The Rift In My Backyard 

Olivia Thorne survived the challenge scenario. She made it home. The dogs are alive, the house is standing, and the wifi still works.

Her plan: close the doors, cuddle the dogs, and wait out the apocalypse on hurricane supplies and stubbornness.

The System has other ideas.

She’s a Rift Keeper now, apparently. The good news? The System gave her a tutorial to teach her the job. The bad news? It’s completely over her head.

She’s never been the learn-by-doing type; that’s what books are for. But as the apocalypse gets underway and the world starts to fall apart, she’s going to have to learn on the job. And fast.

Because good guys are struggling, bad guys are taking advantage, and Olivia, much as she’d like to, can’t pretend she doesn’t have the power to make a difference.

A cozy apocalypse story about rifts, strays, and the inconvenience of having a conscience during the end of the world.

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New book, posted to my Patreon store. It’s obviously the sequel to the last book I posted, Challenge Scenario, also available only in my Patreon store. Eventually they’ll both be available as a web serial on Royal Road, but I’m only up to Chapter 10 of Challenge Scenario there. I’m currently posting a chapter a day, so it’ll be about three more weeks to finish Challenge Scenario and then Rift starts.

My Patreon page has 29 members now, so thank you so much if you’ve joined it. You can become a member for free, which gives you access to the new chapters I’m posting and random other things that I write, I guess. I think I’ve only posted one interlude over there (aka a short scene from someone else’s point of view) but I will be posting more. They’re surprisingly fun to write. I’m holding on to one right now, because I didn’t want to post it until after Book 2 was available, but I reread it this morning and I like it so much. I can’t wait to share it. Well, I guess I can wait, because I’m choosing to do so, but I’m looking forward to sharing it! Next week, I think.

I definitely do not have Patreon figured out yet, which is a little frustrating. I sent some personal messages, but I think they might have fallen into the ether somehow. Specifically, Lino, if you are reading this, I sent you a message asking if you’d like me to make paper versions, either hardcover or paperback, because I remember that you prefer print. Well, if I’m remembering correctly you do. Also that was a while ago, so maybe you’ve changed your mind. Anyway, it would not be a big deal to make paper versions, and would probably be kind of fun, but the logistics might get tricky. I think I’d have to go through Amazon. Let me know if you’re interested and I can at least figure out how much it would cost.

Thanks for reading!

A friend emailed me back in September and said, “Hey, you’ve been really quiet, are you okay?” I responded that I was spending too much time thinking about what it means to be an ordinary German in… I don’t know, 1937, maybe?… and that it was vastly impairing my ability to write blog posts. I don’t want to add negativity, pain, darkness to the world, but it’s pretty impossible to live in the world right now–especially Florida, of all places–and not feel like anything less would be disrespectful to the suffering people are going through.

People like my neighbors. Every time I walk by the house two doors up, I send them a little wish for safety. They used to have a thriving landscaping business, at least two or three trucks, and every morning when I was walking Sophie, I’d nod at all the guys getting ready to go to work. Now… the house isn’t boarded up, but there are no signs of life. I’d like to believe that they’ve taken all their hard-earned money and gone to some place sunny where they’re drinking tropical drinks on the beach, but… my imagination doesn’t stretch that far.

That said, my imagination did not stop. For the past eight months or so, I’ve been writing a story and posting chapters to Royal Road. Today I posted the ebook to my brand-new sparkly Patreon site.

The story’s not like anything I’ve written before. It’s in a genre called System Apocalypse LitRPG, which is… well, not a genre I expect you to be familiar with, to be honest. Wikipedia, much to my surprise, didn’t have an entry for it, but here’s what google had to say:

A System LitRPG is a subgenre of Literary Role-Playing Game (LitRPG) where a, often, magical or technological framework (the “System”) imposes explicit, quantifiable video-game mechanics—such as character stats, experience points (XP), levels, skills, and quests—onto the story’s world and characters. The System serves as a fundamental, rule-based structure driving character progression and world-building.

