Frustrations – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Without AI, I would probably not be writing

I recently got another anti-AI one-star review that I want to pull apart, because it’s pertinent to what I want to say. I actually came up with the title for this post before I received the one-star review, so I’m not just fisking this one for the sake of fisking. With that said, though, there is definitely a lot to pull apart.

I was prepared to rate this as 2 stars. It is repetitive with no real character depth or development and a sincere lack of dynamic or engaging writing.

Two stars… so magnanimous! In all seriousness, though, it’s worth pointing out that in spite of all the book’s flaws, she did read it all the way through. That’s important for later.

Then I read the “author” note at the end of the book that was defending their use of generative AI in their writing process…. not only that but also seemingly insulting other writers who are anti-AI claiming that readers dont seem to care about it.

You know what’s insulting to any author, whether or not they are “anti-AI”? Putting scare quotes around the word “author” when referring to them Though I suspect that she did that on purpose, fully intending to insult me, whereas I did not intentionally insult anyone. For the record, this is the passage from the author’s note that she claims is “insulting” to authors by saying that “readers dont [sic] seem to care about [AI writing]”:

Besides which, after sharing The Riches of Xulthar with lots of readers, I’ve found that most of the rage and vitriol against AI-assisted writing is on the writer side of things, not the reader side.

The other thing is that I was not trying to “defend” my pro-AI stance through the author’s note, just explaining my writing process and sharing the story behind the story like I do in the author’s notes I write in the back of all my books. That’s not me being “defensive,” that just me sharing my story.

But there is something profoundly narcissistic about the way this reader is framing her review. Because I stated something about readers that contradicts her anti-AI worldview, I must be intentionally “insulting” her (or the anti-AI authors she’s white knighting for, which amounts to the same thing). Because I wrote about how I used AI to help write the book, I must be “defending” myself against her anti-AI views. This kind of narcissism can only really come from someone who lives in an echo chamber and is not used to having their worldview challenged.

Well Joe, you are wrong. This book was lifeless and dull and the use of AI showed. Everything was one dimensinal and flat. Word choises were even static. We (readers) get it… FMC had auburn hair. There are other words besides auburn to describe it….

I’m not going to deny, there is some legitimate criticism here. Rescuer’s Reward was one of my earlier AI-assisted books, when I was still experimenting a lot and learning how to incorporate AI into my creative process while still preserving my voice and writing multi-“dimensinal” [sic] characters and stories. So it doesn’t surprise me all that much that I missed the mark with this particular reader for this particular book. Lesson learned. Thanks for the feedback and the useful data point.

With all of that said, though… I can’t help but notice that she read the whole book.

I have yet to hear a compelling AI argument in the reralm of artistic expression and this “book” just exemplified everything yet again. No heart. No depth. Not good.

This is the crux of the issue, and the reason I wanted to frame this post as a line-by-line response to this review. Is there “a compelling AI argument in the reralm [sic] of artistic expression”? Or is any author who uses AI committing an unforgivable transgression against their art?

Here’s the thing: most of the other authors I know gave up writing a long time ago. We all started out with bright-eyed dreams about telling great stories and creating great art, but the hard truth is that it’s almost impossible to make it as an author.

There are many reasons for this: people don’t read very much in today’s culture (I personally blame the public school system for that), and the publishing industry has always been brutally rapacious and exploitive of writers (just read The Untold Story of Books by Michael Castleman—it’s a really fantastic history of the written word).

But the writing itself is also very hard. There’s a reason why even many succesful writers are like this guy, single and living in what amounts to a glorified shack. Most of my writing friends quit when they got married and starting having kids. I sincerely hope that they’re just on a 20+ year hiatus, and plan to get back to writing again someday, because some of the stuff they wrote was really, really good (I’m looking at you, Nathan Major!) But sadly, that won’t make up for the stuff they would have written, but never did.

My wife and I just had our third child. Writing with small children is very difficult, especially when your wife has a full-time job. I love them all to death, though. If I had to choose between being a single writer, or putting my writing on hold for 20+ years and having to restart my whole writing career from zero, just to be able to raise a family, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to make that choice. But it would put a huge burden of guilt on my wife, because my writing was one of the key things that drew her to me back when we were dating. And while our marriage is probably strong enough to survive that, I can’t deny that it would be an incredible strain.

Without AI, I probably would be facing this choice right now. Even though I had managed to streamline my writing process in the last few years, I’ve never been an especially fast writer. Without AI, it took me about a year to write each novel—and that’s before all the demands on my time and energy that come with having small children.

But AI has enabled me to continue to pursue my career and my art, even through this period of life. Not only does this help me to be a better husband and father (which is ultimately the most important thing), but it also means that my readers don’t have to wonder about the things I would have written, but never did. I can write those books now. I can give those stories to the world.

I’m not talking about AI slop. I’m talking about incorporating AI into the creative process deeply enough that it enhances, rather than replaces, my human creativity. We don’t have to be afraid of AI. It makes so many things possible—including running a profitable indie author business while raising (and soon homeschooling) 3+ small children. But it takes a lot of practice to get to that point. And generative AI is still so new that I don’t think there’s anyone who’s truly mastered the art of AI-assisted writing.

My Sea Mage Cycle books are mostly for practice. They’re meant to be fun, light reading. If it gives my readers a satisfying respite from all the doom and gloom in the world these days, I consider that book a success. The experience of writing each of them has helped me to be a better AI-assisted writer. And while the earlier ones may read like AI slop, that won’t be the case for long.

