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.)

58, 546.

That is the current number of words in my draft of Cici & the Curator Search For Treasure. 

58, 759.

That is the total number of words in my final version of Cici & the Curator.

I’d call that a good sign — well, it is a good sign. When I went to sleep last night, I was thinking, maybe, maybe I’d even finish writing today. The possibility existed.

And then, about 4AM, I woke up to the thought, “Why didn’t the wedehunda just teleport?”

Why didn’t the wedehunda just teleport?

WHY DIDN’T THUNDER AND LIGHTNING JUST TELEPORT?!?!?!

So, yeah, I will not be finishing the first draft of Cici & the Curator Search for Treasure today.

And I’d write some more on this blog post, but I have a whole lot of revising to do. Sigh.

At the Spellbound Writer’s Group on Sunday, Dani, the leader of the group, had an exercise for us to do about walking your character through their story backwards. You start at the ending, and make the motivation work back toward the start of the book instead. In her words, “For example, if at the end they get the guy, they are now motivated to lose him. If they find treasure, they now need to hide it. If they solved the murder, they now need to cover it up.” 

I thought about doing this with Cici & the Curator Search for Treasure, which is the fiction that I’ve spent most of my fiction writing energy on in the past six weeks. But I wasn’t enthusiastic. My immediate response was something like, “If I knew how it ended, I would have been finished already. I can’t start at the end and work my way backwards because I don’t know where the ending is!”

But I’ve also got two other fiction projects permanently open on my desktop: Rescuing Ceres, which is supposed to be a cozy sci-fi, but which fails on the cozy, and A Gift of Something or Other, which is Serena’s story in the Tassamara series. As I said, permanently open, and every so often I add a few hundred words to either or both, but more often I tweak some of the 20K words already there. I decided to go with Serena, because her ending — despite being about 40K words away, minimum — felt straightforward. She gets together with the guy, they ride off into the sunset. I didn’t know exactly where their sunset led, but I knew it led to adventure. I knew it led away.

And thirty seconds into this exercise, I knew that was the absolutely wrong ending. They can’t ride off into the sunset together. The promise of the series — the underlying theme, maybe? — is about finding a home, finding a place where you get to be absolutely yourself, with whatever weird gifts you have, where you are welcomed and accepted and loved. Yes, the series went off in unexpectedly ghostly directions for me and I had a lot of thoughts about the afterlife to work out with it, but the point for Akira and Sylvie and Noah — and probably the kids in A Gift of Time — was to find a home. That didn’t work quite so well in A Gift of Luck, because neither Niall or Laurel actually has a gift and they don’t end up in Tassamara (as far as we know), but it was still a book about finding family.

Once I had that realization, whoosh! A book that has been entirely stuck for months — years even — because I couldn’t answer the most straightforward storytelling question there is, which is, “And then what happened?” — suddenly had obvious places to go. And I mean OBVIOUS. Of course they need to see Grace, and clearly Max will be at Maggie’s Place, and Drew aka Andy is going to be looking for a job and yes, it’s essential that Serena go back to her old house and get the things she cares about and, oh, here’s how to solve that pesky mystery that I set up in the first 15K words, and wait, why don’t I have some chapters from Drew’s POV? And duh, that thing with the baby, that’s way more important than I realized…

All of which is great, honestly. More than great, wonderful. Except… I really, really, really want to finish Cici 2. I’ve been working on it for so long and I’ve been making progress, even if it’s been slow. I promised myself that 2025 would be the year of finishing projects, not just constantly jumping between them and always starting something new, and Cici is the farthest along. If I focused and did nothing else — no Choosing Happiness work, no days of distraction, no hours spent trying to figure out design software, no blogging instead of working! — I could probably finish writing Cici in three weeks. Three weeks! That makes so much more sense than switching gears and starting to work on a book that doesn’t even have a title yet.

And it’s even being generous, assuming that I’m not going to be able to consistently write 1000 words a day, even though 1000 words a day is nothing when you know the answer to “And then what happened?” Of course, the fact that I don’t know the answer is the reason I’ve spent so long spinning my wheels and looked at it way, possibly it does make a lot more sense to be working on the project where the answer is, more or less, obvious.

I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.

Meanwhile! There’s a little bar at the top of the interface where I write my blog posts and it shows me statistics for the blog. I never really look at it, because blogging in 2025 is basically writing to the void. I know I have a few loyal friends and family readers, but not very many people read blogs anymore. For that matter, not many people write blogs anymore. It’s all social media and places like substack and medium. I like my blog, though, and I’ve been writing it for a long time, and I mostly write it to myself. I consider me my main reader, and I definitely assume that I am the only one who ever goes back and rereads old posts. All that said, that little statistics bar looked unusual to me today, so I clicked on it, and went to the statistics screen and… um… what?

It says that this post, Desire and Determination, has 37 views in the past week. What? Why? Literally, in that post, I write, “I believe this post gets the Boring tag.” It also told me that this post, A Tale of Two Campgrounds, got 83 views. At least that one has a few links about campgrounds, which means it might have shown up in a google search, maybe? But 83 views is still a ridiculous number. For context, my expectation is usually 7 to 10 views on a post. Yep, that’s how many people I expect to read an average blog post, not including folks who get it via email and may or may not delete without reading.

