Eteros Ego – The Other Me

The Other Me by Sara Jachrich Jeng is not about ‘eteros ego’ numbers in which the sum of the proper dividers of each is equal to the other number.

It is a book about split identities and it opens with a quote from Simone de Beauvoir about the respect that men typically give to women’s property and definition of self.

Man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being… He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.

This book came to my attention because it was promoted by Margarita Montimore, an author with whom I’m familiar because she ripped off my novel in her 2019 Oona Out of Order.

Montimore also promoted Matt Haig’s 2019 The Midnight Library, which was another rip off of my novel.

These four books are all strangely similar and this made me wonder if there had been a little rip off party with three authors passing around the a software tool that had been fed with my book template. Perhaps each person who used the software package selected a slightly different set of writing prompts.

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When the points rest on a diagonal line the same things are happening in the same order in both books. In the slideshow above, I provided a comparison with Maybe in Another Life, an older book that many readers identified as the genealogical predecessor of The Midnight Library and Oona Out of Order. They were wrong. My book was the closest living relative and influence, yet none of the offending authors credited it in their promotional interviews. Not once.

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/virtual-event—sarah-3/clips/6114d56e61b2ef009d8b7658

Haig’s publisher even sent a letter denying that he had ever heard of my book.

I’m not sure that this type of writing should be illegal, but not acknowledging the software tool or texts used is surely wrong and should probably be illegal, even though the tool causes each user to give the stolen material a slightly different twist.

The twist that Zachrich Jeng gave to the template seems to have been influenced by a recent television series called Russian Doll. If you want to splice the ideas from two sources together, it is easier to splice things that share some commonalities and my book shared the *multiple timelines* concept with Russian Doll — a sort of feminine Groundhog Day story with a layer of ominous rot.

Before I get into Zachrich Jeng’s book, The Other Me, I’ll do a run down of the similarities between Russian Doll, Groundhog Day, and my book. This should provide a baseline or control variable for the comparison with The Other Me.

Groundhog Day or Russian Doll vs. My Adorable Apotheosis or Oona Out of Order or Midnight Library

1. The protagonist is loved by no one and loves no one.
2. The protagonist is aware of multiple timelines that his/her life could follow and he/she searches for one that is optimal.
3. This leads him/her to get lost in a multiverse of timelines on a search for one that solves his/her fundamental problem – loneliness and alienation.
4. En route to this solution, he/ she dies and re-emerges on another timeline.

This is a short list of similarities that establish the genre of the stories and it doesn’t come close to suggesting copyright infringement. It is worth noting that the author of a 1981 book called One Fine Day sued the producers of 1993’s Groundhog Day for stealing too much content from his book and he lost. The judge wrote:

The novel is dark and introspective, featuring witchcraft and an encounter with God. It is marked, for example, by an explosion on an airplane that kills 192 people, the rape of one young woman, and the suicide of another. These tragic events recur as the day repeats itself over and over again. In contrast, the film is essentially a romantic comedy about an arrogant, self-centered man who evolves into a sensitive, caring person who, for example, in his repeating day, saves a boy falling out of a tree, changes a flat tire for several elderly women, and learns to play the piano. 

I find that this portrayal ignores the darkness in Groundhog Day in which the protagonist engages in promiscuous sex and kills himself and others over and over in ever more gruesome ways. He also muses about his relationship to God in the movie, so the justification cited by the judge rings hollow since the framing of the story with the man waking up in bed on the same day over and over and gradually learning to care about other people is the same, even though the man in the novel makes less obvious progress towards becoming a decent human being. Nevertheless, when I read the whole synopsis, I have to agree with the judge that on a beat for beat basis, different methods were used to express the character arc. One of my plot overlap lists would look like:

Groundhog Day vs. One Fine Day

1. A man wakes up in his bed and has a regular, lousy day.
2. On his way to work, he encounters a guy who makes a lame attempt at humor.
3. There is a nice woman with whom he works who seems to like him even though he isn’t a nice guy.
4. He wakes up in his bed on the same day again.
5. He is surprised to hear the same lame attempt at humor on his way to work.
6. He wakes up in his bed on the same day again.
7. He slowly realizes that he is re-living the same day.
8. He doesn’t recognize how nice the woman who he works with.
9. Feeling like there are no consequences for his actions, he does whatever he wants and seduces a sexy yet crazy/stupid woman.
10. But his life feels empty without being able to progress to the next day, so he searches for ways to break the cycle.
11. Nothing works, even sleeping in the same bed with the nice woman from work doesn’t break him out of the loop.
12. He figures out how to get out of the loop and pursue the woman he wants.

