Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 8

World of Tiers (Not Its Real Title)

FINE, having been reluctantly persuaded that Thirteen Petals is not necessarily consonant enough with the metaphysics of the world — just envision me being hauled away from that title, kicking and screaming all the way — I’m now thinking most seriously of —

Nine Steps from Dawn to Midnight

Other possibilities:

Thirteenfold World (Elaine’s Teen — this one is sort of growing on me a bit.)

The Dragon Cameo (Mona — to me it seems almost too mundane or … not sure that’s the word … too generic? Not sure.)

Gates of Air and Shadow (do not particularly like this one personally; don’t know why.)

Saffron Sky (this is not an important characteristic of the world, so it doesn’t actually have a lot going for it other than alliteration.)

None of these has a SE Asia vibe the way that (to me) Thirteen Petals did. In combination with the right sort of dragon on the cover, The Dragon Cameo could pick up that kind of vibe. I suppose that technically any cover picks up vibe from the cover.

Tiger Soul (Doesn’t that sound too much like Tiger Mom?)

***

I don’t hate Nine Steps from Dawn to Midnight, and I’m leaning toward that. I believe the cover artist is about ready to begin the cover. Sometime between now and the time he roughs out the cover, I guess I will have to decide, even if “decide” in this case means “close my eyes and throw a dart.”

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Poetry Thursday: Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, quite a mouthful of a name! was born in 1875.

Poetry Foundation says: A writer of short stories, essays, and poems, Dunbar-Nelson was comfortable in many genres but was best known for her prose. One of the few female African American diarists of the early 20th century, she portrays the complicated reality of African American women and intellectuals

Here’s one of her poems I like, and think is especially suitable for midsummer, when it’s too hot to actually do anything.

The Idler

An idle lingerer on the wayside’s road,
He gathers up his work and yawns away;
A little longer, ere the tiresome load
Shall be reduced to ashes or to clay.

No matter if the world has marched along,
And scorned his slowness as it quickly passed;
No matter, if amid the busy throng,
He greets some face, infantile at the last.

His mission? Well, there is but one,
And if it is a mission he knows it, nay,
To be a happy idler, to lounge and sun,
And dreaming, pass his long-drawn days away.

So dreams he on, his happy life to pass
Content, without ambitions painful sighs,
Until the sands run down into the glass;
He smiles—content—unmoved and dies

And yet, with all the pity that you feel
For this poor mothling of that flame, the world;
Are you the better for your desperate deal,
When you, like him, into infinitude are hurled?

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What is a Character, Anyway?

I was startled at my reaction recently when an early reader of Hedesa said something like, “I wasn’t that interested in most of Tarashana characters.”

Here was my instant reaction: Of course not! There aren’t any Tarashana characters in Hedesa.

Then I thought, Hmm, that’s an interesting reaction.

Saying “There aren’t any Tarashana characters in Hedesa” is misleading. Hedesaveriel is in fact a character, though a minor one. Ijesele might be a character, though a very minor one. The other Tarashana characters certainly aren’t characters: they are part of the setting and part of the plot.

But why do I say that? What makes me feel that way? They aren’t all just part of a crowd of unnamed characters (though in fact that does describe MOST of the Tarashana we see). We have three named Tarashana who appear repeatedly and get lines of dialogue: Jesarian, Ledaleuthial, and Inhetariel. I’m sure you notice that this isn’t very many considering that we are in the starlit lands for 350 pages (or so) and see a whopping lot of Tarashana people at a distance.

If you think back to Tasmakat, that worked the same way. The back third of the book — about 350 pages, give or take — featured lots and lots of Lakasha and a scattering of Ro-Antelet. How many of them were part of the setting and plot? A lot. How many of the named Lakasha or Ro-Antelet characters were really characters? A handful. Important characters? A tiny handful: Tasmakat herself and arguably Bakharot, the Ro with the feet, and offhand I would say that’s it. A few others got a handful of lines and were minor characters. The Ro child was so cute that to me she seems like a real character, but very minor, of course. She’s so minor she could be described as part of the scenery. (A cute part.)

***

It is impossible to find characters who are truly scenery as interesting as characters who are really characters. What makes the difference?

Relationships.