Fantasy from A to Z: U is for Unicorns

If you were expecting a post on unicorns or other mythical beasts, I hate to disappoint you again, but that’s not what this is going to be. Instead, I want to write a bit about that most mythical of all human creatures: the full-time fiction writer.

Okay, perhaps we’re not that mythical. After all, Brandon Sanderson estimates that of all his students over the years, perhaps as many as 10% of the ones who set out to become full-time writers actually make that dream into a reality. I sometimes wonder: would Brandon count me as one of those 10%? Should he? The answer to that is… complicated.

One of the first questions I get whenever I tell people that I’m a writer is “oh, wow—how is that working out for you?” Which is really a roundabout way of asking how much money I make, and whether I’ve been able to turn it into a full-time career. I am not (yet) a major bestselling author, and the closest thing I’ve had to a breakout thus far has been my (now unpublished) Star Wanderers novella series, which managed (mostly by accident) to hit the algorithms correctly back when a permafree first-in-series with lots of direct sequels was the best path to success. Then the publishing landscape changed, the algorithms shifted to favor pay-to-play advertising, and my books got left behind.

I will admit that if it weren’t for my wife’s income, I wouldn’t be able to pursue writing full-time. As a family, we’re following a path very similar to my Scandinavian ancestors, where the wife tends the farm while the husband goes off a-viking. In other words, my wife has the stable, traditional career that provides our family with some degree of security, while I have the more risky career that has the potential to catapult us into transformative levels of wealth and prosperity. We’re doing just fine, but it does sometimes feel like my Viking ship has yet to land ashore.

Because here’s the thing: something like 90% of the money in book publishing (after the booksellers and publishers and other middlemen take their often-exorbitant cuts) goes to less than 1% of the writers who actually make any money (and something like 30% of kindle books never sell a single copy).

For every Brandon Sanderson, there are thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of published authors who write on nights and weekends while holding down a day job to pay the bills. My writing contributes enough to the family budget to justify pursuing it, but if I were still single, I would need at least a part-time job.

Indie publishing has created a lot of opportunity for authors to make a career out of their writing, and there are many successful indies who are making a decent living at it. At the same time, indie publishing has also massively exploded the number of books that are published, so the proportion of full-time to still-aspiring authors is probably about the same (and may have actually tilted the other way).

In recent years, it has very much turned into a zero-sum pay-to-play game, especially with advertising. From what I can tell, most authors lose money on advertising, and most of those who are making money are spending upwards of $10,000 each month to make $11,000. The elite few who learn how to successfully game the algorithms to blow up their books often put their writing on the backburner to launch their own companies or provide publishing services, leveraging their expertise to make a lot more than they otherwise would.

The algorithms are changing books in some very strange ways. If J.R.R. Tolkien or Roger Zelazny or Robert E. Howard were writing today, would they be able to make it in today’s publishing environment?

Howard’s Conan stories would either have to be a lot sexier, or else would have to include the sort of tables and character stats you find in LitRPG. His covers would also be a lot more anime, and show a ridiculous amount of cleavage (which he actually might not have had a problem with, judging from some of the old Weird Tales covers).

Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber would all be far too short to make it in Kindle Unlimited—to make it in that game, you have to have super long books that max out on page reads, in order to maximize advertising ROI so that you can outbid your competitors. And if you aren’t winning the pay-to-play advertising game, your KU books will sink like rocks. Also, Zelazny took way too much time between books. Gotta work on that rapid release strategy, Roger.

As for Tolkien… hoo boy, there’s an author who did everything wrong. Decades and decades spent polishing his magnum opus, with a short prequel novel that falls squarely in the children’s category (totally different genre) as the only other fantasy book published in his lifetime. I suppose he could have serialized Lord of the Rings, except nothing really happened in episode 1: A Long-Expected Party. Certainly not anything that would adequately foreshadow all the dark and epic battles to come. Perhaps if he followed a first-in-series permafree strategy, and just gave away Fellowship of the Ring for free… and then made The Hobbit his reader magnet for signing up for his email list… maybe that could have worked? After all, there’s always BookBub…

I jest, of course. Each of these authors’ books became classics, not because of their marketing strategy, but because they hit the cultural zeitgeist in exactly the right way. But is it possible for an author to do that today without also getting a boost from the algorithms? Or do the algorithms have more power to shape our culture than anything else? Those are disturbing questions, and I honestly do not know the answer.

And then there’s the question of AI, which is massively disrupting all of the creative fields. In the interest of full disclosure, I am actually quite sanguine about generative AI, and have already been working to incorporate it into my creative process. I’m not a fan of AI slop, but I don’t feel particularly threatened by it. I decided a long time ago that if AI ever became good enough to write an entertaining book, it still would never be able to write a Joe Vasicek book. That’s insulated me from most of the doom porn out there.

Right now, there is a HUGE fight happening between authors like me who are embracing AI, and authors who treat it all as anathema, and have vowed to never use any sort of AI in any of their books (except Grammarly, of course, because… reasons. And Microsoft Word. And…) Frankly, it reminds me of the big debate between indie and traditionally published authors, back before self-publishing had lost its stigma. The biggest difference is that the level of online outrage has been ramped up to 11, mostly as a result of the social media algorithms (which weren’t as robust or as powerful back in the early 2010s). I suspect that we will ultimately settle on a “hybrid” approach, much like we did with publishing, but the sheer level of vitriol has made me wonder about that.

