Chris Dodds

I’m not sure why we’re in Bangalore. Put some faces to the names we see in emails? Knowledge sharing? None of the answers stick. None of them feel real. I’ve never been, so I don’t push back.

The office accepts us, we meet, we look at diagrams, we eat strange interpretations of American food at the Marriott, where a pulled-pork BBQ sandwich is actually a Sloppy Joe. Breakfast is every fruit known to man.

The coworker who came with me disappears a few days in and I don’t see him for the rest of the trip. Trapped in his hotel bathroom. Must have drunk the water. I’m sure he’s fine. Probably. People ask about him. I shrug.

I’m on my own until the freshers—new hires—adopt me. If it occurs to them that my pointless visit for a week costs more than they make in a year, they are oddly good natured about it. I don’t think I would be.

A couple of them take me shopping, although I don’t know what to buy. They seem surprised that I know a tandoor is for making bread, and that I’ve picked up that kurti and kurta are the gendered words for shirt. Meanwhile, they speak three languages apiece, but mostly want to talk about Marvel movies.

I buy two brass Hindu icons and a sari for my wife. I don’t know if I’m supposed to. My new friends just shrug and take me to a tailor to get the sari lined with what looks like another sari. They don’t warn me about the mirrors on the auto-rickshaws that bruise my shoulders, but do direct the Ola driver to take me straight back to my hotel and not on the great circle he had planned to gouge me with.

The local manager invites me to come on a team field trip to celebrate… something.

On the drive there, the driver tells a story about being stopped in Houston for honking his horn too much. Cop says, “Someone is going to shoot you.” Everyone laughs. He uses the horn like he’s playing Galaga.

I disassociate for the rest of the ride to cope with being a passenger in Indian traffic.

The venue is half cricket field, half water park. Someone was supposed to bring me a spare set of swim trunks but forgot. “It’s OK. You can rent them.”

I have never heard the word “rent” associated with swim trunks before. You cannot, in fact, rent swim trunks at the water park, but you can buy the world’s skimpiest male Speedo for $2.

Ten minutes later, I’m a white-as-bone, tattooed buoy in a wave pool of strangers who are delighted that I can float.

“How are you doing that?”

I tell them I’m American, which they accept as a reasonable answer.

I started writing again this year - really writing, for the first time in decades.

So far I’ve written a novella, a couple of creative nonfiction pieces, and a handful of flash fiction pieces. Learning more about traditional publishing has been a journey.

I’m coming at it with more strategy than a younger me would have: doing research before I submit, being laser focused on editorial fit, targeting a mix of realistic and long-shot outlets to hedge. I’ve got spreadsheets and dashboards to track things. It’s very nerdy.

The robot has been moderately useful here - surfacing presses and magazines I wouldn’t have found, but it’s terrible at gauging fit and quality. When you do find somewhere that looks like a good fit, you often discover that submissions are closed until next year, or they’re actually out of business, or you were wrong and they are, in fact, a terrible fit.

A few things I’ve learned:

• Agents generally don’t care about novellas, but there are presses that publish novellas and only accept submissions via agent. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• The Big 5 also don’t care about novellas and I get it. Paying $17 for a paperback copy of We the Animals is a tough pill to swallow considering how thin it looks on the shelf.
• Chapbooks exist, but no one cares about them except the people who write them.
• Contests are weirdly legit compared to other industries (with caveats).
• Flash is a dopamine trap: fast feedback, likely publication, low traction. It’s good for practicing compression though.
• Modern literary fiction (which I’ve been reading more of) seems to be 90% navel-gazey MFA nonsense written to impress other people with MFAs. Clever for the sake of clever is not a quality I envy.
• Tools like Duotrope are kind of neat.

There’s a lot of domain knowledge to absorb which I mostly enjoy. And I’m getting better as a writer and pushing myself along the way.

I just started submitting things in July and haven’t had any accepts yet, but have shortlisted at a couple of places, like Orion’s Belt. That at least feels nice (oooh, shiny!) and is a signal I’m on the right track.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of self this year. Much of it is the “who am I? / what is this even?” that comes with turning 40. Some other portion is trying to find solid ground when it feels like the world is upside down and on fire.

Art has played into that, in music and writing. What is my voice? What does a me-shaped thing look like? And who do I rhyme with?

I started the year unsteady, but the more work I’ve put in to uncovering who I am, the more grounded I’ve felt. I’m sure this is me channeling my inner Tony Robbins (or whoever is en vogue these days), but maybe that’s the path through the muck of now - knowing who you are, what you value, and how you want to show up in the world.

The latter is the most concrete for me. I want to be someone who:

• makes space for others to be themselves
• leads with vulnerability and gives people access to pieces they keep locked up, while managing the cost of that
• lives as an example of a man who is whole and flawed, not trapped in shame and social programming
• can keep empathy alive without shutting down in a world that feels bleak sometimes

I dunno. I’m trying.

Paycom, OKC’s biggest “tech” company, announced layoffs today that they blamed on AI. Lots of other companies have done the same recently (Microsoft, Saleforce, etc.)

The cynical (but true!) counter-narrative is that AI is just an excuse. Companies have always limped along with pointless inefficiencies.

After a couple years of LLM work, my read is that most “AI optimization” is just someone finally asking obvious questions about bad processes. It’s in-house consulting dressed up as innovation. AI mostly works as a permission structure to kill dumb workflows that could’ve been fixed 20 years ago.

Example: many moons ago I worked at a company where field offices entered truck weights in a spreadsheet, printed and faxed them, and someone at corporate re-typed the numbers into Access. One hour of questioning turned that job into linked Excel sheets. I guess we could’ve slapped an “AI transformation” label on it.

That feels like what’s happening now. “Rub some AI on everything” creates the cover story, but the real driver is people finally saying: “Why are we doing this?”

Using LLMs for meaningful work in a consistent/deterministic way is hard. These companies didn’t all become AI experts overnight.

None of this makes the layoffs less brutal for the people caught up in them, but it does punch some more holes in the AI-is-eating-the-world story.

Built a new site with Astro, deployed on GitHub Pages. I want a place to share things again that isn’t social media.

More to come.