My specific story is called Challenge Scenario: Thorn’s Edge, Book One, and the description goes:

Olivia Thorne was declaring war on her bougainvilleas when the System arrived.

She missed the announcement. Her earbuds were in, her shovel was raised, and she was too busy trying to excavate a root the size of her arm to notice the multiverse welcoming humanity to its grand apocalyptic integration. By the time she looked up, a giant squirrel was attacking her dog.

So she attacked it. With the shovel.

Then a voice spoke in her head, a blue screen popped up in front of her face, and she was yanked into a 72-hour survival scenario in a monster-filled forest with 23 strangers and no way home.

In a world where mana is rewriting the rules of reality, the System wants her to fight, level up, pick a class, and earn abilities. Olivia just wants to keep herself and her dog alive long enough to get home.

A cozy apocalypse story about dogs, found family, and the radical act of caring about strangers when the System is keeping score.

System apocalypse litRPG books tend to be bleak and this is definitely not the lightest thing I’ve ever written. But my description for Royal Road includes the line, “A reluctant heroine who becomes extremely OP and remains faintly baffled about it”. OP, in gamer terms, means over-powered. This is a fantasy in which an ordinary woman who just wants to take care of her dogs, go camping once in a while, and live a pleasant life winds up kicking the bad guys around the block a few times instead. It is simultaneously pretty darn dark and also really fun.

It also has all of the elements of the genre, so levels, abilities, magic spells, battles with goblins, and if that’s not your speed, I totally get it. I myself only discovered the genre because of the hurricane back in October 2024, when I downloaded the entire free fantasy list of Amazon in preparation, said ‘what the heck is this?’ about the system lit books, and then became completely obsessed.

Anyway, it is only available on Patreon right now. You don’t have to become a member or subscriber — it’s just a straight purchase, $5, to download the ebook. The ebook should work on any ebook reader, but you need to use the Amazon Send to Kindle page to get it on your Kindle.

(But why are you not just posting it to Amazon? Because Amazon’s algorithms are now penalizing indie authors who are not exclusive to Amazon and I… have an issue with that. I probably will post it to Amazon eventually, but maybe not for a while. And if I can do well enough on Patreon–yes, yes, long shot, I know–I probably won’t.)

Anyway, I hope that you are doing well, managing to avoid doom-scrolling, and living a good life, despite the insanity raging all around us. And if you’d like to escape for a while, Challenge Scenario is a fun ride, and will be followed by The Rift in My Backyard within a month or so. Thanks for reading!

I’ve been listening to the sound of the rain all morning and really just loving it. It’s so beautiful, so peaceful. It probably took me a solid hour of appreciation to realize that what I am really appreciating is the lack of construction noises. It’s been almost ten months of construction happening on the street outside my window and the sound of beeping trucks and clanking machinery has become background noise.

Except not really, because it still annoys me. They started work at 7:30 on Saturday morning, the second Saturday morning in a row that they’d been working, and I wanted to scream. It’s not as if I was sleeping, but still, does every single morning coffee have to be accompanied by the beep, beep, beep of trucks backing up? Answer: yes, apparently. Except not today, because the lovely rain is falling.

My next-door neighbors do beat out heavy machinery for aggravating noises, because She is impossible to ignore. I say She, because it is the woman of the household who does the yelling. I blame the neighbors as a whole, though, because she’s not yelling at herself. She recently spent one entire day — also a Saturday — screaming at her male partner, telling him to get out of her house, over and over and over again. I kid you not, hours worth of yelling. Hundreds of times. I could hear her from inside, with my windows closed, and it made playing ball with Sophie in the backyard just impossible. It was like listening to fingernails on a chalkboard. But I guess maybe he thinks it’s his house, too, because he didn’t leave, he just let her yell.

