Articles

Getting to the Point


Photo of the Week

I’ve been working my way through my comic book TBR stack this year, and I’m up to the 2021 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man (it’s the series I’m most behind on, simply because it publishes more than the others I read). This is one of the issues I read recently, and I love this cover, because it’s both creepy and romantic. It’s an interesting issue, too, because it’s mostly inner dialogue and Spidey working things out on a mental level. Not something you see in comic books all that often.


What’s the Point?

As I recently discussed here, I’ve been using some AI tools to help me outline and do some other writerly tasks that frankly, I find boring and tedious. I’ve even been using it to clean up my dictation files for spelling, grammar and punctuation, which saved me a fair amount of time just last week.


The outlining part especially has really been making me think. Using these tools to outline requires a fair amount of back and forth – it’s a conversation of sorts, where I give it a prompt, see what it outputs, and then I refine part of that output in order to get results that are closer to what I want/need. This forces me to really look hard at the plot of my story, character motivations, and most importantly when looking at the whole picture, it requires me to think about what the point of the overall story is.


That is not something I’m used to doing – writing off the cuff, I don’t worry about the story as a whole, I just write, and see where it takes me (often it takes me to a good and/or interesting story that requires a chisel and hammer to revise afterwards). To be clear, they do always end up with a definite beginning, middle and end, and a plot with a point of some sort, but I’m not used to thinking about or refining it at the start as I’m doing now.


Looking at the story as a whole before it’s written requires me to really think about what the point of the story is – why do I even want to tell it? What do I hope people will get from it? Entertainment, certainly, but without a point of some sort, it’s just a wandering diatribe of words that goes…well, nowhere. So I spent a lot of time thinking about plots and plotting and stories and points and why we tell stories and why *I* tell stories and…well, you get the point, so to speak.


All that to say, I’ve been using the back and forth with ChatGPT as a conversation of sorts as well, to help me refine the point I want to make with certain stories and themes and plots. It’s fascinating (and often amusing) what the chatbot comes up with, and while they are often off the mark by a wide margin, they always spur my own creativity and help me solidify the points *I* want to make in my stories.


Which is what’s important, of course. It was a bit disconcerting trying to outline without having a point, and it took me a bit to decide why I wanted to actually write the stories (series) I’m currently working on, just because I’m really not used to thinking about writing and story crafting in that way. But, as with all of this, I think it will make my stories stronger, and that’s the important part in the end.


Plus, it’s never a bad thing to get a different perspective. I’ve always just said that the point of my stories is to entertain, but that’s really only the shallow answer. The theme of the current novel draft is not only overcoming adversity, but also overcoming personal fears, as well as the notion that the boundaries we think we need and the boundaries we actually need are sometimes two very different things. Thinking about it in those terms has forced me to really think about what scenes and chapters will benefit the story, and how they all tie in together.


I did this instinctively before, and while I think my previous stories are fine and entertaining, I don’t think they’re as deeply fleshed out as they could be. And I think this new perspective will allow me to do that more easily.


Writing Progress


I got some more writing done this week – some dictation, and some decisions on the timeline, so I re-dictated a scene that needed to go a different way. I also moved some scenes around, and created the first draft of a flash fiction story with AI just to see how it worked, which was interesting. Then I started re-drafting that via dictation, and I have the first little bit done.


So lots of progress this week. Yay!


Recommendation(s)


I took French classes in college, mainly because I needed a couple years of a foreign language for my core credits. One of the things we learned in class was a song, and the chorus has been rolling around in my head for the past week. I couldn’t remember the whole thing (it’s been…well, over 20 years now), so I finally looked it up this weekend so I could listen to it and get it out of my head.


So that’s what I’m sharing with you this week – Sous les ponts de Paris (Under the Bridges of Paris) on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8iJId0reLj8. Enjoy!

 

That’s it for this week! If you have a favorite thing to share, or want to recommend a book, TV show, video or podcast, comment below, email me at jamie@jamiedebree.com, or catch up with me on Facebook or Instagram.


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Call In the Robots!

Photo of the Week

Rhubarb crisp I made this past weekend – one of the most perfect deserts ever, IMO, and equally as good hot or cold!

 

About This Whole Artificial Intelligence Thing

Artificial Intelligence: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.