The most obvious discrepancy is that the woman he wants is different in the book and the movie. In Groundhog Day, he wants the nice woman and in One Fine Day, he wants the crazy/sexy woman but in a dark twist, he realizes too late that the nice woman was the better choice all along.

Eleven points of consecutive similarity doesn’t meet the fourteen point threshold I’ve been using to establish a metric for definite wrong doing, but I can understand why the author of One Fine Day was angry with being denied credit, especially if the pacing of when he repeatedly woke up in his bed was the same as in the movie.

I will now dig into Zachrich Jeng’s 2021 book, The Other Me, a book that initially looks like Russian Doll, but which quickly becomes something else.

Russian Doll vs. The Other Me and Oona Out of Order

1. In one of her lives, the protagonist is a woman who is loved by no one and who loves no one, yet she has city friends.
2. In the first scene, she looks in a mirror at her birthday party and switches to another version of her life.
3. She is disconnected from herself and others.
4. She is desperate to get back on track in her original life, but she gets stuck in a really bad version of her life.
5. She is mixed up with a man who is also stuck in the same time-loop.
6. They both die and get to go back in time to re-live their lives so that a good outcome ensues.

In contrast, The Midnight Library, The Other Me and My Adorable Apotheosis modify this premise: what if there was a ghostly/AI machine that could manipulate everyone’s memories to the extent that they lose connection to their existence in a completely different life. The time frame over which the memories are modified is longer than just a day, as in Groundhog Day or Russian Doll. Instead, it goes back to the female protagonist’s teens, as in stories like 2004’s The Butterfly Effect, a film I have yet to see.

I find it strange that both books chose to associate this technology with a ‘genie’ or ginii and that many sequences of ideas from my book are used to express the premise in Jeng’s version of the story. There are differences, to be sure, but the way in which this book was constructed is highly suspicious, especially since she didn’t attribute the influence of my book.

