A weekend away with my college friends loosened something I hadn’t realized was clenched.
(And if my friends are reading this, they are thinking “butt” right now. Yes, we all graduated from college. No, our minds never left middle school.)
An accessible walkway in the park on our hike.
The road to the rental cabin stopped roading about a mile away. The concrete was pockmarked and potholed, crumbling to literal dust. Leaves collected in the deepest bits, bouncing my little sedan in ways meant for monster trucks.
The cabin was built into the side of a wooded hill and felt truly isolated. New construction, the kind of place meant for large gatherings — 3 living rooms, an oversized kitchen and 4 bedrooms all with their own modern bathrooms.
We stayed up late chatting, we wrestled a puzzle with missing pieces into sweet submission, we hiked rocky trails, we cooked and ate our own food. On the 4th morning I felt different—not just rested but released. My body, from jaw to calves, had gone quiet in a way I hadn’t known it could.
The most surprising part was my legs. They felt light—dancer-light. Dance has always been a part of my life, despite little formal training. It’s something I’ve always done and at times, even performed professionally. (Again, NOT as a cage dancer. I keep telling my sorority sisters that it wasn’t me in a cage, dancing in a metallic body suit in a Pittsburgh night club in the summer of ‘92. They never believe me.)
We hate these signs. This one was on the wall at the rental.
After such deep rest, I felt a buoyant readiness I hadn’t felt in years. It wasn’t energy exactly; it was permission.
Vacation (and rehab, coincidentally) is meant to remove us from daily obligations —work, laundry, bills, volunteer conscriptions. Certain trips, especially solo ones, go further: they free us from obligations to others, from the constant hum of expectation. No worrying about anyone else’s plans for our time or energy. We follow our own flow.
These are such good and old friends, it was almost like flying solo. There was no performance required. I felt so rested. My body had remembered how to exist without bracing for anyone else’s expectations.
That memory followed me home like a tune stuck in my head.
A few nights later at a friend’s house, cartons of Rita’s Water Ice appeared. (For those of you not from Philly, this is an Italian ice treat: finely-crushed ice with flavoring.) I didn’t want any. I’d been eating lighter, avoiding sugar. But after repeated offerings and before my mind could intervene, I heard myself say, “Sure, I’ll have the mango.”
An hour later, I had that familiar post-sugar fog and the tiny inner scolding that comes with it. No one else cared whether I ate it or not. The only pressure had been internal—muscle memory of compliance.
Therapy has taught me that this kind of reflex is a trauma response: the nervous system’s way of keeping the peace. But understanding that intellectually is one thing; feeling the alternative is another. It had been so long since I had felt that unencumbered state, it was almost a shock when it happened.
It’s a state where you are almost oblivious of other people’s wants. Like a little kid discovering a new playground, you just feel pure excitement— not guilt about your parents waiting on the bench.
My room for my stay. It was bear-themed.
Equating kindness with compliance is an anxious transaction. Peace-keeping isn’t always love, and people-pleasing can be toxic. True generosity begins only after self-permission. When you let yourself exist freely—when you trust that your worth isn’t on trial—you stop giving to avoid guilt and start giving because you genuinely want to. That’s an authentic existence.
These days, I’m experimenting with retraining that lesson into my muscles. Before a workout or even a morning stretch, I repeat a mantra that came to me like a heartbeat:
Light in my body, joy to my core.
Remember “Light as a feather, stiff as a board?” That’s the rhythm that came to me. That sleepover-rite-of-passage was one of the few truly engrossing rituals I experienced as a kid: all of us chanting together, waiting for the exact right moment to act as one. (By the way: there are real laws of physics that answer why this trick sometimes worked.)
It’s just 8 words, 9 syllables, but “Light in my body, joy to my core” calls me back to a kid-like sense of buoyant freedom. I hope to say it not only when I exercise, but also when I catch myself about to agree to something I don’t want. Each repetition is a small act of reprogramming my muscles to hold this paradigm of self-respect.
Maybe that’s what growing older means: learning to grant ourselves the permissions no one else can bestow. To rest when we’re tired. To eat—or not eat—the water ice. To remember that generosity, real generosity, flows best from muscles (and butts) that aren’t clenched.