Articles about AI are everywhere, with the advent of ChatGPT and the rise of other large language model based programs. And of course everyone is familiar with the legal and ethical issues surrounding how they were “trained”. Much hand-wringing has ensued, which is to be expected, and in some cases I’m sure it’s warranted, but not all. The courts will figure out the legal stuff, and I really don’t expect it will change much about how the tech is used or available on the public/user side.


The cat is out of the box, so to speak, and there’s no shoving it back in now. I am a bit leery of creating/using AI generated images until those copyright issues are all worked out, but I’m not all that worried about text, especially since I have no plans to actually publish anything written solely by AI (because it really wouldn’t be good enough, and also, I just like writing).


People are always scared of new technology, especially when they don’t understand how it works. Which is fine, and not an implicitly bad thing (it’s good to be somewhat skeptical), but at the same time, I think it’s easy to overlook the exciting things that new tech, and this new tech in particular, can do to make certain tasks easier.


I am a tech person – I work with databases and scripting queries, creating reports, moving data around for logical organization, and things of that nature. I was a web developer for sixteen years before that. So while I haven’t worked with this AI in particular from the development side, I have a pretty decent understanding of how it works in the background, and while I understand the instinct we have as humans to look for the “humanity” in everything, I also understand the limitations of the algorithms used in these programs, and that in the end, it’s still just a computer program that will respond based solely on the information you give it. It’s not truly “intelligent”, hence the “artificial” preface. It can only do what we tell it to. So the results are only going to be as good as our requests, which is as it should be.


All that to explain why I’m really not all that scared of AI, and I’m actually pretty excited about what it can do to make my life easier, especially in terms of writing (and writing code, too).


Just this past weekend, I started playing with ChatGPT. I watched some YouTube videos by authors who have been using it for all sorts of things, but the most interesting to me was taking an idea, writing and refining a synopsis, and then actually having ChatGPT create an outline, which the author then refined to suit, and then creating scene and chapter outlines (also refining after those).


I have been trying to force myself to become more of an outliner/plotter, because it makes writing by dictation much, much easier if I know exactly what I need to write (dictate) on any given day. Pantsing is much more difficult with dictation, and also, I really think my writing will be better with some advanced planning (read: there will be less major revision needed). I’ve been writing a lot of unorganized story/background/plotting notes for my recent drafts, and this is where I think ChatGPT could be really useful for me. If I can put my notes into it, and have it create an outline for me that I can then tweak to fit my vision of the story perfectly (or nearly perfectly), that would save me a *considerable* amount of time and effort, and get me that much closer to my goal of writing with an outline.


Could I do all of this without AI? Of course – writers have been “just writing” for ages (and before that, sitting around telling stories verbally or in pictures). Some writers still prefer to write with pen and paper (I do that too for micro or flash fiction, sometimes). As far as I’m concerned, things like ChatGPT and Sudowrite are just more tools to add to the desk, and I’m totally going to take advantage or anything that leaves me more time and energy for the thing I like best, which is actually telling myself the story.


So…AI for outlining and organizing my thoughts (ChatGPT), dictation with AI transcription (Dragon Anywhere) for getting words down because it’s far faster than typing or writing longhand, an AI editor (ProWritingAid in Dabble) for cleaning up the dictation and making me think about what might need to be rephrased as I go, and an AI “writing partner” (Sudowrite/ChatGPT) to help me with revision ideas (description, tone, whatever else I feel I need more work on) and to stimulate my own learning as I revise. Then my human editor (Carol!) can focus on telling me where all the plot holes are, which is something AI simply can’t do…yet.


**And no, none of this post was written with AI. I don’t really know how I’d even do that with blog posts, given mine are normally thoughts and ideas that I work out as I’m typing. This post was actually about three times as long when I started, and required several revision passes to make it short enough to be “internet palatable”. And I’m pretty sure it’s still too long…but that’s sort of my “thing” (along with ellipses).


Recommendation(s)

The Nerdy Author videos on YouTube are my favorite as far as AI discussions and tutorials go. If you’re interested in writing with AI, I’d highly suggest you check out his channel, and these videos in particular:


Brainstorm an Entire Novel in 1 Hour

Is AI Writing Cheating? My Honest Opinion

That’s it for this week! If you have a favorite thing to share, or want to recommend a book, TV show, video or podcast, comment below, email me at jamie@jamiedebree.com, or catch up with me on Facebook or Instagram.