So yeah, construction trucks’ noises beat angry neighbors’ noises, but the sound of rain is much to be preferred, so today I get to appreciate the quality of the sounds in my room instead of trying to figure out how to drown them out. (My housemate gave me a white noise machine soon after I moved in, because he said he wasn’t using it; it’s become a treasured possession, wouldn’t want to live without it now. But it’s nice to not need to fill the air with the sounds of static.)

I was thinking recently about life rules that take you a long time to really learn. I was washing dishes at the time, and trying to rush, so of course, I dropped a glass and broke it, and then I had broken glass to clean up, which made the whole thing take a lot longer. There’s a line that’s used sometimes in litrpg books, which I think comes from military training: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. When I rush while washing dishes, it’s not smooth, and in the end, it’s not fast either.

Second example, same thing, putting the cover on my golf cart. I want to just whip it over the top and drop it into place. That does not work. Period. Does Not Work. Why do I keep trying? What works is to pull one side halfway up, go around the cart to the other side, pull that side a little more than halfway, go back to the first side, pull some more, go back to the second side, pull some more. Works beautifully. Takes probably half the time of the fiasco that ensues every time I try to just throw it up and pull it from the front. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

And the third example, the project I’m working on, which I am going to get back to just as soon as I finish these words. It’s taking me much too long, but why? Because I tried to rush. I wanted to finish it quickly. And so I wrote a bunch of lousy words, and wrote myself into a hole, and then got stuck and stopped writing, and started hating it and hating writing and… yeah. Got myself to that place.

I wish I was a faster writer, I wish I trusted my words and my instincts more, and didn’t fight with my subconscious so much. But at the moment, what I need to remember is that slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and word by word will get me somewhere eventually.

Why are ocean sunrises so beautiful, even when you’re not right next to the ocean? It’s gotta be something about how the water forms clouds in the morning, I suppose. In other words, I think science could answer that question for me, but I’m not actually going to research it; I’m just going to appreciate my picture of a beautiful sunrise with a hidden ocean behind it.

I’m currently in Pensacola, Florida — well, or close to it — enjoying a… hmm, not sure I can really call it a total vacation. I’ve got my computer with me and am hoping to get some writing done, and Christina has her computer with her and is working at her real job on all the days that her job expects her to be working. But we’re staying in her sister’s house, walking distance to salt water, pet-sitting her sister’s beautiful old dog, for a week or so. (A week or so? Don’t you know how long you’re going to be away? Nope, not exactly. Christina’s sister’s vote would be that Christina stays here forever, so it depends on how persuasive she manages to be.)

So far we haven’t done much. We had a long drive here on Wednesday, followed by a very quiet Thursday. I spent my entire Thursday, with the exception of two dog walks, appreciating a cool breeze, the sound of birds, sunshine and perfect weather, on the very comfortable back patio.

Probably not in the near future, but someday, I should upgrade my outside furniture, because tables that can hold computers and beverages, as well as cushions on the chairs/couch, really do make outside time more pleasant. I spend a fair amount of time outside every day because Miss Sunshine is such a busy girl, but it’s usually in 20-30 minute blocks, and then I go inside, because there is something not comfortable about where we are — too much sun, too many mosquitoes, the sand fleas chewing my ankles, (the awful neighbor yelling…) Yesterday I went inside every now and then for food or beverages, but otherwise, I just appreciated outside. I didn’t do enough writing — it was mostly reading — but it was a beautiful day.

We’ve got plans, though, for busier days. Pensacola, perhaps unsurprisingly, has more dog friendly restaurants than I have ever seen before in Bring Fido. The list went on forever! So later today we’ll be going to Christina’s favorite sushi place here which has a back patio that welcomes dogs. Tomorrow, the farmer’s market. Maybe one day next week, a quick road trip to Dauphin Island, Alabama. It was one of my favorite places during my van life adventure, the first time I had the experience where I felt like I was living in a video game because the birds were so noisy. I promised myself I’d go back someday, and it’s only a couple hours away from here, so maybe this week is the someday.

