I've decided there's no point in continuing.

Beep beep boop boop.

After dropping the youngest to school this morning I jumped on the train to one of my happy places, somewhere that the words always flow, and I feel delightfully peaceful. Even if the cafe is daylight robbery. Also helps that it offers fridge-standard air-conditioning, now that the mercury is creeping up: the British Library.

A very long time ago when I was naive enough to do a Masters in “publishing”, classmates introduced me to this magical place. I wrote most of my dissertation here — so it probably has a latent association with hammering out a vast amount of words with a very pressing deadline. No wonder I like working there now.

Calling up obscure titles from the vast stacks always feels like conjuring magic. Of course I rarely remember to order ahead of time now (extra pertinent since they’re still dealing with the aftermath of the cyberattack which happened over a year ago) and curse myself every time. I used to get such a kick when the green light at your numbered desk would light up, telling you your titles were ready but now you just have to pester the desk staff, like a child on a long car journey - “Is it here yet? Now?”

Today I was trying to pin down something for the novel I’ve been working on for the past year or so, and it was fruitful. Enough to have to restrain myself from doing an at-desk happy dance. Amazing!

And then I met up with friends to go to the Society of Authors’ protest against Meta stealing millions of books and scraping them for AI.

Ah, as Mr Keating once said, life is indeed a rollercoaster.

It’s been such a long held dream for me to even finish a bloody book but hey, why not just throw the concept into ChatGPT and give it a go? It’ll be scraping any eventual book anyway so really, WHAT IS THE POINT?

Today’s protest was set up fairly quickly from what I understand, details were circulated a couple of days ago. So yes, short notice but where were the publishers? The agents? The big celeb authors? As one wag noted, their ghosts were all there.

We gathered in Granary Square and walked up to Facebook’s glass monolith HQ, where they were so scared of the altogether too bloody polite crowd of authors to even accept the SOA’s letter. Instead they locked the doors at lunchtime while we stood outside. Maybe we managed to inconvenience a few engineers who’d been out to Itsu and couldn’t get back in. In any case, AJ West wielded a megaphone with aplomb and we managed to synchronise our chants, finally.

Association of Authors Agents, what action are your members taking? Has there been a statement from the Publishers Association AI Taskforce, their Anti Piracy Working Group or any of their councils? BUELLER?

As I dashed off afterwards — school pick up, book-ending the day — it suddenly struck me that fuck Meta, I do intend to write this book. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. Reading this, by a very different Meta reminded me about the importance of keeping going, creatively.

But increasingly the odd of me bothering to try to publish it have become wafer thin.