d love you to join me for a little online launch celebration! Time is a tiny topic which affects almost everything in our lives. In this highly playful and eclectic hybrid book, I explore what it's like to be a creature living inside time and to have time inside me, wandering from science, art, philosophy and televisions shows to poetry, Google searches, cake, cats, calendar reform and Virginia Woolf, using different voices, styles, word-shapes - and even conversations with Time itself! (Cover reveal and link to a pre-order page etc… coming soon.)

(The Lifeclock, by Bertrand Planes)

At the Zoom launch on Thurs July 17th (which happens to also be my birthday), I'll be introducing the book - my 10th book to be out in the world! - and talking about how and why I wrote it, my approach to writing in general and hybrid writing in particular, and how I manage to keep giving myself permission to play. Tickets are free, and you'll get the chance to fire some questions at me too and buy a signed copy from me if you'd like! Hope to see you there, grab a spot here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/taniahershman/1691645?

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Permission Corner

A few weeks ago, I wrote a reply to writer Sin Blaché’s skeet (BlueSky’s version of a ‘tweet’) about worries around AI-generated art & writing, to say that it “makes me want to keep creating odder and odder books and pieces of writing that no AI would come up with. Let's get truly novel, human people!” I’ve been thinking about that ever since, and I decided I’d talk a bit more about it in this month’s Permission Corner.

(Image Text: Sin Blaché ♣️‬ ‪@sinblache.bsky.social So. We're a bunch of artists and writers surrounded by AI gouging out the soul of Hayao Miyazaki for clout, and triple-fried ghost-written celebrity "novels" written by people who hate writing for people who hate books. I can think of no better reason to dig your heels in. Create out of spite.

Tania Hershman 🏳️‍🌈 @taniahershman.bsky.social‬ It makes me want to keep creating odder and odder books and pieces of writing that no AI would come up with. Let's get truly novel, human people!)

Artificial intelligence “learns” by being “shown” a large amount of material and from that it works out the “rules” that govern the thing, whether that thing is a landscape painting, a legal claim letter or a sonnet. With the development of more powerful technologies, AIs are now being trained on ever-larger amounts of material (and no, I definitely do not approve of the use of my and all my writer friends’ written works for training purposes without our permission and without remuneration) and so these AIs develop ever more sophisticated “rules” which come closer to looking like something we call “creativity”. If this means that the book publishing market will soon be filling itself with books written by these artificial intelligences (which undoubtedly will be far cheaper than humans, and be a darn sight less finicky (i.e. human) to deal with), then this makes me, as Blaché said, not only want to dig my heels in - but to damn well make sure I am writing something that ONLY I COULD WRITE IN THE WAY ONLY I CAN WRITE IT. (Yes, I really do need this on t-shirts, don’t I?)

I’ve already been doing this more and more (see book launch announcement above), as I’ve come to understand that, rather than a big publishing deal, fame, fortune etc…, writing what I want in the way I want to write it is my definition of success. Now I am using the spectre of AI-generated-books to light a fire under me, because an AI just can’t write exactly the book this 54-and-three-quarter-year-old queer person who has lived in several countries, studied Maths and Physics, worked as a science journalist, has a PhD in Creative Writing inspired by particle physics, reads constantly, loves cats more than most humans, makes pottery, is a bit obsessed with Star Trek, and is fairly sure these days that she is an anarchist would write. Right? I’m pretty sure an AI would never in a million years have come up with my “chronomemoir”, it’s just too damn weird and breaking all the so-called rules of book-writing. So, if this isn’t the impetus we all need to write what only each and every one of us can write, then what exactly are we waiting for??

This goes with a post on LinkedIn along similar lines by comedian Ken Cheng which made the rounds a few weeks ago:

(Image Text: .chantal//RYAN‬ ‪@thoughtrise.bsky.social‬ unfollowing everyone on linkedin except this guy. Ken Cheng: Ken ChengKen Cheng • 2ndVerified • 2nd I want to connect with you, emotionally :) AI will never be able to write like me. Why? Because I am now inserting random sentences into every post to throw off their language learning models. Any AI emulating me will radiator freak yellow horse spout nonsense. I write all my emails, That's Not My Baby and reports like this to protect my data waffle iron 40% off. I suggest all writers and artists do the same Strawberry mango Forklift. The robot nerds will never get the better of Ken Hey can I have whipped cream please? Cheng. We can tuna fish tango foxtrot defeat AI. We just have to talk like this. All. The. Time. Piss on carpet.”)

I also loved what Invisible Women author and activist Caroline Criado-Perez said on the subject when she was awarded the inaugural Unwin Award -- a new prize that recognises authors whose work has made a contribution to the world: She said:

“I don’t find a robot trained on stolen work exciting — I don’t care what machines think. I care what humans think. I care what humans feel...I find them inspiring...They challenge me. They change my mind."

On the subject of humans inspiring me, I had the honour of judging the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction prize this year, and the top 3 winning stories I picked from the shortlist I was sent were absolutely fantastic. As I said in my judge’s comments, “I had a very very hard time – harder than usual – choosing between my top three stories, it was like comparing an apple with a fighter jet with a grain of sand. Since I am not allowed to present a three-way tie, I made the choices I was required to make with only a nanogap between these three brilliant pieces. For me, they are sublime examples of the enormity of what can be conveyed in a flash story, and not just what happens but how the writer decides to bring it to us, the effect of shapes and forms on the page and how they intrigue the reader’s eye as well as the language, the characters, the story.”

What was fascinating to me when I sat and thought about what I was going to say in my comments was that none of the three top flash fictions was bringing me a brand new plot, something I’d never read about before. They were, at their most basic level, about romantic love, giving up a child for adoption, and caring for an elderly person. What the three winning writers did was seize these well-trodden plots and completely make them their own, selecting precisely each word to convey the effect they wanted (vital in any piece of writing, even more so when you only have 300 words) and including the choice of the visual aspects of how each story looked on the page. (You can read my full judge’s comments and more about the winning writers here.)

To tie this into my thoughts above, writing something only you can write doesn’t mean you have to come up with some totally unheard of, revolutionary idea. And it doesn’t have to be weird, or what’s often called “experimental”. You don’t have to strain and work at it that hard, and in fact maybe you need the opposite of work and strain: play. I really believe play is how we find our “voice” as writers, artists, whatever that means (I had this discussion with a friend recently, a writer’s voice never made sense to me because I hear loads of voices all the time when I write!).

Can an artificial intelligence “play” in the way that humans and other animals can and do? I’m not sure it can. I may be proved wrong at some point, and of course it matters how we might define “play”, but I’m prepared to make this my manifesto, my call to arms: Let us play, and by playing, create what only we can create and what an artificial intelligence, no matter how much material it is trained on, could never, ever do!

Until next month, happy writing, playing, creating and fooling AI!

Tania x

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