Let Go to Grab Something New
November 2024Some time ago–a decade at least, but it feels longer–a literary agent read a manuscript that I’d written and told me that she loved it, loved my style, but the book felt too calculated, too much like a math problem. It didn’t lack heart per se, she said, but it felt too much like a clocked thing, too neat.
The Truth—and Misinformation—is Out There
October 2024Novelists know a thing or two about making up stories that people want to believe. TIME published an essay of mine, reflecting on misinformation—and how to deal with it—during this latest U.S. election season.
To promote my debut novel’s publication, I was a guest on Andrew Keenon’s podcast, KEEN ON. Our conversation covered numerous topics, from societal nostalgia for outdated tech to the question of whether I could prove that I was a person, not a deepfake.
Do Obsolete Machines Dream of Better Days?
September 2024Part essay, part tribute, part coda to IN OUR LIKENESS: “This September, my debut novel comes out, a happy event to be sure; but also, if I’m honest, a bittersweet one, as there was no greater booster during my long endeavor to become a novelist than my mom, who died a few weeks before I sold the manuscript.”
Nothing’s Ever Lost
September 2024“I was halfway through writing the first draft of a novel about artificial intelligence when I heard that Christie’s planned to auction a portrait produced by AI. This was before DALL-E, before GPT3, before Gemini, Grok, and the latest chatbots. At the time, the idea of an algorithm producing art was plausible, but ridiculous. In theory, it was possible to auction off the bizarre renderings of generative adversarial networks, but who would want to pay for it?”
Rise of the Ghost Machines
June 2024Can You Please Stop being Too Quiet, Please?
July 2024“Today, we hear from Bryan VanDyke, whose debut novel, IN OUR LIKENESS, will be published in September. We’re talking to Bryan about what to do when gatekeepers consider your writing “too quiet” and ways an author can make some noise with their new work without sidelining their own vision and style.”
