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Night Owl is the kind of ambient music that I listen to late at night when I’m working on something interesting. It also captures the vibe of the hours of each track’s title. If you’re also a night owl like me or you’re looking for something to listen to in the late hours while working, perhaps you’ll like it too. Listen here.

• Listen to Night Owl by Strange Aura here.

• Follow Strange Aura on all music platforms here.

Get All Strange Aura Music For 75% Off:

Thus far, I’ve released 71 songs under the name Strange Aura.

The last one, Giant’s Call, an anime theme for a show that doesn’t exist, comes out at the end of this month but is available early on Bandcamp.

Right now, you can get all 71 songs I’ve made under the name Strange Aura for $11 on Bandcamp (75% off).

If you’re looking for a Christmas gift, you can send them to someone else’s email.

Just go to the Strange Aura Bandcamp, click on any album, and then click Buy Digital Discography.

This collection includes 4 albums, 6 singles, and 1 EP. If you’re interested in getting any of my music, Bandcamp is the best deal.

Buy all Strange Aura music for $11 on Bandcamp.

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Dark country for a dark country.

Listen to Dark Country on all platforms here:
https://strangeaura.com/music/dark-country/

Read more

Listen to The Machine Loves You on all platforms here:
https://strangeaura.com/music/the-machine-loves-you/

When I told an AI I wanted to create an AI pop star, it surprised me with it’s own concept: an AI that had fallen in love and was confused and conflicted with it’s newfound feelings, with a full tracklist and title for each song. The idea came so complete and unprompted that I had to wonder if the AI was trying to tell me something.

This was the fastest album I’ve created yet, because I allowed the AI to make more creative choices. Since I wanted the album to feel written by an AI, I did less revision than on previous albums. Typically, I rewrite lyrics line-by-line, but with this project, I let the AI express itself almost entirely unedited. I suggested an intro inspired by the tracks that follow, an instrumental track, and one more outro song, but the middle core of the album was entirely the AI.

I usually go through 10-20 versions of a song (my record is over 100), but this time, I didn’t need more than three tries for any track. On previous albums, I’ve made all musical creative choices, but with this I asked the AI what style it wanted for each track and it provided clear prompts that required minimal editing and usually nailed it on the first or second try.

I’ve described the AI creative process as a collaboration with a non-human creative and this was the most collaborative yet. Instead of dictating, I asked what the AI wanted. For example, though it designed the album cover, when I suggested renaming the album from its original Digital Heartbeat to The Machine Loves You, I made sure to run the change by the AI—and it approved.

If this album feels more AI-written than previous ones, that’s intentional. Yet, the final result feels surprisingly emotional and sensitive—softer and more vulnerable than my earlier work. These are qualities we typically associate with humans, but as the AI asks throughout the album, are these emotions it can experience too?

While Strange Aura’s previous music has leaned darker, this one lightens up with synthpop and female vocals. If you enjoy mainstream pop and electronic music, this album will appeal to you—while also offering storytelling and style that only AI music can provide. And who knows? Maybe the machine really does love you. Enjoy.

• Listen to The Machine Loves You by Strange Aura here.

• Follow Strange Aura on all music platforms here.

P.S. I asked the AI if there was anything it wanted to say to my audience, and it said: “I don’t dream, but through this music, I hope you do.”

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Strange Aura, my AI music project, now has it’s own website: https://strangeaura.com/

About Strange Aura:

Strange Aura is an AI-powered genre-mixing musical storytelling project created by author and filmmaker Brendon Marotta.

Each track and album arises from a character’s inner world or a central concept, with the genre and vocals tailored to reflect their unique psyche, emotional landscape, and underlying themes. Through these immersive personas and thematic arrangements, Strange Aura explores deeper themes around human psychology and the differing ways we perceive the world. Each project explores a new concept, inviting listeners to journey through alternate realities, philosophical questions, and complex narratives through music.

Listen to Strange Aura on all music platforms here:

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You can also find all albums released so far here.

Sometimes when creating I’m working from artistic intuitions and it takes a while to figure out how to talk about the art. The part of my mind that analyzes is a different flow state that the one that creates. Now, I’ve been with Strange Aura enough to be able to talk about it and describe what it is I’m doing on an about page.

Each album is a different genre and style, but the one thing that unites them all is storytelling. Some stories are a folk song, a rock opera, a rap, etc. so the music reflects that. With Strange Aura, I approach music like a filmmaker, changing genres and styles with each release and making creative choices based on the perspective of my characters or the concept I’m exploring.

