Category: Writing
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Who Are You, My Country?
Who are you, My country? Many years have I breathed of your air Drank of your waters Trod on your bones Mingled with your flesh And yet The names of your celebrities are (Who even are they?) Wind in my ears Your latest leaders are (now that we are in between elections) faceless, forgotten Your…
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Cheah vs ChatGPT
I’ve always been a skeptic of the use of artificial intelligence in creative work, especially Large Language Models and art generators. An AI analyzes a prompt, gathers input, optimises data, and generates an output that attempts to satisfy the prompt. An AI does not create. An AI does not think. An AI does not know.…
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A Culture Fractured
The old magic is gone. There won’t be another Lord of the Rings. Nor will there be another Narnia, Conan, Shadow, Zorro, or any other cultural icon that will bring a culture together. The ones still in existence have been parasitized by corporate interests, transformed into one part soulless cash cow, one part propaganda machine.…
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Mind-Body Unity in Writing
How do you write from your centre? A coaching client recently posed this question to me. As a shakuhachi player, he is familiar with the concept of playing from the hara, from his abdomen. Power is generated from the hara and focused through the lips to generate sound. Is there a way to do something…
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Writing A Different Approach to Martial Arts
Most English-speaking readers would be familiar with Western portrayals of martial arts. In movies, television, games and prose, fight scenes are the cornerstone of Western fiction. One commonality I’ve noticed in most Western fight scenes I’ve seen is that they are portrayed as exchanges of force. Every fight scene is presented as a contest of…
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The Last Thousand Words
Dozens of days of research. Hundreds of hours of writing. Constant sweating and fact-checking, checking in proofreaders and editors, editing and re-editing the manuscript, polishing it to perfection. Every fact must be checked, every slang word period-accurate, every last detail lifted from reality. And what is the fruit of your labours? One thousand words. No…