159 – After the Full Stop with Philip Charter

Philip Charter, fiction writer, prose editor, the man behind totallyhumanwriter.com and the editor of the 21 Futures Bitcoin fiction anthologies, joins Avi for a conversation about storytelling, the slow craft of prose, and the gap between the two that most people don't see until they try to cross it.

The thread that runs through the hour: Bitcoin is not the story. People don't care about Bitcoin, they care about the impact it has on their own lives, and the work the space is sleeping on is the work of showing those impacts in human terms. They argue that Bitcoin-centric fiction faces an almost impossible bind: Bitcoiners treat fiction as frivolous, and non-Bitcoiners read anything orange-tinted as a scam. The more interesting territory is stories where Bitcoin lives quietly in the plot rather than wearing laser eyes on the cover.

From there the conversation moves into the long apprenticeship of prose, the chasm between a great oral storyteller and a workable sentence on the page, and the unmistakable tells of AI fiction – the stacked adjectives, the spectral humming, the silences that stretch, the quiet everything. Avi shares his own experience using AI for the first pass of July 18 and the horror of recognizing those tics. Philip's defence of the short story form follows: it is a snapshot of change where the reader writes the ending – meaning living between the words and after the full stop, which is precisely the territory LLMs cannot reach.

They close on Bitcoin's culture funding problem, the case for patrons and guilds (Bitcoin for the Arts, the artist guild forming around BTC Prague), and the affliction that keeps artists making things whether anyone pays for it or not. Plus Philip's nearly-finished fantasy novel about a husband chasing mythical islands across an alternate-world ocean while his wife tries to find his trail home.

Links

• Philip on Nostr
• Totally Human Writer
• 21 Futures
• Bitcoin For The Arts
• Finding Home Episode 4 [Discount code: PIONEER21]
• Revolution.Rocks
• BTC Prague Discount code (15%) – NOSTR