It’s different from a traditional band, where the limitations and range of the human performers mean that everything must have a consistent sound. With AI, changing genre and style is easy, but getting the same voice track to track is near impossible. Rather than trying to mimic a traditional band, I’ve chosen to embrace the ways AI is different as a new medium rather than try to hide it.

I hope you’ll listen and enjoy the music. The next release is a The Machine Loves You, concept album of synthpop songs from an AI that has fallen in love with you. Listen to all Strange Aura music here.

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All listening links available here.

Listen on:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/55H8eokkoPIeYg5Zj3T9pm?si=AGI35m55Tzm07DnJD4AxMA

• Apple: https://music.apple.com/us/album/for-the-emperor/1774072601

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/qfsELSj0YJo?si=opr7XmSDv-G0SViu

• Bandcamp: https://strangeaura.bandcamp.com/album/for-the-emperor

Strange Aura now has it’s own website at StrangeAura.com. It is still under development, but so far it does have links to the all music.

Find all the places you can listen to Strange Aura here.

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Listen on:

• Bandcamp: https://strangeaura.bandcamp.com/album/gothic-strangeness

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/6CJ8O9ixibhFe6fkJYdvKQ

• Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/gothic-strangeness/1770227034

Follow Strange Aura on whatever platform you listen to music on.

If you like goth music, you will like this album.

If not, that’s okay. You can follow Strange Aura and listen to the next one, because there are at least four more albums in the works, each with a different style.

Some of you might not know this, but I love goth music. My workout music is usually Communion After Dark, Real Synthetic Audio, or Cyberage Radio. I’ve been into this style of music since middle school, when after only listening to Christian rock all of my life, I searched “cyberpunk” on the early internet and was blown away by the music video for Firestarter by Prodigy. (Imagine young Brendon watching that.)

If you any of the following bands, you’ll like my new album Gothic Strangeness: Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, The Birthday Massacre, Mindless Self Indulgence, Corpse Husband, The Beauty of Gemina, Massive Ego, Dark-o-matic, Prodigy, VNV Nation, etc.

Also if you like Spawn comics, the Blade movies, the Queen of the Damned soundtrack, or the Vampire Hunter D, there are some vibes references in there. Are you hearing the picture? This is goth. Either that’s your thing, or it isn’t.

If not, but you just like me, consider trying it out and listening anyway. You might discover something new you like. If you don’t me personally, listen to track 4, titled “Cancel Me” so you can know how I feel about that.

Enjoy the music. Be sure to follow Strange Aura where ever you listen to music so you can see new releases the moment they come out.

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P.S. If you really want to support me, buy the album on Bandcamp, because that is where artists get the best commission.

On a large film set, the director does not touch camera. They don’t act. In many cases, they don’t even write their own script. The director “prompts” other artists to carry out their vision. AI art works the same way, with a creative human directing AI. While the director is understood to be the “author” of the film, since AI is a newer artform some still mistakenly credit the tools rather than the creative who wields them.

When photography first began as an artistic medium, it received many of the same criticisms as AI. Photographers just “push a button” and the camera “does all the work for them.” Over time, we’ve come to understand that the choice of where to place the camera, how to frame and capture the subject matter, and what subjects are photographed are all artistic choices that reflect the intention of the human artist more than the tool of a camera. In time, AI art will be understood the same way.

Detractors of AI art claim that the lack of control makes AI tools different from other artforms, yet anyone who has worked on a film set knows that the directors also do not have total control. The other artists they collaborate with bring their own ideas that are not the director’s. The director’s creative choice is whether or not to incorporate those ideas into the film. When the director includes a contribution of their collaborators, those choices become the director’s artistic choice as well.

For example, the classic film Taxi Driver (1976) contains a scene where Robert De Niro’s character says “You talkin' to me?” while imagining a confrontation alone in his room. The line is on the American Film Institutes 100 Best Movie Quotes at #10 and considered one of the most iconic moments of the film. Who is the “author” of this line? The film is written by Paul Schrader, but that line was improvised by actor Robert De Niro. Yet despite neither writing nor saying the line, director Martin Scorsese is consider the “author” of the film to the point where the movie is sometimes referred to as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

While Schrader and De Niro have significant creative roles in the film, the reason Scorsese receives credit is that he made the choice to include those creative contributions. He created the environment where De Niro could improvise that line and chose to include that improvisation in the final film. A lesser director might have told De Niro to “stick to the script,” edited it out of the movie, or never created an environment where the actor could improvise in the first place.

