Tag: editing

Intelligence and Cognition

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It seems that I am constantly apologising for not posting more here. Have no fear, these apologies appear on my other sites, too.

My absence here is due to another writing project I am focusing on. The competing project has a working title of “Democracy: The Grand Illusion“. It’s a work of fiction, so I am documenting it on my Philosophics blog.

Recently, I’ve been posting content related to my initial editorial process using AutoCrit.* I was planning to produce content for this site as well as YouTube using Hemo Sapiens: Awakening as the source material, but since I am currently writing this academic non-fiction piece, I figured I’d apply it there.

For me, writing fiction is different to writing non-fiction. With fiction, I have an idea, and I document a possible skeleton framework. This may (and does) change as I make progress, but it serves mainly as waymarkers to orient my original idea. In this manner, I am more of a planner than a pantser.

Once I establish this structure, I start writing exposition, and all bets are off. I do not feel restricted by this framework if my subconscious has a different idea and the characters and narrative come to life.

On the other hand, non-fiction is very planned and structures. I create chapters for continuity and flow. Then I place all sorts of section content within each chapter and record thoughts and citations.

For this book, I did most of this in 2021-22 during the tail end of the COVID debacle. I stopped and started, but this month I am re-engaging. As the skeleton and muscular systems are already in place as are many organs, I need to add the rest and flesh it out. This is how I occupy my days.

Despite the planning, nothing is cast in stone. Case in point, I had just drafted a chapter on Defining Intelligence. It included sections on.

  • Intelligence
  • IQ (as a proxy for intelligence)
  • Emotional Intelligence
  • Multiple Intelligences
  • Cognitive Biases

I thought I was done until I decided to add a section on Cognitive Deficits and Limitations. This inclusion prompted me to rename the chapter to Intelligence and Cognition.

I expect this book to be completed in 2024. I’ve written some 58,000 words with another 30,000 more likely. I don’t really have a target in mind—just the content I want it to cover.

I may still pop in to demonstrate AutoCrit on my published book as I feel it may be instructive.

* AutoCrit is an AI-based editorial application. I am a member of their affiliate programme, so I gain minor financial benefits at no cost to you if you purchase through a link on this page.

Write, Review, Revision

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I lost my faith in the English language and trust in people in grade school where I was taught the 3 Rs – reading, writing, and arithmetic. On balance, these each have the R consonant sound on the stressed syllable, but it is otherwise misrepresented. Game over.

In this tradition, I’ve got my own 3 dodgy Rs: Write, Review, and Revision. This sums up my approach to writing.

Write

Duh, right? You’ve got to write to write. In fact, to be a better writer, you’ve got to be a reader, a leading-candidate for as fourth R – but I’ll call it a necessary precondition. Being exposed to reading allows you to absorb different styles and genres. It remind you that pedantic constraints of grammar need not apply. My grammar-checker reminds me often.

I took this route as a musician as well. Exposure to genres, styles, and approaches fortifies your craft. Some of the best groups contain members of diverse backgrounds. Sure, there are some groups where members are cut from the same cloth, but they are usually stuck in a particular niche. Nothing wrong with this mind you, if you don’t mind being painted into a corner. I’m too claustrophobic for this.

Review

Once you’ve written, review your work. In fact, this should be more than one representative R. Perhaps it should instead be read, write, review, review, review, review… or an alternative, read, write, review, write, review, write, review… To be honest, when I write blogs, I just write – stream of consciousness. No net, no review. Submit. Done. But this is not how I approach longer works. The longer the work, the more read-review cycles.

Hemo Sapiens: Awakening has already been published, and I would still change some things – perhaps many. It’s an art. Art is done when the creator (creatrix?) dies.

Revision

After you’ve dumped all of your thoughts onto the page, write, review, rinse, and repeat, you have to opportunity to revise your work before you release it into the wild – transplant it from your private greenhouse to watch in flourish or perish.

A revision is more than a review. It’s the opportunity to re-view, re-vision, re-imagine the work that arrived in the first pass with sequential editorial hining and rework.

Maybe you now imagine a new character or story line, a new twist, two characters can be consolidated. Perhaps even a different ending or beginning. It’s all clay. Sentences are malleable.

As a professional musician, I learned not to become married to your work. And just as your parents may not appreciate your choice in partners, your readers may not appreciate your art. And this is not important as an artist. This is only important in the commercial realm. I don’t find this realm interesting. It the reason I don’t enjoy pop music – disposable commerce. We don’t so much categorise books into pop, but we should. At least we can.

Now I’ve gone off on a rant. In a novel, I would likely delete this during an editing cleanse, but here, there is only forward.

In the end, you can just write with none of the ancillary activities – as I do here. Or you can take a different approach to harden your final output. I don’t prefer to call it a product.