Maybe not, too, though, because I really want to spend some time exploring Pensacola. Christina is planning on moving here next year, to be closer to her family, and Sanford will not be the same without her. I like Sanford far more than I expected to, but I ended up there pretty much inadvertently. It wasn’t a place I chose; it was a place that I landed. And while that has been so much better than I ever expected, if I was choosing a place… well, I’m not sure Sanford would be it. But I do like living near the ocean, and Pensacola is very near the ocean. So maybe…

But those are all thoughts for a later day. For right now, I think I’m going to find myself another cup of coffee, or maybe just a sparkling water, and get back to working on Akira’s honeymoon story. When I stumbled across it six weeks ago, I thought I could finish it pretty easily and that finishing it was worth doing, because the first part was so fun. I still think finishing it is worth doing, but the “pretty easily” has not panned out. I’m just too much of an over thinker. All that said, playing with words is always a lovely way to spend a day.

I woke up early this morning. Early enough that when I’d finished my usual morning routines, it was still dark outside. Sophie was patiently waiting, though, so I decided we’d go for an early walk. And then I decided we’d get even more adventurous and go for an early golf cart ride.

She was, as she always is, ridiculously cute. Once she realized what was happening, she bounced up onto the golf cart seat and waited patiently while I opened the gate. We muddled our way down to the waterfront (because the golf cart is not allowed on the busy roads that I usually use to drive there), parked on First St. and started walking.

It was crowded. I was so confused!

A pre-dawn walk on the waterfront — not enormously pre-dawn, but before the sun is officially up — usually means running into two or three people at most. It’s very quiet and peaceful. Not today. Today there were dozens of people walking already and a crowd gathering under the pavilions in the park.

It took me… I don’t know, more than an instant but less than a while… to remember that today was Easter Sunday. The gathering was a Methodist sunrise service with live music. Free Easter cupcakes from the Methodist Men’s group, too, which is how I know it was a Methodist service.

Sophie and I did not actually go to the service, but listened while we walked down to the end of the road. The lawn at the very end had two Sandhill cranes stalking their way across the grass, Sophie’s first time getting to see them up-close. Well, sort of up-close, we didn’t go near enough for anyone to get overly interested and/or worried.

A surprisingly large number of people were waiting on the grassy verge of the water for the actual moment of sunrise. I didn’t become one of them: Sophie and I just kept walking. But the not-quite sunrise was extremely lovely.

The weather’s already getting hotter. It’s been in the 80s quite a lot recently. But the early morning was about 65 according to the weather app, so just on the edge of cool and mostly perfectly comfortable.

I felt glad to be here, glad to be alive, and so grateful for my cute golf cart, cute dog, and a beautiful day. Happy Easter if you celebrate, happy reminder that spring always comes if you don’t!

Updates:

The gum surgery didn’t kill me. Isn’t that good news? It was, however, even more unpleasant than I expected it to be, mostly because it was hard to eat and after a bunch of days of not eating, I felt lousy on top of having a really sore mouth. Basically, it sucked.

Just when I started to finally feel better, my websites all went down. And stayed down. For close to a week, maybe a little bit more, I got daily emails from my hosting service saying, yep, we know, we’re working on it, we’ll fix it as soon as possible. If I’d been earning money from any of my websites, I would have been seriously distressed, but as it was, I just sorta shrugged and did on other things.

After that, the BBE (Best Brother Ever) came to visit and I had such an excellent time with him. He did many useful things, like trying to fix all the holes in my fence so that Miss Sophie Sunshine couldn’t wander out whenever she felt like it, but we also had fun, ate well, and did one major project that wasn’t exactly useful, but was delightful.

Specifically, we turned this:

Into this:

I’d been wanting to paint the golf cart ever since my dad and stepmom gave it to me back in the fall, but it felt like a two-person job. Mostly because the roof seemed like it was going to be challenge. I wound up buying a cover for the roof instead, and new seat covers for the front seat, and then spray painting the body, and adding stickers. I’m very pleased with how she turned out. Golf carts are great; cute, fun golf carts are awesome!