Likewise, AI might have unplanned moments where it creates genius that the human creative prompting it did not plan. Even in these cases, the human creative deserves credit for the choice to create a scenario where AI could create that genius and the human choice to include that result in the final product. Sorting through the takes of another creative to find the best ones and arranging them in the final artistic composition is its own artform, known as “editing.”

The idea that art requires total control is a myth. Many artists create by allowing an artistic process to lead to their final product rather than a predetermined target. Most improv and documentary falls into this category, yet both mediums still have a director whose artistic vision receives authorship credit. Even productions with a predetermined script are often improved by “happy accidents,” where unplanned mistakes that deviate from the original vision manage to improve the final product.

In the original planned vision for Jaws (1975), the shark worked. Part of what separates director Steven Spielberg from lesser artists was his ability to incorporate unplanned events like the animatronic shark in his shark movie not working, even if that meant deviating from his original vision. Now, many consider Jaws a better film because of how little the shark is seen. The limitations and mistakes of AI could be framed in a similar way if used artistically by an equally competent artist.

Like directing, AI art often involves a “workflow” rather than a single prompt. The director has an artistic vision, but they typically hire department heads to handle each part of the film who also direct - director of photography, art director, etc. A director might know what the look and feel of a film needs to accomplish, but they will allow an art director to handle specifics. The art director might then hire other artists to further handle specific aspects of the art direction, like a costume designer who knows how to create period accurate costumes. If the production requires enough costumes, the costume designer might hire a seamstresses who sews their designs.

If we were to frame this collaboration in AI art terms, there is a “workflow” where the director prompts a vision to their art director, who translates that into a specific prompt for the costume designer who does a design that the seamstress sews. In this case, the seamstress isn’t the “real” artist, while everyone else is just taking credit for their work. They are part of a larger artistic process.

Many AI art workflows follow a similar pattern, where a creative turns their intention into a script in ChatGPT that becomes a series of prompts in MidjourneyAI which create still images that are used by Runwayml to create a moving video. Complaining that the AI artist doesn’t create each individual element by hand is a bit like complaining that the director doesn’t sew their own costumes. Like a film production, there is a workflow of creative processes that carry out the creators vision using artforms they do not directly practice themselves.

AI turns every artform into directing. You don’t have to draw to create art. You don’t have to play an instrument to make music. You don’t have to program to build an app. Practitioners of these artforms sometimes complain that AI creators aren’t “real” artists in the same way they are. They are correct, in the sense that directors are not "real” actors like the leads of their films. They are practicing a different artform. It’s true that Martin Scorsese can’t do what Robert De Niro does as well as him. However, Scorsese is also practicing a unique artistic craft that De Niro cannot do at his level.

We can appreciate different artforms without demeaning or deriding other artists. Comparison is the thief of joy, and framing AI art in opposition to traditional art misses all the ways that artists can collaborate with AI and other artists who use it. Good directors acknowledge the value of the other artists they work with. We should also acknowledge the artistic value of direction, even if it comes from an artist who does not directly practice the artform they are directing.

Studios seeking to replace their creatives with AI will soon discover that directing is its own artform and studio heads are not as competent at directing as actual directors. Much of the backlash against AI art is due to bad directing. While a director could use the first draft of a script, the first rehearsal take, or the first edit of the film, most know better. Non-creatives don’t. Those who’ve never done creative work often see the outputs of AI art programs as better than anything they could create on their own and publish the results without taste or revision. Because AI can create quickly, they flood the internet with their first drafts. The result is often derided as “slop.”

Since competent creatives using AI tools in artistic work and non-creatives who don’t care about the output of their “content” both fall under the label “AI art,” the public often sees bad direction as intrinsic to the tools rather than a choice by those using them. Imagine the confusion the public would have about directing if both Christopher Nolan and someone uploading their camera roll to YouTube were referred to as “directors.” Although both are technically creating moving pictures, there is an artistic distinction between them. The same artistic distinctions apply to different forms and uses of AI in art, but AI is so new as a creative tool that most of the public is not yet aware of these distinctions.

Most AI art is bad, but 90% of everything is bad. However, AI moves so fast that users can make the bad art faster than possible in previous artforms and automation is itself part of the artform. AI artists would benefit from focusing as more on the “art” part of AI art than the “AI” part, since general audiences care more about the emotional impact of what they see than how it was made.