You may not even opt for revisioning because you had it all in your head. You just needed to rush to capture it all on the page – 700 pages times 7 volumes. You’re the lucky type. That’s not my style, so I’ve not much to say on the matter.

My parting words – just write.

Hemingway App

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Origins, Origins, WritingTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

I watched a YouTube video that referenced Hemingway App as an authors’ tool. Here, I pasted some sample content from Hemo Sapiens: Origins to see what it might suggest.

It’s a short passage, but the only things it found were trivial nits.

Highlighted, the complaint is that the top sentence (in yellow) is too complex, so I should break it up as shown in green. The only difference is that it swapped the semicolon with a full stop and capitalised the next letter to begin the next sentence. It also declared the Grade 11 writing sample to be reduced to Grade 6.

Is this really worth more than the free trial or the time and effort?

It highlighted two other related challenges: both adverbs, and neither with remediation advice. In the sceen shot, you can read ‘slightly crispy’. Honestly, I don’t have a more direct way to show this information. I suppose if it was ‘crispy’, I could specify a ‘crunch’ sound. But how is the crispy crunch diminished when it’s just ‘slightly’? Enquiring minds want to know.

Hemo Sapiens: Origins

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Now that Hemo Sapiens: Awakening has been released into the wild, I can again focus on Hemo Sapiens: Origins. I started writing Origins a few weeks ago, but I was interrupted by the review and production process of Awakening.

In the world of Pantsers and Plotters, I tend to fall somewhere in between, but I favour plotting.

I write in Word. In the example above, you can see the working chapter titles, the year(s) a chapter covers and its starting page. Some of the chapters already contain preliminary copy.

As a writer, I don’t necessarily work chronologically. I find the chapters that are the most compelling and interesting to me. Then, I work down to the bridging chapters, hoping that the meat of the chapters penned earlier will support and inspire the later ones.

As I write, I usually create a ‘Boneyard’ chapter. This is where ideas go to incubate or die. Workable ideas are resurrected whilst others are laid to rest. Some ideas are like zombies, but at the end a project, they are either among the dead or living.

At the start, a chapter looks something like this. It’s a blend between ideas and story beats. Each chapter is outlined similarly. The other advantage this lends me is that I can *ahem* walk away from writing for a while and still have handholds and reminders when I return. For short fiction, I just write. No outlines. Perhaps just an idea to explore.

What is your writing style? Leave comments below.

Proof Positive

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Mates, the proofing process was Hell. I even count the number of times I reviewed my book, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening. Then I sent it out to a couple of Beta readers, one of whom went over and above and did some proofreading, which I appreciated. I made some amends, and I ordered a proof.

The proof arrived relatively quickly—even without expedited shipping, which would have been more than twice the price of the book.

Lessons Learnt

  • Get a proof copy of your book
    Don’t skip this step. It’s inexpensive and is key to assessing formatting issues. It is also an opportunity for last-minute proofreading. I discovered probably 4-dozen nits that slipped through the cracks.
    • Layout
      In one case, I had an indefinite article (a) orphaned at the end of a line. I entered a soft return to get it to start on the next line to enhance readability.
    • Cover Art
      Silly me. I designed and composited the cover, and I didn’t hide the bounding rectangles I used to reference how my cover, back, and spine present. My proof copy has these rectangles in place. It’s not a huge issue, but it is an aesthetic flaw that I corrected.
    • Major Misses
      This is not as likely to happen to most authors, but this books began its life as four or five short stories that were in the same universe on a shared timeline, so I decided to add connective tissue and create a novel. The problem is that the short stories were set in Bristol, London, and Manchester, but I needed to set the novel in a single location, and I chose Manchester. A beta reader noticed that I even though the story was in Manchester, I left a scene having a character reflecting on the Thames, which is a feature of London. I changed it. Unfortunately, there where two instances. I was lazy, and I changed the instance they pointed out to a generic ‘river’, but I left another instance as ‘the Thames’. Oopsie.
    • References
      Another issue I caught is again fairly unique. I wrote out a male character and offloaded his scenes to a female character. I decided that I didn’t have enough material and differentiation for the two characters. It sounded good at the start, but he didn’t make the final cut. The problem is that I missed a few ‘his’ to ‘her’ pronoun swaps. Oops.
    • Punctuation
      Man, I missed a lot of question marks and a few commas. Nothing major, but it matters.
    • Spelling
      OK. Not too many here, but I had swapped a wonder for a wander that I missed the first hundred times through.
    • Spacing
      Again, minor formatting issue. The biggest offender was rogue spaces between en-dashes and trailing commas: – , instead of –,. It’s a little thing.
    • Tenses and POV
      This book was written in third-person, present, limited, deep point of view. Or that was the goal. All too often, I would slip into past tense. In some cases, it might have been OK, but I edited a lot back into present tense.

