This article summarizes what I’ve been working on for the past six months. In a later post, I will summarize what I’ve been doing to prepare for future novel writing series, and how I’ve used AI to help. My writing year runs from October to September because of my birth month. This year’s plan was to draft four novels, but I added a fifth because I was plugging away so well with a new series. I had two books in the can and on schedule. Then I turned to the Navy Quartet of the Postal Marines and ground to a halt. Why? I spend a lot of emotional energy writing novels. Starting in the Spring, however, work started taxing my emotional reserve.  From Novels to Yak Shaving On April eighth, I marked my last entry writing a novel. The great thing about keeping metrics on yourself is knowing when these things happen. Since I also use Basecamp to project manage myself (and my family), I have weekly entries showing what I’ve been up to. Since then I have been coding a cross platform text editor called Verkilo. It’s been a dream of mine for well over a decade. I’ve used Scrivener, and I have cobbled together my own novel writing tool chain using various text editors over the years. I’m comfortable writing in native LaTeX and have a point-perfect template for polishing my novels in print. Since I had no energy for novel writing, and since AI has reached a useful threshold, I gave it a go. Verkilo by October or Bust. My goal between April and October of this year is to write a cross platform text editor from...

Originally Written 22 March 2023. With the explosion of AI, I wanted to offer a use case I've found helpful for me that might interest you. In 2022, I released four novels that I spent 12 years rewriting. As a plotter, my characters often derail scenes, rendering my treatments useless for quick reminders of the novels. Some treatments are missing. To accurately fill in the record, I want precise treatments. I used ChatGPT4 for 3-sentence scene summaries on my current work-in-progress (Book 5) and the first book in the series. I questioned its accuracy once; I was wrong. The summaries are around 5% of the original scene length, which will greatly aid my work on the rest of the series. If you want to give it a try, my current prompt is the quoted bit below. Paste it into GPT4 (not GPT3, which gives crazy results), and then the scene you want summarized. "Please provide a concise scene summary in exactly three sentences, that captures the key events and conflicts, mentioning characters and locations as needed. Start with the POV character's name, location and scene goal in the first sentence. Use 'But' at the start of the second sentence and describe the setback they encounter. Then, use 'Therefore' to state their new goal in the third sentence." --  Ben Wilson, Author