First Step

I’ll finish my read-aloud of First Step today, meaning it’s done and ready to publish. Like I said in my previous post, the finances need to be available for that to happen and I’m not sure when that’ll be. Rest assured, Dedicated Reader, that I’ll get it out there as soon as I can. Yes, I’ll likely do one or two more proofreads at publishing time, but I can safely say this one’s in the can. No further changes to story, plot, or details. I like it and think it turned out quite well, especially after so many false starts. Writing half the story from the narrative POV of an AI was a change of pace and fun, and the other half from a female POV was new and different for me to write. A different challenge popped up in the fact that the reader knows all the characters survive for several decades due to the epilogue of First, so any life-threatening danger isn’t really that life-threatening. I feel like I still made it engaging enough. Overall, it’s a good story for both narrators and engaging, at times funny, and plenty of action. Looking forward to getting it into readers’ hands when the opportunity arrives.

Q1

We’re already a quarter of a way into 2025 and my, hasn’t it gone by fast? That means it’s time to take stock, to evaluate the state of the union, track my progress, and so on. Going into the year, you might remember that I made a list of goals, like I’ve done the past couple of years. This time I deliberately set achievable goals, knowing it might be tough to get a few things done due to the money required. One thing I wanted to do was publish First as an audiobook, but that looks unlikely in 2025. Between lower bonuses and helping to fund an upcoming wedding, finances are tighter than expected. I also wanted to publish Assignment Day, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen, either. It’s not all bad news, though. I finished the first book in my new series and will start writing the second one within a week. Once that’s done, I’ll publish both to Kindle Unlimited and the only expenses will be for professional cover design. Heck, given the state of funding for publishing my other books, I might end up putting out three in the series before the end of the year. Ninety days in so far, and it’s looking like this is going to be the year of writing, writing, writing.

Aloud

I’m currently in the midst of my read-aloud for First Step. Other than the usual typos or missing words, I’m also finding instances of word repeats. Those are the cases where I use a word and then within a sentence or two, use it again. You’d think something like that would be obvious, but in reality it’s only when I read the story aloud that I find those. Why? Because they break the flow of the spoken word more than the written. Saying the words aloud should mean a nice narrative rhythm. It’s when there’s a break or even a falter that I find something that needs to be reworded or rephrased. The flow of the language should be natural. I’m about a quarter of the way through the book, and as always, it’s a very useful and instructive exercise.

Habit

I thought I’d outgrown this habit. Especially with the rise of eBooks or being able to order a book at a time online and have it delivered the next day. But no, when I go into the local bookstore on Sunday, intending to just look around, I walked out with three more books than zero. And it’s not like I need more at the moment. I have another book ready to go when I finish my current read, although I’ll probably go back and read a Dickens novel before I read that. So, that’s two books in waiting. Plus, the series I’m reading on my Kindle at the same time, but that doesn’t really count since I always have something else going concurrently. Adding three from my recent purchase brings the total of books up to five. I know, there are plenty of people out there with a lot more TBR stacks than mine. It’s just funny that I haven’t experienced this in quite some time. It’s a good problem to have.

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.

Ready

I’m about to run into a problem. A good problem, I think, but a problem nonetheless. Assignment Day is polished and ready to publish. First Step is almost there, just needing a read-aloud and final proofreading. And I’ll be done by early next week with the edits on the first book in the series I’m writing. If you’re counting along at home, that means three books ready or darn-near-ready to publish. And by summer it’ll be four because I’ll have the second book in the series finished. That’s a lot of books. So, what’s the problem, you ask? It’s the age-old problem of money. Putting out books takes money, whether you’re one of the big publishing houses or a solitary dude sitting in his home office at 6:30 a.m. pounding away on the laptop keyboard. I plan on releasing the first two books in the series at the same time on Kindle Unlimited, so those books won’t take a lot of investment, just some professional covers. Assignment Day and First Step? They’ll take a bit more cash to get out the door. I just have to budget ahead and be ready to go when I have the chance. I know, you’re wondering if this is a veiled fundraising request. It’s not. I don’t want investors and I don’t want to crowdfund. These books might be ready to go, but they’ll come out when the time is right.

