My first publishing contract! (or, what is real)

So I have my first piece coming out in an anthology in December (!).

It’s about the orange sky day, summer 2020, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Coincidentally, that day was exactly the six month anniversary of Google’s work-from-home pandemic lockdown. Vaccines didn’t exist yet and people still wore masks outside (partly for smoke, also partly for covid). It felt like the world was ending.

I wrote the piece itself later. Once upon a time, it would have been called fiction; once upon a time, it would have been called memoir. I’m confident I didn’t get the dialogue to match reality – no way is my memory that good after more than a year! – so I’m going with fiction.

Interestingly, I’m sure Kerouac’s On The Road (one of the dullest books I’ve ever read, by the way, and how’s that for a controversial statement!) would at various points in time have been published as memoir, rather than fiction as it initially was.

So what is real? And what do we say is real, and how does that match up?

As part of my piece appearing in the anthology, in July I reviewed my first-ever publishing contract (again, !!). It was a standard, template kind of thing, unremarkable – except that it included a couple of clauses about generative AI. One confirmed I hadn’t used generative AI to write the piece, another that the publisher would try to avoid my work being used for training data.

I asked how long those phrases had been part of the template.

About a month, was the answer.

The world changes fast.