The Riches of Xulthar is now complete! I’m sending it out to my editor this afternoon, and if all goes well, it will be available in all formats by the end of September.
In the meantime, I have decided to post the entire thing chapter by chapter on my blog. I’ll be posting the final, unedited version, as well as my AI-assisted draft which I wrote/generated with Sudowrite. It was about 60/40 generated/written, so I can’t say how much of it was purely AI, but if you plug it into an AI text detector you should be able to get a pretty good idea.
My process for writing this novel was as follows:
ChatGPT: The whole thing started out by playing with ChatGPT, with the prompt “let’s write a fantasy adventure story in the style of Robert E. Howard.” I thought it would turn out to be a pretty straightforward short story, but it quickly ballooned into something else. I still kept playing with it, but mostly to get the framework of the overall story.
Outlining: Once I had a general idea for the story, I spent a couple of weeks outlining the whole thing, as if I were outlining one of my regular novels. Besides a chapter/scene map and a list of all the throughlines with their associated plot points, I also filled out character sheets for the main characters, with a little bit of help from ChatGPT.
Sudowrite: I used Sudowrite to write/generate the first draft. This was about 60/40 human written to AI generated. Basically, I would write a few hundred words, generate a few hundred words, and either keep it, tweak it, or throw it out and write something else. Rinse and repeat.
Humanizing: Once I had a decent rough draft, I passed it through the “human filter” by rewriting it into a new document, with the AI-assisted draft on my other screen. No copy-pasting, though there were sections where I basically wrote it out almost exactly how it appeared in the rough draft. However, I also made some pretty substantial changes, even expanding the rough draft into new scenes and chapters. This phase took the most work.
Revising: After the humanizing phase was done, I went through a normal revision draft, the way I do with all of my novels. I got some feedback from my writing group for the prologue and first chapter, but otherwise didn’t get any reader feedback, mainly because the process was so accelerated that I doubt anyone could have gotten it back to me in time. More on that later.
Polishing: For the final polishing draft, I went through and cut a straight 10% off of the whole novel, scene by scene. No major story changes for this phase: just sharpening up the prose and making it as clean and tight as possible.
Without using AI, it takes me anywhere from 6 to 18 months to write a novel, sometimes much more. But from start to finish, The Riches of Xulthar only took me three months—and the first of that was mostly just figuring out what to do with all of this content that I’d produced while playing around with ChatGPT. I didn’t start using Sudowrite to generate the actual first draft until the second week of May, and here we are in the second week of July, and the entire thing is finished.
I am very eager to hear what you guys think of this book, which is why I’m posting both the final unedited draft and the AI draft on my blog. I’ll be posting a new chapter every week, the final draft version on Thursday, and the AI draft version on Saturday. I hope you enjoy it!