On Youtube, creator Meredith Novaco posted a video dissectingSilver Elite by Dani Francis, a book that’s caused a stir in the weird little corner of the internet known as “BookTok” — a nickname that suggests a broader reading community, but IRL, IMO, BookTok mostly revolves around romantasy (fantasy novels that follow romance-genre plot rules).
That’s probably more detail than you wanted already. But oh, there’s more.
Novaco suspects that Del Rey Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, may have conjured an author and prompted a large language model (LLM) to write a novel based on elements from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (you’ve heard of it; the series sold over 100 million copies and counting), and Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing (a 2023 viral hit that sold 2.7 million copies upon release).
Her theory: Del Rey allegedly told a team of staffers to prompt an LLM over and over until they had something publishable. (Allegedly! Don’t sue us, Del Rey.) The team may have fed those two blockbuster titles into the model; the resulting similarities in plot, character names, and key events are simply too on the nose.
On top of this, Novaco points out, “Dani Francis” appears to be a ghost from the machine—no photos, no social media presence, no public appearances, not even a LinkedIn page. To say that’s unusual for a viral BookTok author is like saying the Library of Alexandria was a decent little book nook.
These points alone would’ve won me over to Novaco’s theory. But what truly sealed the bindings was her sentence analysis—the way she shows where LLMs lose the plot. Predictive text can lead a language model’s sentences down a primrose path that ends in brambles. If you know what to look for, Novaco insists, you can spot AI-crafted fiction a mile away.
Prediction, Not Creation
I’m human. When I write, I’m thinking. Sometimes I think for a long time—and like most writers, the blinking cursor mocks me.
When an AI writes, it’s predicting. It never suffers the curse of the blank page or that damn flashing vertical line.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude—these models aren’t brainstorming or reminiscing or deciding what sounds good out loud. They’re guessing the next most probable word based on all the words that came before. They’ve read billions of examples of human writing. We’re quite predictable, it turns out.
So, like a squirrel racing up a tree, an LLM follows branches—word after word after word—until the squirrel finds himself with a complete sentence. And then it jumps onto the next one, forgetting all about that spent branch.
You’ve already seen this at work in your phone’s predictive text. Type “I went to the store to buy…” and the model runs through millions of possibilities: milk, groceries, a gun, some peace and quiet. Each has a probability score. The algorithm selects the word that statistically fits best, given the patterns it’s learned.
It’s not “thinking.” It’s two maths in a trench coat pretending to be a muse.
The Sentence-Structure Tell
Novaco makes points I hadn’t heard anyone articulate before. I’ve worked with ChatGPT for over a year, and my experience taught me it’s a terrible fiction writer (for now). Its sentences manage to be both strange and banal at the same time. The absence of a body—of sensory experience—is painfully obvious.
She shows how these sentences can take a “weird turn”: grammatically correct, sensorially absurd.
For instance:
“The cell is painted a dull shade of gray that hurts my eyes.”
Dull shades don’t hurt our eyes. Neon ones, sure. Dull ones? Not so much. And while millennial gray might make our eyes roll, it doesn’t sting them.
Another example:
“Our quiet footsteps echo off the concrete walls, muffled by the linoleum floor.”
Setting aside the choice to reference linoleum in a fantasy novel (what?), the physics are all wrong. An LLM hasn’t walked a cold, echoing hallway. It doesn’t know that quiet footsteps don’t echo—by their very nature—and that linoleum muffles nothing. Grammatically, the sentence is fine. Functionally, it’s nonsense.
LLMs are trained to avoid syntactic risk. Their default is the safest, most probable way to arrange information. But when humans write, we build images that reflect emotion and follow the folklore of human physics.
The Human Sense
Novaco’s video fed my soul. Psycholinguistic analysis is exactly the right way to root out AI writing. She highlighted passages that felt human—then contrasted them with stretches of unmistakable AI slop.
For those of us who’ve been working closely with LLMs, it was exhilarating to see someone break down, line by line, what rushed, AI-assisted fiction looks like.
Because the sentence tells the story—and when the sentence rings false, it’s not the plot that gives the AI away. It’s the empty echoes of its uncanny literary valley.
As a follow-up to my last post, I want to now offer my apology and my warning. I’m going to keep your secrets, but I won’t keep mine. I want to write fiction, and if I don’t write these “everything” essays, I won’t write any stories. My brain is an Appalachian forest full of wagons of words, rumbling around, waiting for release.