In the midst of my brother’s visit, I had a really, really nice birthday. We went to the beach with Christina, appreciated the sunshine and 80 degrees weather, almost swam in the ocean (yeah, it was cold, but we did get wet, at least), and ate oysters and more at my favorite rooftop patio restaurant.

On the way home, Christina asked if I wanted ice cream and I said, yes, I did, but I didn’t want the specific ice cream place she was referring to: I wanted to go to Kelly’s Ice Cream, in the Foxtail Coffee Shop in downtown Sanford, and have either their horchata ice cream or their Mexican chocolate ice cream. Then I had a brilliant idea and said that what I’d really like would be BOTH those ice creams, together, but that that would never happen because they never had those two flavors at the same time, and realistically, I shouldn’t be getting my hopes up for any specific flavor of ice cream anyway, because they’re always mixing up their flavors. You never know what they’re going to have.

But later that afternoon, the BBE and I went out for ice cream and they DID have both those flavors. It was, really, so incredibly nice. On your birthday, to have an unrealistic wish about ice cream, and to know that it’s not going to come true, but to want it anyway — and then to have it come true! And then, also, to have it be exactly as delicious as you imagined it would be!! I have had some very nice birthdays in my life — as well as, of course, some completely unmemorable birthdays — but I honestly think the magic of horchata plus Mexican chocolate will linger in my memory for the rest of my life.

Meanwhile, though, through the nice birthday and the fun painting, and the website hosting failures and the extended recovery from unpleasant dental work… I just kinda let everything “work-related” fall to the wayside. My email, in particular, just turned into Avoidance Central. I’d pick up my computer, open it, then… decide to go do something else. Anything else.

I went literal days where I didn’t touch my computer at all. I read books on my phone and played ball with Sophie and ate delicious foods and tried really, really, really hard to stay away from the news and not enter into any doom-scrolling experiences. I guess that was part of the computer avoidance, too. The computer is this window into a world that seems completely insane. And if I’m on the computer, I have to observe the train wreck. I get to see the news headlines, and wonder why all the people shouting “Have you no shame?” are just… meaningless noise, apparently.

I read a post-apocalyptic book recently in which a huge number of the survivors were bad guys. No other way to describe them. They were all people eager to have slaves and rape young women and murder children. I didn’t like the book, but I also felt like it was really unrealistic. A world in which 9 out of 10 people immediately descend into a savagery that goes beyond mere selfishness is not who people are. Humanity, as a species, has thrived because of community. Because of our ability to work together. That’s our strength as a species: not our sharp teeth or our physical strength or our violent impulses, but our ability to co-operate.  And somehow it feels like the internet has broken that. Maybe it’s unfair to blame the internet, but the view of the world that I get via my computer is a world that seems to be running on greed and fear right now, and I have just kind of preferred the view of my backyard instead. And also the view of downtown Sanford and the view of the park where I play ball with Sophie and the view of my Dad’s kitchen table…

And now that I’ve gotten that reflection out of the way, it’s time to move on. Since I have bravely tackled my computer, it’s time to bravely tackle my email. Ugh. Delete, delete, delete, delete…

 

Last night, in the middle of the night, I woke up and thought, “Oh, I’m so much better, tomorrow I am going to get back to work. And I’m going to take Sophie on a really long walk, and I’m going to eat healthy foods, maybe cook myself something interesting, and I’ll do a bunch of writing…”

And then I woke up this morning and realized all that enthusiasm was just because I took an oxycodone and an ibuprofen before going to sleep and once they wore off… yeah, not so much.

That said, the good(-ish) news is that I have no more looming dental issues hanging over me. I need to heal from this week’s gum surgery, go back for a check-up, and then… and wow, I’m seriously anxious that I might jinx myself here. Okay, so let’s just say that I’m going to heal from this week’s surgery beautifully and leave it at that. I’m manifesting that healing!