      I also switched several times out of limited into omniscient. To be honest, I left some of this alone.

      I was also guilty of some incidental head-hopping. Sue me. It happens.
    • Create Your Audiobook First
      OMG. I thought I was done, but I found so many small issues when I was forced to micro-focus for the audio version. It helped so much. I have been told to read your book out loud—advice I follow—, but I still uncovered a treasure trove of mistakes in the audio version. Moreover, some things that didn’t sound awkward earlier, now did, so I had the opportunity to change it up.
    • Last Minute Amends
      As it happens—in line with the audio version advice—, feel free to make more substantial content amends. My favourite one. When I heard this line during an audio review—I was literally listening in bed—, I got up and changed it immediately.
      • Before: When they arrive at the compound all is quiet except for the crickets that pause to listen.
      • After: When they arrive at the compound all is quiet except for the occasional cricket.
    • Obviously, crickets pausing to listen are also quiet, so…
  • Give yourself time enough time to do a thorough review
    I set a 1 March release date, so I left myself plenty of runway to take off.
  • Be patient
    Even though I gave myself plenty of time for review and amends, I rushed the process and approved a book that wasn’t ready for approval and had to do late revisions.

I”ve probably not mentioned some, but I had the opportunity to fix each of these mistakes, so I’ll bookmark this page and my next book will be that much easier to publish.

First Beta Reader

Posted in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Awakening, Book, ChatGPT, Claude, Cover Art, Dall-E, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve just received my first Beta feedback from Hemo Sapiens: Awakening. I’ve hired three readers and engaged two, so I’ve got more to go.

As I wrote recently, I’ve been using AI to review my work, and I’ve been waiting for flesh and blood humans to give me their opinions.

My Beta reader is Enrico B from South Africa. My next reader is from the UK. I found them both on Fiverr.com, a site I’ve successfully used for music collaboration in the past. Although your results may vary, it’s a generally inexpensive way to get quality results. I hired Doni from Indonesia to design my title and subtitle.

Judge the quality for yourself. I happen to like it. I was going to commission the rest of the book cover, but I opted to do that myself.

Enrico provided me with a summary report as well as an annotated markup of my manuscript. Beta reading is not developmental editing or copyediting, so I wasn’t expecting line edits, but he did provide commentary on most chapters. In my case, his focus was on pacing and adding narration to fast-paced dialogue exchanges. In most cases, he advised my to slow my roll, but I’ll wait to see what the next reader writes. My style is rather curt and quick, and perhaps Enrico wants to savour a bit more. I feel that his advice is constructive. I just don’t know how much I’ll implement—probably at least a little.

One Thousand Words

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Claude, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens, Writing, YouTuberTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

My target goal for writing is about 1,000 words per day. It’s a goal I hit way more often than not. On a good day, I can reach 2,500 or more.

As a reference, I write in Word with pages formatted for a 6 x 9 form factor, so a page holds about 200 words, which equates 1,000 words to about 5 pages. Not too shabby. It puts 60,000 words at around 300 pages or 50,000 words — a small novel—at around 250.

Doing some more maths, at 1,000 words a page, one can ostensibly write a 60,000 word novel in about 2 months. Not bad, right?

You still need more time for editing, revisions, and so on, so 3 months per book of this size gets you 4 books a year. If you are writing tiny novels or novellas, then you might be able to double this. I ‘m not sure how sustainable this is, but maths doesn’t care about sustainability.

Some people think they can game the system and produce a novel a day with AI. The truth is that they can. The other truth is that the output will most likely suck. If you actually read the material critically, a person could not likely publish a book a day. A piss-poor book a week would probably be a challenge. A book a month or so might be within range — even more achievable for shorter fare.

This might be someone’s goal, but it’s not mine. My interest in writing to to write. It’s not about quantity or even commerce. My writing is not my livelihood. It’s an art. I’ve seen so many videos on YouTube given advice how to write and sell more books. Usually, this involved researching the marketplace and determining what’s hot. Is mystery hot this month? Write a mystery book. Need some ideas for books? AI will help.

I guess I just don’t come from that position. I watched a video the other day with a woman switching from offering low-content books on Amazon to some other business model. Her entire modus operandi is to make money online. Myself, I felt sorry for her. I know that two-thirds of people dislike their jobs, so she’s in good company. By that I mean, she might as well just pick some random money-making job because it’s probably as stupid as whatever else she’d be doing. The question is whether it’s worth it.

For me, I’ll stick with writing at least 1,000 words a day with the occasional doubling. Hopefully, I sell some books along the way. Time will tell.

