... and it very clearly has a long way to go.
I write and maintain my stories in Google Docs, and I have stubbornly ignored the nonstop prompting to use AI to help me with my writing. Then I thought, "why not try it?" since it wouldn't leave me alone, so I did.
Mixed bag. I like how I can tell it to write a few paragraphs where such and such happens. It saves a lot of time by writing a substrate, which takes me forever so I'm glad about that. What it writes, however, is a weird mixture of creepily on point and bizarrely wrong... and often way too verbose. Somebody once said, "perfection is not achieved when there is nothing left to add, but rather when there is nothing left to take away" and I have to agree. I think it's useful, as it writes a good base of prose, but I don't know if it's saving me a bunch of time since I basically eviscerate all the generated text to make it say what I want. It's a nice starting point, though, and that seems to make things easier. It gets rid of the most boring parts of writing.
"Suggestive" was my first attempt at writing a story inspired by another author who I thought could have gone much further with the premise, and I was frustrated he didn't. Somewhere he mentioned he also uses AI, so that seemed to also make me inclined to take it more seriously.
I have also seen absolute travesties of AI writing. There are books for sale on Amazon as we speak that are incomprehensible gibberish. So I guess it's an Uncle Ben moment, where AI is great power, but also great responsibility.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the stories.
So a bunch of people were having difficulty finding the first two stories in A Modern Day Mage; apparently there's an automatic filter that prevents you from even seeing work that contains underage sex. Fair.
While I won't apologize for the stories I wrote twenty years ago, I understand that people might not want to read that sort of material. Honestly, at the time I was writing The Touch and The Sight, I still felt it was a bit... risky. But the plot required a cocky, talented teenager driven by hormones and guided by a flexible morality at least partially shaped by his environment, and there's just no way he'd hold himself back. So... it is what it is. If I had to write the stories again, I likely would have chosen a slightly different setting to avoid the pitfalls of modern sensibilities. Sometimes stories just don't age well. I do think they still read well though, and I get it if you're lost reading the third installment. I have no intention of going back and editing the first two parts however; it would have to be a complete rewrite.
I will say I don't intend to have David engage in explicit underage sex in this part. It will still be happening, but it will be tastefully(?) off-screen, as it were. Hope that clears up the confusion.
I've got a bunch of partially finished stories. No idea if I'll ever finish them, but should I post what I have here? I don't write a lot, just when the mood hits me. I personally find partial stories a bit annoying, but it might be nice to at least have them read and critiqued. Thoughts?