On the reader end of things, though, it seems like most readers don’t really care if a book was written with or without AI assistance, so long as it’s actually a good book. Which means that there is a real opportunity for authors who 1) know how to tell great stories, 2) have already found and honed their voice, and 3) know how to strike the right balance between the AI and the human elements.

Which describes my own position almost perfectly. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve read, written, and published enough books that I have a pretty good handle on what makes a great story. I’ve also honed my voice well enough that I can write in it quite comfortably. And as for the balance between AI and human writing, I’ve been working hard on that since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022. Half a dozen books and about a million words later, I’ve learned quite a lot about how to best strike that balance.

Will AI replace authors entirely, making this particular unicorn extinct? I don’t think so. But AI may radically change our concept of what “books,” or “writers,” or “writing” really are. A long time ago, I realized that even if AI became good enough to write a decent book, it would never be able to write a Joe Vasicek book. Only I can do that. Whether or not that’s worth something is up to the readers to decide.

Fantasy from A to Z: All Posts

Yes, Brandon Sanderson has gone woke

By his own admission, in his latest blog post: On Renarin and Rlain. He says the post is addressed “toward my more conservative readership.” However, he also calls himself “an ally to LGBT+ people” and boasts about writing the “first openly gay men [in] the Wheel of Time.” When discussing Christianity and his own Latter-day Saint faith, he makes repeated appeals to “empathy” and “respect,” without addressing the Bible’s clear condemnation of sexual sin. He also does not mention the Family Proclamation, which clearly lays out his own church’s position on homosexuality, transgenderism, and gay marriage.

In other words, Brandon basically told his conservative readers “I hear you, but you’re wrong.” He implies that any conservative Christian who has concerns with the gay romance in Wind and Truth is lacking in empathy and respect. He also implies that by voicing their concerns, they are dividing the world into “us” vs. “them” and betraying a key tenet of their own Christian faith.

If Brandon genuinely wanted to allay the concerns of his conservative readers, he would have acknowledged the Family Proclamation and Biblical standards of sexual morality. He would have discussed the gay romance of his latest book in the context of such standards. Then, he would have presented an argument similar to Andrew Klavan’s: that conservative art is not the same as conservative life. Good art must provide an honest and truthful representation of life. It should not glorify or promote those aspects of life that are evil. Brandon starts to make the first half of that argument, in discussing how Tracy Hickman portrayed gay characters in his books, but he fails to follow it up. He doesn’t explain how making a gay romance essential to the plot of Wind and Truth serves the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Brandon doesn’t seem to trust his conservative Christian readers to be able to separate the sin from the sinner. He also refuses to acknowledge the lived experience of his gay and lesbian readers who have chosen to live morally pure and faithful Christian lives. Like Brandon, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some of the most inspiring members of the church for me are those who struggle with same-gender attraction but still live true to their testimonies. I imagine it must feel pretty lonely at times like this, when their brother in Christ has chosen to side with those who preach the false gospel of pride, equity, and self-worship, instead of the gospel of the One who declared “Father, Thy will be done, and the glory be Thine forever.”

Has Brandon denied his faith? I’m not Brandon’s bishop, nor am I his eternal judge. It’s important to remember that the church is not a place for perfect people. I do think there ought to be a place in the church for self-described LGBT+ allies, so long as they sustain the leaders—and the doctrine—of the church. But if he hasn’t crossed the line, he’s certainly standing a lot closer to it than I ever would.

My personal testimony is that the Family Proclamation is inspired of God, and that the men who wrote and signed their names to it are prophets, seers, and revelators. It teaches true principles about the family and sexual morality. We are all children of God, gays and lesbians included, and that makes us all brothers and sisters regardless of how we choose to live. At the same time, Christ didn’t suffer and die for us so that we could continue in our sins. If the Family Proclamation is true, affirming homosexuality is not an act of love, no matter how empathetic it may be. Christ had empathy for the woman caught in adultery, but because He loved her, He also commanded her to “go, and sin no more.”

On a personal level, I feel frustrated and disappointed by Brandon’s recent turn. I count Brandon as an early mentor—in fact, it was Brandon’s class that inspired me to pursue writing as a career. I haven’t spoken with Brandon in years, but I do still count him as a friend. If I could sit down with him I would ask him about the people he’s surrounded himself with. They seem to be leading him in a bad direction, since he seems to have grown out of touch.

Has he betrayed his conservative readers? Yes, I think he has, and that he’s making a big mistake by doing so. One of the things that set him apart until now was the fact that his books are very clean. His fans may argue that Renarin and Rlain’s romance is also clean, but as a conservative reader, it feels more like a camel’s nose peeking under the tent. In a world of drag queen story hour, pornographic gay pride parades, and genital mutilation of children, is it even possible to have a clean gay romance? I think not. To paraphrase Brandon, as much as we may long for the days where there was no slippery slope, maybe that world never existed. Maybe there will always be an instinct to divide the world into the “clean” and the “queer.”

So let me just say this: whatever the stories that Brandon wants to tell, I can no longer trust that they’ll be the kind I’ll want to read. He could still turn around, of course, and I genuinely hope that he does. But reading between the lines, it seems that this turn toward the woke is not a new direction from him. It seems to be something that he’s contemplated for some time. I’ll still read the rest of his secret projects and keep my signed copies of the original Mistborn trilogy. But I’m going to DNF the Stormlight Archive, and probably won’t buy his future books.