There are days—years, even—when I’ve put off being myself. Now, I find, I’m in a bit of trouble, for this act of avoidance has carved pathways in my brain like wagon wheel ruts in the dirt. The habitual hiding grinds me down and stops my writing cold.
Years ago I stopped blogging. There was no rage-quit, no dramatic farewell. One day I simply… stopped. Part of it was the shift in the web itself. In the early 2010s, the culture turned: what had been a heady and productive space became a volatile kill zone. Anything you wrote brought hate. Even a pile of sleeping kittens could get you doxxed.
Around then, a saying began repeating in my head: “If you can’t write everything, you won’t write anything.” It was a warning. If I wasn’t raw and vulnerable in essays, my brain, like a spiteful woodland sprite, would block the fiction too. No inspiration. No risk. No stories.
Whatever, I told myself. Who cared? I had paid writing work. I had kids and a spouse to support. I convinced myself I didn’t need that shit. If I blogged, if I wrote “for real,” my family’s privacy might be breached. My truths might leak out. Playing it safe meant shutting it all down.
Fast forward. My youngest went off to college, and time sucker-punched me in the jaw. I’ve been reeling for more than a year. I am so used to pickling on the back shelf of life’s dark pantry that I don’t remember how to start fresh.
I try to recall what it felt like when I was younger—35 years ago, even just 15 years ago. Back then I had the right to speak, to be seen, to exist. I used my voice freely. Then society screamed at me: no-one asked for your opinion.
No-one asked, that was true. But here’s another truth: no-one ever asks anyone. And no-one asked anyone to come over here and read what I write.
I’m done with the haze. I’ve always been a writer, and I’ll die a writer. And guess what? Writers fucking write. Now I’m simply going to write anything, so I can get to writing everything I’ve always dreamed of. The wagons of words are leaving the forest now, creaking into the unknown. I don’t know where this trail leads, but I’m following it. Hike it with me. Together we’ll find what lurks in the shadows and discover what awaits us just beyond the trees.
I started this blog in 2003 on the suggestion of a former coworker. I used it like a journal. I wrote personally, stream-of-consciousness, almost like letters to friends.
It was like that for a few years. But then social media arrived, and those of us who were early adopters in the blog space were thrust into spotlights. My near-anonymity vanished.
IRL neighbors started approaching me with sly looks. “I found your blog,” they’d say, as if they’d uncovered a secret. Purplecar.net was not a secret — nor was it truly anonymous like many blogs were then — I just didn’t advertise.
Then came the capitalism. I refused to put ads on my blog despite the pressure. Looking back, maybe that refusal looks foolish; at the time, I didn’t want to commercialize my thoughts. I didn’t want to pore over Google Analytics daily. I didn’t want to chase engagement. But the online space simply wouldn’t tolerate anything else for long. There was pressure to pick a niche, build a brand, and maintain it.
In 2007 I erased four years of personal journal posts and changed my focus. I branded myself as a blogger interested in the convergence of psychology and technology.
For a few years I kept at it, even when my heart wasn’t fully committed. The change cost me some friends/readers, but it gained me the social-media crowd. I found the topics interesting, but I wasn’t willing to permanently brand myself that way. Eventually, I gave up, and this blog sat in virtual storage for several years.
Yesterday, after the new iOS update, I considered the Journal app — simple, searchable, calm interface. I’ve been journaling by hand since I was a child; only recently have I slowed my daily practice. Would that app get me back into logging some thoughts? Then I remembered: I already have a blog I could use for that.
Apple Journal App
I made a post on TikTok yesterday about how blogging can feel futile — like screaming into the void. But I don’t want to write only about psychology, technology, AI, or politics. I don’t want a brand. Today I realized I wasn’t thinking straight about it.
Thankfully, since leaving Twitter and laying low these past several years, I have almost zero followers. That’s a gift.
This is now sacred expression. My own ritual. I don’t need to turn on comments. Friends who want to reach me will. Strangers who stumble across this may stay, or they may pass by. Either way, it’s fine.
I won’t check analytics. No advertisers will clock my presence. And it’s fine if neighbors or friends read this; it was never a secret. I’m older now, and less concerned — less afraid — of being seen.
Talking (not screaming) into the void is the point.
It’s okay if you’re along for the ride. You are welcome here. And it’s okay if you’re not. I’m a writer. And writers write.