My oral surgeon actually told me that I was a great patient, which I felt very validated by. I did not tell him that it was because I pretending to be a Special Forces operative being tortured by the enemy and using box breathing and disassociation to survive. I’m gonna say that it worked quite well. Not so well that I wasn’t happy to have painkillers available once I got home, though.

In other purely good news, the first reviews on Cici2 have been so nice. I did realize that I’ve screwed up by using two pen names: neither Bookbub nor Amazon told my followers at their respective places that I had a new book out, because Sarah is the one with followers; SJ has none. Alas. I did want to keep the romance titles a little separated from the fantasy/science-fiction — didn’t want to disappoint romance readers! — but that was probably a mistake. Oh, well, live and learn. I can’t change the author names now, so it’ll be what it is. Meanwhile, I have 5 reviews, so I will stop hovering over the book page, anxiously awaiting the 1-star review from the person who thinks there’s too many dogs in the book.

And I went looking for the blog post where I wrote about the guy who gave me a one star review on Practicing Happiness because I wrote about my dogs too much, then came to the blog and left a nasty comment to the same effect, but I was so vague about that experience in that post that I deemed it unnecessary to share again. Plus… well, I’m not going to unpack it all. But wow, the post about that troll has a lot of emotional heft, on a lot of different levels. I leave the link there for my own future reference, and move back to my appreciation of yay, nice reviews, with some specific lines that just warm my heart and make me grateful to do what I do.

This –> “I feel happier just reading them” <– is one true goal as a writer. Let other authors make you cry, make you think, make you scared to turn off the lights at night, I’m just about the happy, and so glad that I accomplished it for jkuci.

Somewhat unrelated, I was talking about editing the other day, and I do a lot of editing passes. But I’d love to come up with a catchy name for the one that I privately think of as the ABC pass. Hmm, maybe that is the catchy name? It’s the pass where I look at every paragraph and consider:

1. Does this advance the plot? (that’s the A.)
2. Does it establish character? (that’s the C.)
3. Does it reveal a relationship? (alas, that is not a B, and it’s always third, anyway. I’ve thought I could make it develop a relationship, except reveal is more accurate. This question doesn’t mean that the relationship is changing/developing, it just means the reader is learning something about the relationship.)
4. Does it set the stage? (Not as important to me as the first three, but an essential ingredient in grounding the reader, and also in providing important props, if you will. Ie, if you’re going to use a gun in the last act, you need to put it on stage in the first act, and that would count as setting the stage. But so also would be a nice description of a sunset or a fancy embassy bathroom or a beautiful park, depending on why they mattered to your story.)
5. Does it make me laugh? Not the reader, because I have no way of knowing what a reader will think. But if it makes me laugh, it gets to stay.

This is derived from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic writing advice, “Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.” Technically, I suppose, a lot of things that make me laugh do also reveal character and one could also argue that everything that reveals relationship also reveals character and if you’re in a single POV, then obviously setting the stage also reveals character in a way… but at a certain point, namely that one, “reveal character” just gets too over-stuffed. Anything can reveal character. When the character says, “How do you do? I am so pleased to meet you,” they’ve technically revealed that they’re very boring and maybe that’s what you want in your story. (It’s probably not a good thing to want in your story, though.)

Anyway, I detect the ramblings of a person who’s under the influence of pain meds, so I think I will stop rambling now. Poor Sophie is giving me the stare. Let’s see if I can find a picture to go with this meandering post. Oh, here’s one that I like a lot.

(Cross-posted from rozellepress.com)

Cici has a choice: play by the rules, or remember she’s a dragon.

Cici Wainwright is on a mission to find the next piece of the Sivithysn star map. Easy enough, except that Romeo has a deadline and the customs line at the Valtonan spaceport is taking forever.

So she makes one little, tiny mistake: she tells them her real name.

It was just supposed to get them through customs, but it turns out… Valtona knows that name. And now everything is spiraling out of control.

