So, Anyway, I Say As Though We Are Mid-conversation, And You're Not Just Being Invited Into This Conversation

So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you're not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I'd sent over. (<3)

The conversation can be surmised as, "This feels like something you would write, but it's juuuust off enough I'm phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm."

They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird... And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the "he would not fucking say that" meme?

Yeah. That's what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.

Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the "suggestions" are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my "decline" every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don't know.)

It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I'm over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:

ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, "Look how they massacred my boy."

Fearing that it wasn't just this one manuscript, I've spent the whole night going through everything I've worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I've not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It's fine; it's all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter's wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.

This is a sentence from a Batman fic I've been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:

"It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas."

This is what the AI changed it to:

"It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug."

Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words "Batman Muppet threesome?"

Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit's side piece too much???? What have I wrought?

Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.

I’m a book and a half into The Murderbot Diaries and the whole thing is just

Murderbot: I don’t understand humans I don’t think like them at all

Murderbot: *goes to a job interview and has to watch seven episodes of its favorite show to calm down afterward*

Me: actually this is the most relatable character that has ever existed

So I'm finally reading "The Old Man and the Sea". I was into it at first--the friendship between the old man and the boy, the village life, the banter. But the middle. Y'all. The middle. It's killing me. Pages and pages and pages of "He let the line out. He watched the sunlight glimmer on the water. His back ached under the pull of the line. He thought of baseball. His hand cramped, and he was angry at it. It was a worthless hand. He picked up the fish he caught earlier and slit it open. He threw the guts overboard and skinned it. He washed his hand in the water. He washed the flesh in the water, then cut it into strips. He ate a piece. It was not good, but he needed his strength. He thought of the boy. The skiff moved steadily through the water, pulled by the great fish. It was a strong and noble beast, but he would kill it if he could. He ate another strip of fish. He wished for salt, though he was surrounded by the sea." OH MY FUCKING GAWD GET ON WITH IIIIIIIIIIT

Basically how it went down.