Focus in a tornado

When one door closes...well, you can probably re-open it later.

Change is inevitable. We begin changing from the moment we plop out of the womb and it doesn’t stop until we give up the ghost. And who’s to say it even stops then? Maybe your ghostly self just keeps on changing in the realms beyond. Change is going to happen no matter what.

That doesn’t mean you have to like it.

It can be about as comfortable as a never-ending wedgie. (I’ve never understood people’s ability to wear thong underwear.) Change comes in a million forms and some days you’d be quite happy to freeze time so you can catch a breath. But life doesn’t work that way. The more you fight change, the angrier or more worried you are about it, the more it wears you down. I’ve found that stepping back, analyzing it, and figuring out how to adapt with the least amount of friction works for me.

Nothing like a bit of detachment, eh?

We are in the midst of big changes over here at Global Wordsmiths. There was a time when our business model worked really well. One part of the writing playground fed into another, with writers able to loop between them. But AI is changing the world so fast, and that most certainly includes the publishing sector. When you can ask Gemini to plot out your book, read it over, and give you feedback, why do you need to pay an editor? When you can feed your manuscript to the beast and get it “edited”, why pay 1k for a person to do it for you?

These are rhetorical questions. There’s nothing better than the human touch and understanding of connection, and AI can throw some real googlies into your work. Plus, AI is trained on EVERYONE’S work, which means when people use it to craft, there’s a good chance all those books are going to sound very EVERYONE.

Change means we have to adapt. And the painful part of that means we need to start remodeling our world and potentially setting things aside. Not burning bridges or shutting down, but quietly placing them in a drawer until the world settles into change that’s a little more rhythmic than the earthquakes and tornados we’re surrounded by right now.

Focus is key to survival.

That means the pen names that aren’t bringing in enough income will have to be gently tucked away along with the clothes we’ll fit into one day. It means less time on anything that isn’t going to stabilize our day to day living expenses. I will admit that I cried when I understood the need for this particular change. Like I said, we don’t have to like it. But fighting it also means continuing to bang our heads against a wall of marshmallow. It’s rather pointless and messy.

So. What do you need to change? What are you fighting against when maybe you need to refocus?