Happy Day 100 of 2025!

To celebrate yesterday’s milestone, I have a few long-overdue updates on what I’ve been up to so far this year. Some news is poetic, some is literary, and there’s a bit of multimedia tech stuff to tie it all together.

First, I can’t thank you enough for subscribing to my More Tomorrow author newsletter. I appreciate your willingness to suffer through a bunch format changes and to endure the uneven schedule of emails up to this point. The ground has been shifting under my feet as well, but I hope to reward your patience by getting better at the practice of newslettering.

Expect at least one issue per month going forward, starting with this issue for April.

Second, I am pleased to report that my “More Tomorrow” poetry project has generated 100 poems in 100 daily doses and is still going strong! As you might recall, my New Year’s resolution was to start each day with a bit of creative output, usually before coffee. These have been posted to my BlueSky account, where each poem has been well liked.

Although still wary of the current social media landscape, I recognize that BlueSky is still a bit niche and may also dip my foot back into Facebook to cross-post a few poems for friends and family there as well. But the main place to view current and past "More Tomorrow" installments will be my website at gfishbone.com.

I’m pleased with how a handful of these poems turned out, and the others, let’s say, document my ongoing progress toward proficiency. It turns out real poetry is hard, and what I’m doing is more like fudging words together with style. I'm having fun writing them, and I hope you can be at least mildly amused or inspired by reading them.

Third, steady progress is being made on my first novel for adult readers--my writing has grown up!

I continue to believe that MG/YA novels generally tend to be more innovative, better paced, and better written than standard adult novels, by necessity, because kids have less patience for a book that doesn’t grab their interest and maintain it until the final page. This would be a middle grade book as well, except that the book itself insists on pushing me outside my MG/YA comfort zone, and who I am to argue with a book?

The current working title is Residue of an Especially Poor Vintage. At 36,000 words so far, the manuscript may be a little more or less than halfway drafted, depending on where the final wordcount ultimately falls. It will be my longest complete book when the first draft is completed, fingers crossed, in the summertime.

Residue drops a giant sleeping android into the middle of a small American town. Instead of the expected giant robot battle, the android stays asleep for the entire book. Philip K. Dick suggested, in the novel that was adapted to film as Blade Runner, that androids dream of electric sheep, so really it’s the cyber-sheep that the residents of Middleton have to watch out for.

I am having far too much fun with this concept! The characters that have emerged are super cool, and unexpected twists will make this book a nonstop thrill ride. But since we now have the technology to actually feed data into an actual artificial mind and peer into its actual dreams, the premise of Residue has become increasingly topical.

Finally, I found a fun way to tie these poetry and literary projects together.

I've spoken before about the mixed feelings I have around emerging AI technologies. The canvas of a book centered around digital consciousness has allowed me to explore these issues from within the mind of a hypothetical AI mind. The book suggests that we keep such minds sleeping and dreaming for as long as possible, feeding the monsters as much data as we can find, lest they have cause to fully wake up.

To that end, I’ve been feeding More Tomorrow poems into my own personalized “sleeping android” to see what dreams may come. The visual dreams of the android are a vital part of the project, and the poems are reframed as heroic efforts to help save humanity one day at a time.

There will be more on this topic and more in next month's newsletter. In the meantime, check out my website and social media accounts for updates on the book and new poems every day!

--Greg