I have a few more scenes to finish before I get into the technical side of fitting things together. When I write fast, I usually leave TODO notes in all the places where things need to be fixed. I also put notes in scenes that have “issues” that I think of when I’m not writing. Near the end of the rough draft, these TODO notes build up and need attention. Fortunately, I’m able to leave detailed notes in the sidebar of Scrivener so I won’t forget anything when I come back to fix things. To anyone on the outside, looking in, it appears that my word count slows to a crawl. From where I’m sitting, it’s hectic as I rewrite pieces, re-read scenes, and figure things out. It’s all part of my process and usually works pretty well.
Looking at my draft, I see there are about 4 to 5 scenes left to write. I already know I need a few connector scenes to bridge some of the action together. The word count (as of this post) is a little over 94k. Five scenes will be over 6k words (probably more like 8k). Then I’ll probably expand a few scenes, those have been marked with notes that I need to lengthen the scenes. That usually happens when I write a scene and I’m in a hurry to get it down so I can get the next scene going (In such instances, I just want to get the ideas out of my head). Then I leave a note to expand the scene, which means that I need to add more sensory detail to it. Sometimes I don’t have a proper ending to the scene, so I have to analyze it and decide where to cut it off at.
Once all of that is done, I can start my editing. That’s a very tedious process that is time intensive. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I can pour in more time in the next two weeks to get the book completed and ready for the read-out-loud. That can be done over a weekend (keeping my fingers crossed).
Finally, to make it into a book, I have to finish the cover and get the EBook up on Amazon. That is followed by posting the Ebook to Draft2Digital, Kobo, and then on to the paperback.
Then what happens?
Well, it’s on to book 3! Technically, I already have 3k words written for book 3. That’s because I chopped a couple of scenes out of book 2 and moved them up to book 3. If I’m lucky, I’ll be deep into the rough draft of book 3 in July.
ChatGPT
Anybody that has read the back cover of my books has seen the author profile that describes what I currently do for a living. Technically, I’ve been writing software since about 1978. Which was back when Mainframes still used punch cards. I got into computers with the 6502 and 8085 processors. I had to build my own computer to be able to own one. Yup, that 8-bit speed demon had all of 4k of memory. No hard drive, floppy, or any storage to speak of. And I poked in hexadecimal values to write a program. Yeah, it wasn’t much fun. I wanted to get a cassette drive interface, but I was in the Navy before I got that serious. Then I ended up buying a Macintosh. The first. 128k of memory.
Anyway, I’m sure everyone wants to know what my position on AI-assisted writing. I’ve played around with some of the tools that are available and, while they are impressive, I don’t think AI is really there yet. I sincerely hope that AI doesn’t get to a point where books can be written by a computer that can’t be distinguished from an author. That feels a lot like cheating. Plus, who would buy a book? Just type in a prompt into AI, and tell it to create 5 twists and a surprise ending. Voila! You have your own personal story to read.
I’ve been keeping up on the latest news and some things are quite horrifying. Like stories about new authors bragging about cranking out 10 books a month using AI. Sigh. Hopefully, the trash they produce will earn them the 1-star ratings they deserve, but unfortunately, if hundreds of thousands of these “Get rich quick” people do this, it’ll flood the market with trash and make it more difficult for those of us that slave over the keyboard to get discovered. I’m still going to plug ahead with my current projects (Two series) as if this nonsense was not going on. I may end up with two complete sets of books that don’t see many sales as I get buried under this mound of AI-generated stuff. I’ll reassess my situation after I complete these projects.
I guess we’ll see how this all shakes out…