23Q4: Book updates, AI news, and trope work
Not to mention a new format and social platform...
Hey Y’all!
You may notice that things look a little different since we last interacted. I’ve started using Substack for my newsletter. I recently attended a webinar offered by
with Dan Blank (), and really liked what I saw.I’d heard of Substack before—around the time Twitter became X—but never really looked into it. (And I happily filed it under “one more thing I don’t want to learn.”) But after Dan’s webinar, I was impressed by everything it offered. It’s a one-stop shop for managing your subscribers and supporters.
The way it works is you write your article (or newsletter) on Substack, and when you hit publish, it emails to your subscribers. After that, the post remains on your Substack page as a blog article. There’s a social aspect called Notes, which looks similar to Twitter. From there you can create a post where others can like, comment, or share. It even has some paid features similar to Patreon that would allow you to create different levels of content for different subscription plans. (Don’t worry, I’m not doing that right now, but it might be nice for future endeavors or other projects.)
Anyway, I’ve spent the last two days getting my account set up and bringing over my previous newsletters, so everything is in one place. Let me know what you think about the new format.
Oh, and if you’re not following Jane Friedman in some form or fashion, you should. She’s a great resource!
Things I’m Working On
Women in Caprock Series
Okay, okay… book progress. Ugh. I have now started TWO next books in the Caprock Series. I’ll work on one, then reach a point where I need a break, so I’ll pick up the other for a while. Of course, working back and forth takes longer because I forget things like the names of side characters. You should have seen me opening up one file and searching for the name of that guy who… You get the picture.
So right when I was thinking there has to be an easier way, I got an email from the makers of Scrivener announcing a webinar on how to Write Your Book Series in Scrivener. Perfect timing! I was all in.
And because I’m a lover of systems, I immediately put what I learned to use. After backing everything up (because IT, y’all!) and verifying my original files were safe, I spent about a week organizing all three books into one series file. Scrivener makes it easy to move documents from one file to another, so the bulk of my time was spent synchronizing my metadata across all books. Now, it’s pretty easy for me to find people and events from anywhere in the series without stopping my forward progress. I love it.
(I feel like this adventure should be an article on the blog.)
Surprise Memoir
The other thing I’ve been developing is a memoir I didn’t know I was going to write. Well, maybe a memoir. It might turn into a self-help book. I’ve been working on it in the background for a while, capturing miscellaneous lessons learned from my career that helped me become a better project manager.
When a fellow writer asked me how many words I had so far, I surprised us both with my answer. This side project into which I occasionally scratched a story was already up to 53,000 words.
My goal on that one is to finish fleshing it out with the remaining stories queued up in my head, then find a knowledgeable editor to help me figure out how to shape it.
Publishing News
Quick Updates on Past News Items
AI Audiobook finally published. It took far longer than the promised four weeks for the Apple AI-generated audiobook to go live. More like three months. But it’s live now. I listened to the free sample and, while it sounded amazingly like a real person (and not a robot), it didn’t quite convey the emotional tone I think a live human would have. I took comfort from hearing Erin Wright (of Wide for the Win fame) say she used AI-generated audiobooks because most of her readers/listeners listened at faster than normal speeds, which eliminates the tone anyway.
Working with AI
Speaking of AI, the debate continues on whether it’s okay to use. We seem to be settling down into two major camps: okay with helping on ad copy and idea-generation, but not okay with actually writing the book.
Meanwhile, the debate on copyright infringement continues. In September, the Authors Guild organized a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT. The assertion here is the AI companies are using literary works without permission to train their machine learning models.
Also in September, Amazon KDP added a new setting to the book upload process, asking authors to declare if any parts of their book were AI-generated. And since there’s been confusion over what exactly AI-generated means, Amazon has now defined what is “AI-generated” versus “AI-assisted.”
According to Amazon’s terms of service, AI-generated means using an AI-based tool to create the actual content, even if you did substantial edits afterward. AI-assisted means using AI-based tools to edit, refine, error-check, or improve content you created yourself, or using AI-based tools to brainstorm or generate ideas for your original work.
Latest Articles on Writing
Here’s what’s new on the blog since last time:
Keywords for Your Book: How to Scrape and Organize Data for Ads
This is a step-by-step tutorial on how to scrape data from Amazon and organize it in Excel for use as keywords for your book.
Using ChatGPT to Create Story Outlines and Character Descriptions
A quick look into how I used ChatGPT to further develop my characters and story plot line for my next book.
Changing the Mouse Scroll Direction on Windows
Another techie article about changing the scroll direction on your mouse. (Good for anyone who has to go back and forth between macOS and Windows.)
What’s On Your Mind?
A while back, I asked what do you struggle with most as a writer? And one answer I got back was coming up with fresh material. Did they mean coming up with fresh material because they’d written a ton of books? Or was it simply coming up with fresh material that people haven’t seen before?
I don’t remember who said this, but I heard/read someone discussing this very topic not long ago. Her take was if you give a roomful of writers the same trope(s), the same basic plot line, and even the same story beats, each one will come up with a different story.
Along those lines, I highly recommend reading The Trope Thesaurus by Jennifer Hilt, where she talks about how you can use tropes to develop or deepen your story. She discusses in a fun, easy-to-follow manner how tropes weave into the goal-motivation-conflict layers of your story. (It read like a fiction novel and I didn’t get bored.)
The second part of the book discusses the tropes (expected and unexpected) used in different genres, and the third part is an index of over seventy tropes with explanations and examples.
And if that doesn’t help you, maybe drop a few tropes into one of the AI tools to help generate a idea, right?
Let me know…
Got any resources that helped you with your writing? Drop a line and I’ll share it with the audience.
Until next time, butts in chair and ink to paper!
Lancy
Thanks for the kind mention!