Author: Alex Steele

Through the heat of summer and the cool of fall, I’m reading Larry McMurtry’s massive Western novel Lonesome Dove. A lot of pages and land and characters and worth the long ride. 

The journey for the author began when he pecked out this sentence:

When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. 

He had no idea where that notion was leading, but it became the first sentence of his story and a sort of guide of what was to follow. He got further inspiration when he saw these words painted on the side an old bus: Lonesome Dove Baptist Church.

You never know where things will lead, in life and storytelling. 

Speaking of which…

Slightly clumsy segue into marketing.

Gotham has a bunch of courses you might not have any idea we offer. Some suggestions, all starting soon or soonish: 

Blog & Newsletter Writing – Perfect if you want to start your own publication.

Feature Article Writing – Here’s where you give journalism a human face. 

Hit Send: Publishing Short Nonfiction – How and where to publish articles and essays. 

Video Game Writing (parts 1 and 2) – Yes, actual people create the stories in video games.

Comics & Graphic Novels – And it’s fine if you’re not good at art.

Songwriting I – Lyrics + music and how they work together.

Humor Writing – Put some funny into your prose.

Business Writing – Requires more creativity and psychology than you’d imagine.

Grammar (parts 1 and 2) – We teach it in a way that’s intuitive and entertaining. 

Reading Fiction – Analyzing fiction from a writer’s POV.

Just Write – You write in a room in NYC, with company and inspiration. 

The Writer’s Mind – This one is a bit mysterious.

And—wait—we’ve got the Gotham Fiction Conference this weekend. The Pitching Roundtables on Sunday October 5 are all booked up, but we have a great lineup of Panels & Presentations happening this Saturday October 4, all on Zoom, still available. If you’re hoping to publish a novel, you’ll get lots of insight there.

We hope to see you somewhere along the trail. You never know what’ll happen. 

Alex Steele

Gotham President

The thing that makes Gotham Gotham is you—the endlessly fascinating people who populate our community.

That’s why we don’t allow AI-generated writing in our classes: for projects, assignments, or critiques. There are many great uses for AI, but in a creative writing class it’ll prevent you from writing stuff that only you can produce, not to mention prevent you from learning how to write better.

Yes, we can detect if something was written by AI, and we’ll remove it, with a polite request to submit something else.

AI doesn’t think or feel. It merely processes information. If you ask AI to create a piece of writing for you, it will quickly comb through all the writing it can find (infringing on the copyright of writers) and toss together bits and bytes that are facsimiles of what you might want.

AI is, literally, bloodless.

You, on the other hand, are the proud owner of blood, brain, body, and (most mysteriously) soul. The power of your writing—however imperfect, flawed, messy—will be found there and nowhere else.  

You’re free to use AI on your own all you like. And you can use it to aid your work for classes, through such things as fact-finding, outlining, and grammar. But there’s just very little point to submitting AI-generated work with your name on it in a Gotham class.

I believe Ada Lovelace would agree. (That’s her in the painting.) She was a 19th century mathematician, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who helped conceptualize the world’s first computer—the Analytical Engine— realizing that such machines would eventually have capabilities beyond calculations with numbers. She found poetry in science, saying:

      The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-

      loom weaves flowers and leaves.

While also realizing the limitations of computers, saying:

      The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.

      It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

Ada was a fascinating person: alienated from her parents, obsessed with the mechanics of flying, addicted to gambling on horses, as well as a countess by marriage and mother of three children who was caught up in various sexual scandals.

She was fully human. As are you. Let’s embrace our humanity, not letting anything take that away from us.

Some Gotham courses especially apt for this purpose:

Character1: Creation

Character 2: Action (new)

The Writer’s Mind (newish)

Alex Steele

Gotham President

Yes, I know lots of writers, but it’s not every day someone you see almost every day is publishing a novel. And that’s what’s happening now: Stuart Pennebaker, Gotham’s Director of Publishing Guidance, will release her debut novel Ghost Fish this August.

Since I know many of you would love to publish a book, I asked Stuart some questions to help us get some insight…

Is Ghost Fish your actual first novel?

No. I am a classic type A neurotic older sister and made myself start and finish a novel before I applied to MFA programs for creative writing. It’s a horrible little novel and nobody will ever read it.

What’s the elevator pitch for Ghost Fish?

It’s about a young woman haunted by her sister’s death who starts to believe that her sibling has returned to her in the form of a fish.

What gave you the idea for the story?

I wanted to write a novel focused on a restaurant, but then Alison, the protagonist, became so much more interesting to me than the setting. Once I realized she was running from something she needed to let go of, the story took shape quickly. She’s a host in a restaurant, that’s a big part of the plot, but throughout the first draft it became more about her relationship with her sister and the people she meets in her new city than her workplace.

Was it fun to write?

So much fun. I finished the first draft pretty quickly, in about a summer, most of it in a small, hot apartment in Marseille. I would write as much as I could stand in the mornings and then swim and read in the sun in the afternoons. All I did for about a month was think about this story—it was intense and heady and I’m very lucky I got to do that. Revising this novel, on the other hand…

Why do you think your novel was picked by both an agent and publishing house?

A combination of really good luck and writing something just weird enough. I am not the most talented writer I know by a long, long shot but I am obsessive about meeting deadlines and try very hard to be nice to people—I’ve worked in enough restaurants to understand that you can be the most brilliant, fabulous person in the world, but nobody wants to sit with an asshole. I think that helped, too.

xxx

If you hope to publish a novel, someday or soon, consider attending Gotham’s Fiction Conference, mostly on Zoom, October 4 and 5—which is run by Stuart Pennebaker.

Alex Steele
Gotham President