Random thought: If a World Cup game ends 0-0, did it actually happen? If so, why? Explain.
Since I’m traveling in Guadalajara this week, I have no “tiempo” to waste, so here’s the story of the “semana,” with my “gracias” to Susana Mejor for the prompt.
Finding the Best & Discarding the Rest
Before Sgt. Rockmiller brought in the first applicant, he briefed Jensen, Personnel’s newest member. “Watch and learn, kid.”
Halfway through the interview, Rockmiller asked, “You pull someone over and he bribes you. What do you do?”
“Am I in the city limits?” the applicant asked.
“Where else would you be?”
“Maybe he teleported me to another dimension.”
“Exactly,” Rockmiller said. “So he could reconfigure your brain.”
“They do that to cops?”
“Sometimes.”
“Not to me!” The applicant bolted from the interview.
“You see that, Jensen? The secret is to out-crazy the nut-jobs.” Rockmiller said. “I just saved the city a fortune.”
Since beginning the giant purge around a month ago, in my quest to get my manuscript down to a reasonable level, I managed to lose 162 pages from the bloated 582. I currently sit at 420 pages, which is 60 more than where I’d like to be, but now I’m thinking I’ll be sending it over to my editor so she can use her eagle eyes to suggest final cuts.
That’s the less-than-exciting news, but I can counter it with something that thrilled me recently, and believe it or not, I have AI to thank. I use a proofreading program called ProWritingAid to check my work before I release it into the wild. They now offer a manuscript analysis service, and I uploaded my latest draft just to see what I might get out of it. I was more than a bit skeptical, wondering what kind of helpful advice artificial intelligence would give me—even more so when the evil machine told me it would take 4-5 minutes before my analysis was ready. Like I had that kind of time to wait. What I got back was a mind-flowing, incredibly helpful 21-page analysis that included: story overview, plot analysis, setting, themes & motifs, potential readers, similar well-known books, main character comps, and specific areas that worked well, as well as those with major or minor concerns (along with suggested fixes and their specific locations in the novel).
Remember, all the above was delivered in about five minutes, and it cost me all of $35. Will it replace my human editor? Not for a second, but it did result in a major paradigm shift for me and my prior opinion of AI. Yes, a lot of it is justifiably terrifying to all kinds of artists, but it also has tremendous potential to assist—not replace the creative process. The analysis caught chronological errors in my story, called me out on some things that strained credulity, and even suggested I have my detective do something that was in my prior draft that I cut to save space.
I incorporated nearly all the notes suggested, and not just because my ego was boosted by a machine that said my novel was comparable to Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch books (my favorite author). Well, that may have influenced me slightly.
This latest (and much stronger) draft will be in the editor’s hands soon. I’ll report back when her latest notes arrive. Spoiler alert: They won’t reach me in 4-5 minutes, but they will be worth the wait.
Thanks for listening.
Scotty out
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