First Step

Today I’ll finish my edits on First Step, the sequel to First. I’ve rearranged some things based on the suggestions from Grok and firmed up other minor points that seemed reasonable. I ignored several of the items Grok pointed out, not because the AI was in error, but because I thought my way was better. That’s incredibly vague, you say. Fair point. Let me give an example. One of the characters thinks it’s funny to use an avatar when communicating with others, and Grok said that didn’t work in some of the later, serious scenes. I disagree. That’s part of the storyline and character, and to me it’d be out of character for him not to use an avatar. So I kept it in. There were other things Grok listed in the developmental edit feedback that made sense, such as how one of the characters survives. Yeah, it would’ve stretched belief if I’d left it as originally written, so the change ended up being a good one. That’s also one of those nagging thoughts you have about a manuscript but can’t quite put your finger on. Overall, I’m pleased with how this one turned out after so many false starts. It’s proof that you just have to keep writing and at some point inspiration strikes or things coalesce into a coherent story. Maybe I’ll write more on that in another post.

200

I checked the Amazon page for First today and it reached a milestone - 200 ratings. It maintains a 4.5 rating, which is very exciting. When you have a pool of that many people giving their opinion, it evens out the highs and lows. It’s also exciting because 200 is a nice number. By way of explanation, a very small percentage of people give ratings on the books they read. I’m not talking about reviews, which are the written opinions you see in even fewer cases. These ratings are the number of stars, from one to five, that people can leave quite easily on their Kindle when they finish the book. Would be nice if everyone did it, but it’s a voluntary activity. It’s interesting to click into the ratings and realize four people gave the book one star, while 124 have rated First as a five-star read. Sorry those four people didn’t like the book, but really happy that so many people did. It’s a nice little marker on the road for this book, which has now been out for almost 18 months. TBH, I didn’t really know what to expect with the number of ratings. I thought a few dozen were great, but the total continues to grow steadily. Thanks to all who left a rating.

AI - Part III

I’d finished the first draft of my sequel to First and felt pretty happy with it. I knew it needed at least one more pass and I remember seeing somewhere that Grok could do a developmental edit. For those who don’t know, that’s where an editor looks at continuity, consistency, storyline, loose ends, pacing, and just overall how the book fits together. What works and what doesn’t? I paid an editor to do this for First and it was well worth the money. With (currently) free access to Grok and the chance to see what it could do, I decided to give it a whirl.

I started off by asking if it could do a developmental edit, and Grok replied affirmatively and asked if there were any areas I wanted it to concentrate on. I gave a few suggestions like the ones mentioned above, and it told me it could look at the first chapter, a portion of the manuscript, or the whole thing. I uploaded a Word document with all 75k words. Here’s the part that blew my mind: within seconds it started responding with observations about the story, the characters, and things that didn’t work quite right. Seriously, in 15 seconds I had three pages of feedback. Wow.

I know what the next question is: how accurate was it? Incredibly so. I’d say in the range of 95%. For example, it named a date for the story and told me there needed to be a few indicators of time passage for readers to keep track. Well, that date was exactly that particular day in February 2025, which is not when the story is set. It had an instance where it misinterpreted a character and their actions in a couple of paragraphs, but other than that I was completely amazed at its output. And that 95%? Spot on. Grok asked what I thought and I responded that it was good, at which point it poured out another three pages with an action plan for addressing the issues. It offered to make suggested changes, but I prefer to do those myself. As much as I liked it, I don’t trust anyone or anything else with my story. And I’m not going to be one of those writers who uses AI to write books. I’ll take suggestions and decide if I want to use them or not. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks going through those bullet points, picking the ones I agree with, and improving the book.

Overall? Absolutely incredible. No knock on editors, but getting feedback in seconds instead of weeks was amazing. I hope there’s still a place for editors because the people I’ve worked with are great. I kind of did this as a lark but found it to be really useful. Will I use it going forward? I’ll let you know. I’m going to let Grok take a stab at the manuscript I mentioned in the previous post, the first in a series, and see what I get back. I’ll report back on that experience soon.

