The Isabel Allende of the Pampas

That day was Sunday. I hadn't been able to write a line for a fortnight. I was already thirty thousand words behind schedule, according to Stephen King's daily production criteria. Well, to be honest, since I'd started writing four months earlier, I'd set myself the goal of writing just a thousand words a day. For someone who had never written anything other than a technical report, a thousand words a day wasn't so bad, was it? But what really bothered me at the time was the lack of ideas, the creative block. During the first four months that I started writing, I deluded myself with an incessant stream of real and imaginary subjects that came to me as soon as I sat down to work. It seemed like it would never end. "Creative block?", I laughed to myself, "that's just laziness".

But then again, who works for free? Anyone who writes wants to see their readership gradually increase. That is, if no miracles occur and your book or blog becomes a success story. But after wasting a lot of time building a pretty blog and studying SEO practices to find out why no one could find my blog when they searched for it on Google, I still had the same three loyal readers as at the beginning: my aunt, my friend, and a crazy Brazilian lost in the USA, who, I don't know why, kept reading my short stories.  The lack of interest from other readers in what I was writing ended up discouraging me. That's probably why the flow of ideas stopped one day.

From time to time, my mother would check the blog to see if I'd had the courage to post any new stories about the family. After reviewing the subject of the latest short stories, a little out of patience, and with her anger contained by the lack of a reason to vent it, she would get distracted and wipe the finger smudges off the screen with circular movements on the side of her hand. My poor blog would get dizzy from this unexpected handling and go crazy counting new hits. These days, I'd go to sleep happy, dreaming of my 40 new imaginary readers. "Could it be that, with the change I made to robots.txt today, my blog will finally start booming?" I would ask my dog, who, lying next to me, would only look in the opposite direction, lowering her ears and settling her muzzle between her paws before closing her eyes and going to sleep. She was incapable of lying.

As for my dog, I have to confess that she hated my blog. Not without reason, the poor thing! The time I spent writing was the time I spent not paying attention to her. A thousand times during the day, she would come into the office to see if anything new was happening in Shakespeare's kingdom. After playing with the whistle hidden inside the belly of her stuffed pirate for five minutes, hoping to get my attention, she would usually go off, moaning at the top of her lungs, towards her bed, inconsolable.

On that fateful Sunday, after spending two fruitless hours sitting in front of the computer, and answering a call on the intercom asking me to control my dog's yelps at nap time, I finally convinced myself to test the use of the artificial intelligence (AI) everyone had been talking about. "Well, don't they say it's working wonders? Maybe AI can get me out of this block by giving me a good text suggestion," I said to Suki. Emboldened by the sudden attention she'd received, she burst out in a flurry like a sheep when I tickled her back. She ran in and out of the office, flipping over the carpet and the trash can, before barking again. 

That day, before ending the writing period for good, I opened the program, selected creative mode and started writing the prompt: "Please create a short story written in the style of Isabel Allende about a retired woman with no money who decides to move back to São José do Norte, the town where she was brought up. She moves into her grandmother's house, where she is haunted by the spirits of the family. In S. J. do Norte, she meets her first great love, who had left town to study Oceanology. But after graduating, he discovered that he was afraid of the sea and couldn't work with Jacques Cousteau's team. He became a failure and returned to S. J. do Norte, where he met the main character of the story."

After writing the prompt, I pressed the 'Create' button and got up to prepare lunch, which I had completely forgotten about. I washed, peeled, chopped, cooked, seasoned, had lunch in 15 minutes, and went back to the kitchen to put away and wash the dishes, pots and pans.  Two hours later, I finally fell exhausted into the armchair in front of the TV. It wasn't until I came out of my trance and started getting ready for bed that I remembered the task I had asked the AI program to do. I went back to the computer and there it was, the short story I had asked for with a polite and obsequious request, consisting of 20 short paragraphs, most of which began with the word 'She'.

I read the text without much enthusiasm. I had asked for the short story to be written in the literary style adopted by Isabel Allende, but the result was more like the syrupy style of the novels sold in paperbacks on the newsstands. However, not wanting to spend another day without publishing on my blog, I copied the text and posted it exactly as it had been produced by AI, after all the lack of periodicity in publications is the death sentence of a blog. 

I spent the next few days in Capão da Canoa, either fighting the wind with its very fine sand that hurt my face, or diving into the shallows of a chocolate-brown sea, full of mothers-in-water waiting for some unwary tourist to venture into their territory. It wasn't until a week later, when I returned to Porto Alegre, that I decided to take a look at my blog and spend a few more hours in search of inspiration. The page containing my blog access statistics was already open, I just had to refresh it. I swear, I wasn't prepared for what I saw! In my absence, 20,457 people had read the last story posted on my blog. A total success! I was so excited that I immediately took a picture of the computer screen and shared it with my family. It was only when I had just pressed the 'send' button that I remembered that the story hadn't been written by me, but by AI. And, to tell the truth, I hadn't even thought it was very good...

Perhaps if I hadn't asked 'Please', if I had been more assertive, it would have tried harder to create a quality text. But the artificial intelligence program, I already knew from experience, was tricky. There were days when, if I didn't ask it nicely, it wouldn't respond to the detailed requests to generate an image. On those days, it would generate any image, just to annoy me. He was also full of prejudices: there were words he simply wouldn't accept, like the day I had to change the word 'slave' to 'black boy'. And so I began to fall in with his ways, so dependent had I become on his products. Until then, he had been indispensable for keeping my blog visually appealing, without risking becoming hostage to copyright disputes due to the use of images copied from the internet. 

In the few weeks that followed, the number of readers of my blog grew exponentially. I had become a revelation and was now known as the 'Isabel Allende of the Pampas'. Soon, I was selling advertising space on my blog and, with the profits, I was living in great style. The apartment I had previously lived in alone was no longer enough for me; I had moved into a four-bedroom, two-living-room penthouse in the condominium across the street, where a Cordon Bleu-trained chef spent his days preparing special dishes for me and my guests. Although Suki now slept alone in her own room, she was more satisfied. We spent the whole day going back and forth together, except for the fifteen minutes when I locked myself in my office alone to create a prompt and post the result on my blog.

Despite having a lot of free time, I had become a prisoner of social media. Followers on social media, you know, must be fluffed like kings, because when something you say or write displeases them, they abandon you and go in search of another writer to follow. Now I understood why so many people kept posting 'Reels' and 'Feeds' on insta, telling insignificant details of everything that was going on in their private lives and in their little heads. 

As for the short stories, especially those written in several chapters, my mailbox was flooded with emails from readers demanding that the ending of these stories be romantic and optimistic, nothing different would be accepted. Frankly, even my aunt was easier to please! Just two years after I had become a literary success, I now felt like an obese, hypocritical old woman. After the first few days of acquiescing to the wishes of my followers, everything that was going through my head had started to jump out of my mouth. My followers quickly became dumbfounded by such rudeness. And their number dwindled day by day. 

In the midst of a bout of anger, I decided to close my insta account and stop using AI. I would go back to writing the psychopathic and pessimistic tales of yesteryear under a new pseudonym, and thus regain my mental balance. Life was smiling on me again, along with my three loyal readers from the past. The others ignored my new blog. Although there was a link between this blog and my original one, no one seemed to think it was worth following. But what can you do if you can't please everyone? The best thing is to please yourself!