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Writing Notes: Planning? Plotting? Who Am I?

As you can see, I’ve finally settled on a new name for this blog. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to add a banner to the blog page on my site, but I will, because I’m quite fond of this one I whipped up last night. It makes me chuckle. And we all could use a good chuckle, right?

Welcome to Writing Lint.
🙂

As a friendly reminder, the Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale for ebooks is in full swing, and this week,The Biker’s Wench and The Minister’s Maid are discounted, and The Handyman’s Harem Girl
  is free! They’re campy and fun and perfect summer reading.

I’ve been doing some planning. Or a lot of planning, actually. I follow Holly Lisle’s blog, and she’s been doing something very inspiring over the last few months (moreso because she’s also been moving her entire online presence to a new platform, which is about the least fun thing ever for anyone, but she has an entire course load and community to shift, which is about like moving the Titanic).

Holly’s been writing/revising a five-book series all at once. Well, one at a time, but consecutively, without releasing any of them until they’re all done. She wrote all the drafts, and now she’s going back through and revising them all, to ensure continuity and cohesiveness throughout the series.

Which is genius, when you think about it. Once you have all the books in a series done, the hard work is finished. And then you can release them all at once, or one per month, or one every other month…which means people can finish one, look forward to the next, and pre-order the rest, since they’ll all be scheduled out and public.

Genius, I think. Especially when you can write as steadily as she has for the past…nearly a year.

In any case, I don’t know if I have the patience to do the same thing Holly’s doing, but I love the concept. And just watching her work has inspired me to, if not write all the books at once, at least plan all the books in the series out before I even start writing, getting as much detail down as I can, and making sure the plots mesh as much as possible before digging in.

Things will change as I write – they always do, but even though I like to just start writing and see what happens, it’s a lot less work to have a roadmap when I have to make the most out of every little bit of writing time I can grab.

So I’ve been planning, and plotting, and laying out a series that’s getting bigger the farther I dig into it. Once I decided that I really wanted to write a family saga, the floodgates kind of just whooshed open, and suddenly I had three families involved, starting with mail-order brides (which I now have to research) and ending up in present day with the tangible items that each of the first three women deemed important enough to pass down through generations.

The story feels big – really big. We’ll see what happens as I get deeper into the storylines, but I’m excited to explore the different legacies swirling around in my head.

More to come as I dig deeper into The Magpie Legacies.

Of course, I also recently got an idea for a series themed around lamps….

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Variety News: May 10, 2022

Photo of the Week

Why beets? Because I needed pictures of beets for my alter-ego’s upcoming release, and this one is gorgeous, methinks.

General Discussion: Reading Roots
The novel I’m working on revising right now is a hot mess, to put it bluntly. It’s like I had no idea where to go after I started (which I didn’t – I rarely do), but rather than finding a plot and running with it (like I normally do), it was a painful trial-and-error process wherein I wrote three or four separate stories until I finally found the main plot I was looking for all the time in the second to last chapter.

This is why some people outline.

In any case, I’ve been trying for awhile now to develop a single community where I could base a collection of stories that are all stand-alone, but they share the setting and overlap characters and timelines. I was thinking about how I could connect this story (once I finally get it working, I mean) to another draft I need to revise and edit, and I finally had to ask myself, “what is it about this concept that makes you want to write a collection of stories related to a single setting?”

The obvious answer is laziness, of course, because once I develop a setting, reusing it over and over is much easier than building a whole ‘nuther world. And creating an entirely fictional setting is easier than making sure I get every single element of an existing setting exactly right so I don’t get raked over the coals for a simple omission by the most discerning of readers.

But it’s more than that, and I decided that for me, it goes back to my “reading roots”.

I grew up on sweet romance, westerns (which are basically just romance with cowboys, even when written by men), and dashes of sci fi, mystery and paranormal “flair”. I *loved* sweeping family sagas that span generations through a single setting, small town/ranch dramas and the feeling that something other than wild animals might be waiting in the woods or in the back of a dilapidated barn to help or hinder humans at their pleasure.

Then we started watching “Outer Range” on Amazon, which is a sci-fi western decidedly heavy on the sci-fi, and something clicked in my brain. I don’t want to write something like that, specifically, but I want to write an “off-the-map” family saga series (collection, really, since they won’t need to be read in order) set here in my home state with western and barely-there paranormal elements in a modern wrapper that occasionally looks back at its historical roots.