To sum up, we’re currently rewatching the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series, one of my favorite shows and one of the best so far this century, and there are scenes in the first couple of seasons where the characters talk about a mystery and the shape of things to come. I can honestly say that with this little exercise I’ve seen the shape of things to come.

AI - PART II

Okay, let’s back up a minute. I made a comment last post about AI being unreliable, but what has two thumbs and made an unreliable statement? This guy. I mentioned ChatGPT but what I meant to say was Copilot. I had written most of the first draft of the first book of a new series and thought, hey, let’s see what this new feature in Microsoft Word can do. So, I fired up the side panel and asked it for a summary, which was decent enough but got a few things wrong. Just for fun, since I still had several chapters left to write, I asked it for possible story endings. It gave me three or so, which were decent enough as far as being in-line with the story, but also rote, like these are lazy endings. I used none of them, not that I would have anyway since I already knew how I wanted the book to end. What percentage did Copilot get right? I’d say probably 70%. It overly emphasized minor characters and misunderstood major ones, and also didn’t get some of the supplemental storylines and characters. Given where we are with AI, I guess it wasn’t horrible. The book has a lot of chapters and is all third-person narration, making it complex for me to keep track of on my own. Was the AI output useful? Not really. Maybe when I go back and ask for an outline or a marketing summary. Then again, I had a much better experience last week with the first draft of another book and a different AI. Next time we’ll talk Grok.

AI - Part I

I’ve now written a couple of books, one published and one in editing, that include major characters and plot points related to Artificial Intelligence. In real life, though, I’ve been slow to adopt the new technology. Not sure why, because I’ve always been interested in the latest and greatest. I stood in line at a Best Buy in Kansas City to get one of the first iPads. The store had only five, and I got the fourth one. I still remember watching Raiders of the Lost Ark on a plane flight and seeing the reflection on the screen of a guy in the row behind me craning his neck over the seatback to see the sleek new device. Even further back, I enjoyed video games and wanted to have the newest consoles and games. And before that, I bought into new tech like compact discs. I have a history, as you can see. Which adds weight to the question: why wait to adopt AI?

Maybe because so far its implementation has been done in a way that’s not natural for me to use. Take Siri, for example. I’m a reader and typer, not a talker and listener. Reading is my preferred method of learning, and I’d much rather type a phrase into a Google search page and quickly read the results than to have to speak what I want and have the nice Irish lady give me the results. Yes, my Siri has an Irish accent. Anyway, I can type almost as fast as people talk, and I can read faster than someone can recite a list of bullet points. I know, there are other forms of AI besides Siri. I’ve given a little bit of a look at ChatGPT and asked it some questions about writing and my books, but the results weren’t very consistent. For example, I copied in the text of a book and requested a summary. It listed some of the very minor characters as major ones, confused some of the settings, and so on. Not very reliable. Why do I bring up that example? Well, mainly because it relates to writing and AI. And to the story I’m going to tell you next. Hang on ‘til Tuesday to find out more.

Winning

Started off yesterday with a nice email notifying me that Next Time won in the Romance - Love Stories category for the International Impact Book Awards. They pass out awards every month and Next Time won for February 2025. Their winners’ page is a long scroll with a lot of categories, but worth it. For each category, they note how many entries there were and sometimes have more than one winner. Well, I’m happy to say my category had ten entries and Next Time was the sole winner. I’m not so conceited that I don’t want to share the podium, and no slight on the other entries, but it’s certainly a nice validation to say that Next Time came out as the undisputed first place book in that category. The book has been out for eight months now, and I’m happy that it’s still winning awards. If you’re interested, the link to the awardxs list is on the book page for Next Time here on my site.

