Second Step

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I disagreed with some of the suggestions Grok made about my draft of First Step. Specifically, that one of the narrators uses an avatar when communicating with others, one character in particular. It’s part of what makes their relationship interesting. Grok said that having the narrator use an avatar in some of the later encounters in the book is distracting and doesn’t work. Remember that? Well, I thought about it over the course of a couple of days and decided to give it a try. After all, it’s not like a movie set for eternity in its current form on film. I can delete, add, and move stuff around to my heart’s content until the book is published. Wouldn’t you know? It turns out Grok was right. The avatar inclusion in those scenes didn’t really do much in the way of advancing the story or adding to the characters’ interaction. Taking it out intensified the back-and-forth between the two characters without that trivial distraction and now I think those couple of scenes were good enough without the attempted humor. It’s interesting how the Grok feedback made me think about it, and even though I didn’t agree, just putting the thought in my head was enough for me to eventually consider trying the edits. And in the end, that made the book better.