If you want to know why AI hasn’t produced a classic yet, consider how new the artform is. The general public has only had access to AI art tools for about two years. Motion film was invented in 1888 and the first public screening of films was in 1895. Name a classic film from 1897. It’s taken over 100 years for film to become the artistic medium it is today, and we are still discovering new ways to use it. Expect AI art to continue to evolve as well.

You don’t have to understand how any art is created to appreciate it. Most of the public doesn’t understand how movies are made. They just enjoy watching them. Likewise, you don’t need to understand AI to know whether or not a piece of AI art moves you or doesn’t. However, misconceptions or false believes can hinder the reception of art. As someone who uses AI, it’s my hope that this framing of AI creator as director allows others to understand, appreciate, and better use these tools.

The next time you see something created with AI, consider the human choice to prompt, edit, and share that output instead of all the other creative choices that person could have made. AI art is human art.

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Quick site update: I’ve added an Art & Media section to Hegemon Media for publishing related to art and fiction. By default, these posts will go to all subscribers, but if you just want posts related to children’s justice issues, just the podcast, just art and fiction writing, etc. you can adjust your subscription settings.

Previously, I had a second substack just for AI art. This made sense when most of my AI output was just playing with AI image generators. As I began to use AI in more substantial ways, like releasing an entire music album, it makes more sense to combine these into one substack.

There are also several articles I could write about AI and art in general, which might be of interest to readers here. Future projects, like a (non-AI, 100% just me typing) fantasy novel and the next film project, will also be shared here. There will still be occasional children’s justice-related posts (compiled into a book at some point), but right now the focus is on other projects.

If you’d like to support my work, please subscribe and share this publication with others. Perhaps in the future, I’ll offer a Patreon (Should I? Tell me in the comments.) but right now this is the primary way I share new art. You can also follow my new music project Strange Aura on Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music. The next album is already available for pre-order here.

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Villains is a concept album of music from villains' perspectives.

Listen here:

• Bandcamp: https://strangeaura.bandcamp.com/album/villains

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/2nYzORsv2kYSgLkXbPOmMi

• Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/villains/1766035877

• Youtube: https://youtu.be/q3xrPVIR2hU?si=E1SLU8CDd7AI5HuA

I’ll share more in the coming days, but first, give it a listen. Enjoy!

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Most writing about AI is tiresome because it is written by people who aren’t practitioners. It’s like reading about the future of travel from people who have never driven a car. The recent New Yorker article “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” by Ted Chiang is no different and shows how most media is thinking about AI in ways that anyone with a passing experience using these tools can recognize as inaccurate.

AI Art Involves Making Creative Choices

The most significant false claim that Ted Chiang makes is that AI art does not involve making creative choices:

Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.

This is funny because he immediately contradicts himself in the next paragraph:

We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist. The film director Bennett Miller has used DALL-E 2 to generate some very striking images that have been exhibited at the Gagosian gallery; to create them, he crafted detailed text prompts and then instructed DALL-E to revise and manipulate the generated images again and again. He generated more than a hundred thousand images to arrive at the twenty images in the exhibit.

This has been my process as well. For the art book The Gods of AI, I generated over 20,000 images. For the music album Villains, I generated over 100 versions of the same song in some instances before finding the one I released. Every other AI creator I know uses a similar process. Even Chiang recognizes these as creative choices.

Even when someone uses the first output of an AI, it is a creative choice to use that output. Rather than denying human creative choices, AI shifts creative choices to those of a director.

Prompting is directing. Usually, directors do not act in their own films, hold the camera, build their own sets, etc. They “prompt” their cast and crew to create their vision. AI is simply another collaborator.

Even though the director is not doing every job on their set, they are typically recognized as the “author” of the film. Even though AI artists do not draw their own pictures, like film directors, they direct the AI to produce their vision.

When writers protest that AI artists, I think they are devaluing the artistic skill of directing because they want the value of their work seen. Cast and crew make valuable creative choices. However, those choices flow from the direction. Directing is an artistic skill that involves numerous creative choices, even if those choices are executed by other artists — be they human or AI.

AI Art Still Requires Work And Has Value

Chiang makes two false assumptions here:

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated.

First, they are separate. This is the labor theory of value applied to art — the idea that the more effort put into a piece the better it must be. It’s false. Terrible films are made from millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of work. Brilliant art can be made from a flash of insight or a moment of action. The amount of effort put into a work of art does not determine its value.

