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| Happy 1 year book birthday to Litany |
I was starting to make a packing list for this upcoming weekend's Boskone science fiction and fantasy convention in Boston when I realized it's been one full year since LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD was released.
Getting the manuscript from idea to finished novel was a long journey - over six years, in fact. While staying with a project that long can be frustrating, I don't regret the time and effort that went into its creation. Working on this book was, at times, so difficult I tried to abandon it. At other moments, the joy of telling these characters' stories was intoxicating. Ultimately, it challenged me to grow as a writer in ways I had not anticipated.
The story, itself, shifted and morphed in ways I hadn't planned. My initial notes have almost nothing in common with the completed story. They way I see it, this is not a bug, but a feature of the creative process.
This week, the writing internet was rife with critiques and hot takes about AI generated novels. (There was a story in the NYT business section about a romance writer using LLM/Generative AI to write whole novels in under an hour.) My feeling about LLM/generative AI is clear: No. Absolutely not.
As in no, I won't use it. Not in any part of my writing process. I won't reiterate all the ways the tech is energy and water wasting, the way it has been trained on stolen work (my own included), the way it cannot be trusted to output correct and factual information to queries, and many many more arguments you probably have already read hundreds of times.
Could I use LLM/Generative AI tools to write hundreds of novels in the time it took me to complete LITANY? Probably. Aside from any discussion of quality (a loaded word, and one nearly impossible to define), I can honestly say that no LLM could have produced a book as layered and complex as LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD.
Why not? Because this wasn't a story that could have emerged from prompts. Even the questions I grappled with didn't start to become clear until after I had written, deleted, and rewritten the beginning of the story nearly a half dozen times. They continued to deepen and expand all through the drafting process. I literally had to write the book before I could have crafted a prompt to capture even the smallest part of it.
No sophisticated mad-libs program could have found a short cut to that destination.
My main reason for writing is to discover the heart of a story. Sure, having my work sell, win awards, be read, be appreciated and enjoyed is all great, but none of that is possible or even of interest to me without the journey.
And if that journey takes longer than I planned? Well, that's where the journey gets fascinating. That's where all the best adventures and stories come from.
If you are looking for a very human tale, filled with emotion and hope, with earnest characters coping with loss and searching for connection, please give LITANY a try. I have always written the books I needed to read. Perhaps you need this story too.
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