Writing By Machine: There's a short story by Roald Dahl, the children's book writer called "The Great Automatic Grammatizator." It was written for grown-ups, and is about a writer for the literary magazines who is approached by a man who has developed a machine that perfectly creates the types of stories found in the popular magazines. They tell him they'll pay him for his name if he'll let them attach it to stories cranked out by the machine. The writer declines, but the machine stories become so popular that no regular writers can sell any more.

I was thinking of that when I downloaded a couple of "story helper" software programs this morning, because, as usual, I couldn't think of what to write. It was as good a stalling tactic as any.

One was just all around bad, and the other was good, in that it taught lots of terminology, but I'm sort of on the side of Algis Budrys, who feels such terminology is more valuable to critics than it is to writers.

All in all, I was not surprised to be really disappointed. I'm not even going to bother linking to the programs. Which makes this post pointless.

But what do you expect? This really is just another stalling tactic, after all. Why should it go any better than this morning's?