The Other Me vs. My Adorable Apotheosis

1. We meet the young woman protagonist via a first person singular narrative that starts out with two scenes set in separate party/bar locations where she is drinking alcohol with her friends. (Jeng p. 1-17) (Hacker p. 4-30).
   1. When we first meet her, she views herself as someone who wants to be an independent woman in the city. Her only friend in the city has a trust fund while she is not rich. (Jeng p. 3) (Hacker p. 9)
   2. We are quickly shown how she is torn between this identity and that of a person who stayed close to home/family/marriage. (Jeng p. 7) (Hacker v.2)
   3. In the first pages of both books, we meet her father who she associates with security and then we meet her boyfriend/husband — a man in whom she had little interest in school. He puts his hands on her waist at a party/club filled with people she doesn’t know. (Jeng p. 7, 13) (Hacker p. 4, 30)
   4. This, coupled with the effects of alcohol, prompts her to feel disoriented and disconnected, not sure of who she is, so she runs down a hallway past the restrooms and leaves the party to go outside and get a breath of fresh air. At this point, she encounters a small child who doesn’t exist in what she considers to be her real life. Once outside, she meets a drunk person and the smell of smoke. (Jeng p. 9, 10) (Hacker p. 30, v.2)
   5. In these pages, we also learn that she has a bad relationship with her mother. We also meet the mother of her significant other and a person with a strangely elongated neck (Jeng p. 17) (Hacker p. 11)
2. We learn about the protagonist’s fundamental problem with loneliness and identity. (Jeng 1-17) (Hacker p. )
   1. The party/outing was her significant other’s idea. He was trying to make her feel less alone, even though she seems insensitive to all efforts of people to connect to her. (Jeng p. 13) (Hacker p. 9)
   2. She goes to visit a bathroom mirror to get a sense of her identity, but this caused her to completely lose her grounding. (Jeng p. 4) (Hacker p. 33 v.2)
   3. We learn that the protagonist’s identity is defined by her experience in school and her choice to either be an independent, city woman or to marry a certain man who didn’t interest her when they were in school together. (Jeng p. 13) (Hacker p. 13)
   4. In her life as an independent woman she is not close to her parents and family who wanted her to get married.
   5. It becomes clear that she is so mentally torn between these two life options that she has developed delusions that she has actually lived both lives. The cause of this is mysterious and she doubts her sanity, telling no one what she really thinks is going on. Jeng makes this clear right away, but in my book this is a very slow, gradual reveal. Jeng immediately shows the symptoms and gradually reveals the cause whereas I reveal the cause and slowly reveal the symptoms.
3. The mystery of what caused her fundamental problem with loneliness and identity is explored.
   1. She blames her alienation on shallow relationships defined by reflecting one another’s preferences. (Jeng p. 3) (Hacker p. 65)
   2. She had a fainting spell, so maybe the problem is in her brain. (Jeng p. 16) (Hacker p. 38)
   3. She blames her alienation on a doll-like, non-human identity. (Jeng p. 18) (Hacker p. 12)
   4. Her lack of integration with technology is blamed for her alienation. (Jeng p. 20) (Hacker p. 10)
   5. Her lack of children is blamed for her alienation. (Jeng p. 22) (Hacker p. 64)
4. We learn about the technologically oriented places where the people in her world work.
   1. A wearable tech device [that blocks signals] is mentioned. (Jeng p. 19) (Hacker p. 15, [v.2])
   2. Tech work places tend to give their workers terrible hours. (Jeng p. 19) (Hacker p. 21)
   3. There is a workplace that is run by/specializes in AI assistants. (Jeng p. 20) (Hacker p. 41)
   4. A difficult job interview is mentioned. (Jeng p. 20) (Hacker p. 18)
   5. In the context of tech-oriented people to whom she has no connection, characters named Peter and Daisy are mentioned. (Jeng p. 20, 23) (Hacker p. 19, 32)
5. She is trying to decide who she wants to be.
   1. She looks at the older people in her environment and worries that she will turn into them. She doesn’t want to be them. She isn’t sure who she is. (Jeng p. 23) (Hacker p. 54)
   2. She is in a relationship with a guy who seems nice, but she isn’t in love with him. (Jeng p. 31) (Hacker p. 33)
   3. A cat is used as a symbol of her attraction to her other life/curiosity. (Jeng p. 31) (Hacker p. 91)
   4. There is conflict between her commitment to her affection for an attractive guy and a ‘nice guy’. The ‘nice guy is jealous of the attractive guy. This is part of a scene in which she and a guy cook dinner together but don’t get to really eat it because of an interruption from another guy. (Jeng p. 44, 50) (Hacker p. 120)
   5. When she thinks about her true identity, she thinks of her less well-off childhood girlfriends and her work as a babysitter. She visits the place where she grew up and sees a boarded-up house. We learn that her mother’s health is ailing. (Jeng p. 69, 73) (Hacker p. 151)
6. A tech mystery emerges.
   1. She is living in the not too distant future and there is something unnerving about technology. She is at home and an appliance talks to her. (Jeng p. 32) (Hacker p. 95)