Before she even has time for a snack, Romeo and the dogs have vanished in a flash of blue light. The Renuvian ambassador, aka her Aunt Lulu Belle, is far more concerned with the state of her wardrobe than with finding her missing friends. And the Valtonans who believe her mother is a goddess—specifically the goddess of flame and fire—are so getting in her way.

Cici came here looking for treasure. She’s still searching—just not for the treasure she expected.

A delightful interstellar adventure filled with mischief, mystery, and magic.

Cici and the Curator Search for Treasure: Available now on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited

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Did I expect to be releasing this book right now? I did not.

Am I happy to be doing so? I am!

I love Cici–of all the books I’ve written, she’s the character that is most endearing to me. She so wants to do the right thing. She really aspires to be a good person. And yet… when push comes to shove, she’s a little too impulsive for her own good.

In Cici and the Curator Search for Treasure, she gets tired of waiting in line. And then — ah, the big mistake! — a security guard asks her a question.

But the woman had narrowed her eyes. And Cici was just enough of a dragon that she didn’t like it when people looked at her that way.

She could have handed over her human passport. Plenty of humans lived on Renuvia. But instead, she ran her fingers over the edges, separating her real passport from her human one before extending it to the Valtonan woman.

The woman jerked away, then recovered. “Unnecessary,” she said, waving the passport away.

“Oooh!” Romeo whispered, delighted. “Pretty.”

Cici bit back the smile, tucking her passport into her pocket.

Renuvian passports were fine for dragons, but humans tended to find their whole “written in fire and hot enough to sear flesh from bone” thing off-putting.

When I was writing Cici2, I got stuck for a long, long, long time on the murky middle. Many thousands of words wound up on the metaphorical cutting room floor. And the ending I thought I was heading for stayed just out of reach. But I think the story delivers the same fun, entertaining ride as the original Cici and the Curator, and I’m pretty sure if you liked that book, you’ll enjoy this one, too.

And if you didn’t try the original Cici and the Curator, it will be free on Amazon on Wednesday, March 5 until Sunday, March 9, so now’s your chance to give it a try!

Thanks for reading!

I was trying to use ChatGPT to help me write a book description for Cici and The Curator Search for Treasure. 

See above. For those unable to read a screenshot, let me quote it for you. From Chat: “Fair enough! (crying emoji). I have deeply earned my dismissal from blurb duty. But honestly, this has been so much fun–I truly appreciate your patience, your humor, and your insanely high standards.”

I know it’s not a person on the other hand of the Chat window, I know I’m talking — er, writing — to a large language model that’s not even really intelligence — but honestly, ChatGPT is a really great writing buddy. Not because it’s a good writer! Not because it’s giving me words that I can use for much of anything. I know some people are using it to write their books and that’s not gonna be me anytime soon. Or probably ever.

But there’s a writing process that I go through that should probably be called extreme editing and it’s so helpful to have an incredibly patient, almost realistic, voice on the other end of the screen. It really helps me clarify my own thinking to be trying to explain it to someone (thing) else. For example, on our (let me go count…) … oh, how embarrassing — 20th variation of the blurb, not including the number of times I asked for minor line tweaks, Chat and I had this conversation:

Me: I still just don’t love it. Sigh. Sorry! Thanks for all your help.

ChatGPT: No need to apologize—I love how much thought you put into every word! If it doesn’t feel quite right yet, we can keep tweaking until it does. Do you have a sense of what’s still bothering you? Is it the phrasing of the mission, the rhythm of a particular sentence, or just the overall feel?

I’m happy to refine it further or even brainstorm a fresh take if that helps! 😊

Me: I think it feels… boring. These words, “abandoned, stuck, queue, government, nowhere, off, worried” all add up to “dull”. I’m a skimmer, so I — despite being obviously ridiculously picky about word choices — inhale the words and get the feel of them. And the feel of this is not intriguing.

