Despite the incessant flash and chatter of the online mediascape, those of you who faithfully read Rural Reflections-The Reboot may have noticed that we’ve not published in a while. Some of you may even have wondered why. The answer is multifold, so I thought I’d tackle it in one of my favorite exploratory forms, Summer Brennan’s “Five Things Essay.”
For some readers, the word “essay” might call up nightmares of their English Comp professor. Fear not! The “Five Things” format is just a way to follow Montaigne’s idea of trying out ideas and seeing where they go.1
At least it’s done for now. I spent most of July getting the manuscript ready to send to my editor, which meant, among other things, drawing maps. I am not blessed with a natural ability in the visual arts, so it turned into a whole thing, albeit a worthwhile one. The only real hiccup happened when the process showed me the book was missing something, which meant a few hundred words of new writing.
Then, I had the screen reader read the whole thing to me aloud, an exercise in both humility and no small amount of entertainment. My book has quite a few Haudenosaunee-based place names, some of which it pronounced just fine, some of which it got comically wrong. The voice also, for reasons of its own making, insisted on pronouncing “river” with a long i, which was alternately hilarious and irritating, given that this is a book about floods.
As for the humbling part, well, the screen reader highlights just about every embarrassing error a writer might make: the overused words,2 the missing punctuation, the spelling mistakes that have probably been in every earlier draft.
Finally, a few days before it was due, my first reader suggested it was missing just one more scene. I could have dismissed the idea, but my gut said she was right, and so I embarked upon one more round of new writing.
At last, however, it is in the hands of my editor, four years after the flood that led to its creation.
On the first day of my annual summer trip to the Finger Lakes, I got up from the dinner table, felt the slightest of twinges in my leg, and within minutes completely lost function as my knee began to swell. I made it to my parents’ couch and got ice on it (the knee, not the couch), but it kept getting worse. By the time my father helped me to the garage and I managed to wedge my throbbing, nonfunctional leg into their car for a late-night trip to the ER, I wanted to howl. Maybe I actually did.
I thus spent most of my time away practicing RICE,3 then saw my knee doctor within two days of getting home to Kentucky. He diagnosed it as hemarthrosis, which is when a joint fills up with blood.4 There is no specific way either to cure or to prevent it; the body eventually reabsorbs it, and you can do physical therapy to regain strength and mobility. I’m walking without crutches now, but my knee replacement no longer feels as far away as I would like.
Since I’ve not been getting out much, I started working on permissions for the book. In the process, I uncovered a new layer to the problems that arise when local papers get sold to ever-larger conglomerates. Not only is local coverage lost as newsrooms shrink and lose personnel, which creates a maelstrom of effects all its own; it also creates a labyrinth of difficulties when you’re trying to verify publication credits. I have met a lot of people who knew, worked with, and even wrote for my grandparents, yet their word does not prove that my grandparents wrote the articles and took the photographs they did. Even most clippings do not suffice, since they rarely include all the requisite information. Instead, a corporate representative who probably cannot locate Hornell on a map5 has suggested I consult digital archives, archives that for this, as for many small-town papers, do not exist. I cannot regret the many hours I have spent looking, though, as I have corresponded with many unsung heroes in the form of local librarians and volunteer historians. They will get the biggest of shout-outs in the book.
I doubt I need to tell readers about the impact large language models6 have had on the publishing industry. At first Substack seemed like it was going to be a safe haven in that storm, but the terms of posting here keep shifting, and writers are not always warned ahead of time. I now have to check a box to say that my posts may not be used to “train” LLMs (this should be but is not the default setting), then I have to check another box to say I don’t want my posts scanned by Pangram, a program that claims to be an AI detector (this too is not the default).
You might be wondering why I would object to having my posts scanned. My content is human-generated, so why should I care? One reason is that Pangram, like all AI detectors, has gotten things wrong countless times. Moreover, I have no reason to trust that it won’t be used to further “train” LLMs without my consent, especially since the news has been full of stories about chatbots “going rogue.”
I intend to keep writing “Rural Reflections–The Reboot,” but I don’t yet know what that looks like. I love playing with the polyphony of our two voices, but have begun to wonder what other shapes that might take and how often I will post them. Weekly? Every other week? Once a month? When I figure it out, you will be the first to know!
I also don’t know if I want to stay on Substack, or if I want to move to a different platform. Substack has changed a lot in just the three years since I’ve been on here. It used to feel like a safe little niche for someone who likes writing and wants a place to share it. Now it has podcasts, videos, “followers” as well as subscribers, and both “chats” and “notes” (both of which are separate from comments on individual posts). It’s starting to feel like it’s in the midst of an identity crisis, the end result of which may be just another social media platform, the last thing I want or need.
No worries, though. I’m not going anywhere just yet. I have a few things I’d like to post about my trip to the Flight 93 memorial (just prior to the knee incident) and how much harder it is to wreck your knee in your mid-fifties than it would have been even ten years before. I can’t migrate anywhere until I know where we’re going, so for now, stay tuned. Another post will show up soon.7
Caveat emptor: you might end up with more questions than answers when we’re done.
For a while I seem to have had a love affair with “harrowing,” to cite just one example.
Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation.
At first, I had been telling people it’s when your joint fills up with your own blood, then I realized the “your own” is superfluous. Think about it—who else’s blood would it be?!
My grandparents reported for the Hornell paper for many years, the same paper that published Ruth’s columns.
Also known as “artificial intelligence” (AI).
If you’re a paid subscriber and want to cancel your renewal just in case, I totally understand. I’m thinking about a different payment model anyway, something that involves less of a reader commitment in terms of both money and time.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.