Brandon ends his blog post by saying that one of his primary goals in life is to be more empathetic. This is what motivates him to write: because it’s how he explores the world. I, too, feel compelled to explore the world through my stories, but my primary goal is to pursue the truth. Those two goals aren’t always in conflict, but when they are, I think the pursuit of truth should be higher. The pursuit of truth ultimately leads us to love one another more fully and more meaningfully than the pursuit of empathy does. It saddens me that Brandon disagrees.

Just finished my last short story

So I just finished writing what may be the last short story I ever write, at least for the forseeable future. Years from now, I may scribble out a quick short for a charity anthology or something, but unless someone actually commissions me to write one, I’m done for now. Instead, I’m going to focus all of my attention on writing novels, since that’s where all the money (and readers) are.

This last one was fun: a post-apocalyptic tale in a wintry wilderness, where the scout of a tribe of survivors comes across the “Ark Facility” built by a bunch of wealthy elites to freeze themselves in stasis while their workers maintain the facility, and wake them once civilization has been restored. But of course, the plan goes to hell, and the only person left is the daughter of the last caretaker, all the other workers having abandoned the aging facility rather than trying to maintain it. So the scout convinces the girl to come with him, and to leave the facility in the care of the elites after waking them up. That’s when the drama begins.

I wrote the rough draft of this story with AI, back when I was just starting to climb the learning curve for AI-assisted short stories. Because of that, it was rather frustrating in parts, and I ended up throwing out almost everything that I generated. It still turned into a +8k word novelette, though I may be able to cut it down to 7.5k or lower with a couple of revision passes.

But frankly, I don’t much care whether it ends up as a novelette or a short story, because I’m not going to bother submitting it anywhere. I’ve come to the conclusion that none of the short story markets for science fiction or fantasy are worth submitting to, because they are all commercially non-viable and exist primarily as (typically short-lived) passion projects, stepping stones for people trying to carve out a career in the book world, or as vehicles for clout-seeking authors and editors to get their names on the ballots for the Hugos and the Nebulas.

Also, I’m a straight white male conservative, which automatically makes me anathema to every (and I do mean every) pro-paying science fiction short story market. The 1,000+ rejections that I’ve accumulated over the course of my career give me authority to say that—specifically, 1,062 rejections out of 1,255 submissions, according to my lifetime stats on The Submission Grinder (and most of those 193 non-rejections were submissions that never received a response). Thank God for self-publishing.

Since I’m not yet at the point where I can consistently write and publish a novel each month, I will continue to republish some of my old short story singles on the off-months when I don’t have a novel. I was doing the novel-a-month thing for the first few months of 2024, but needed to take a break after the third Sea Mage Cycle book to recuperate, re-evaluate, and rework my writing process. Starting in 2025, I will probably start publishing a novel every other month, and ramp up the process until I’m doing a novel every month. At that point, I’ll retire the free short story singles for good.

It’s been a good run. I’ve written and published about 60 short stories, some of them with semiprozines and anthologies, but most of them indie. I do think it’s a good way to get started when you don’t have much of a following, and I attribute a sizeable chunk of my own following to my consistency in putting out new content for my readers each month. But the money is all in writing novels, since that’s what readers are actually willing to pay for—and given the current state of short fiction, I can’t say I blame them.

How I would vote now: 2023 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

Alright, let’s tackle the most controversial Hugo awards since Sad Puppies 3—and possibly the most controversial Hugos ever!

The Nominees

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

The Actual Results

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal
Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

How I Would Have Voted

No Award
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Explanation

The 2023 Hugo Awards were an epic clusterfuck, from which the Hugos might never recover (and honestly, I kind of hope they don’t). Not only did the organizers exclude a bunch of titles like Babel by R.F. Kuang that probably would have placed very high, if not outright won first place—excluded them for no other discernible reason other than that they might have offended the Chinese Communist Party, since China was hosting the awards—but they also disqualified thousands of Chinese ballots for the same reason that they disqualified thousands of Sad Puppy ballots in subsequent years since the big kerfluffle in 2015: namely, that they were Wrongfans having Wrongfun.

Apparently, to get on the Hugo ballot, you have to either 1) pander to or be a member of the SFWA mean girls club (for crying out loud, two of the authors on this year’s ballot were former SFWA presidents), or 2) write a lesbian love story. I suppose you can also get on the ballot if you write a love story that’s gay, transgender, polyamorous, or some other flavor of queer, but lesbians are easier because the male readers are less likely to be grossed out or confused by it.

Anyways, I didn’t enjoy any of these books, though I have to admit that I didn’t even try to read The Kaiju Preservation Society (because I cannot stand Scalzi, either as an author or a human. The Collapsing Empire with its random throwaway sex scene in the second or third chapter was the last straw for me) and The Spare Man (my wife picked it up and was so confused and turned off by the non-gendered pronoun dickery that I knew it was too woke for me). I DNFed Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series with Gideon the Ninth, for reasons that I detailed in my recap of the 2021 Hugo Awards.

As for Nettle & Bone, I was pleasantly surprised at first, because the love interest was heterosexual—which, for the Hugos, is very unusual these days. But there were other things about the book that turned me off, such as the anachronism of a religious medieval world that’s been gutted of anything religious that might offend a non-religious reader in 2023, and a very anti-natalist bias with some lines that could have come straight from Margaret Sanger. So that’s why I put Nettle & Bone below No Award, and didn’t even bother ranking it anywhere on my ballot.