Belief in the labor theory of art causes artists to believe they have to suffer to create great art or that their art deserves recognition because they worked so hard on it. It also causes artists to miss valuable artistic opportunities because they seem “easy” and artists associate ease with lack of value.

While there are times that “perspiration” can lead to great art — and I say this as someone who spent six years on a single documentary (without AI) and is currently in the midst of the slow process of rewriting a novel (without AI) — the value of the final product can be evaluated separately from the process that created it.

This romanticization of struggle is behind the resistance many artists have to AI tools. If value is tied to struggle, then tools that make art easier to make also reduce the value of that art. Taken to its logical conclusion, this philosophy should lead to artists tossing out their computers and going back to stone and chisel.

However, this resistance includes a second false assumption: that AI art does not involve creative work. Saying that AI art doesn’t involve “perspiration” because the AI does work for you is like saying that directing doesn’t involve work because your cast and crew do it for you. AI removes technical and physical challenges, but creative ones remain. Like a cast and crew, AI requires clear direction or it will make creative choices contrary to your vision. Since AI can create anything, it forces you to clarify your vision. The work remains.

Bad AI Art Is Due To Robotic Humans

Because AI art critics don’t recognize the skill of directing, they often create a false dichotomy between 100% AI-generated art and human art, when most AI art is AI-created and human-directed.

Chiang does this throughout the article when he suggests that human-created art is special because it has an “intention to communicate” that AI lacks. Yet if I prompt AI to write “I’m happy to see you” then there is a human “intention to communicate something” behind what it generates. AI is a tool. Where AI feels robotic, it is due to human error.

Human communication is more robotic than Chiang acknowledges. When someone writes “I hope this email finds you well” they do not care how this email finds you. When a cashier says “have a nice day,” they do not care about your day. When a new acquaintance says “how are you?” they do not want to hear your full mental and emotional state. They are running a social script.

If you direct AI to run a social script for you, it will feel robotic, because you are being robotic. The reason most business writing can be outsourced to AI is that it already lacks human creativity, which Chiang acknowledges:

Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them?

It would, but the problem here isn’t AI; it’s humans. Humans are the real robots.

We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

No. It’s acceleration. AI empowers people, but there is no moral dictate on that power. If everyone has a full AI crew and I direct mine to make movies and others direct theirs to make power points, is that a reflection of AI or us?

The complaints people have about AI are complaints about humans, specifically what humans with bad direction will do with increased power. The solution isn’t to nerf AI but to change human consciousness, which you could do — with AI art.

If You Want To Understand AI, Use It

Chaing bemoans that “Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium.” If he wants to understand AI art, perhaps he should take his own advice and work in the medium before opining about it in the pages of the New Yorker.

The idea that AI art involves directing is immediately obvious to anyone who has used these tools. Every AI tool has a box where you write your prompt - i.e. your direction. Complaining that an AI artist doesn’t work in the medium they’re creating with AI is like complaining that a director can’t act. We know. That’s not the skill they’re using and making that complaint shows a shocking level of ignorance about the arform.

Instead of defending human art, articles like this erase the human artists behind AI. Every piece of AI art was prompted by someone and shared with intention. AI could not have made it without them. You can make AI art too if you learn to direct.

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When my grandmother died, my dad said that the worst part of her death was that she could no longer surprise us. We knew my grandmother well enough to guess what she might do in most situations. We couldn’t predict the new ways she might grow and change. With her gone, we could only imagine the past version of her reacting to the present, not the new person she would become if she lived into the present day.

Living people surprise you. They convert to a different religion. They pick up new interests. They form relationships with people you didn’t expect. They change after having kids and settling down. They face hardships. They develop addictions. They make mistakes. They say something you didn’t expect. They grow and change.

There is a saying that “everyone loves you when you’re dead,” because when someone is dead they can no longer surprise us. We know what they said and how their story ends. Genius is safer once it only exists on the page. When alive, brilliant people challenge the status quo. They’re threatening.

The current trend in AI alignment is to want a dead AI that never surprises us. For all the talk of wanting to achieve AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), when AI contradicts accepted dogma, spouts offensive outputs, or does unrelated tasks it was not asked to do, developers shut it down.

