{"id":22244,"date":"2025-12-04T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=22244"},"modified":"2025-12-04T09:19:30","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T16:19:30","slug":"writing-through-the-holidays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/writing-through-the-holidays\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing through the holidays"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It&#8217;s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, the most magical time of the year\u2014and for parents of three small children, it&#8217;s the busiest time as well. This week has been packed with all sorts of things, which means the writing has taken a backseat for the moment. Still, I&#8217;ve been managing to get a little work done, mostly in the early mornings.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignleft size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"160\" height=\"256\" src=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/TSATS-test2-thumb.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-21330\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m about 40% done with the rough AI draft of <em>The Soulbond and the Lady,<\/em> book 2 in the Rise of the Soulbond King Trilogy. I&#8217;ve also been working on the human draft of <em>The Soulbond and the Sling,<\/em> though progress has been slow (which is also why I haven&#8217;t been able to update the cover, or make a cover mock-up for <em>The Soulbond and the Lady<\/em>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It took me only four days to write the prompts and generate the rough AI draft of <em>The Soulbond and the Sling,<\/em> which came to about 153k words. That was pretty wild. But the draft turned out to be a little too rough, which is part of the reason why it took so long to revise the AI draft and get it to a state where I was ready to move on to the human draft. So for <em>The Soulbond and the Lady,<\/em> I&#8217;m trying to be more careful. If I can fine tune the prompts to generate a much higher quality rough AI draft, it shouldn&#8217;t take nearly as much energy to revise it, which means that I can finish the AI draft of book 2 while I write the human draft of book 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was hoping to finish the rough AI draft of <em>The Soulbond and the Lady<\/em> before Thanksgiving, but that didn&#8217;t happen, so now I&#8217;m hoping to finish it before Christmas. But I&#8217;ve currently put that WIP on hold so that I can finish the novella version of &#8220;Christopher Columbus: Treasure Hunter&#8221; in time to publish it in February of next year. I&#8217;m currently about 15% done with the AI revisions, and if things go well, I&#8217;ll have a finished AI draft by the end of the week, or early next week at the latest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With the Christopher Columbus series, I&#8217;m experimenting with different forms of AI-assisted writing, leaning more into the discovery writing aspect of the creative process. So it might take longer as I figure it out. That&#8217;s frustrating, because it means slower writing progress, but by the end of it I&#8217;ll hopefully have learned a few more things about AI-assisted writing that will help out with future books. And even with how frustratingly slow it is, I am having quite a bit of fun with this WIP.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignleft size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"160\" height=\"256\" src=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/TUS-ebook-thumb.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-20753\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>After Christmas, when I&#8217;ve hopefully finished both of these WIPs (at least through the AI draft phase), I plan to pick up <em>The Unknown Sea<\/em> again and work on that one until it&#8217;s DONE. I&#8217;m planning on a release date in March of next year, which might be a bit of a challenge given how crazy it is around here, but I&#8217;m really looking forward to finishing this one and getting it out into the world!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, the most magical time of the year\u2014and for parents of three small children, it&#8217;s the busiest time as well. This week has been packed with all sorts of things, which means the writing has taken a backseat for the moment. Still, I&#8217;ve been managing to get a&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/writing-through-the-holidays\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Writing through the holidays<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1605,1806,1846,1838,1831,1830,1829,2084],"tags":[133,46,274,925,891],"class_list":["post-22244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christopher-columbus-interstellar-explorer","category-sea-mage-cycle","category-the-rise-of-the-soulbound-king-trilogy","category-the-soulbond-and-the-lady","category-the-soulbond-and-the-sling","category-the-soulbound-king","category-the-unknown-sea","category-treasure-hunter","tag-family","tag-goals-and-plans","tag-holidays","tag-news-and-updates","tag-publishing-schedule","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-5MM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22244"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22459,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22244\/revisions\/22459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}