There’s a mouthful (eyeful?) for ya.

I’m so sure I want to write this that I already bought the domain name of my fictional community – a place even my characters won’t find on any map, and things aren’t always what they seem when you’re there.

I’m going to call the series…well, I don’t know yet.

But the town is called Snakebite, Montana.

Currently Reading
In Defense of Plants by Matt Candeias, PhD (non-fic)
The Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz (Mystery)

Currently Watching
Outer Range (Amazon)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount)
The Equalizer (Paramount/CBS)
NCIS (Paramount/CBS)

Pop Quiz!
What are your reading roots? Which genres do you most remember from your childhood/youth reading years?

Post Round-up
The Writer’s Desk (last updated: Monday, May 9, 2022)


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Change and Patience

Words for the Week: Stress, exhaustion, bloom.

Changing routines is hard. I am trying rather valiantly to switch things up, with moderate success, but it’s slow going considering I have to rewrite neuro-pathways (essentially muscle-memory for the brain) and also actual muscle memory/kinetic energy. But! I was able to get back to the office at 11pm every night this past week, and after comparing the time it takes me to transcribe with the time it takes to just write, and the editing time required after each…I was able to determine that for me, writing the initial draft instead of dictating it, and then transcribing it later is definitely more efficient.

So, no more dictation, though I may use that just for capturing random thoughts to set the scene or details I want to include later. We’ll see.

It also means (given the editing component) that I have a lot of rewriting to do from last year. *sigh* But I can use my dictations as outlines of sorts, so all isn’t lost.

In other news, I’m trying to figure out how to motivate myself to keep up with daily/weekly chores so small issues don’t become big issues. Like the fact that I had to clean out my fridge yesterday and it was completely gross. Or that I routinely let non-dishwasher-safe dishes pile up in one of my sinks, and they sit there for weeks simply because I hate hand-washing dishes so I don’t do them right when they’re “generated”. And there’s the recycling that I don’t take out to the garage, so then I have empty cans and bottles piling up on my kitchen counters making it more difficult to cook.

Laziness is the only reason I don’t take care of these things right away, before that pack of celery becomes goo on a fridge shelf, or before there are so many cans on my counter I don’t have room for a cutting board. I know it needs to be done, I just choose not to take the 5 minutes to do it because I don’t feel like it, or I’m too tired, or just unmotivated.

I’m not sure how to motivate myself to do these things right away instead of waiting until they get to the point of no return (which then requires several hours of time to catch up rather than 5 minutes). I know routine is part of it, so that even when my brain doesn’t feel like it, kinetic energy and muscle memory just pull me into getting it done. I rely on that a lot for daily things, and it works well, once it’s coded into my brain. Re-coding though is…often problematic.

But I need to do something. Keeping up on these things gives me more time overall, and that is what I covet most…more time not doing housekeeping or cleaning chores. I also really hate cleaning veggie goo and moldy leftovers out of my refrigerator.

Am I trying to change up too much, too quickly, between the writing and household stuff? Possibly. I’m impatient with the fact that I can’t make quicker progress, mostly because I’m finally motivated to fix these problems, and it’s stressful going through the change. So I’m anxious to get through the transitional period and to the other side where this stuff just “happens” without so much mental effort.

Alas, “extra mental effort” seems to be the theme of the past 12 months and continues on. So I don’t know why I expect personal growth to be any different.

I did make some monthly goals for writing/publishing, and a plan for reaching those. I may have made them too late to hit this month, but it’s still a solid plan going forward. So there’s that.

I’ve been working on rehabbing my hip too, with good progress. Slow and steady with that…Friday was the first day I could do three sun salutation sets with zero pain. So this week, I start strength training for the muscles in and around my hips, in hopes of keeping any future damage to a minimum. Yet another change where patience is required (or a lot of damage could occur).

And my hair has hit another awkward point of growth…I really am going to have to find a new stylist soon, if only to even up the back and then sort of calm down the flippy-ness of the upper layers. That will be a February project, I guess.

Change and patience. Patience and change. Two things I am quite weary of at this point, but with enough patience and time, things will stabilize and get easier. It sometimes takes awhile, but they always do.

Eye on the prize, and all that. *sigh*


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