Edit Mode

Still in edit mode for the sequel to First. I’ve shored up a couple of things and might delete a scene today. I like that particular scene, but I don’t think it does much in pushing the plot forward. I’ll reread and see if it’s as I fear. No worries, though, the book is coming in just over 75k words, which seems about right. The next thing I’m going to do is read it out of order. What does that mean? This book has two narrators who switch chapters. I’m going to read one narrator all the way through and then go back and do the same with the other, alternating chapters for each. That’ll give me the chance to view each as a continuous narrative and make sure I haven’t accidentally created gaps in their particular stories. Other than that, the editing is going well and hoping to be done by next week with the majority of it. Then it’ll be time to read the book aloud to myself as one of the final steps in getting it ready to publish. When will that be? Not sure yet, but you’ll be the first to know.

Bam!

Bam! In my last post, I mentioned that I’d started editing the sequel to First. Yes, I did. In fact, I finished the initial run-through on Saturday. Yeah, I probably could have done yardwork, but instead I spent several hours working on the book. I have to say, it was in better shape than I thought and expected to spend a few months on it. Instead, I shored up some of the weak points yesterday and today and we’ll see where that leaves things. Why is this so different from when I pulled Assignment Day out of the virtual drawer and spent more than two months editing it? Let’s take a little ride in the wayback machine, shall we? I’d like to chalk it up to experience, so let me explain. I wrote First and spent a LOT of time editing it, but also learning a lot. In between that writing and learning, I wrote the draft of Assignment Day. I published First and then edited Next Time. By the time I returned to Assignment Day, I’d learned a lot and realized I had to fix a lot of things to make it a better book. That translated to writing this draft for the sequel to First, where I spotted problems as they arose. That leads to less major editing in the future. Experience paid off in a creating a draft that is probably closer to the finished product than anything else I’ve written. The other piece of why it’s in good shape is due to the multiple false starts I had in trying to create the sequel. I had at least three attempts in putting together a storyline that I liked, failing miserably each time. It wasn’t until this last go-around that the mixture came out right and the magic happened. All of those factors combined into a book that I think is pretty darn good. Hopefully I don’t ruin it by tinkering with it too much.

Drafted

Great news! I finished the draft of the first book in my new series yesterday. I was right, the characters led me to a satisfactory conclusion and I set the stage for the next book. I’ll let it sit in the virtual drawer until I have the second book in the series complete, which might be summertime. That way if there are directional changes in the series as a whole, I can go back and edit the first book to conform. For those of you counting along at home, I have three books in various stages of completion. One, Assignment Day, is ready to publish once I get the funding. The second, the sequel to First, is done and needs several rounds of editing. I started doing that this morning and I have to say it’s not in as bad of shape as I thought. And, of course, the third is the draft I finished yesterday. Of the seven goals I set for 2025, completing this draft means I can mark off one of them and we’re barely halfway through the second month of the year. Lots of writing and editing going on around here and at some point it’s going to be publishing time. Looking forward to it.

Trends

As most authors do, I check my book sales on Amazon almost every day. And as mentioned previously, they don’t give you a raw number, but rather a ranking. I’ve learned over the past 18 months or so that while you can’t tell how many books you’re selling, you can at least tell you’re selling something. Why do I repeat all this? Because I’ve noticed something the past few weeks. Normally, I advertise with BookBub Friday-Sunday, spending a few dollars on running campaigns, which means I sell some books on the weekends. How do I know? Because the Amazon rankings go up for the books. Fascinating, you say. Not really, but thanks for feigning interest. Here’s what I’ve noticed that actually is interesting: I’ve been seeing the rankings also change positively at times during the rest of the week, fluctuating up and down even though I’m not running ads at those points. It’s been nice to see, although I don’t know the cause. Are my books getting recommended to other readers in ‘You Might Like’ sections? Or are people late in reading their weekend emails so that some of the sales are delayed? Have people added my books to their reading list and they’re now getting to them? Not sure if all or any of those could be the reason, but it’s fun to watch.

Ending 2

I recently wrote about figuring out the ending for the book I’m working on. Still thinking about it. I’m getting close, probably a week or so away from finishing the draft. Does it worry me that I don’t have a solid ending worked out yet? Not really. I trust the characters to get me there. In my mind I have the foundation of the ending and need to add in a little zest, like a chef would say in one of those cooking shows. It’s a little different mindset because not only do I have to wrap up the immediate story, but I also have to set the stage for the next book in the series and beyond. There will be storylines that play out over multiple books, as well as hints of characters or incidents that will come back into play at some future point. I think some of that will become clear if I actually sit down and make a map of my thoughts. Right now, though, I’m in writing mode and want to get this completed. I’ll circle back to some of that other stuff later.

