Tag: editing

1st Draft Chapters

Posted in Awakening, Book, hemo sapiens, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Aftermath, Status Update, WritingTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

My first draft of Hemo Sapiens: Awakening is almost finished. Below is a screenshot of my Word document with the navigation panel open to show the chapters, sections, and working titles.

The content from Chapter 5 (with tweaks) was taken from my short story, The Unidentified, published here, so it’s not spoiler to share. Funny enough, I just notices an error in my screenshot. Emily’s daughter Grace is almost five*, so I’ve amended that in my draft.

For those wondering, I maintain a spreadsheet with the birthdates and ages of all of the characters, so I can age-progress them appropriately. And there are certain maturity stages that occur around a certain age, for example, when their fangs come in. Just turning five, Grace won’t have fangs yet.

At this point, I’ve got 250 pages and 37 chapters. I deleted over 1,000 more words today—from 57,641 to 56,616—, but I expect to remain over 50k.

I also started working on the title and subtitle artwork, which I’ll share when I’m done with it. As I already know the title and subtitle of my next book, which is at least 60% done (🤞) in its own right, I am making sure the Hemo Sapiens title art leves space to nestle in the subtitle.

I’m getting excited, but the finish line is still a ways away. I think I’ve reached a major milestone in completing the first draft—99.999%, I feel. I still need to work on the cover art and layout and lining up Beta readers.

* Grace is five in the short story, but she’s been demoted a few months in the novel.

Subtractive Editing

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Sometimes less is more. So, I’ve just lost about a thousand words in my Hemo Sapiens story. Cutting the fat to retain the lean.

As difficult as it is to kill off that which you’ve spawned is difficult. It’s even harder when you are trying to reach a word-count goal. I’ve gone from about 32,500 to 31,500 in a day, on my way to 40,000+.

I’ll get there. I have enough ideas to get there without just padding to narrative with fluff, but still. And I know that there are sections, likely totalling some 500 or more words waiting on the chopping block. I won’t lose the whole scene, but some exercise may see this trimmed to half. I’m putting this off. No need to drop some 1,500 words overnight. We’ll see. This scene may get a reprieve.

Revisioning is not just proofreading and copyediting. It’s a chance to reimagine.

And this is just my first draft. First draft is a difficult concept for me to buy into because I do so much editing in place. The story’s not even finished, and I am making wholesale changes. And in this time, I consider the piece holistically, so I’ll tweak here and there, add some foreshadowing or description, try to work in a cliffhanger or two. But there will come a time when I can consider this good enough, and then I’ll work on the first revision.

I like the word revision. I think I got it from Margaret Atwood, who says take this opportunity to re-vision your works. Revisioning is not just proofreading and copyediting. It’s a chance to reimagine. When writing a longer piece, you’ve likely lived in the world you’ve created for a while at close range, but now you’ve got a chance to step back and view it from a distance. Take some time off and revisit with fresh eyes.

Wrestling with ChatGPT

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Claude, Generative AI, hemo sapiens, Software, Status Update, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I use ChatGPT as a copy editor, and I am constantly bouncing ideas off it. If only I had some available alpha readers. lol

This afternoon, I had it review passages, especially since I recently consolidated characters. Because of this, ChatGPT felt that I should elevate the Detective Sergeant from a secondary B-level character to a B+ character. Therefore, I should flesh her out more to make her more memorable. And I should expose the reader to more of her internal dialogue.

I took this advice to heart and reviewed the sections I had shared. I tend to indicate internal dialogue in italics, and there was plenty of italics. Of course, ChatGPT doesn’t have access to this markup, so I manually wrapped curly braces around {internal dialogue}, thusly.

I copy-pasted the section back into ChatGPT and asked for an analysis. This time, it was all praise.

This is something worth keeping in mind. You might have to do some extra throwaway markup for your AI editor to keep it honest.

Pro Tip: Another thing I do, is I place my [author comments] in square brackets and instruct the AI to ignore these in the analysis. I use author comments as placeholders for my own exposition, notes for later clarification, and so forth. With the brackets, I can just tell ChatGPT or Claude something like:

Analyse and evaluate this section. Inner dialogue is in curly braces, { }. Ignore content is square brackets, [ ]. This seems to work for me. YMMV

Killing Joke

Posted in Book, Character, hemo sapiens, Status Update, WritingTagged , , , Leave a comment

I killed off a character, but not in the way you might think. In my Hemo Sapiens novel-in-progress, I decided to merge two characters into one.

Initially, I had wanted one, but I decided I would have two detective Sergeants play off one another in a good cop/bad cop sort of way. In the end, they had nuance, but there wasn’t really enough to justify the reader to track two people. They each had separate story lines and interacted often enough, so the question was how to combine them.

Allow me to step back for a moment. My word count was about 132,500, and I was still merging five short stories into this novel idea and making good progress. In fact, it’s been assembled, but I need to smooth some edges and fill in some gaps and transitions as well as look for opportunities to foreshadow and refine payoff promises.

During this process, I felt that the two Detective Sergeants weren’t worth keeping. I opted to retain DS Lewis, a female, and cut DS Jones, a male. Lewis was a bit more insouciant and Jones was more rigid. Jones drank coffee and smoked cigarettes while Lewis was repulsed by these. They exchanged banter and worked in parallel on the main case. Now, I had to ferret out all of these instances and turn Jones’s masculine pronouns into the feminine form.

In some ways, it will also read better. I found myself changing Jones said to she said instead of to Lewis said because the reader was no longer tracking the two in a scene with other. I feel that the he said|she said structure takes less effort for the reader to parse, so it’s a Win™, and I’ll take it.

I mainly use Microsoft Word to write, so I just searched for all instances of Jones and made all of the necessary adjustments to Lewis. Then, I had to proofread all of the surrounding content to look for straggling pronouns. I think I’ve gotten them all, and I’m ready to continue polishing the merges. Oh, and I’m not even done writing it yet.

I am aiming for at least 140,000 words, but I’ll take more if it makes sense. The last thing I want to do is to pad a story. If it doesn’t move the plot forward or demonstrate something about a character to a reader, I don’t want it. I hate bloat, and I’ll presume most readers are the same. Very little body fat. Believe me, I will fat-shame a book. At 132,500 words, I’m at 135 pages. At 140,000, I should be at 168 if the maths hold. I’ll be fine with that. Again, if I can get more with meat (apologies to vegans), I’ll do it.

I already have an origin story in mind as well as many sequels, so I want to keep enough meat on the Hemo Sapiens bone to serve them well.

If you’ve had to sacrifice a character for the greater good of your work, I’d like to read about it. Drop a comment. Cheers! 🍷

Claude’s Copyright Cares

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Claude, critique, Generative AI, Software, WritingTagged , , , , Leave a comment

As I’ve written before, I use AI for copy editing and general editorial review. Today, I added a couple of new sections and asked Claude for its input. I received this response:

I apologize, I cannot provide a substantive continuation or analysis without potentially infringing on copyrighted material. However, I’m happy to brainstorm respectfully within the bounds of AI guidelines.

Evidently, developers have been inserting additional copyright infringement routines, which is fine, but it doesn’t explain why this was triggered as I ask for a review of my own material that I pasted into the interface.

I find it very difficult to trust AI. I suppose the adage is trust but verify. With AI, it’s trust, verify, verify, cross-check, and check again. AI seems to be its own worst enemy. This may be its denouement until Wave 5.