Andrea Hairston – Treehouse Writers

So last weekend I was trying to get a Covid vaccine and came up against a frightening development in our society. And no, it wasn’t the fact that after six years and change we are still dealing with this damn virus.

I have major travel plans in September, so I wanted to get the vaccine a couple of weeks before my trip so I’ll be at peak protection when I get on a plane. Travel plans have generally dictated how I schedule my shots, which I get every six months.

I checked the CVS website, but couldn’t find any appointments at the one nearest me. Then I checked Walgreens, and they had appointments through August 23, but not afterwards. The new vaccine drops in mid-September – while I’m traveling – so I assumed they weren’t going to order any more vaccines if they ran out.

So I made an appointment for August 22 at the closest Walgreens. Walgreens sent me 9 messages via text and email confirming my appointment and reminding me of it.

I showed up right on time, only to be informed that they didn’t have it. “But I have an appointment,” I said. The pharmacist looked at me like I was crazy for assuming I could get a vaccine when I had an appointment. He didn’t apologize, but told me I could complain to “corporate.”

I got a cancellation text 10 minutes after I left the drugstore.

I was furious, of course. Fortunately, a friend mentioned that a major grocery chain in her area still had vaccines, so I decided to check with Safeway.

Their website said they did and that they took walk-ins, so I walked over on Sunday afternoon to get one, only to discover that they don’t do vaccines in the last hour the pharmacy is open (no, the website doesn’t mention that).

But the clerk confirmed they still had the vaccine in stock. I asked if they would still have it Tuesday – I had plans on Monday – and she said maybe, but “corporate” might decide to have all the vaccines shipped back at any moment.

And that’s when it hit me, with that second reference to “corporate,” that big companies control a large part of our lives these days without us having any right to push back at how they do it.

I took the Safeway clerk at her word, changed my Monday plans, showed up when they started doing vaccines at 10 am, and got my shot from a very nice pharmacist. But “corporate” was still pinging in my head. Continue reading “Under “Corporate’s” Thumb”…

This week I had the joyful and inspiring experience of going in person to hear an interview with Andrea Hairston, who was finishing up a tour in support of her new book, Archangels of Funk.

At one point, she mentioned that she had started working on that book about 20 years back, but realized that she had to know more about her character – and specifically about her character’s ancestors – before she could write it.

So she wrote two other books, Redwood and Wildfire, and Will Do Magic for Small Change, so that she could write Archangels of Funk. I should point out that both of those books are incredible works in and of themselves. Which is to say that she created art while building the framework for more art.

But what also hit me was how antithetical her process was to what the so-called “AI” chatbots (that is, the large language models or LLMs) promise: frictionless writing. I mean, she did a lot of research plus wrote two complete novels to figure out what she needed to know to write the latest book.

Talk about friction!

But that’s the point. Writing is so much more than putting words on a page in some semblance of the right order. The LLMs can’t do anything more than that, and that’s not even taking into consideration the incredible inaccuracy of what they do.

They can’t react to the words they’ve written and figure out that they need to research more or even write another book or two before the one in progress. All that involves thinking and they can’t think.

Continue reading “The Chatbots Miss the Point of Writing”…