Legends & Lattes wasn’t terrible, but I got bored after the first couple of chapters, and because of the lesbian love story I’m not too keen to try it again (though I suppose I could be persuaded otherwise). As for The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, I didn’t find anything objectionable with that one, and actually got about halfway through, but… I just didn’t care about any of the characters. Not a terrible book, but it just wasn’t for me.

Of the two, I think I liked The Daughter of Doctor Moreau better, or disliked it less, which is why I put it on the ballot above Legend & Lattes and below No Award. Why include anything on a ballot below No Award? Because the way that ranked choice voting works, you can still influence the outcome that way even if No Award is eliminated during the counting. It’s basically like saying: “I don’t think any of these books deserve an award, but if I had to award one of them, I’d give it to (1) and (2), in that order.”

So that’s my take on the infamous 2023 Hugo Awards. Frankly, I think it would have been much better if the Chinese wrongfans had completely taken it over, and made it so that Worldcon was held in China every other year, with Chinese authors dominating the Hugos from now on. There are certainly enough Chinese sci-fi readers to justify such a move. But alas, it seems that the Trufans are going to keep clutching the Hugos with a deathgrip until 1) they’re all dead (since most of them are boomers anyway), or 2) the Trufans and the Hugos both become culturally irrelevant, if indeed they aren’t already.

(Speaking of China, hi Mike Glyer! Still buying views from Chinese clickfarms to boost your online rankings? It must be a real slow news week if you pick up this blog for your File 770 pixel scroll.)

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

Riches of Xulthar update

So it’s the 25th of the month, which is also the 25th day of the billing period for Sudowrite, and used up all of my AI words. The Riches of Xulthar, my first AI-assisted novel, is currently a little over 27k, which means I have 13k words to go (I’m shooting for the minimum novel word count for this project, though I’ll probably go 1-2k over).

I could buy some extra AI words to round out the month, but I’m going to just wait until the next billing period on June 1st. That means no more generative AI writing, but there’s still a lot of work to be done, not only for this project, but for all those practice short stories that I wrote with Sudowrite at the beginning of the month.

I’ve been vacillating between whether The Riches of Xulthar is any good, and whether I ought to just trunk it. Part of the problem may be that I got caught up in Laria’s story, which isn’t very typical for the sword & sorcery genre.

But more than that, the writing process has just been really choppy: it started as a short story attempt with ChatGPT, with the prompt “let’s write a fantasy adventure story in the style of Robert E. Howard.” But it quickly morphed into something much longer than a short story—and because ChatGPT has a short memory, I started running into problems because of that.

My early attempts to “humanize” it by typing out (not copy-pasting) the AI output into a separate document made it even messier, since I kept trying to feed those humanized bits back into ChatGPT. When it started to feel like I was wrestling with the AI to pull the story in the right direction, that was when I needed to try another AI writing tool.

Sudowrite has been great in some ways, and a struggle in others. Most of the struggle is to be expected, given that the program has quite a steep learning curve, but it does make me wonder if this first novel is any good. Most of the time, I feel like the best I can do is to get it about 80% there, and finish the rest of it myself.

And that may be the best I can do with these AI tools at all. Most of the time, it feels like I’m only getting it 50% or 60% finished, so getting it 80% of the way to a publishable quality book may actually be optimistic. It may turn out that AI-assisted writing is a lot like the coder meme above.

So for this next week, I’m going to set the AI writing aside and focus on the “debugging” phase, which I’m calling the “human filter.” It involves retyping the story word for word into a new document, and tweaking or revising it along the way. It will be interesting to see how that goes.

More early thoughts on AI-assisted writing

It’s become something of a cliche that true writers write because they can’t not write, but as with so many other stereotypes and cliches, there’s a kernel of truth in it. I’ve been writing on and off since the 8th grade, and even during periods of my life when I wasn’t able to focus on writing, the writing itch would still come for me, and I would have to sit down and sketch out something, even if I never did anything with it.

Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at telling whether I’ve done enough to satisfy that creative urge that drives me to write, and whether that urge has been left unsatisfied. Yesterday, I realized that something felt off because that creative urge had not been satisfied—which is strange, because after only two weeks of working on this AI-assisted novel project, I’m already halfway done with the first draft. Indeed, yesterday I “wrote” (if that’s the right word for it) a little over 4.5k AI-assisted words.

Now, this should go without saying, but the point of writing professionally is not how good the creative process makes you feel, but how well and how quickly you produce a quality finished product. But I do think there’s a correlation between the two: that you are more likely to create a quality finished work the better your creative process satisfies your creative urges.

In the last three months of writing with AI, I’ve had some writing days that were better than almost any I’ve had in years. I’ve also had some very meh days, which is to be expected… but what isn’t so expected is this feeling of being creatively unsatisfied, which I usually don’t feel unless it’s been two or three weeks since I’ve done any writing. Something weird is going on.

How much of this feeling of creative dissatisfaction is due to the fact that I’m outsourcing a significant portion of the creative work to an AI, and how much of it is simply to be expected from trying to master a new and unfamiliar skill, which has kept me from satisfying that urge in the same way as I have in the past? At this point, it’s difficult to say. Probably a little of both.

Having worked on this for a while now, though, I think that the writers (and other creative types) who are going to succeed the most with AI-assisted creative work are the ones who figure out how to integrate the human element of their process with the AI element of their process, such that each one complements and enhances the other. Right now, everyone’s talking about how AI will replace us, but that’s really the wrong way to think about it if you want to learn how to master these tools.

