So I just finished the rough AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, after nine days of outlining and prewriting, and five days of working with Sudowrite to generate it. The rough draft clocks in at 18 chapters (plus a prologue and an epilogue), 80 scenes, and 153,254 words. I used about 770,000 AI credits from start to finish, including for generating all of the characters and worldbuilding in addition to the text of the draft itself.
I have to say, I am really impressed with the incremental improvements over at Sudowrite, and with Claude 3.7, which was the AI model that I used to generate most of this book. I did try out Sudowrite’s new Muse model, but I wasn’t too impressed with it, at least for generating new chapters. For the in-chapter tools, such as guided write, expand, or rewrite, it’s probably fantastic, but with generating new chapters from my outline it just felt too much like it threw all my worldbuilding into a blender. Most likely I either had the creative setting set too high, or I gave it too many prompts.
But when I switched to Claude 3.7 (Sudowrite’s “Excellent” model), the results were amazing. I seriously felt less like I was writing the novel and more like I was reading it for the first time. There’s still a lot of work to be done, especially in the second half of the book, where many of the scenes strayed from the overall story structure, either forgetting things that had already happened or assuming things that hadn’t yet. There’s also quite a bit of worldbuilding that I would like to add in, and a handful of small hallucinations that need to be cut out, as well as a major change that I made in one of the characters and need to smooth out in other scenes… but overall, I found myself really enjoying this book, and was frankly surprised at how well it fleshed out the setting and characters, making them really stand out. It also added some really great dialogue that is probably going to make it to the final draft.
I was originally planning to lay this WIP aside while I switch to another project, but I think now the best course will be to work on the AI draft until I make it as good as I can. That way, I can tinker with the AI prompts while they are still fresh in my mind. Once I’ve gotten the AI draft as good as I can make it, I’ll lay it aside for awhile to let my subconscious work on the story, so that when I pick it up again, I’ll be better able to do an awesome human draft.
I would have added a mock-up for the book cover, but you would not believe how hard it is to get an AI image generator to give you a picture of David and Goliath that doesn’t have David holding a bow and arrow! Seriously—every time I prompt it for a fantasy illustration of David and Goliath, where Goliath is a giant horned monster, it shows David with a bow and arrow instead of a sling. It’s almost as bad as the strawberry problem! But let’s see if WordPress can do it…
Nope. Yet another AI image fail. I even specifically said he was wielding a balearic sling. Sigh.
