jon321971

You can’t beat a pub quiz - when you reach a certain age. I wouldn’t have dreamt of attending one in my 20s and 30s when I was too cool for school-like environments in which you had to answer questions! But now I’m older and wiser? All over them. And it’s good to see competitors aged 20-80 taking part in the one in my local boozer. Phones away. Engage the brain. Bit of healthy competition. It took the team I quiz with about ten thrashings and a few close calls before we won. Victory...

I wrote Last Writer Sitting in 2023. My copywriting business was already on the wane, following the launch of Cheat GPT the previous November (it stands for Generic Pilfered Trash, right?). Even then, it felt like the writing was on the wall for us jobbing writers, not on the page or screen where we prefer it. I’d seen a demo of the tech, and although the output was pure slop, it was quick slop that would be good enough for many clients who were more concerned about their bottom line than...

Thankfully, I got out of working in ad agencies (as a copywriter) before many of them slid into the abyss of AI slop, and before I wrote The Pub Gardeners. If ever there was an industry bound to embrace technology that enabled the cutting of corners, the lowering of quality and the non-payment of creative human beings, I suspected advertising would be it. The lead characters in my short novel The Pub Gardeners aren’t quite so lucky. The writer and art director duo of Darlington and...