   2. We learn that people are highly dependent on tech devices to augment their memories. (Jeng p. ) (Hacker p. prologue, and original first chapter) Whereas Jeng’s protagonist initially has a voice in her head that reminds her of things she is supposed to know about her life and it is only slowly made clear what the origin of that voice is, my protagonist lives in a world in which everyone uses such memory augmentation devices except for her.. initially. She gets her internal voice later. It is the same plot device introduced in different ways. As I developed my story, I introduced the plot device in two different ways. Initially, I just explicitly came out with it in the prologue and first chapter and in later versions, like the published version from 2018, I slowly revealed the plot device, making it implicit but not explicit.
   3. A tech workplace has an experimental AI technology that she doesn’t understand. (Jeng p. 58) (Hacker p. 59)
   4. She is having trouble with her memories of timelines that didn’t happen in her present reality and this trouble gradually intensifies throughout the book. (Jeng p. 67) (Hacker p. 41, 47, v.2) In version 2 of my story, I added a ghostly manifestation of her sister who may not have died in another timeline.
   5. She takes a trip to a place that she associates with the life she left behind, but finds nothing to connect to. There is a noisy machine in her parents’ home that does something mysterious and possibly nefarious. (Jeng p. 70) (Hacker p. 147, 177) In version 2 of my story, there is a tree that is missing from the place she remembered. There is also a bit added to the poolside scene about noise being used to manipulate her parents.
7. There are some strange coincidences of similar world-building elements.
   1. An older, married couple with children is comfortable with the idea that a tech device will record all of their conversations. (Jeng p. 70) (Hacker p. 302)
   2. A chapter opens with the protagonist in an argument with a man that causes him to have to pull over to the side of the road, making a rumbling/crunching noise. In this scene, she is upset about losing a parent. (Jeng p. 80) (Hacker p. 4)
   3. There is a disembodied voice that pipes up whenever she isn’t sure about what she remembers about her life. It is her memory assistant or virtual self or or echo self, as in my book. (Jeng p. 54, 114, 122, 135, etc..) (Hacker p. 268) In my story, she was resisting getting this AI technology installed in her head while everyone else had been using it all along. Near the end of the story, she succumbs. The system engineered social stability by guiding people’s lives in certain directions and in both books, the stability of the system is threatened at the end of the story.
   4. The technologists of this future world prefer faux agricultural aesthetics for their building projects– like a tourist’s version of the countryside. Cows are mentioned in this context. The aesthetics are described as uncanny. (Jeng p. 128) (Hacker p. 149, 193)
   5. She meets a nefarious, powerful character from the tech firm who gives her a “smile with too many teeth”. This identifies him as the villain/Peter/Chess. (Jeng p. 128) (Hacker p. 90)
8. She revisits places and experiences from her youth to try to regain her sanity.
   1. She enters a classroom like space in which a professor presides over a group of students with an unbalanced ratio of men to women. The person in the minority has a hard time fitting in. (Jeng p. 93) (Hacker p. 77)
   2. In a moment of identity crisis, she talks about regrets over her life choices with an old friend. There is a moment in the conversation when she retches. (Jeng p. 103) (Hacker p. 213, v.2) The retching part is only in version 2.
   3. A big guy who is marrying her friend is very friendly and comes over to hug her even though they aren’t close friends. (Jeng p. 104) (Hacker p. 148)
   4. She remembers the guy she wasn’t interested in when she was in school — that in her city life, he had been stalking her while she was working. (Jeng p. 136) (Hacker p. 84)
   5. She remembers her life as an independent woman being marked by financial instability and being passed over for credit. (Jeng p. 140) (Hacker p. 137)
9. The effect of the mind erasure machine is confusing her about her marriage.
   1. Because someone is tampering with her memories, she goes in search of her home, but can’t find it. Then she gets lost in a place that should’ve been familiar to her. (Jeng p. 89) (Hacker p. 260)
   1. After losing her mind in search of lost memories and getting lost, she finds her way back home, takes a shower, and is immediately buried with affection from a man who loves her even though she is strangely disconnected and pulling away from him. All of the attention feels intrusive. (Jeng p. 114) (Hacker p. 267)
   2. Her trouble with her mind is causing problems in her relationship. She and her husband have a fight about sex and her husband has a panicked reaction about medical issues and medication related to sex. (Jeng p. 119) (Hacker p. 242)
   3. She remembers a story about a friend of hers from her past. The friend had almost died due to childbirth. (Jeng p. 119) (Hacker p. 150)
   4. She and her husband have a dog and no child is planned. Her husband doesn’t seem to be honest with her about everything that is going on or why he freaked out about the medical issue. (Jeng p. 119, 124) (Hacker p. 272)
10. Regrets about her choices haunt her.
