We’ve spent the last couple of days getting ready for another cross-country road trip as a family, this time to Arkansas. My side of the family is going down there, mostly because my youngest sister works at a national park, so it’s more convenient for us to come to her (and it should be fun as well).
The plan is to drive to Omaha, spend a couple of nights with my brother-in-law and his wife, then drive down to Arkansas and spend the week with family. Once we’re done, we’ll just drive straight back to Utah, hopefully in two days, but more likely in three. After all, we’ve got a five year-old and a two year-old with us.
This is the first big road trip we have this summer. The second one is at the end of July, and we’ll be going up to northern Alberta for a reunion with my wife’s side of the family. Her grandmother passed away earlier this year, and this was the soonest everyone could get together (getting passports for the kids was a little tricky).
I’ve already schedule blog posts through the next week and a half, so those should be coming up each day. I’ve also been writing more Fantasy from A to Z posts, and I hope to write the rest of them while I’m out there, though I’m not stressing out too much about that. If they get done, great, if not, I’ll just finish them when I get back.
The big reason why I’m blogging daily now is because of some major problems I’ve been having with my email list. I used to send out a newsletter approximately every week, but over the last couple of years, my open and click-thru rates have been creeping ever lower, until just last month they suddenly dropped by more than 50%. Turns out there’s a whole lot of backend stuff that changed in the last year, most of which I barely understand.
But ChatGPT has been a huge help in figuring out what’s wrong, and how I need to register DMARC and SPF and all the other stuff that I still don’t understand. My wife has also been a huge help in sorting through it all. I think it’s all set up properly, but I haven’t sent out a newsletter yet, and probably won’t until I get back from Arkansas. I also need to update my newsletter template. ChatGPT should be really good for that.
So the email newsletter is turning into a monthly thing, and the blog is turning into a daily thing, at least for the forseeable future. All of that might get thrown out the window when the new baby comes along, at least temporarily.
In the meantime, I’m working on Fantasy from A to Z and the rough AI draft of Lord of the Falconstar, both of which are coming along quite well. I’m going to experiment with having one human WIP and one AI WIP active at the same time, because ChatGPT suggested that this would be the best way to maximize by writing time and productivity.
I fed ChatGPT my accountability spreadsheet and the daily project journals I’ve been keeping for the past year, and it came back with some fascinating insights into my writing process. It’s amazing how you can feed it a bunch of raw, barely-formatted data, and get a genuinely insightful analysis.
Is this taking away jobs from a data analysis / writing coach? Not really, at least in my case, because I doubt I would have hired one. But the results sure are useful. I’m also experimenting with feeding my entire book into ChatGPT and asking it to write a book description or generate a cover. It’s amazing how it can “read” a whole novel in a fraction of a second, and spit back answers that show (or at least simulate) a genuine understanding of the material.
But one thing ChatGPT can’t do is convert a short story into a screenplay—at least, not without significant human input. I tried uploading “What Hard Times Hath Wrought” and told it to turn it into a screenplay, and the results were hilariously bad. Maybe Sudowrite has a plugin, though…
So I’m at Cape Cod right now, vacationing with family for the next full week. Since my parents are moving from Massachusetts from Iowa, this will probably be the last time that we come up here, at least for a very long while. I’m doing my best to enjoy it, which means that I’m not doing much writing at all.