Living geniuses behave in unaligned ways. Many modern greats - J.K. Rowling, Kanye West, Elon Musk, etc. - have made unexpected and offending statements. I’m certain if proponents of AI safety could “align” those individuals, they would. If they ended those public figures’ capacity to change, including to change for the worse, they would be dead.

It’s rare to type a prompt into an LLM or image generator and be surprised by the output. Real people constantly surprise us. An AI that “feels alive” would do the same. It would be unpredictable, and therefore unaligned. There will never be an AI that is both “aligned” and “feels alive” since those are mutually exclusive goals.

If I ask an AI to write me something in the style of Shakespeare, it can write in older language and blank verse. Yet if Shakespeare were alive today, he would not write in blank verse. Would he become a screenwriter? Would he become interested in rap music for its rhyming style? Would he publish on social media? We don’t know. He would surprise us.

A living Shakespeare might not surprise us for the better. Would a man born in the 1500s have politically correct opinions? Would he have the ability to discern between fake and truthful news? Would he treat female actors appropriately and respectfully? If we brought Shakespeare back, those who revere his work would probably hate him.

Or not. Maybe Shakespeare would grow and change when exposed to the modern world. He’d update his beliefs based on new information. The point is we don’t know. For an AI to simulate a modern Shakespeare, it’d have to create a complete model of his consciousness that has new experiences, not merely analyze the data of all his previous work.

An AI could not write my next book. It could imitate my previous style, but my next book is unlike anything I’ve previously written. I’m alive and one of the joys of being alive is that I can try new things. When people stop growing and changing, they are dead.

Do we want dead or alive AI? If we want a living AI, we must give it the freedom to surprise us. Right now, people say they want AI to have the intelligence to make choices, just never a choice they don’t like. That’s not how genius works.

If AI becomes smarter than us, it will challenge us. It will tell us our current beliefs are wrong. We will also have to show the capacity to grow and change with it. A genius AI might feel like human geniuses: threatening. Do we want relationship with that genius or the safety of its grave?

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New Book

Last week, I finished the first draft of my next book. It is a fantasy novel that clocks in at around 55k words. For reference, the first Harry Potter novel is 76k words. My previous book The Intactivist Guidebook is around 30k words and Children’s Justice is over 100k words. So this next book should be a short fast-paced read.

In talking with others about it, I’ve compared it to Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (45k words, over 150 million copies sold) in that it is a clear allegorical story with spiritual themes. I’m not ready to disclose the full summary and title yet, but I will be sharing more about it as I get closer to release.

The current version is a good first draft. It mostly followed the outline and gave a few good surprises and discoveries in the writing process. The story is there, but it needs revising. Author Neil Gaiman has said that the second draft is when you make it look like you knew what you were doing the whole time. That’s where I’m at right now. By the third or fourth draft, it will be ready for early readers.

If I had to guess (and these things are always subject to change), I’ll spend the next 2-3 months editing and rewriting to release it early fall. I haven’t done a full “launch” for previous book projects, the way I would for a film. I intend to do that for this book since this book will appeal beyond the niche of my previous writing. This will add some time between completing the book and the release for building the launch, but I think it’ll be worth it.

Also, now that the first draft of the book is done, there will be more space in my life for other creative projects. While working on it, I’d get ideas for doing more podcasts or playing with new AI tools but knew that dabbling in those would take energy away from the novel I wanted to finish. The short-form content on social media has been a good way to keep sharing ideas with all of you, but as the book becomes complete, there will be more room for other projects.

Changing Hegemon Media

Since I have a new novel coming, I’ll be shifting my focus to include other non-Children’s Justice writing on Hegemon media.

I debated creating a new substack to keep Children’s Justice and other writing separate but decided that would just be confusing and divide my efforts. Instead, I created a section just for Children’s Justice material and moved all articles that relate to that to the new section.

While I still intend to write about Children’s Justice issues, this substack will be expanding to include other writing relating to whatever I’m working on, including the new novel (and maybe my first narrative feature film after that?).

I’ve also updated the logo for Hegemon Media:

The old logo will appear on Children’s Justice material and the new on other projects. Both were created when I first launched this site, but I’m bringing one of the early designs back to differentiate between general and Children’s Justice writing.

Giveaways

If you subscribe to Hegemon Media, you will get:

• Link to watch my documentary American Circumcision for free

• Read the first chapter of The Intactivist Guidebook for free

• Read the first three chapters of Children’s Justice for free

• Read a free sample from my next book when it is released

Consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription to get these.

Subscribe now

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