I grew up in the hey-day of sugar cereals, back when they didn’t even bother to disguise their main ingredient. Back then, Corn Pops were Sugar Pops, and Honey Smacks were Sugar Puffs, and Golden Crisps were Super Sugar Crisps.
Our father hated the idea of sugar on cereal, and he periodically banned them from our house, preaching about how Lucky Charms or Captain Crunch were rotting our teeth and brains. He wasn’t wrong.
He would lay down the law and direct our mother to only purchase non-sweetened cereals. We’d get Corn Flakes and Rice Puffs and Rice Krispies. To make matters worse, we’d get the store-brand, knock-off copies of those.
All that meant was we had to spoon more sugar into our bowl each morning. Until, of course, he saw us scooping heaping teaspoons, two, three, or maybe four per bowl, and about lost his mind.
“Do you know how much sugar costs?” he’d yell. “Do you realize what you’re doing to your body?”
I admit: I didn’t know anything. I just liked sugar.
Once the sugar was locked away, things were pretty grim at breakfast. We never went hungry, but you’d think we were in Stalag 13 and LeBeau had promised all the strudel to Sergeant Schultz.
The real problem was that there wasn’t time in our life for a proper breakfast. There were ways we could have learned to cook a few simple things ourselves, eggs, toast, and the occasional sausage aren’t that difficult.
One of us could have been trained to make omelets, prepping the chopped ham, onions and peppers the night before, and whipping them together in as much time as it takes to eat four bowls of plain, unsweetened cereal.
Cooking omelets like it was a factory assembly line could have set us up for jobs once we left high school, working at a courtyard hotel, wearing a silly hat, and putting up with obnoxious midwestern families who suddenly become tyrants while overseeing the cooking of an omelet.
Instead, the craving for sweetened cereal dominated our thoughts.
Story Spill in Aisle Nine
I worry that, soon—very soon—most mainstream television shows and movies will be like sugar cereal. They’ll be packaged with enticing titles, attract with colors and prizes inside, and will race against each other to have the most novel gimmick for a story.
But, really, they’ll just be the same drab, bleached wheat ingredient dressed up for commerce. Generated by generative A.I., they’ll follow a familiar formula, shifting a pre-determined number of things around to catch your eye long enough to make you watch for a couple of minutes.
It’s already happening over at Netflix. This N+1 article explains how Netflix has foregone all pretense of telling good stories. Their target audience is the “casual viewer,” someone who wants to watch television but without being engaged. They aren’t using A.I. yet, but they’ve reduced their production values to something of an all-time low.
Orwell suggested it in 1984, when that dystopian world would have machine-generated books and music to help snuff out any new ideas, and give the proletariat something to fill their time.
I spend a lot of time working on my novels. It’s less than it used to be, but I don’t want to rush them. You get one shot at honing a story down to its best version.
Just like every popular version of a breakfast cereal is copied by a competitor, a lame, unimaginative story can be copied by generative a.i. and presented for your reading pleasure. Honestly, sometimes the stuff written on cereal boxes is better than stories cranked out by these machines.
Or maybe I’m crabby because my brain really did rot from all that sugar.
Nature Might Find a Way
The worst of the unsweetened cereals was plain, puffed rice. You can get them in ginormous bags for a couple of bucks. There’s nothing to them. Those little buggers float on milk like dead bugs and taste like saw dust (don’t ask how I know).
Nature finds a way, as Goldblum proclaimed in Jurassic Park, and when our parents were distracted, one of us (me or one of my two brothers) dug through a cupboard to find the sugar.
Had we summoned the gumption to instead offer to cook breakfast, maybe we would have learned more at school, broken our sugar dependency, and invented something to save the world from itself, or at least made one of us filthy rich.
When I write my novels, I like to think that I’m showing up with gumption aplenty to provide better stories for those who grow tired of the story versions of knock-off Lucky Charms and cardboard-flavored Cheerio clones.
Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…
In the next week, I’ll launch the presale for my next novel, Ashley Undone. You can still jump on the advance reader option right now. I hope you’ll consider buying it during the pre-sale (which will be heavily discounted)
Ashley Undone is Cinderella story about a young woman who is so desperate to save her father from the clutches of greed that she destroys his business with a RansomWare attack; but she unleashes her stepmother’s fury, and Ashley must fight to save her father’s life.
How do you become an advance reader?
- Get an ebook and side-load it using this link
- Get an ebook as an email attachment by contacting me at “mick@mickeyhadick-11cc4d6.ingress-earth.ewp.live”
- I’ll also have a few paperbacks available, so contact me and ask about that
Maybe You’d Like
This week I’ve joined with authors for a giveaway of Mysteries…
https://storyoriginapp.com/to/oSOHFwD
Next Picayune
Thanks for reading the Mickey Picayune. I’ll be back in two weeks with another edition.
All the best,
Mickey Hadick
P.S. Here’s that link one more time: https://story.mickeyhadick.com/ashley-undone