    1. She thinks about her wedding to a guy she wasn’t attracted to when they were in school and who she rejected in her other life. (Jeng p. 123) (Hacker p. 139)
    2. She is constantly tormented by the issue of losing her identity to someone else. (Jeng p. 124) (Hacker p. 273)
    3. She is being the world’s worst wife and refusing to be kind or affectionate with her husband, even though he desperately loves her. He abruptly gives up because he can’t take the constant rejection. (Jeng p. 127) (Hacker p. 273)
    4. Because of the breakdown in her marriage and her connection to the villain/Peter/Chess, she is in danger of completely losing her control over her identity, abruptly becoming a completely different person all at once and the implication is that a sort of advanced technology is the cause of it. (Jeng p. 160) (Hacker p. 275)
    5. She meets up with a friend from her childhood who has a bunch of kids and who looks terrible because of a bad marriage with a guy who hits on very young women. (Jeng p. 181) (Hacker p. 150)
11. We finally learn a bit more about how the machine that created the parallel lives works.
    1. The machine at the tech company uses AI and some quantum effect to change history. Technical info dumps seem to occur at similar intervals in both books. (Jeng p. 187, 197, 200, 275-277) (Hacker p. 187, 197, 201, 275-284)
    2. The AI changes the past to shape the present.
    3. The tech company also erases people’s memories when they don’t conform to what they are trying to engineer. (Jeng p. 233) (Hacker p. 253)
    4. The AI saves a version of itself (thoughts, memories, knowledge, personality) and merges itself with an earlier version. (Jeng p. 236) (Hacker p. 268)
    5. The AI *is* the system and it is hard to know everything about what it is doing. (Jeng p. 236) (Hacker p. 201)
12. Some random world building similarities jumped out at me.
    1. We get a scene of a mother stuck in a bad marriage and refusing to feed her child’s histrionics over feeling hungry. The girl works herself towards tears in a manipulative fashion. (Jeng p. 188) (Hacker p. 301)
    2. Intermittent fasting is mentioned. (Jeng p. 200) (Hacker p. v.2 intro)
    3. Music is featured on almost the same page in both books. (Jeng p. 201) (Hacker p. 195)
    4. Her splintered soul is described as being in ‘shards’. (Jeng p. 207) (Hacker p. 298)
    5. She deals with surgery and recovery in a hospital and getting food after leaving the hospital. (Jeng p. 224) (Hacker p. 160)
13. She is trying to avoid having her life run by this AI system and by the man who wants her to be his wife.
    1. The person who operates the system once ran a person off of a bridge in a horrific car accident. (Jeng p. 236) (Hacker p. 159)
    2. The machine is causing her and others to suffer from Deja Vu, reaching for things before they are ready to be reached for. There is a sort of time slip. (Jeng p. 238) (Hacker p. 190)
    3. She characterizes his love for her as untrustworthy : ” You weren’t in love with me, you were in love with your idea of me.” I used the same form of expression. (Jeng p. 278) (Hacker p. 9)
    4. She makes plans to break into a high security laboratory to hack into a machine. (Jeng p. 279) (Hacker p. 216)
    5. This leads to her death and to the death of the man who wants her to be his wife. (Jeng p. ) (Hacker p. 238, 231)
14. Again, there is a lengthy stretch of technical explanation for how the machine works.
    1. She meets a man who was married to her in a life she doesn’t fully remember or identify with. (Jeng p. 270) (Hacker p. 286)
    2. The machine workplace is described as being like a cult. (Jeng p. 274) (Hacker p. 288)
    3. An expert in the machine explains how it works. (Jeng p. 275-277) (Hacker p. 275-284)
    4. The machine is broken. (Jeng p. 282) (Hacker p. 281, 227)
    5. Because of the broken machine, her ex-boyfriend dies. (Jeng p. 308) (Hacker p. 231)
15. She realizes that the machine gives her more options.
    1. Someone who doesn’t care about the integrity of the timeline gets control of the machine and all hell breaks loose if people all try to optimize their lives at the same time. (Jeng p. 298) (Hacker p. 290)
    2. She realizes that she has had so many more parallel lives than just the one with Dodo/Eric and without him. (Jeng p. 302) (Hacker p. 288)
    3. In some of her other lives she was unethical or she had a baby. (Jeng p. 305) (Hacker p. 288)
    4. People who remember multiple timelines cause problems for the AI control system and are eliminated to preserve the stability of the system. (Jeng p. 307) (Hacker p. 291) In both books, the protagonist’s memory is causing problems for the AI system throughout the story, but in my book, I have the memory problem affect lots of people and cause mass death.
    5. She poetically describes the experience of having consciousness but no body. It is the experience of dying. (Jeng p. 313) (Hacker p. 294)
16. We get a happy ending.
    1. She is frustrated by how other people get attention and praise for their intellectual work while she is ignored. (Jeng p. 67) (Hacker p. 125)
    2. She gets to see her dead ex-boyfriend again. (Jeng p. 331) (Hacker v.2)
    3. She gets public recognition for her artistic expression. (Jeng p. 330) (Hacker p. 296)
    4. She gets to reconnect to the life she lost in the first chapter. (Jeng p. 331) (Hacker p. 298)
    5. I find it strange that in both books a 22 year old woman is mentioned. (Jeng p. ) (Hacker p. )

