Oct 7, 2024
It took a little longer than expected, but the first draft of the first story is now done. Tomorrow I will be starting a new story and I am looking forward to that.
I would say that Sisterhood had been a real learning experience for me. There were some mistakes that I made that I hope I can avoid in future stories. I went into this one completely blind, and that might not be the best way to do it for me.
In the past I have usually planned what I am going to write, and I think there are definite advantages to that. Even if I don’t end up sticking to the plan, having one can be useful. So I think I am going to try that for the next story. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate, just a sense of what the ending is going to be, but having that will, I think, make a big difference.
The publishing of Sisterhood will start on Thursday. I am not sure how long that’s going to take, but probably not long. That’s when I will work on the cover and things like that.
Tomorrow then, it’s a new story and at this point I have no idea what that is going to be. Looking forward to finding out later when I sit down and try to come up with a plan.
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Words written today: 1,067
Words written total: 8,855
Plus / Minus target: 855
Currently writing: Sisterhood
Currently publishing: n/a
Latest release: n/a
Oct 4, 2024
Last night and this morning I got into the state of mind where everything I have written this week seems stupid and I was trying to think of ways I could quit the story and still continue the challenge.
If I’m honest, I’m surprised it has come so quickly, but this is the point where in the past couple of years I have stopped. Maybe it came sooner because I’m writing something short and the point isn’t related to the amount of time I’ve spent working on the story, but to the percentage of the story I have written?
I was pretty close to stopping, but then I realised that this was the whole point of this challenge: to reach that point over and over again in quick succession and keep going anyway, like I used to. In doing so, I hope to take away the power of that feeling.
It helps that it is a short story because there are only a few days where I have to deal with feeling like I’m wasting my time on a rubbish story. In a couple of days I will be working on something new.
In that sense, I count today as a big success and when I finish the story tomorrow or Sunday I will be very pleased.
I’m 641 words ahead of schedule now. So averaging 134 words extra per day. Tomorrow is Saturday, so time won’t be as tight and I might get some additional words, but we shall see. As long as I get my 1,000 words I’m happy.
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Words written today: 1,103
Words written total: 5,641
Plus / Minus target: +641
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Currently writing: Sisterhood
Currently publishing: n/a
Latest release: n/a
Oct 3, 2024
A crazy day at work today but I got my writing done in the morning so pleased with that. I also have a working title for the first short story.
The interesting thing with titles is that they really help to focus the story. There are a few strands now coming together thanks to the working title, which may very well turn out to be the final title.
Other than that, not a lot to report. I’m now half a day ahead of where I need to be.
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Words written today: 1,106
Words written total: 4,538
Plus / Minus target: +538
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Currently writing: Sisterhood
Currently publishing: n/a
Latest release: n/a
Sep 24, 2024
A.I., or LLMs, are probably here to stay and are going to have a massive impact on publishing and most other industries. Tech companies are investing enormous sums of money and once beloved events are putting their feet in it and losing the goodwill of people who once loved them. The technology is advancing at an impressive rate and in a short time, what we have now is going to feel like a child’s toy. So now seems like a good time to have opinions about this stuff.
First off, given the number of generated images on this website, you might assume that I’m all in on A.I. It’s a fair guess given the evidence, and when I did all of it, I probably assumed I would be too. But that turns out not to be the case and one thing I’m going to be doing during my writing challenge is removing all A.I. generated content from my website. So stake in the ground time: I am not in favour of A.I. generated content.
When GPT 4 was released, I tried it out, made some things, and it was fun. I made images of characters I was writing about, made the headers and logos on the website, I even tried using it to write some stories and that was… interesting. It certainly boosted “my” word count to new heights, but it wasn’t fun. Sure, I could look at it and congratulate myself for “writing” so much, but it didn’t feel like writing and that’s a problem when the main reason I have always had for writing is because I enjoy it.
It was easy enough to make that decision for myself and my work: there will be no A.I. because it detracts from my enjoyment of writing. It gets a lot more difficult to draw lines around using it for other things.
A.I. Generated Images
This falls into (at least) two categories:
- Images I generate myself
- Images other people generate
It’s easier to say that I will not generate images myself and instead hire artists to do it. But what if they use A.I. generated images? Am I going to tell an artist what they can and can’t do?
The Quality Conundrum
As things currently stand, it’s relatively simple to point out a piece of writing or artwork that has been generated by A.I. They have a look about them. But we are in the infancy of these new tools and it seems reasonable to expect that one day the content created by A.I. will be indistinguishable from work created by a human. What happens then?
One day I think it will be possible for a reader to go on Amazon and type in things they like in a story and have a unique book generated for them that ticks all those boxes. It will be their ideal book and no human will have been involved. I think they will enjoy that book.
The same will probably be true of films and other mediums.
Trying to prevent that future feels like attempting to stand in front of a tidal wave and barely factors into my decision making now. Apart from the fact I’ve decided that I don’t want to ride that wave. It seems inevitable, but that doesn’t mean I have to contribute to it.
There are a lot of things that I can’t prevent that I choose not to take part in. This is just another one to add to that long list.
What my decision really comes down to is my enjoyment of the writing process. I don’t have any illusions about success. The only thing I am entitled to is the work, and with that in mind, shouldn’t I want to make the work as enjoyable as possible?
What it comes down to
With writing I have decided not to use A.I. because I enjoy the process less when doing so. With other forms of A.I. I have decided not to use it because I have decided I don’t want to contribute to the inevitable future where a shared culture no longer exists.
May 2, 2024
The whole reason I started writing stories is because it is fun. Little five year old James laying on the floor with his Ghostbuster’s notebook and pencil wasn’t making up stories because he wanted to make money, run a business, post about it on social media and all the other stuff that comes along with being an independent author. The only reason that little guy did anything was because he thought it was fun.
It’s easy to lose sight of that, and I’m certainly guilty of doing so, from time to time. I get so focused on the metrics, on fine tuning my processes, on being as productive as possible that I forget the simple pleasure of sitting down and making up a story out of thin air.
When that happens, you inevitably get bogged down, the whole thing starts to feel like a slog, like hard work. Which I think comes through in the story. If I’m not enjoying writing it, is anyone going to enjoy reading it? I can’t see how they would.
I started writing because it was fun, and most days it still is fun, but I need to get better at recognising when I’m sliding into not fun and do what I can to pull myself out of it. There’s no point writing if you don’t enjoy it.
I’m sure there are other things that we started off doing because they were fun, but turned them into hard work. I don’t know why. Part of me wants to blame it on the culture of side hustles and the nature of capitalism, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. Maybe people are just wired this way?
