All my handwritten notebooks are in a bin at the moment.

Things are temporarily packed away while some workers work in the studio.

I grabbed one of the notebooks. It was labelled 1994.

Page after page, recto to verso, top to bottom was filled with a somewhat legible scrawl.

(I wonder: would it be legible to a text recognition system??)

It was my writing exercises at the time, which was to more or less ‘novelize’ the things happening in and around my Manhattan-based life. My inner Martin Amis, I thought at the time.

A bit of a mode of writing that Barthes called “the writerly text” — nothing didactic, but there’s a story of some description, with characters appearing with their motivations.

The familiar hostess at the neighborhood local was more than that. The boss at the agency I worked at was fleshed out to compensate for their peculiarites and idiosyncrasies.

The people I met at the occasional party were more than just a name and a face and a job and a habit.

I made up curious quirk backstories.

This was all rarely represented by the facts as I knew them. ALmost never.

After all, this was just my version of the ‘morning pages’ ritual.

A bit Keroacian stream of consciousness long hand from a slightly mad fellow.

I’d imagine I was on deadline to finish my novel and such.

This idea of the ‘morning pages’ was the motivation — the stretching exercises for the brain. Finding the ‘creative way’ as Rubin frames it. The ritual of the act as a kind of indulgent punishment meant to bulk up this weird vascularized piece of meat that I remember some grammar school teacher or another describing as a muscle.

What are the tools and rituals for that?

What are the ‘kettle bells’ and crossfit cultures today for the writer’s brain?

This is the motivation behind Ghostwriter and Vibewriter, but particularly today, I want to focus on Vibewriter.

While I was doing a month of beta testing for Ghostwriter with some normal humans, they honed in on one feature that was like an afterthought.

I was focused on building a robust, generative writing muse that would help people write more, and better, and with more joy.

But people liked this ludic feature I had tossed in on a whim: Vibe Mode.

Vibe Mode was a simple button that would generate a short passage in the genre of a Hardboiled Detective Novel.

You know..like..Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, vibes.

And then a timer would start, and you (the user) would write under the pressure of this timer. 30 seconds or whatever, and then the AI would turn off your keyboard and it would pick up again, continuing the story, vibing on the semantic turns you had contributed.

I was surprised by the feedback: people liked the ludic exercise. In fact, that’s all they wanted to play with.

“Can you put in a screenwriting genre?”, one person asked.

“Solarpunk would be cool. I wonder what that would be like?”, another said.

Then they wanted a “Free Writing” mode where you started the text, and then the AI contributed.

This is what Vibewriter has become.

I feel like it is genuinely a kind of adjacent consideration as to the AI writing tools that are out there.

Open beta for the moment over at vibewriter.nearfuturelaboratory.com