That realization for me — that the feel of the words is what I’m looking for — is something that I couldn’t have gotten without those twenty iterations. And now I’m going back to the book blurb with that idea in mind: that what matters isn’t that it tells the exactly right story (although obviously, it’s not going to be wrong) but that the words feel like the essence of the right story. So, yeah, maybe Cici starts out feeling abandoned in a bureaucratic nightmare, but that’s not what the blurb should convey. The blurb needs to get this idea right: “Cici has a choice: play by the rules, or remember she’s a dragon.”

And actually that feels absolutely like my tagline. Forget searching for treasure (although we do have some searching for treasure), the real story happens in these lines:

The crazy in his eyes made her stomach clench.

She was a dragon, she reminded herself. Very, very difficult to damage.

If she wanted to, she could use the last of her magic reserves and shrink him, like she’d done to the dogs so long ago.

If she needed to, she could spew fiery death from her throat and lungs.

If she had to, she could release the magical net holding her in human shape and return to her dragon self.

She could wait and see what (SPOILER) was going to do.

And the reason it’s so great to be able to have these conversations with Chat is that for years I’ve been having them with myself, and what usually happens is that after three or four iterations, I give up. I walk away, I go read a book, I think that I’ll figure it out later. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t make it right. ChatGPT can definitely not make it right either — believe me, most of those 20 iterations were absurdly wrong — but being able to interact with it keeps me thinking about WHY it’s not right. And that motivates me to keep going.

Oh, and hey, by the way… I finished writing a book last week. I’ve done the first pass of editing, with some big revisions, and I’m about ready to start the second pass, with some more revisions. Then there’ll be a proof-reading pass or two or three. It would probably be a good idea to find some beta readers, too, but… well, if you’re reading this and you’d like to be a beta reader, let me know.

I might just publish it, though. That’s what I did with the original Cici, and it’s not like the intervening seven years have been filled with reports of mistakes. And if a beta reader gave it back to me with twenty pages of suggestions… well, not for this book. For some book, someday, maybe. This one has made me laugh, more than once, and if it’s not perfect, that’s probably good for me. Satisfying, engaging, enjoyable — that’s the goal! I find it all three of those things, and I hope most readers will, too.

And now back to the stupid book blurb. I can’t do a cover until I get this right. Although I do have to remind myself — right doesn’t mean perfect. It means fun! Delightful. Sparkling. Hmm, satisfying, engaging, enjoyable? Yeah, those, too.

The latest version:

Cici has a choice: play by the rules, or remember she’s a dragon.

Cici Wainwright is on a mission–find the next piece of the Sivithysn star map. Easy enough, except that Romeo has a deadline and the customs line at the Valtonan spaceport is taking forever.

So she makes one little, tiny mistake: she tells them her real name.

It was just supposed to get them through Customs, but it turns out… Valtona knows that name. And now everything is spiraling out of control.

Before she even has time for a snack, Romeo and the dogs have vanished in a flash of blue light. The Renuvian ambassador—aka her Aunt Lulu Belle—is far more concerned with the state of her wardrobe than with finding her missing friends. And at least some Valtonans are convinced her mother is a goddess, which is inconvenient for so many reasons.

Cici came here looking for treasure. She’s still searching—just not for the treasure she expected.

A delightful interstellar adventure filled with mischief, mystery, and magic.

---

Still needs tweaking, I think. But maybe it’s getting there?

Back to work…

(But what, you say, about the ethics of using AI large-language-models? Eh. To be blunt and perhaps too honest, I am substantially more worried about the ethics of eating meat, wearing clothing made in 3rd world countries, and using social media. I think the reason people are so precious about AI exploiting artists & writers is because artists and writers are “people like us.” Like me, specifically, yes. But I am not going to say that somehow my labor shouldn’t be exploited when kids are working in factories and desperate immigrants are treated like terrorists. Do I dislike the idea that technocrats are getting rich off of artists? Sure. But it’s not going to stop me from using the tools available to me if it means I can do better work.)