Since I am reasonably cynical, I usually assume that a higher number of views happens when bots target the site for spam links or malicious attacks of some sort, and then I go through and make sure my security is high and I’m not letting bad comments get posted. In this case, however, the pages in question look fine, and I haven’t been flooded with fake comments, so I am mystified. If, therefore, you are reading this post and you are new to my blog and you were one of the 37 or 83 views on those posts in the last week, could you leave me a comment and tell me how you got here? I would so love to know. Even if it’s just something weird and unrelated to me, like “oh, my professor did an assignment about blogging in 2015 and your site was given as an example of a boring blog,” (which, you know, sounds ridiculous, but maybe I will be the last blog standing someday, LOL!)

But now I’m going to get to work. Or rather, now I’m going to take my darling dog outside to play for a while, because she’s giving me the narrow eyes and the folded ears, which basically means, “Human, you are failing me. Do you not remember that I am first in your time commitments?” And then I’m going to get to work.

Cici or Serena? Must decide…

I woke up this morning at 5:45, turned the coffee on, finished the book I’d been reading the night before, played a couple games of solitaire, then opened Scrivener to start writing.

And was promptly completely overwhelmed by everything I wanted to do this week but hadn’t: taxes, update my bio, finalize the front page of my Choosing Happiness website, add a contact form to that site, write 5000 words of Cici, write a blog post for this site…

If I’d done a little something every day, the way I intended to at the beginning of the week, it wouldn’t be overwhelming at all. Well, okay, maybe it was a little ambitious considering how I have been eking out the word count. But not crazy overwhelming. Unfortunately, that’s not what I did.

Oh, I worked on Monday.  It was a productive day. But on Tuesday I went to Merritt Island to visit my friend Lynda and meet her friend Leigh. We talked books and writing and editing—conversations I could have for days. Alas, we didn’t have that long, but we had a great lunch (at a Brazilian restaurant, Brasas) and I had no regrets.

On Wednesday, I realized that because of a busy weekend (which included a trip to the Mount Dora Arts Festival where I bought this awesome mug), I really needed to take care of some of life’s basics, aka laundry and cleaning and grocery-shopping, and I didn’t get much done beyond that.

On Thursday, I had great intentions. I was pet-sitting for Riker, but I brought my computer, had my writing spot, was all ready to work… but the day was lovely. Absolutely beautiful in a Florida February way. I never looked at my weather app to see what the temperature was, because the temperature was perfect. I wound up sitting outside by the fire pit, hanging out with the dogs, occasionally lackadaisically tossing a ball for Sophie, and reading. Every half hour or so, I’d think, “I should really get my computer,” but then I’d go back to reading my book. Do I have any regrets? Nope.

Often when I have a “wasted” day, I do have regrets. I feel guilty. I reach the end of the day and I think, oh, I should have done so much more. I should have written more words, I should have X, Y, Z. But that dissatisfaction—that feeling of falling short—is the antithesis of happiness. My three personal macronutrients of happiness (inspired by Arthur Brooks, in Build the Life You Want) are Satisfaction, Engagement, and Enjoyment, so when I start feeling dissatisfied with my choices, I’m basically shooting my happiness in the foot. And sure, ideally, that should mean make better choices! But let’s face it — knowing what I should do and doing it are not the same thing.

Yesterday, though, I didn’t let myself feel guilty. I made my choices, I enjoyed my choices, and at the end of the day, I felt like it had been such a nice day, so lovely and peaceful and serene, that it was worth celebrating.

And then this morning rolled around. Ugh. Taxes. Website. Contact form. Bio update. Linktree. Write books, market books, clean out 400 emails from my inbox. ARGH! At first, I took one step back and thought about using one of the handy life tools that I’ve accumulated over the years. Maybe bird-by-bird, Anne Lamott’s advice about taking one word at a time; or maybe a 20/10, from Unf*ck Your Habitat, which is getting stuff done by working for 20 minutes, followed by a 10 minute break. Both are systemic approaches to making overwhelming tasks less overwhelming.

But then I decided to take an even bigger step back. My problem today was not the length of my to-do list: none of it is urgent, none of it is going to change my life if I finish it today. My problem was the feeling of overwhelm. The feeling of life being oppressive and scary. The feeling of failing because I am not productive enough. And that feeling doesn’t get fixed by a checklist.

Instead, I decided to take the WIN — the Walk In Nature — and so Sophie and I hopped in the car and drove to the waterfront.

 

 

And after our WIN, when we got home, I took a deep breath and got to work — feeling happy and peaceful and like whatever I finish today will be good enough.

Did my WIN reset my day? I don’t know, really. I can’t tell what the rest of the day will be like. Will I wind up frustrated? Am I going to be annoyed with myself before the day is over? Will a quick glance at the news turn into doomscrolling or a need for despairing escape, either one eating up my hours? I don’t know! Could be.

But my WIN wasn’t about gearing up for productivity — it was an experience complete in itself, a moment to remind me why the rest of it matters. My goal in life isn’t to be the most productive, or the most well-informed, or even to be rich (although that would be nice). My goal is to love the experience of the life I’m living.

And for that goal, the walk in nature is always a WIN.