Telescope

I still remember the first time I saw Saturn through a telescope. I figure I’m not alone in a memory like that, but hey, this is my blog and I’m telling the stories here. We lived in southern New Mexico and our class, maybe third grade, had taken an evening field trip to a local observatory. I remember seeing the planet and rings and how incredibly awesome it was to view the ringed planet like that rather than as a picture in a book. I was reminded a little of that last night when I got out the telescope the kids got me for Christmas. The weather has been overcast most nights since then and I’ve only been able to use it a couple of times, but finally we got a break. The first thing I viewed was the Moon. It was about a half-moon, which means it’s better to view so you can see craters and contrast along the terminator. Contrary to what some people think, the full moon is the worst since the shadows are what make things interesting. Plus, the full moon washes out everything else in the sky and generally makes for bad viewing. Anyway, I put the Moon in the center of the field and stepped aside for The Wife to see. She remarked this was probably the closest view she’s had of it other than in a book. Why do I tell this story? Because I think whether it’s Saturn when you’re a kid or the Moon when you’re a grown-up, they’re images you never forget. And in my case, started me on a lifelong journey of fascination with space that has ended up in my writing several books set against the backdrop of the planets and stars. I’m not saying that childhood look through a telescope made all that happen, but it sure didn’t stop it, either.

Time

It struck me recently that if I’d signed a deal with an agent back in mid-2022, my two recent books might not be published yet. I wasn’t posting to this blog at the time, but I’ve talked here previously about taking several months to research agents and send a multitude of query letters. It took a lot of time away from actually writing, but I figured it was worth a shot. The deal with that model is the time for the search, you sign a contract with the agent, the agent shops your book around, a publisher wants it, you sign a contract with the publisher, and then you wait. If an agent had been interested and able to sell First by the end of 2022, it might have come out toward the tail end of 2024. Next Time wouldn’t even be on the schedule yet since the publisher would probably want to see how First sold before committing to any other books. And Assignment Day? I probably wouldn’t have had time to finish it yet due to promotional commitments. All that to say, I’m incredibly happy I went the self-publishing route. I’ve sold more books than I expected but not as many as I want, and both have earned multiple awards. Would I have sold more with a traditional publisher? Can’t say for sure. All I can say with confidence is that it’s nice to be in control and put my books out there in my own time.

AI

I hear there’s a bit of conversation on the Interwebs about AI and writing. I took Microsoft’s Copilot out for a couple of short test drives and here’s what I found. No, I didn’t have it write a book for me. Although, I might try that and see how it goes just for fun. I took the manuscripts of Assignment Day and the new book I’m working on and asked it how I could make the story better. For the new book, which I ran through AI first, it gave me a list of about seven bullet points, saying I should use foreshadowing, more inner monologues for the characters, and some pretty general stuff like pacing. It picked up on the fact that there are multiple characters, which seemed like a good thing. Contrast that with its output for Assignment Day. The book starts off with a chapter about a character who appears later in the book, but he’s not the narrator or main character. Copilot threw out eight items, more than half of which named that first guy as the main character, and no mention of the actual first-person narrator. The list was similar to my first experiment with suggestions on more dialogue, pacing, descriptions, and proofreading.

Next, I asked for a summary of Assignment Day. This went a little better. It missed how a scene fit into the overall plot, but overall at least Copilot recognized that character from the prologue wasn’t the main one, but it also didn’t name the actual narrator and protagonist. At least it came up with a useful summary: “The story intertwines themes of technology, virtual reality, and the quest for truth, culminating in a suspenseful and engaging adventure.”

Were the answers to my question useful? For the most part, no. Would I get better results if I got more specific with my questions and honed in on certain aspects of the books? Probably, but not right now. More to come as I experiment with AI from time to time and figure out how it can actually help.