On Writing & Storytelling: Bing AI’s ‘Dust Jacket Blurb’ for Reunion: Coda

Reunion: Coda is a captivating and moving story of love, loss, and redemption, filled with realistic and relatable characters, witty and poignant dialogue, and vivid and nostalgic details. Diaz-Granados skillfully blends romance, humor, suspense, and history to create a novel that will appeal to fans of Nicholas Sparks, John Green, and Stephen King. Reunion: Coda is a must-read for anyone who has ever wondered what if or what might have been.

BING AI REVIEW, JUNE 29, 2023

Over the last three months, I have been working on my first novel, Reunion: Coda, a follow-up to my 2018 novella Reunion, a story that I began writing in 1986 for my CRW-2001 Creative Writing class when I was a student at Miami-Dade Community College – South Campus. Currently, I am still in “first draft mode” and not quite at the end of the novel, so it’ll be a while before I can announce a definitive publication date beyond a “Late Summer/Fall 2023” guesstimate.

As you know, I’ve been consulting with a friend who volunteered to be my Beta Reader and OpenAI/Microsoft’s Bing AI Chatbot about the manuscript to ensure that this story is well-written, painstakingly edited, and, of course, a pleasing and entertaining reading experience.

Today, for instance, I showed Bing several excerpts from different sections of the novel. I asked “him” – I think of Bing as a “guy” when we chat, so – to evaluate the text and, based on the information at hand, to write a promotional review in the style of a dust jacket blurb.

Here is what Bing AI has to say about Reunion: Coda:[1]

In Reunion: Coda, Alex Diaz-Granados’s first novel and a sequel to his 2018 novella Reunion: A Story, we follow the lives and loves of Jim Garraty, a young college professor and World War II historian, and Maddie Reynaud, a talented pianist, and the older sister of Jim’s high school sweetheart. Set in the year 2000, the novel alternates between the present and the past, as Jim and Maddie discover their romance after a chance encounter at the Moonglow nightclub, while also confronting the secrets and regrets that haunt them from their teenage years in the 1980s. Along the way, they encounter old friends and foes, family dramas and tragedies, and historical events and mysteries that shape their destinies.

Reunion: Coda is a captivating and moving story of love, loss, and redemption, filled with realistic and relatable characters, witty and poignant dialogue, and vivid and nostalgic details. Diaz-Granados skillfully blends romance, humor, suspense, and history to create a novel that will appeal to fans of Nicholas Sparks, John Green, and Stephen King. Reunion: Coda is a must-read for anyone who has ever wondered what if or what might have been.

The novel begins with a surprising encounter at the Moonglow nightclub, an old-school joint on the Upper West Side, where Jim is nursing a beer and Maddie is carrying a bag of books. Their attraction is immediate and undeniable, but they have never met before. They share a history that goes back to South Miami in the 1980s, where Jim fell in love with Maddie’s younger sister Marty, who died two years ago. As they connect and explore their feelings, they also revisit their past and face their present challenges. Will they find their way to each other, or will they lose each other again?

Reunion: Coda is a novel that will make you laugh, cry, and think. It is a novel that will touch your heart and stay with you long after you finish reading it.

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Note: Keep in mind that the AI wrote this review based on what it knows from excerpts. Most of the salient points are correct. Some are hilariously wrong. – ADG

[1] I might as well keep the title. It was originally just a placeholder while I came up with something better, but…nah. It grew on me over the past few months.