By plotting all of the page numbers out, I can count 25 consecutive points in one plot line and 40 consecutive points in another plot line.

There were some mythemes that I expected to see developed in the book but that didn’t show up. They would’ve fit right in, so I wondered if they had been removed.

1. She has a crisis because of theft of her intellectual property.
   1. She is frustrated by how other people get attention and praise for their intellectual work while she is ignored. (Jeng p. 67) (Hacker p. )
   2. She is devastated to learn that a colleague takes credit for her work and she has been erased from the narrative. (Jeng p. ) (Hacker p. )
   3. She visits a public presentation of the work she had created and understands that no one will believe the truth. (Jeng p. ) (Hacker p. )
   4. She is devastated to see that when she presented the intellectual work, it was ignored, but when her colleague presented the same work, it was celebrated. (Jeng p. ) (Hacker p. )
2. We learn about her independent life.
   1. In her life as an independent woman, she has too many student loans and her life choices are restricted by them.
   2. She frequently complains about not having any money in this life.
   3. She finds herself in a strange city in which this guy she didn’t like when she was in school is the only person who seems to care about her. He is her stalker.
   4. She looks in her bathroom mirror to get a sense of her identity, but this causes her to lose her grounding or anchoring.

Even though I appreciated many of Jeng’s observations of the minutia of human behavior and her twist on the themes we both expressed, this book looks like it was structured with the assistance of a software tool that fed writing prompts to the ‘author’ and since those writing prompts seem to have been extensively mined from a source with which I’m familiar, I believe that this tool enables the copying of unacknowledged works of literature.

Jeng was given many chances during her promotional work to attribute my book and she failed to do so, instead attributing unrelated works:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_(novel)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Springs_(2020_film)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Things_(2021_film)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Traveler%27s_Wife

There are so many ways to write a time warp story and I can guarantee that Jeng’s book does not share 100 commonalities with each of these stories. At least the commonalities that can be found will not be as specific as those in my list and they will not be as consecutively arranged.

I don’t dispute that Jeng’s book and my book are significantly different in several respects, I just contend that they are also significantly similar and that since the re-write of my book was constructed with an advanced editing tool, an ethical and possibly legal line has been crossed. These automated writing/spinning tools open the door to a (criminally?) lazy way to create a book (in 7 days) and they are definitely unethical without attribution.

Nevertheless, of the three books that utilized a template from my book with a focus on this particular premise, this one is probably my favorite because the ending had some surprises and I could see that she added something to the writing prompts taken from my book rather than just burying them in tedious minutiae. Don’t get me wrong, some of the scenes did feel like tedious rehashes of fragments of rejected time-warp stories about marriages, but if you have a good twist at the ending, I can forgive almost anything.. except for unattributed copying.

I mean, in the heat of the moment, every writer has been sloppy in note taking. You see some method of expressing an idea or bringing a scene to life that you want to imitate and expand upon or even use and footnote, so you jot it down for later and may lose track of the source. That happens, especially with first books when you’re learning some new techniques. But when you return again and again to a single source, mining it for a hundred writing prompts, there is no excuse. That isn’t just sloppiness.

Jeng wrote that the writing process took five years and, given the signature of the software package, I wonder what she means by ‘writing process’ because in this interview, she described her use of a lot of spreadsheets and cutting back a manuscript from 170 thousand words to less than half of that. This isn’t how my book came together, so I’m a bit confused by why so many authors think that writing a book involves spreadsheets. When an AI creates a mashup of two songs, the original artists are attributed. It should be like that for books too.

Because of the methodical nature of the copying, I am also concerned that Jeng’s software tool borrowed material from more than just my book. There were some rough spots where I could really see that I was looking at cut and pasted, spun text. For example: “No joy on his computer; I should have known he’d be too careful to use the same password for everything.” p. 261

… or when she was cooking eggs while talking to her husband and the eggs burned. I understand how it is possible to overcook eggs so that they stick to the pan, but I have a hard time imagining burning and smoking eggs during a brief conversation — as on page 42. Bacon, sure. Eggs, no.

