Newsletter 06-29-26

 

                The life of a writer is often times beset with trial and tribulations, but the loss of a trusted took is the cruelest thing of all. G. is a friend of mine, who is a writer and is blind. Recently G. had to have her brailler repaired, which means she could not write for a long time. A brailler is a device with six keys. You press the proper keys at the same time and you get one letter punched into a piece of cardstock in braille. While many of us struggle to hit U instead of I or Y, she has to create each letter. G. says she can type fifteen words a minute with her brailler, then she and her assistant edit what she wrote. I don't know if I could work like she does, but she's an incredible writer of erotica.

                 Writing is a deeply personal thing, most writers have their own style, and to some like G. each letter is a creation from the soul. For me the creation comes from the whole. I'm usually banging out the wrong letters. Two writers shape my path, Andrew Klavan, and Garrison Keillor. Politically, artistically, spiritually, the two are polar opposites, but when they talk about the art of writing, they echo each other, One quote from Garrison Keillor echoes my style of writing:

 “We writers don’t really think about whether what we write is good or not. It’s too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.”

 That's kind of what I do. Instead of mail it off, I put in in the cloud and share it online with KMaz and she goes over it and we discuss it in real time. But the problem for me is that the story is the thing, the words I use and the punctuation I chose to convey that story come next, the story comes first. And the tool I've used for the past 2 years to straighten out my words and my punctuation was ProWritingAid.

 ProWritingAid helped with grammar, punctuation, and would tag me on all sorts of things, like sticky sentences (whatever that is) and comma splices (I hate them things) but recently it stopped doing handy things like grammar, punctuation, and wording. It wanted to review what I was writing, search for plagiarism, give me a critique report, do paraphrasing and stuff my PC with AI. All these extra goodies cost extra. You pay $120 a year then buy more credits to make the software that you paid $120 for to work. After it's AI update it missed all forms of errors that I toss on the page because I'm writing quickly.

I cancelled my subscription, why should I pay $120 for 12 months of "For only five credits you can…?" The problem is that "You can…" was something that was part of the subscription 3 months ago. And now there's nowhere to go. So I'm working with what is installed in Word. Their editor is getting better, and there is also the worst AI in the world: CoPilot. I'm experimenting with CoPilot. I've got a set of instructions that I feed into CoPilot: "Review this document searching for grammar and punctuation errors. DO NOT correct anything, point out what you find and let me decide how to fix it." So far it's working, but if I forget to say "DO NOT correct anything…" it will re-write everything.

I have started Gods Save the Queen Book 5, and I'm working without a safety net of ProWritingAid, just editor, which is so-so, and CoPilot, which is like a six-year-old with a search engine strapped to its ass. I just started and I'm up to 3,500 words and it's time for a time shift. I'll be bouncing back and forth in time and I hope it doesn't get too confusing. Book 5 starts six years after the end of Book 4. Marlon is a healthy six-year-old boy with a three-year-old sister named Hollie. Chapter 1 starts with the birth of Marlon and Hollie's new brother and sister: Llywellyn and Llewela (Named after elven warriors from the past) but Chapter 2 starts 36 years in the past with a woman named Jutta Aldana who just had a child out of wedlock. I hope that isn't too confusing. We'll see. That's why I do these books in pieces like that.

Where is Stormwatch? I can here some of you saying that. Stormwatch Chapter 16 is done. It was very tough to write because so many people in the story were sad, but now that Chapter 16 is finished, everyone can be happy. We're going to send Josh and Veronica on their honeymoon, John is going to take a week off and splash in the new pool in Jupiter, and Audrey is going to introduce Mike to his cabin while everyone is gone. But that's all in Chapter 17 which I won't start for a few weeks.

Once Stormwatch Chapter 16 got the a-ok from KMaz I sent that to Lit for publication. The minute it went, so did I. I was so sick last week, I only had 6,000 words to write (that's about 3 days of writing for me) and it took me eight days to do that. I missed Trivia on Friday (G. won) and I almost missed Music Night on Saturday, and I had a great music theme - bands with siblings in them. But the story is done, KMaz liked it, and now it's yours, ready for you to read, there on Literotica.