I suspect that the way to master AI-assisted writing is not to try to get the AI to “do the hard stuff,” or replace some aspect of the creative process, but to integrate it within your creative process such that it enhances and magnifies your own, very human efforts. For that reason, I’m changing the way that I count my daily words so that I no longer make a distinction between words that I “write” myself, and words that the AI “writes” or generates, because the AI can’t generate words unless I give it enough to work with. Often, that means that I write a little, then generate a little, then tweak what the AI generates and write a little more. When the process is working well, it’s very difficult to say which parts were purely AI “written,” and which parts were purely human “written.”

But it’s still going to take a while to figure out exactly how to integrate AI into my writing process. As I continue to do that, I’m going to pay close attention to how it satisfies—or fails to satisfy—my creative urge to write, not because that is the end goal, but because I suspect that if my creative urge is not being satisfied, the AI-assisted stuff that I’m producing probably isn’t very good. It may not be very good even if my creative urges are satisfied, but if something about the process is missing, then something about the final product probably is missing as well.

Anyhow, those are some more of my random thoughts as I continue to experiment with AI-assisted writing. I was hoping to finish the rough/AI draft of The Riches of Xulthar before the end of the month, but I’m almost out of AI words for this billing cycle, so I’ll probably move on to the “humanizing” phase for what I’ve already written, which is where I retype the AI-generated stuff in order to pass it through what I like to call “the human filter.” Hopefully that helps to give the story a little more of my personal voice and style, and not read like something that could have been AI generated by anyone. But I’m still working out and experimenting with that part of the process, just like all the others.

How I hacked my ADHD to triple my daily word count

Writing with ADHD can be tough. It’s easy to beat yourself up for being “undisciplined” or “lazy” when the greater problem is that you’re trying to work against your ADHD instead of finding ways to make it work for you. It’s like swimming against a rip current instead of swimming sideways to get out of it.

In the last month, I’ve made a really fantastic breathrough that I think will change the way I write from here on out. So far, it’s helped me to double or even triple my usual word count. The novel I’ve been wrestling with for more than a year now—the longest one I’ve written since I started indie publishing—now looks like it will be finished in just a few of weeks, when I expected it to take a couple of months. Needless to say, I’m really excited.

What changed? I found a way to make my ADHD work for me, rather than against me.

In my previous post, A reading hack for the ADHD addled brain, I explained how I exploited my ADHD to read more books. Basically, I did the same thing, but for writing. There was a lot that had to happen first, though, and the biggest of those was that I had to learn how to make and keep an outline.

Step 1: Learn how to outline properly

For years, I just sort of assumed that I was a discovery writer, probably because of the ADHD. Most of creativity has to do with finding novel or unexpected ways to combine two or more ideas, and when you have ADHD, your brain naturally jumps from idea to idea. That was why I always hated taking meds when I was a kid: I felt that it stifled my creativity. And since most of this idea jumping happened subconsciously, I assumed that outlining would also kill that process.

But after a few years of struggling as an indie author, I realized that my writing process was too slow. In order to succeed, I needed to publish more frequently, but in order to do that, I needed to produce more content regularly. Back then, I would usually write a novel from start to finish, laying it aside for a month or two if I ran into a serious block, and also after finishing each draft. A typical novel would go through two or three revision drafts, so it would literally take years before a +70k word novel was ready to publish.

I decided that the best way to shorten my writing process was to “cycle” through the book, combining all the drafts so that I was working on revisions while simultaneously writing the rough draft. In order to keep track of all that, I needed to keep an outline. So I tried out a few different methods and tweaked them until I came up with a method that worked well for me.

The thought of outlining can scare a lot of writers who consider themselves “pantsers” or “discover writers,” but the thing to keep in mind is that there is no one right way to keep an outline. In fact, there are probably as many ways to outline as there are writers. For some, a couple of quick sketches on the back of a napkin is enough, while for others, it turns into a massive story bible that’s just as long (or longer) than the actual book. But without trying out a lot of different methods, you’ll never figure out what works for you.

It took me a couple of years, but I eventually developed a method that worked really well for me. With it, I was able to write Edenfall and The Stars of Redemption, as well as the last two Gunslinger books, in much less time than it took for my other ones. I was also able to combine all eight of the Star Wanderers novellas into a novel—something I probably wouldn’t have been able to do very well without a solid outline to keep it straight.

But I still would run into blocks that would occasionally derail the project, at least for a little while. I ran into that a lot with my current WIP, Children of the Starry Sea. Sometimes, they were genuine story problems that I needed to work through. More often than not, though, the problem was one of momentum: I was having too many bad writing days interspersed with the good writing days, so that each day felt like I was starting from zero. After a while, that becomes difficult to keep up.

Step 2: Allow yourself to write out of order

When I came back from my second hiatus to work on Children of the Starry Sea, it was clear that my new method wasn’t working as well as I needed it to work. Children of the Starry Sea is much longer than anything I’ve published so far, and I found that I just wasn’t producing enough new words consistently to make my “cycling” process of revisions work.

Around this time, I remembered something I’d heard on a recent convention panel, where one of the authors shared how he collaborated with another author. Instead of going back and forth, he told his cowriter: “how about you just write all the odd chapters, and I’ll write the even chapters, and when we’re both done we’ll combine it all together and see how it turns out.” To their surprise, it actually turned out really well.

