My uncle just got remarried, after losing his wife of some 40+ years to dimentia. The wedding was Saturday, so I flew up there in the early morning with my two sisters who live here in Utah. And then, because my four year-old daughter had her first primary program in church this Sunday, I flew back that night around midnight.
With all of that said, though, I still managed to get 2k words of writing in while on the plane or in the airport (mostly on the plane). This was all human writing, taking the stuff that I’d previously generated with AI and using it as a detailed outline (or sometimes as a loose suggestion) while I rewrote it in my own words. Which goes to show how AI-assisted writing can be super useful, especially for those in-between moments where it’s impossible to get a more sustained focus. If not for what I had previously generated, I wouldn’t have gotten more than a couple of hundred words in, if that much. And of course, I didn’t get any writing in during the wedding or any of the family stuff before and after.
Needless to say, after waking up at 5am to fly out, and not going to sleep until 2am the following morning, I was pretty hashed all Sunday. But the primary program went really well. My daughter remembered her part, and all but swallowed the microphone as she shouted it so we could all hear: “I love Jesus! Jesus is the Prince of Peace and the King of Kings!” It was hilarious, and very cute.
Sudowrite just rolled out a new outlining feature in their Story Bible, which replaces the old outline field. I tried it out this morning, and two things strike me about it:
First, it’s really nice that there’s no longer a word limit on the novel outline. I did have a little trouble getting my chapters to link with the outline, so there are probably still some things on the backend that need to be smoothed out, but I did get it to work in the end.
Second, it is SUPER convenient to be able to have the AI generate the individual chapter descriptions. After playing around with it, I found that the best way to generate them was simply to copy and paste all of the plot points from the spreadsheet that I use to map out the whole book, not even bothering to format it for the weird table breaks and tabs. The AI takes all of that input as-is and spits out a super accurate chapter description every time! Very nice, and hopefully it translates to better chapter beats too.
So for today and tomorrow, I’m going to work on the outline for Lizzie-99XT. After that, I’ll go back to writing out the rough human draft for The Road to New Jerusalem, and probably just focus on human writing for the rest of the month.
