Tom Thomas is a writer with a career spanning forty years in publishing, technical writing, public relations, and popular fiction writing.
“My business now is to weave circumstance, happenstance, intention, and mischance into stories.”

The Machine Condition:

After Almost a Year … – August 9, 2026

It has been almost a year—back to September 10, 2025, when I posted about the slashing death of the Ukrainian woman on the light-rail train in North Carolina—since I last posted on this, my one-and-only author’s website. And it has been almost six months since I last sat down to push the words forward on my latest book project, which was also the one I paused when I started, wrote, finished, and self-published the book that became Three Sisters, featured nearby.

Most writers would call that a long dry spell. Some refer to “writer’s block,” which usually means that the story is there in your head but, for some mysterious reason, the author just can’t get the words out. In the case of this project—which deals with demonic, or rather “daemonic,” possession and has some autobiographical elements, as any novel will—the story just stopped. I was half-outlining and half-“pantsing”—that is, proceeding scene-to-scene by the seat of my pants—on this story when I realized that it would either go in some trite, mystical direction involving violence and exorcism, or it would end in a psychological jumble of misunderstandings. The story was also headed into areas of life experience requiring extensive research that I didn’t relish pursuing. And so, it stopped. Maybe that, too, was the reason I paused this book to write Three Sisters in the first place.

But there was also a reason I stopped blogging on this site and stopped progressing on the novel. It might have just been creeping old age, loss of resolve, and laziness in myself. I mean, at a certain point you realize you’re sending messages into the void and not getting much back. Like you’re shouting down a well, but there’s not even an echo. So why bother? But underneath all that there was—I think, examining myself psychologically—a hidden despair.

I have been a writer almost all my life. I started my first book at age twelve: four typewritten pages with a good, mysterious beginning but no middle or end, although I did make a crayon-on-cardboard cover for it. I wrote my first complete novel at age sixteen: 472 typewritten pages, double-spaced, with carbon, as real authors are supposed to do. It was a dreadful space opera that is best lost to time. Since then, I’ve been an English major; a book editor in various fields; a technical editor, technical writer, and documentation specialist in various fields; a communications and public relations writer and speechwriter, again in various fields. Oh, and I published sixteen of my own novels, both traditionally and independently, plus five more in various collaborations. Pushing words, shaping grammatical sentences, and making images dance in your head have provided me with a good living and a good life. I even married a librarian.

Like all writers, I had to go through a period of making wrong starts and producing unpublishable slop,¹ but that’s just something you work through to learn the craft. And like all writers, I read obsessively—that’s what an education in English literature means. You read from the best, learning how good, publishable authors do it, picking up motifs and phrases, sensing the language, seeing the plots unfold, and pushing your own head through the tangled web of ideas to see how this thing called storytelling works.

And I have no regrets … but, here at the end, when I’m retired from the corporate world and no longer dealing with the needs and opinions of traditional publishers, free to write whatever I want, there’s this new thing on the horizon: the so-called “artificial intelligence” based on large language models (LLMs).²

Look, these are just prediction machines. Trained on the universe of written language—including good books and articles, plus a lot of slop, obfuscation, and outright lies, mostly from social media and the internet—they build a database representing networks of word relationships. Each word is a “token” with a higher or lower probability of its being found near and related to any other word. If you type into your email software “Let’s meet at grandma’s …” the program will offer “house” as the next word, because that’s where families often go for reunions. But if you meant to write “grave,” then the program is out of its depth.³

I understood all this. But then I realized that this is kind of what I do, too. Trained on a lifetime of obsessive reading in good books, I’ve made my brain into a database of language, phrases, motifs, sentence structures, plot lines, character types, visual descriptions, and so on. When I sit down to outline a book, I’m playing a “what comes next?” game with my internal database of plot actions. When I sit down to write a scene or dialogue in the actual book, I’m playing the same game with the character’s next moves or words. I’m a lot more sophisticated than an LLM, because I can bring a universe of non-literate experience and feeling to the process. And yes, I can look at what I’ve already written and decide, separate from the initial creation process, whether it works or not. (See above, about the daemon-possession novel.)

But then … anyone can now put a prompt to an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude, get a “what comes next” output from the software, and then play the “does this work or not” role by him- or herself with the product and try to refine the query. And yes, I try to use my writer’s brain to come up with new combinations based on existing models,⁴ but the LLMs can produce some surprising outputs, too.

Over the years, I’ve looked for easier ways to put words on paper. I tried the early speech-to-text programs twenty or so years ago, but they were awkward, made one mistake every ten words or so, and took endless effort to correct properly if you wanted the program to learn your speech patterns. Instead, with my years of training, I just think of an idea, look at the screen, and fire up this little nexus of cells in my brain that connects the voice in my head to my fingertips, filtering the language through my internal database of good grammar and interesting syntax—and words appear on the screen.

It might seem that using an LLM would be just another step in easing the creation process. Except that … this is different. The artificial intelligence is not just an aid to what I do. It’s a replacement for what I can do. Fifty years of knowledge and experience are replaced by an online account costing $20 a month.⁵ That conclusion leads to despair. I feel like an artisanal weaver with a hand loom having been replaced by a steam-driven weaving machine programmed with Jacquard cards.

So, what’s the point of going on? Well, after all this moping … just because I can!

1. Anyone who produces a “brilliant first novel” is really publishing their third or fourth manuscript that finally got accepted. And a couple of years ago we all learned about Harper Lee, whose brilliant To Kill a Mockingbird was in fact her second attempt at the story.

2. These programs are called “intelligent” because of Alan Turing’s definition: that if you can exchange responses with a program through a hole in the wall for half an hour and still can’t tell if you’re talking to another human being or a machine, then the program is intelligent. Turns out, in my opinion, that’s a pretty low bar.

3. Artificial intelligence differs from earlier software and database applications in that it can be accessed and directed by voice or keyboard prompts or queries using simple language, instead of requiring precise inputs in what used to be called “structured query language” (SQL). You’re making open-ended suggestions rather than seeking specific content within the database.

4. As a Hollywood producer once told me: “Think Top Gun but with boats!”

5. For another example, one of my strengths as a communicator has been the ability to sit in on a day-long corporate meeting taking notes and then, by ten o’clock the next morning, produce a 2,000-word summary for everyone to read. Now, all that can be done with a free “AI Companion” add-on to a Zoom meeting or a notetaking card in your pocket. Sheesh!

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