These eggs are burnt, but still not smoking (incomplete combustion). I think you need some starch or fat to create smoke.

Regarding the protagonist’s personality, the feature that stood out to me was an inconsistent narrative voice that was at times rather dead inside.

This woman was broken.. unable to care about herself or others in more than a superficial manner and I believe this was a defining feature of my protagonist as well. She was sort of a reflection of an immature version of myself at my very worst.. traumatized and just two steps away from emotionless and dead empty yet going through all of the motions of the life that was expected of her without ever fully coming to life other than as a foil for an absurd, darkly comedic world. Jeng doesn’t take a comedic approach and instead digs into the moment by moment dynamics of a marital conversation between a controlling yet loving man and a broken woman who can’t easily feel connected to him or others. Is she evil? Did she try to hurt him or others? Not really, (except for the part where she accidentally murdered a million people.. I explore her daughter’s feelings about her mother’s war crimes in the not yet released sequel.)

The other thing that worried me was the possibility that I was reading a real woman’s account of a real relationship with a rather strange man who offered his protection (from a threat he engineered?) in exchange for controlling her life. At work, he was described as a psycho, deceptively charming man-child who sexually harassed young female workers and ran a secret recruitment operation that took over control of the workers’ lives and disconnected them from their families. His boss (or other self) was even more psycho, ex-special forces, and had no qualms about taking inhumane measures to get the result he wanted. When she tries to escape from their control, she and her husband are shot. In that sense, Jeng’s book is a lament about the loss of a woman’s family in exchange for a man who had tricked her into accepting slavery.. and tattoos? In this context, the part about the psycho man-child being in the business of selling the possibility for rich people to erase or un-do certain things on the internet.. is particularly disconcerting. Such a person would have an interest in collecting criminally talented people from the prison system. Even if he is regulated by a government that is interested in having a monopoly over such technology, that amount of concentrated power should be kept under lock and key and only taken out in cases of severe emergency.

In conjunction with a carefully crafted internet history, I can imagine that it is possible to give a person brain damage, cover them in tattoos, and then tell them vivid stories about how they got all of those tattoos. . sort of like the guy in Memento or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. You could drop them into a new life and set of ‘friends’ who are really just minders or social workers for people who needed to be erased. Who believes a crazy person covered in tattoos? Nobody.

When truth is beauty and beauty is truth, authenticity is the primary quality that makes an artwork good, so is it possible for an artwork to be good when it has been created with an unacknowledged source or automated collage tool?

I love this picture that my daughter drew yesterday. I would like to get it professionally re-drawn or filtered and put it on the cover of one of my books — without the trademarked word, “Godzilla”, of course.

You can’t see it in this photo, but she used two different shades of blue in an interesting way and the red lines have an almost iconographic look. The eye is also done in an interesting way. I like it so much that I want to get some posterboard and create a few large scale variations of it.

It looks like a dragon crossed with a volcano and she attributed her source of inspiration: Godzilla. She is at such a young age that it is almost impossible to be inauthentic and that gives the work a type of purity to which adults always aspire to recapture in their creative endeavors.

Plato thought that all art was bad in comparison to the thing itself since reproductions always carry a degree of falseness, yet when the human brain is incapable of taking in every aspect of truth all at once, art can provide a useful crutch to allow for individual aspects of truth to be taken in one at a time.

The ugliest art I have seen uses automated fiction creation tools to encrypt and say things that aren’t allowed to be said more directly. It is simplistic, yet inefficient and verbose, burying meaning in noise. I understand the need for occasional encryption, especially in politically fraught times, but when such encrypted communication begins to drown out all other forms of communication, culture dies in a swamp of meaninglessness, especially when that art is given a big boost via marketing.

When we create authentic art, it is a reach for love and connection. The woman who bought this shredded Banksy painting paid over a million dollars. Is that how much empty publicity and hype is worth?

Jeng’s Penguin Random House marketing effort seems saturated with fake, paid for reviews, subsidizing what I view as an inauthentic, lower-quality product. Before the book was even released, it had 73 reviews on Goodreads and the author even complained that not all of them were 5 star.

I am me and you are me and we are all together… really? I prefer a bit more individuality and that is why I think it is important to respect individual property and intellectual property.