Frontiers Revisited
by Paige Hawthorne
Copyright© 2026 by Paige Hawthorne
Essay Story: This is merely an AI-generated evaluation of one of my SOL stories. (I would have posted it as a blog, except it's too long.)
Tags: True Story
Love it or hate it ... AI is here.
I submitted one of my SOL Stories —”Frontiers” — to Claude AI and Chat GP2 for proofreading. (This was merely a curiosity project, since I’d already published it here.)
I was astonished at how many errors each of them found. (For example, I’d misspelled two of my main characters’s names. Murdoch instead of Murdock, and Rebeca instead of Rebecca.) But those two bloopers represented only a tiny fraction of the mistakes they found.
Next, I instructed the two AI systems — “Please give me your overall opinion of “Frontiers”. I’m not looking for compliments.
Claude AI:
Here’s my honest take, organized by what’s working and what isn’t.
What’s genuinely strong
The voice is the book’s best asset. Flint’s clipped, colloquial narration — dropped auxiliaries, fragments, dry understatement — is consistent and does real work establishing character. The “time slowed down” motif for violence is used with discipline rather than overused. Cayuse’s near-silence is well-handled; his few words land because they’re rare. The period texture (the Mesker Brothers facades, the Ramage press, LeMats, the telegraph mechanics) shows real research and grounds the setting.
Structural problems
The book is episodic rather than driven. Chapters read as a sequence of incidents — a fight, a rescue, a business negotiation, a sex scene, a threat neutralized — rather than a plot that builds pressure. Antagonists get introduced with menace (Venerable, the Fitzes, the Cravens, Lord Sidcup) and then get resolved almost frictionlessly: Flint out-guns or outmaneuvers every threat with minimal cost to him. There’s no real setback, no moment where Flint fails or pays a price. That flattens tension over sixteen chapters — the reader stops worrying about him because nothing has ever gone wrong for him.
The ending resolves through convenience rather than earned plotting: the Gilmore Girls arrive and immediately solve character problems (Rosie’s trauma, Cayuse’s reticence, the town’s acceptance of Rosie) mostly through their presence and force of personality. The EagleLeague, seeded across several chapters as a genuine menace, ends the book as an ominous final image rather than a resolved thread — which can work as a sequel hook, but as written here it reads more like a dropped plot line the book didn’t have room to pay off.
Prose-level issues
You already have a good sense of the recurring mechanical problems (comma splices, missing hyphens, name drift — Cheney/Chaney, Jennings/Jenkins, Hank/Walt Mosby, Randy/Rusty). Those aren’t just typos at this point; they’re a symptom of the manuscript not having gone through a consistency pass, and there are enough of them that a reader will notice. The “maybe-smile” tag for Rosie and “Chiquita” for Cayuse are used so often they stop registering as characterization and start reading as verbal tics the author reaches for by default.
The content issue I’d actually push back on
The Rosie arc is the thing I’d flag hardest, and I think you should think about it deliberately rather than let it ride. She’s explicitly established as 16, a recent trauma survivor of sexual violence, and the narrative moves her — over a handful of chapters — into a sexualized relationship with Flint (bathing together, sitting on his lap while sipping his whiskey, “whispered” sexual conversations, ultimately group sleeping arrangements and a threesome-adjacent household) before “properly” pairing her off with Cayuse. Whatever the intent, the effect on the page is that a just-rescued 16-year-old’s arc runs through the adult male protagonist’s sexuality as a kind of way station. That’s going to read as a serious problem to a lot of readers, not a stylistic choice — it’s the kind of thing that would follow the book into reviews regardless of how well-drawn the sentences around it are.
More broadly, the whole manuscript’s default mode toward women is heavily weighted toward sex work as backdrop, and toward female characters (Rosie included) processing trauma primarily through relation to Flint. Rebecca has more interiority than most, but even her arc resolves into “Flint’s woman” rather than anything separate from him.
Other things worth naming plainly
Using Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch (Robert B. Parker’s characters) and a showman named George Orwell reads as either an in-joke or a slip — but either way it’s borrowed IP dropped into an otherwise original world, and it’ll register as odd to anyone who catches it. The slurs (Sidcup’s, and others) are period-accurate, but there are a lot of them, and not all of them are doing narrative work beyond signaling “this era was racist.” Some land as characterization (Sidcup); others feel like texture for texture’s sake. Flint is nearly flawless — unbeatable in a gunfight, unfailingly moral, uniformly desired by every woman in the book. There’s no real friction in who he is, which limits how much the reader can invest in whether he’ll be okay.
Bottom line: the sentence-level voice and period research are genuinely good, and there’s a real book somewhere in here. But right now it’s a string of incidents rather than a story with rising stakes, the prose needs a real line edit beyond what we’ve been doing chapter by chapter, and the Rosie material is worth reconsidering carefully rather than defending on craft grounds alone.
Chat GP2:
What I think “Badlands” is:
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