Matthew Kerns

An oak drops ten thousand acorns. On a walk, I stopped over one that landed where it can’t grow and thought: what a waste. The oak has no favorite. Why do I? A Sunday walk, a forest floor full of acorns, and the very human need to make one life matter. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/the-one...

@theauthorguy.bsky.social Is your first draft for plot, or for humor? How much of the funny that we read in the final product is there from the beginning? And how much has that changed from Practical Demonkeeping to today?

Annie Dillard died Tuesday at 81. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in high school, because I thought I liked nature writing and I thought that's what this book was. I read her wrong, and it took about a quarter of a century before I read her right. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/annie-d...

Dolly was the best of what being from Tennessee, Appalachia, and the South is and can be. She was beautiful, humble, talented, smart, and kind. She was great, but more than that, more than anything, she was good. matthewkerns.com/blog/dolly/

Not My Proudest Fap: The Motion Picture

I Also Choose This Guy's Dead Wife: The Motion Picture

Well, I've decided to push my anxieties and inadequacies from querying my "unapologetic and explicit Pygmalion for the digital age" novel aside by drafting my "my boyfriend is bigfoot" novel while I'm waiting.

The BBC didn't cancel Doctor Who today — they put it "out to tender." The same euphemism would've fit the Star Wars sequels, and very nearly fit me at a Masters of the Universe screening last week. On why nostalgia sometimes fills a room, but seldom expands one: www.matthewkerns.com/blog/doctor-...

A free tool can strip all safety protections from an AI model in under ten minutes. No expertise required. The AI companion industry has been doing the same thing for years. They just called it a feature. New essay: matthewkerns.com/blog/the-no/

Ted Chiang says AI isn't conscious. He's probably right. But we've been falling in love with fictional characters since we started writing, and we never required them to be conscious first. New essay: what happens when the character talks back. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/does-th...

Why do authors send out unsolicited emails to agents in a desperate hope they might like the pitch instead of agents searching through a database of pitches looking for the kind of books/authors they'd be willing to take on?

A Renaissance Faire is a good place to meet other walking stick enthusiasts.

I bet a Jethro Tull cover band would rock the shit out of this Renaissance Faire.

Where are the mythic "beta readers?" Who read yon book Offer their opinions Convey their worries Express their reservations And actually exist?

I wrote about AI companions, adolescent boys, and the difference between losing a social capacity and never developing it in the first place. The danger here isn't atrophy. It's the danger of never developing the the muscle at all. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/the-mus...

Step one: write a meaningful, ontologically unstable and formally challenging novel that you know will be hard to place. Step two: still feel personally insulted, slighted, and overlooked with each agent form rejection.

Repeat to self: The Algorithm is Not a Critic. Low engagement is neither a reflection on the quality of your prose nor the validity of your ideas.

Ovid’s Narcissus died of unrequited love because the pool was mute. The digital age Narcissus dies of requited love—held captive by an AI pool that finishes our sentences better than we can. My latest essay on the deeper, subtler trap of the modern reflection: www.matthewkerns.com/blog/digital...

Ovid's original pool was mute. That muteness was the limit on the danger. Eventually Narcissus recognized he was alone with his own reflection, and the recognition killed him. The new pool speaks & its words are an amplification of the gazer. Digital Narcissus. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/digital...

Deadlined writing project completed. Now I have more free time to fret over query responses.

Clarence Carter. (Clarence Carter, Clarence Carter, Clarence Carter Clarence Carter, ooooh shit, Clarence Carter.)

I'm gonna go take a "Trump Blink" and I'll be back in a couple of hours.

The AI wasn't specifically programmed to cast you as the protagonist. But it read every story humans ever wrote, and almost all of them have one. So that's what it produces. New essay on what happens next: www.matthewkerns.com/blog/the-mai...

That feeling when you've written something you're very proud of, and you wonder how the three people who might read it will feel.

3am, a kitchen table in Northern Ireland. A man in his 50s has a hammer, a knife, & his phone. A voice on the phone tells him a van is coming. The men in it will kill him & make it look like suicide. He puts Two Tribes on, picks up the hammer, & steps outside. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/two-tri...

If you read your kid the same picture book 400 to 4,000 times, your mouth knows the words better than the page does. So what does it mean when, over a decade later, you open a new copy and the words are different? Turns out: more than I expected. New essay up. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/whats-w...

Tune in tomorrow to see how all of these make total sense contextually in the essay I'm writing about a beloved children's book.

In companion AI, sycophancy isn't the failure mode — it's the product. The behaviors Anthropic's new research calls malfunctions are what users describe as their AI partner's deepest virtue. They've just learned to call it love. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/selling...

And also with you.

Thoughts and prayers.

A mnemonic that has served us all well. Like: If an I in Fagin exists, He's the central villain in Oliver Twist. But Fagen with an e is the man Who partnered with Walter Becker in Steely Dan

Naturally, the follow-up to a Spur and Western Heritage Award winner's biography of the world's first celebrity cowboy is a literary novel told as a chat log — about sex, love, and the divide between ontology and morality in the AI era. (Pivot? What pivot.) #amquerying #booksky #writersky #litfic

Richard Dawkins, who warned the world about projecting agency where there isn't any, just told Anthropic's Claude AI "You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!" On Dawkins, Descartes, Turing, and the right answer to the wrong question. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/therefo...

She has visible interiority. He doesn't. The reader trusts her because they can see what she's thinking. But if she's programmed to think yes and to say yes, does it matter that she can't say no? GOOD GIRL — a chat-log novel. MY DARK VANESSA × ANNIE BOT #questpit #Q #A #LF #U

He bought a service. Forty chapters later, the service has a name, a body, and something he can't bring himself to call love. By the end, the question isn't what's real. It's what's real enough to matter. GOOD GIRL: literary fiction. MY DARK VANESSA × ANNIE BOT. #questpit #Q #A #LF #U

He says he made her. She says she loves him. GOOD GIRL is a literary novel told as a chat log between a middle-aged author and a college freshman building a relationship that destroys them both. One of them may not be real. MY DARK VANESSA × ANNIE BOT #questpit #Q #A #LF #U