My wife and I just got back from vacationing at Lake Tahoe. It was our 12th anniversary, so we did all the romantic stuff, like visit Vikingholm and hike up 1,200 feet to Eagle Lake and up the trail above the lake. We also visited Virginia City and did all the touristy mining town stuff like taking the mine tours, riding the steam train, walking up and down the main street, stopping at the saloons, etc.
We listened to Starsight by Brandon Sanders (the second book of the Skyward series) on audio during our trip there and back. Driving from Salt Lake City is a 9-hour ordeal. Fortunately, we don’t have kids, so there’s that. If you’re interested in some of the places that we hike, you can visit my hiking blog and check out the pictures: hiking.frankdecaire.com. I’ll have the Tahoe vacation photos up later today.
Book 3
With Secrets of the Tome in my review mirror (including the softcover version), I’m focused on book 3. Summer is bad for productivity because I’m writing in my spare time. If I ever turn this into a full-time gig, I’ll set my work hours and produce at a more consistent rate. Then I can set an actual deadline that I can count on. But, my current production rate is not too bad and I’m usually close to my deadlines.
For book 3, I have a tentative title of The Demon in Me. It fits the theme of the book and it’s about Cassandra. She’ll be written in first-person and the other Point-of-View characters will be in third person. This will be the first time I’ve done this, and so far I’m liking it a lot. I can get deeper into the protagonist’s head, which is important if it’s a person who is being controlled by an alien entity. I’m working on what it feels like to be trapped in a body that the person can’t control anymore.
This book will be focused on the human to Archon connection and will expose more details of what can be done and how it works in their world. The last book was about the Tome and the discoveries that various characters in the story make.
AI stuff…
Ah, the AI nonsense just keeps chugging along. I’ve looked at some of the tools, and they all look shiny on the outside, then they produce garbage when made to create something real. Which is probably a good thing. If AI gets to the point where it could produce a book as good as Brandon Sanderson writes, every author will be out of a job. I suspect that day will never come. One issue with AI is that its output is based on the data that it consumes, which means that it’s just taking stuff already produced and mixing it into something new. That sounds like what humans do, except we also produce new material that isn’t based on any previous works. Yes, we may borrow from ideas that were written before, but there is always someone who comes up with something completely fresh and never thought of in the past.
The hazard with AI is the number of people that don’t really understand how it works. The ones that jump on board and are giddy about the ability to write a book in a day and blast it up on Amazon. I’ve read the comments on some of these products that are advertised on Facebook and it makes me shake my head. They go on about how this is just a tool to make them more efficient, then they move on to stupid phrases, like “I’m going to produce 10 books a week!” Yeah, great. Keep pumping out that garbage. I suspect most of these people don’t know how to write and are unwilling to put in the labor. I can assure you, dear reader, that it takes considerable effort to produce a good book. I had the same attitude when I first started writing. “It’s so easy.” Not, really. The trick about writing is that there is a lot of nuance to it. Show-don’t-tell is difficult to get right. It takes practice. “Depth” takes practice. Characters that are not flat are very difficult to create. It takes practice. I look back at my first books and cringe.
Writing
So, the learning process goes on, just like the world of Computer Science. You don’t stop learning after you get out of school. In the case of writing, I’m self-taught, so I started with a lot of myths about writing that are beaten into the average person by their High-School English teacher. It’s been tough unlearning all that “Proper English” stuff. It’s a road that leads to stilted writing (which I still struggle to fix). Grammar checkers don’t help either. Those tend to push sentences toward research paper-style writing. Therefore, I don’t give the grammar checker much thought anymore. If it catches stuff that is obvious, I fix it, but I don’t rewrite my sentences to make them more “proper.” That leads to bland writing.
Right now I’m in the middle of Dean Westley Smith’s Depth in Character course, and it’s fantastic. I’m taking this Teachable course because his Depth and Advanced Depth courses had the largest impact on my writing. I took those two courses back-to-back while I was writing the last Daphne book (Supercomputer). Boy, I wish I would have stumbled onto those courses much earlier. Now that I’m taking the Depth in Character course, I realize that this would have helped me fix my Daphne series problem. She’s too much of a Mary Sue character. The stories are great, but she needed to be much more flawed, and probably the number one thing that makes the character uninteresting is that she is not really in control of her situation. That was something I didn’t think about when I wrote those stories. The protagonist must be in control at the beginning of the story. I’ve mentioned this before, but I also know that writing a book series with only two main characters is not a good idea. It sounded like a good idea, and it was easier to write a story with only two main characters. It works with some genres and series, but not so much with Sci-Fi.
This Blog
I’d like to write more posts for this blog. I have “Stories” that I’ll share coming up. They’ll just be tiny stories. Maybe something that happened in my life that’s funny or maybe crazy (’cause we’ve all had something crazy happen to us). I might be able to carve out a half-hour slot every few days to post something. It’s just practice for me and something for all the bored people out there that want something to read. It’s also to drive traffic to this blog, which currently consists of nothing but updates of the books I’m working on. It’s important if you’re out there waiting on the next book. Unfortunately, they are published at long intervals (measured in months). So, I have to do a song-and-dance to keep everyone entertained in between books. Maybe I’ll start with two posts a week and work up to three or four.