^The Authors’ Atrium

From the desk of T.M.Gareth

The Authors’ Atrium Gallery began as part of a thought experiment.

The original Authors’ Atrium was a concept for my novel Cut Like a Gem. It was an invitation-only hobnobbery where writers would hang out, share their work, and learn from each other. Anonymity was enforced, and each writer had to choose an author for an avatar.

The premise is clearly farcical, considering there’s a limited pool of real world historical authors to choose from—at least ones the writers would want to use.

Celia Thompson, the main character in Cut Like a Gem, had joined the site under the name Beverly Cleary where she met plenty of like-minded individuals who praised her works. However, she also found herself tormented by another character operating under the name Hemingway.

The question became, what would a site like The Authors’ Atrium look and feel like? I had built a fake website framework for screenshots, but my curiosity turned to populating that forum with other personalities. Users who had their own lives and stories to tell.

The style I went for was the “halcyon days of just-post-dial-up” feel. It hearkened back to the era before “social media.” A time that now resides only in memory. A time and place with hours of my youth spent on various boards arguing about whatever it was I had decided was important in that moment—and rarely was.

Where are my spectacles? The Wheel of Fortune is about to start.

Recalling the sorts of characters who haunted those old message boards with me, I came up with an original list of six “users” borrowing long-expired authors as their avatars. I then fed those into an LLM along with instructions for a solid base. Using the list and the ground rules, I told the AI to generate conversations based on my concepts for specific scenarios—outlines, call sheets, themes.

As part of the illusion, the timestamps are designed with a little math to make the “Gallery” appear active and evergreen. The latest thread will always be from “yesterday,” and each prior thread will adjust accordingly.

Now, to the elephant in the room—I do not condone the use of AI for the generation of novels. Using AI as an advanced grammar-checker and inconsistency gut-check? I’ll testify to that. However, every word I put into my published works is generated by me, my fingers on the keys.

The Authors’ Atrium Gallery is a different phylum of creature. I wanted it to function as a sort of “virtual ant farm” where these personalities would interact, and I could observe them.

The results were middling. Repeated patterns. Flat jokes. Bridges to nowhere. The typical AI problems.

For that reason, I decided to edit each conversation, punching dialogue, changing beats, swapping who said what. Sometimes doing heavy rewrites, but trying to keep the original flavor that the AI had taken the time to produce.

The effort became so enjoyable that I decided to share it.

This is neither purely AI, nor is it purely my own. It’s somewhere in between. It is presented without any deception or mischaracterization—other than the timestamps.

And if you’d rather read work that’s entirely my own, I recommend picking up Cut Like a Gem.

Speaking of mischaracters, here’s the “cast.”