The Chronicles of Xeo Woolfe is new and refurbished — evolutionary prototype style. It comes from some original chapters written way back in 2004-6. I killed many ugly style-babies when recently completing it, while I suffered the pain of formally psychologically-trained self-reflection.
Conceptualised and creatively birthed in 2004, the first paragraphs of The Chronicles of Xeo Woolfe hit the Internet in 2005. It was just a hobby project then while I was continuing further study in the humanities at the age of 36, and I was learning my art while trying to decide what to do when I grew up!
The dialogue worked out nicely, and so thoughts of adapting the work for the screen emerged early. However there were many vicious interruptions along the way.
The editing, however, was a mess. To be brutally frank with myself — so was some of the style and expression. This was partly due to some of the interruptions I experienced while writing — which were completely awful.
I’ve always known there were problems. When I asked my MPhil supervisor — the eminent Orwell scholar Peter Marks — about it in 2011, it was the first time I’d ever seen him lost for a response. I saved him the awkward moments by not demanding one.
Now that writing Xeo Woolfe’s no longer a hobby, however: I fixed it. I fixed it hard. I fixed it very, very hard.
It hurt. I suffered the agony of brutal self-reflection, trained by hundreds of psychology lecturers. (I completed an advanced psychology degree). Yet, a labour of love it remains. There are many new chapters which have never before hit the Internet.
So although I hate editing I love fiction writing. Editing my grammar and killing my ugly babies: I hate. I’ve learned at last to go back to the good habits that Sue Woolfe taught me in postgraduate writing school at The University of Sydney — a dog’s lifetime ago in 2011. (More about the borrowing of a name in a moment.)
So the old chapter-episodes are now new again, and the new episodes are far more lovingly crafted. I have decided this evolutionary prototyping approach (this is a metaphor from software engineering which means to keep improving something) is okay because I am a postmodern informationist comic science fiction author. More importantly — however — because I read on line that J. K. Rowling had to resubmit Harry Potter to publishers many times before they published her excellent work.
Bad vanity editing and failure to pay attention to craptastic aesthetics and expression in some of the Xeo Woolfe episodes didn’t stop a few scriptwriters pinching some of my ideas. (I am overstating some of this a little self-bruisingly, but not all of it.) Not everything was bad. Some of the literary invention, prose, turns of phrase, and jokes were pretty good.
A coupled of the situational novums got pinched.
They ended up re-seeded and sprouting up in various fields of clover and other pastures. I’m take it as an intertextual honour.
I even had a pornography writer pilfer my nom de plume (Avery Gabriel Axton) at one point. I still have no idea who they were. Not a friend, methinks. Not very relevant either.
Splashes of horrendous editing and bodgie style notwithstanding I’m not a completely clueless scribbler. While completing my MPhil in English with Peter (specialising in science fiction) I did manage to get 90s in my postgraduate short story writing course under the tutelage of the eminent Australian author Sue Woolfe. (I’ve not seen Sue since, but she was a great teacher. Being able to write and also to teach writing is not easy, and is a rare and special skill set indeed.)
In that academic creative setting my editing and expression were both a lot better. I was paying attention properly.
I borrowed the spelling of Sue’s name for Xeo Woolfe to honour a great teacher, but also because I had been studying Old English and Old Icelandic literature including — obviously — Beowulf as an undergraduate and I was trying to decide how to spell ‘Xeo Woolfe’ in my intertextually charged postmodern creation.
I can’t currently remember how I spelled it in 2004, but I think it was just ‘Wolf’ (Now I have to dig through my backups to sate my curiosity.) I felt — for some reason — that this was a bit flat. But ‘Woolfe’ is nice because of the fluffy sheep reference. You know — the things that androids may or may not dream about. Xeo is a bit androgenous, and a bit postmodern, and a bit metrosexual, and a bit nonbinary. He’d wear a woolly cardigan. In fact that’s not a bad idea. ‘Woolfe’ is also beneficially more realistic and less contrived. It’s often the little details that make a big difference.
So now here we are. First class honours in philosophy, a master of philosophy in English, and a PhD in philosophy later (with a degree in psychology along the way) I am still wondering which way to go when I grow up. My writing, however, has gone back to 2011 in Sue’s class.
This is a good thing.
The first thing you will read is the prologue. It is partly straight sci-fi-sit-com action, and the comic tropes in it have become a currency of intertextuality in science fiction in the last ten years, often becoming textual, tropic and memetic ‘replicators’ in cinematic and television sci fi. However, it’s also postmodern. So look out for the ghosts of Quentin Tarantino, Douglas Coupland, Thomas Pynchon, John Updike, and of course Rushdie and Stephenson. (The only fiction I enjoy as much as science fiction is magic realist science fiction. I absolutely adored American Gods. For my Gaimanesque efforts you can check out Melvin the Magnificent when it is released.)
My MPhil in science fiction literature makes me feel almost licensed to say that you can consider some of what I do meta-postmodern. Watch the narrator and elements of the pseudo-narrative closely.
That’s enough literary theory and enough of the associated bad language. We don’t study here. We do.
Okay so we study our craft and we do, but we don’t analyse it unless we’re killing babies. Analysis is a job for literary theorists and psychoanalysts. I think that’s about right. I will have to ask someone smart like Fry, Gaiman, or Rushdie.
I was finding my feet, and my voice, as an author at the time I invented Xeo Woolfe, and the episodes that followed (2–4) were not as elegantly balanced in terms of style, pace, and voice as I would have liked even then. As I said — I hurt myself fixing them. If J. K. is allowed to, then I’m going to do it too. (Thanks J.K.) The lost episodes — soon to be revived in book form and for the series are better by far (although there is perpetually room for much improvement).
The most recent episodes are those of an author punished by another 15 years of fraught and exhilarating life and a lot of self-reflection enhanced by self-inflicted formal psychoeducation.
They are post-post-modern (and meta-postmodern!) literature that has the audacity to admix post-actualism and dissembling post-postmodern anti-tropes with brazen pulp and yet implicate the elevation of science and reason. The narrative voice is politely decimated, and the rules…
What rules?
The Prologue is now, finally smooth and polished. I think I said this once before when it wasn’t, but then I hurt myself. So, dear reader, you should get a giggle out of it, and feel Xeo’s postmodern pain, and not a little of his geworfenheit…
Silly anti-simulacrum novums, anyone?
About the above stable diffusion image. I know quite a lot about machine learning architectures having a background in cognitive science, computer science (1996!) philosophy of information, and cognitive psychology. The word is that stable diffusion machine learning systems don’t do verbatim reproduction of text well.
I can promise you that what is going on is that the security community and government in the USA is very worried about panic in labour markets and society in general so they have intentionally hobbled some of the capabilities of LLMs like ChatGPT. (This works a bit like reverse eminent domain.) Remember the news in 2022 about ChatGPT getting dumber? They’ve done the same with stable diffusion.
I know Professor Fry is worried about the impact of LLMs on writers. Don’t worry Professor. Fiction is really hard for LLMs. The longer the novel, the harder it is. You won’t see Neal Stephenson unseated by LLMs in their current format any time soon. Really good fiction writing is much, much harder to replicate than images because of the abstract concepts, subtexts, semantic intertexts, and numerous other less tangible features. As any philosopher will tell you: semantics are much softer jelly to nail to the tree than are syntax, grammar, and vocabulary.
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