French-English Content in Word

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It seems that spelling and grammar checking in Microsoft Word might use some improvement.

Here is a segment from a chapter from the first draft of Hemo Sapiens: Origin. Notice the last paragraph. I’ve written some dialogue in French with a tag in English. followed by more dialogue in English. This is my attempt to provide guidance to readers who don’t read French, so they can still maintain the context The problem is that Word doesn’t do a great job of accepting language markers. In this case, ‘notifies’ is underlined as being incorrect because Word, despite being informed otherwise, sees this as being French.

I wish I could just highlight a phrase and select the language from a context menu. Up front, I could specify that I am using languages X, Y, and Z, so I am not burdened with a laundry list of language options.

Another interesting thing to me is that there are separate auto-correct dictionaries per language. This makes sense, but it creates a burden to have to signify the language to let Word know which one to use. In my case, I tend to add accented words to autocorrect because I use a standard English-language QWERTY keyboard, and Windows/Word doesn’t make compounding diacritical marks very easy.

For example, a common entry might be ‘bien sûr’ for ‘bien sur’. I also get guillemets « » from << and >>, respectively.

Sadly, the ‘Detect language automatically’ feature isn’t very reliable either, so I leave it unchecked instead of having it misidentify languages.

I just noticed a typo in the screen shot. Word missed that ‘belonging’ should be plural, but probably thinks it’s a verb rather than a noun. Other AI tools make similar semantic errors.

AI Writing

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Claude, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens, Video, Writing, YouTuberTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I use AI for copyediting, but I don’t quite understand the use case for using at as a writing tool. The gist is that the AI can brainstorm ideas for books, chapters, characters, and so on. In fact, once I was conversing with ChatGPT about some philosophical socio-political topics, and it suggested that it would make a good book idea. I asked it to elaborate, and it gave me more ideas. These ideas didn’t particularly ‘click’, but I was intrigued.

The AI suggested something in the mystery / thriller vein, not particular my genre. I asked about setting and time. It recommended London, New York, or Tokyo. I asked about time, and it suggested Victorian England or future Tokyo.

The problem is that I felt it would be an interesting exercise on an intellectual level, but I had not emotional interest, so I didn’t pursue it. If I did have an emotional investment, I feel that I’d already have had the idea.

The video below is a YouTuber I follow. His schtick is writing fiction (and more) with generative AI—tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and more. Here he discusses creating outlines (for Plotters) with ChatGPT.

Although he maintains a day job to pay his bills, he earns money through his writing and his social media presence. This is where I get lost.

If I am a driven writer—I suppose the operative being ‘driven’—, I already have an idea. I know on a high level what I want to say, where I an set, who the key characters are, and so on. Why would I need AI. As I mentioned above, in an edge case, I didn’t know, but it wasn’t my idea in the first place. I suppose I could have whipped the AI into writing it for me, but why? I suppose I could do the exercise just to see where it went, but this would not only NOT be my writing, it would (and did) distract from what I am passionate to write about.

And, yes, he can still use AI as an idea generator, and he can tweak the prose it outputs, but the question is still why? Isn’t that the challenge of writing—to have a beginning and end in mind and just want to connect those dots with story?

I have an unfinished book still on the backburner where I had a theme and a beginning, so my plan was to write from stream of consciousness and see where it took me. As it happened, the ending became wishy-washy, so I stopped to rethink where I wanted in to end. I decided that the ending wasn’t bad; it was just anticlimactic and would make a better beginning for a sequel. Now I needed an impactful ending. And some of the middle needs shoring up.

I took a break from this book and focused my attention on the Hemo Sapiens universe. I know not only what I want to do for at least four books, I have space to explore beyond this. Why would I need AI to give me ideas? Once I am satisfied with these books, I’ll return to my original one with more writing experience under my belt, so it’s win-win.

If there comes a time where I have to rely on AI to generate writing ideas, I think it will be time to exit this hobby.

Voldemort Reigns

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Is Voldemort secretly François-Marie Arouet? I’ve never seen the two in the same place.

I am fleshing out the outline for Hemo Sapiens: Origins and I was sharing a chapter structure with Claude. One of the bullet points cites a quip by Voltaire:

« Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer. »

Voltaire

English Translation: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”.

I fed the chapter outline to Claude. Among other things, it mentioned this:

Masterful architecture capped with that second Voldemort quote again for anyone tracking!

— Claude

I did a double-take. I re-scanned my copy and looked for a quote that might be interpreted as being said by Voldemort. Alas, there was only one quote—Voltaire’s.

My AI had confused Voldemort with Voltaire. I’ve never seen these two in the same place either, so it could be fact.