So with that in mind, I decided to experiment with skipping around my current WIP, rather than writing it in order from start to finish. If I woke up and felt like I wanted to write an action scene, I would pick one of the action scenes out of my outline and write that. If I felt like I wanted to write the ending, I would skip ahead and write that. If I felt like I wanted to write the next scene, I would go back to where I’d left off and write that.

The outline was the key. Without it, there’s no way I’d be able to keep everything straight and know where each part is supposed to go. The outline also had the added benefit of dividing the novel up into smaller chunks, making the overall project much less intimidating. The way to eat an elephant is to take one bite at a time, just like the way to climb a mountain is to take one step at a time. Same thing with novels.

That’s all well and good, you may be thinking, but what happens when you’ve written all the stuff that you want to write, and all that’s left is the stuff you didn’t want to write? Isn’t that a bit like eating your dessert first, and leaving your vegetables for last? Not really, because chances are that if you really don’t want to write a particular scene, the reader probably won’t want to read it either. So if you can find a way to rework your story so that scene becomes unnecessary, you’re probably better off doing that.

But I actually haven’t had that problem yet. The thing about ADHD is that it actually feels right to jump around all over the place like that. Just because I don’t want to write a particular scene on one day doesn’t mean that I won’t want to come back to it sometime later. And more often than not, writing a later scene actually makes things fall into place with the earlier scenes, and makes me more excited to write them.

It’s as if the project itself is a puzzle. Can you imagine trying to put a puzzle together in linear order, starting from the top left corner and moving to the bottom right? That would be pure torture! Instead, you pick up whatever pieces catch your eye, and try to fit them in with other, similar pieces, until the puzzle itself begins to take shape.

There a lot of disadvantages to writing with ADHD, but there are some areas where the ADHD can actually become a strength, if you learn to work with it instead of against it. I’ve already mentioned how it can help with creativity, since your mind is always bouncing around between different ideas. What I’ve learned in the last month is that writing out of order is another great way to harness ADHD as a strength, since something that leaps out from writing one scene can often lead to a breakthrough in another. Writing out of order gives your ADHD brain the space it needs to make those intuitive leaps, and harnesses the “oh, shiny!” toward something productive, rather than driving you to procrastinate.

Step 3: Start in the middle, not the beginning

For me, the hardest part of writing is getting started. That’s probably my ADHD: it’s always easier to get distracted than it is to settle down and do what you’re supposed to do. Once I’ve settled down, though, and gotten into a groove, I can usually stick with a task until it’s done. In fact, once you’re in something of a flow state, the ADHD can actually make you hyperfocus.

So if the hardest part of writing is getting started, how do you turn that from a weakness into a strength? By leaving the next scene(s) unfinished, so that the next time you sit down to write, the scene has already been started and you just need to figure out the next word. One word leads to the next, and before you know it, you’re in the groove again.

By far, this has been the biggest part of my breakthrough: realizing that I don’t have to write every scene from start to finish in one sitting. In fact, it’s better if I don’t. Instead, I’ll typically finish one or two scenes in the morning, then pick out three to four scenes in the afternoon and write the first couple hundred words or so, deliberately leaving them unfinished so that I have a variety of scenes to choose from the next day.

If the hardest part of writing is getting started, then the hardest part of getting started is feeling overwhelmed at how much you have to do. But if all I have to do is write a couple hundred words, that’s easy! It also works with my ADHD instead of against it, since I get to jump from scene to scene instead of getting bogged down.

With the way that I used to write, most of my “writing blocks” had less to do with the actual writing and more to do with working myself up to write. Many times, I found that if I just sat down and opened up my WIP without thinking too much about it first, the writing would come a lot easier. Starting in the middle is a great way to harness that, because you aren’t confronted with a blank page the moment you sit down. It takes a lot less effort to find the next word than it does to find the first word.

So with where things stand right now, I just need to start four new scenes every day this week and I’ll have every remaining scene in my novel WIP started by Saturday. From there, if I can finish two or three scenes a day, I can easily finish the rough draft stage of this novel WIP before the end of February—which will be amazing, since I’m only at the 65% mark right now, and historically that’s always the part where I find it most difficult to write.

I’m really looking forward to writing a whole novel from start to finish using this method. As soon as Children of the Starry Sea is finished, I’ll start outlining the sequel, Return of of the Starborn Son, and write it the same way. If things go well with my current WIP, I’ll be very optimistic about finishing the next one before the end of the year—perhaps even before the end of the summer.

I do expect things to get crazy around here soon, though. Our second child is due in the early spring, which means enduring a month or two of chronic sleep deprivation. I’ve gotten to be pretty comfortable with writing at 4AM, but we’re also getting a lot more uninterrupted sleep than we were when Princess Hiccup was a newborn. I anticipate that we’ll have at least a month where nothing gets productively done.

So it will be really fantastic if I can finish Children of the Starry Sea NOW, before the baby comes—and not just the rough draft, but the revisions too. Fortunately, I don’t think I’ll have too much difficulty with the revisions. I’ve already cycled through the first half of the book a couple of times, and it’s working pretty well. Also, revisions come a lot easier to me than writing new words. I’m not sure why that’s true, but it is.

And for the record, I don’t advocate jumping around all over the place while doing revisions. It’s probably best to do that part in sequential order, if nothing else than to make sure that all the scenes and chapters flow properly. I haven’t gotten to that part of this writing method yet, so it will be interesting to see how it goes. So far, the stuff I’ve cycled through actually seems to flow pretty well, but I need to take it from the beginning to really be sure.

