Things on My Mind: (Sunday, April 16, 2023)

Project X Update

Well, even though I am sticking to my “No working on Project X on weekends” rule, I can’t quite shake off the impulse to think about the characters, settings, and situations of the story. I already know who the protagonists are – one very well, the other…not so much – and I’ve already decided where, when, how, and why they meet. As a result, part of me wants to break the Cardinal Rule of “Thou Shall Not Work on Thy Literary Project on the Weekend,” while the more rational – or is it the more cautious – part of my brain nixes the notion.

I did a bit of behind-the-scenes “prep” earlier this morning. I opened my seldom-used WriteItNow 5.0 creative writing program (which is like my Kindle Create app but geared more toward creating a book rather than formatting and prepping it from a finished manuscript created on Word). I bought the CD-ROM software when I still lived in Miami and installed it in this PC’s immediate predecessor, but I hardly ever used it – partly because I didn’t know how to upload .png or .jpg picture files for the Character portraits, but mostly because I tend to use Microsoft Word and its familiar features and I wasn’t sure if the two programs are compatible with each other.

Since it is Sunday, and since I am intent on sticking to a 5-day workweek schedule for Project X (I don’t like taking weekends off when it comes to blogging; I need to get at least some writing in on Saturday and Sunday – that’s what my life here has come to, for good or ill), I didn’t do much. I started a Character profile, chose one of the few Profile pictures I found in WriteItNow (it does not match how my protagonist looks, but fine), gave him a birthdate, and started a list of his positive and negative personality traits.

That’s it. Nothing less. Nothing more. It’s the fucking weekend and unless I have a truly pressing need to write and publish Project X quickly, I will just enjoy my time off.

Reunion & the Bing AI Chatbot Reimagining

Last night I posted ‘Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken’: A Scene from ‘Reunion’ Reimagined by Bing AI in the Style of Stephen King, the last (at least for now) in a series of “collaborations” between Bing’s OpenAI-powered chatbot and me.

If you’ve followed that multipart series, you know that I’ve asked the AI to rewrite selected passages from Reunion, a novella that I – unwittingly, at first – started writing in 1987 and completed (at least as the first draft was concerned) in 1998. I self-published Reunion through Amazon in the summer of 2018, but I recently – on the advice of my now-retired journalism prof – went back and made some revisions to the text, added a few things (front matter, back matter, and a spiffy new cover), thus creating a “second revised edition” to both the paperback and e-book versions.

As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, I can’t afford to pay Kindle Direct Publishing or even Facebook Ads for marketing services to help me sell my work. So, I’ve resorted to what I hope is an innovative way to get the word out on Reunion without, you know, bashing people on the head and saying “Please buy this book! Now!”

And my “advertising campaign” has had at least some success; one of my Facebook friends ordered not just the Kindle edition of Reunion, but also a copy of Save Me the Aisle Seat, based on one of these “chatbot reimagined” posts I shared on the Social Network,

One Last Reimagination

This morning, after I fiddled a bit with Project X on WriteItNow, I moseyed over to Microsoft Edge – my browser of choice is Google Chrome – and asked Bing AI to rewrite the summary of Reunion in the style of Jennifer Egan, who has apparently become my literary (not literal) crush:

Here’s the result of my request:

Reunion: A Story

He was a history professor, a bestselling author, a man who had it all. Except for one thing. The girl he never told he loved. She was his high school crush, his unfulfilled dream, his what-if. She was gone. Until one day, he got an email. From his old friend. The one who knew her too. The one who invited him to Miami. To see her again. To face his past. To change his future.

Well, that’s all the news that’s fit to print, so I’ll close for now. Have a good rest of your Sunday, wherever you are (unless, of course, you live west of the International Dateline, where it’s already Monday, April 17).