Hi everybody 🙂 Let me know your opinion on these 2 topics ⤵️

How has your summer been? I was away for about fifteen days. I travelled around Italy, partly to visit my family and partly to explore new landscapes. That time gave me the chance to reflect and to disconnect from my computer as well, although I did mess around on my phone. I stayed active only on Substack, which I use as a laboratory for stories and thoughts. So, if any of you are on Substack, feel free to leave your link in the comments, or look me up — I’m Marcello Iori. Thank you, @Stacey Brooks, for your continued prayers. It’s a positive energy that we all appreciate, and it does us good. Welcome to all the newcomers. Last time we were at 60, but now we’re only one or two people away from 80. Over the last 10 days I must have declined at least 8-9 requests to join the Skool group. The reasons? Skool flagged them as being at high risk of spam, and we don’t want anything like that here. There are sections where you can write and promote yourself if you want to, without flooding the chat. And the second reason is that they didn’t answer my question: what are the 3 most important things? I know it sounds trivial, but for me, that’s a way of getting to know you without ever having seen you. One of the last people wrote to me: “I don’t know.” So, you understand, with that kind of energy I certainly can’t let them in. This is a slow group, one that still has to blossom. It has potential, and I hope to bring you more content soon. I know Skool in general tends to favour groups where people learn how to make money or how to use AI. Here, I thought we could learn the old-fashioned way: first you study, and then you apply. And when you apply, if you have genuinely studied, you get the results you were looking for. Unfortunately, I’ve seen too many people pay internet gurus and get no results. There’s a saying: theory without practice is an end in itself. Practice without theory can be harmful. I write with a pen and a computer, so I won’t talk about AI in relation to writing. There are other groups for that.

I know I’ve been a little absent. I’ve been travelling quite a bit recently, and I’ve barely opened my computer. Sometimes I tried, but often I didn’t even have it with me. I wrote various notes on my phone, but I’m not the kind of writer who can actually write on a phone. I prefer voice notes. Yes, I love voice notes. I even like the pauses in my voice notes. Or the voice notes of anyone who leaves something worthwhile behind, like a thought or an idea. There are often those silences when a sentence breaks off before another one begins, and in that fragment, in that uncertainty, there is something fascinating. There’s something beautiful about it. Anyway... Being a writer is a challenge. Perhaps it always has been. Many writers who became classics were already wealthy or were supported by wealthy families. They wrote. They published. And now they are classics. Many others, however, suffered. They wrote through illness, deception, hatred, pain, and even desperation. Sometimes the personal stories of writers are more interesting than their actual writing. But a question has come to me recently: What does it mean to be a writer today? In 2022, I published my first novel in English. I knew nothing about AI, and I had no idea how internet tools would change the meaning of writing. Because yes, there is a meaning to it. Am I wrong? Or at least, there used to be. Art is an effort. Not just a physical effort. It is an intellectual effort. It is a war with yourself and with society. Not one of those brutal wars with weapons. More like a struggle, the same kind of struggle our characters go through, or the struggle we face when we try to find the right words, or the struggle derived from the challenges we face in our everyday lives. Now AI can find those words for you, if you want it to. So what does it mean to be a writer today? And what will it mean tomorrow? I always thought I would become a writer when I grew up. And in a way, it happened. Not in the way I wanted, but I write for a living.