Toward a new writing technique

For the last year, I’ve been struggling to write this novel (Children of the Starry Sea, Book 2 of the Outworld Trilogy) according to my new novel writing method, which I’ve been developing since about 2017. The method involves creating a rigorous scene-by-scene outline and cycling through each scene multiple times, so that you basically revise the book as you go.

However, for a novel WIP the size of Children that doesn’t seem to work very well: either my mind is stuck in the revisions, or I’m so focused on producing new words that I don’t get around to revising, or (as happens most often) I’m so torn between both that I can never get in the right headspace, and my productivity suffers.

One of the things that happens is that I get hung up on a scene that I don’t really want to write. There are other parts of the story that appeal to me, but in order to get to them, I have to write that scene first… IF I’m writing the whole book in order from start to finish. So because I don’t want to write the next scene, I end up working on revisions for a while, which makes it harder to get back into the right headspace to write new stuff… you get the picture.

But the thing is, because I have such a rigorous scene-by-scene outline, I don’t actually need to write all the scenes in order. So lately, I’ve been picking and choosing which scene to write next, experimenting with writing the book out of order.

So far, it’s worked out pretty well. The outline gives me all of the plot points and character arcs that need to be worked out, so I can treat each scene as a sort of mini-story, which helps to eat the proverbial elephant. (How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.) Also, my ADHD-addled brain really loves the creative freedom of being able to pick and choose what to work on next, ignoring whether it has anything to do with what I wrote yesterday.

Of course, this means that the revisions will have to wait until all the holes in the narrative have been filled. I may be able to do it on a chapter-by-chapter basis, with the first revision happening once all the scenes in a chapter are done, and the next revision focused on fitting the chapters together, but I don’t know. It may just be better to put off the revisions altogether until the entire rough draft is complete.

Then again, there are advantages to cycling through the manuscript during the drafting process. It can help to identify plot and story problems as they emerge, which can help to remove writing blocks before they become really onerous. Also, it leaves me with a lot less work to get to the final version, once the initial manuscript is complete.

So here’s how I think I’m going to do it:

Prewriting: Develop a rigorous outline that includes a scene-by-scene map with all important plot points and character/relationship arcs.
Rough Draft: Pick and choose which scenes to write, focusing on hitting the plot/character/relationship points and making each scene cohesive.
First Revision: Fix all the points in the revision notes (such as things that need to be foreshadowed) and focus on making each chapter cohesive.
Second Revision: Fix any remaining revision notes and focus on overall story and chapter flow.
Final Revision: Focus on the sentence and paragraph level writing to cut the book’s word count by at least 10%.

So maybe I’ll do the first revision in-line with the rough draft, as each chapter comes together. Unless the book has major problems, the second revision should be pretty straightforward and not take longer than a week or two—besides, it should probably wait until the first draft is totally done, since that’s the time to work on overall story flow. And the final revision can go in-line with that.

I don’t know if any of that makes any sense to anyone but me. Thinking out loud does help to put my thoughts together, though I’m not sure how much it makes for good internet content. Still, I’m curious if anyone has any thoughts on the subject. Have you tried out something similar? Or does the very thought of writing like this feel like scraping nails on a chalkboard? Let me know! I’m curious to hear your take on it.

Bowing Out

Back at the end of August, I blogged about how I was going to do a writing challenge in September to produce more short stories to fill out my publishing queue. At the time, I had a couple of stories that looked like they were going to be picked up by one of the major magazines: the editor had expressed interest in buying them, and we were going back and forth with an editorial discussion about the series.

Well, to make a long story short, all of that fell through, and it looks like I’ll be self-publishing those stories after all. I’m not really sure what changed, but to give you an idea of what kind of a short story market this is, it’s been around for decades and regularly gets written up in Locus Magazine’s year-in-review. The editor said that things had gotten crazy on his end, then didn’t respond for about a month, and when I sent a polite followup email asking for an update on the status, he gave me the standard “I’m going to pass on this one, but send me your next story.” Which strikes me as kind of weird, given how our previous correspondence led me to believe that the contract was just a formality and he’d be sending one over soon, but whatever.

So now that these stories are back in the publishing queue, I no longer need to write a bunch more to fill it out. In fact, I’ve actually got enough stories to publish one a month through next April, and after I finish the third Christopher Columbus story, I’ll have enough to get through June (one of my older stories comes out of exclusivity in May 2023). Here is the schedule as of right now:

OCT 2022: “Blight of Empire”
NOV 2022: “Christopher Columbus, Wildcatter”
DEC 2022: “The Freedom of Second Chances”
JAN 2023: “The Body Tax” (needs to be revised, but it’s already been workshopped)
FEB 2023: “Christopher Columbus, Treasure Hunter”
MAR 2023: “The Library of Fate”
APR 2023: “Hunter, Lover, Cyborg, Slave” (needs to be workshopped and revised)
MAY 2023: “Christopher Columbus, Wormhole Mechanic” (partially written, needs to be finished)
JUN 2023: “In the Beginning” (still under exclusivity, though I got a special exception to publish it in my third short story collection, The Stars Our Destination.)

Given that I have enough stories to fill out the next nine months, I’m going to bow out of the September Shorts challenge. This is really good for two reasons: first, it allows me to focus more attention on my current novel WIP, the sequel to Star Wanderers; and second, because I’ve fallen really behind on the Zedekiah Wight stories for my J.M. Wight pen name, and this should give me some space to work on the next few of those.

So that’s the plan: refocus on Children of the Starry Sea and work on Zedekiah Wight stuff on the side.