Last week, I finished the AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, the first book in my new epic fantasy series! Here are the stats:
- 20 chapters (including prologue and epilogue)
- 80 scenes
- 136,294 words
So it’s a little short for an epic fantasy novel, but this is only the AI draft. As I rewrite it into the human draft, I will add more details and nuance that will hopefully flesh it out, bringing it closer to the 150k – 180k word range.
I started the AI draft in March, but I wasn’t working on it continuously all that time. I worked on it in about four separate bursts, each one lasting a few weeks. In total, it took 70 working days, or approximately 12 working weeks to write it.
The next stage is the human draft, where I rewrite the whole thing from scratch to make sure it’s entirely in my own words. I’ll keep the AI draft on-screen as a reference, and may use some turns of phrase that I like, but I’m not going to copy-paste from it. This way, the resulting work will be entirely my own.
I don’t know how long it will take to finish the rough human draft, but I expect it will take longer than the AI draft, perhaps even 2x or 3x as long. Then again, if the AI draft is clean enough, it might even take less time than that. I’ve been getting pretty good at these AI drafts, and it’s already at least partially in my own voice, given how my personal taste guided which parts of which AI generated iterations I decided to keep. I also did a revision pass with no AI whatsoever, mostly just to smooth out inconsistencies.
But the AI draft is complete! This is the longest book I have ever written with AI, and one of the longest ones I have written in general. I hope it is the first of many more to come!
(And also, I really need to get a better book cover!)