If and only if the secondary character is in a relationship with the protagonist, the character becomes a real character. That’s what I think, and this would be an interesting thing to discuss at a convention because I can imagine different authors and readers taking other positions. But to me, it looks like this:

Nameless people in a crowd — pure scenery.

Person who barely opens his mouth but plays a pivotal role in the plot — element of the plot.

Person who conveys information — element of the plot.

People whom the protagonist notices exist, but doesn’t really notice as people — scenery or elements of the plot.

People with whom the protagonist has a minor, unimportant relationship — minor characters.

People with whom the protagonist has an emotionally important relationship — now you’re talking. These are real secondary characters. These are the characters the protagonist cares about as people, and therefore the characters the author and readers also care about at people. There are a lot of characters in Hedesa. In order of their importance to Tano, they are:

Raga … … … Tokowa … … … Gedes, Kelleos, Parra … … … … the pony, Hedesaveriel, Nagaro, Barano, Varorda … … … … … everyone else back here somewhere.

The pony is possibly up a bit closer to the front. Regardless, the reader is not likely to care all that much about characters that are lost in the clutter at the back, although if I did it right, the reader ought to care enough to notice various events involving some of those characters. But almost everr reader is probably going to care a lot more about characters closer to the front. It’s closeness to or importance to Tano that moves the character from the back to the front, and I would argue that this is always, always, always what makes the character important to the reader as well. I mean emotionally important, which is totally different from important to the plot because the character does something.

And there aren’t any Tarashana characters who are important to Tano except Hedesaveriel, who isn’t THAT important.

The NEXT book will be different, because I’m going to ditch most of the characters, THANK GOD — this is probably going to take longer than I hope and making it happen will probably therefore add length and I will be rolling my eyes about that, but eventually, I hope fairly near the beginning, an event or two will occur that will make this happen. [No mass death, just putting that out there; a lot of characters will move offstage, not die.]

[I bet it really happens at about the 50% mark — ed.]

No matter when that happens, at that point, for the rest of the book, the characters who will be on stage will be more important to Tano, or else scenery, those two basic categories. If a Tarashana (or Saa’arii) character is on stage at that point, they will be a real character and I trust you will find them engaging as well as interesting. They will also enable us to learn a whole lot more about their people(s).

I do know exactly (relatively speaking) how some of this will work. But I’m not sure how much I want to say about where the story is going, because spoilers.

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Almost, Okay?

All right, due to this and that, including an abrupt visit from relatives I hardly ever have a chance to see, I did not quite complete the final proofing pass last night.

I’m doing that today, it should take just a few hours, fitting those hours in around other things will of course slow everything down still farther, BUT, I am determined to drop HEDESA at my Patreon by the end of the day today, so that IS coming up.

***

For those who might want to know, here is the list of TUYO books in chronological order. This list or something similar will go up on the series page at this website soon-ish, but here it is now. I’m bolding and underlining Ryo’s trilogy because the chronology of everything else is described relative to that trilogy. I’m italicizing any books that aren’t close to finished.

MARAG — 20 years before TUYO.

NIKOLES — 14 years before TUYO

TUYO

SUELEN — immediately after TUYO

TARASHANA — 1 1/2 years after TUYO

KERAUNANI — concurrent with TARASHANA

TANO — immediately after TARASHANA

“Returning Hokino’s Knife,” in the Tuyo World Companion, a few months after TANO, concurrently with —

TASMAKAT — opens immediately after TARASHANA and stretches out for months, what with one thing and another.

HEDESA — opens immediately after TASMAKAT

BEREKET — I’m giving away the intended protagonist, and I hope this doesn’t backfire because I run into unanticipated issues, but I really enjoy the opening scenes that are on the page. Takes place concurrently with HEDESA, causing The Thing That Happens in the West.

HEDESA BOOK II, UNTITLED — opens immediately after HEDESA, but I haven’t started it.

HEDESA BOOK III, UNTITLED — I would be astonished if the rest of this story fits into one book, so I’m assuming two more books from Tano’s pov before this story reaches an actual conclusion. I actually know, more or less, the ultimate conclusion. It’s going to take time to get there.

RIHASI — Two years after TASMAKAT, and therefore about two years after BEREKET, and honestly I think it will wind up fine whichever someone reads first. My intention is to make sure it does work fine whether someone is going in chronological order or publication order.

The odds seem very high that other books will appear that are set either before or after RIHASI, or both.

TATHIMI — my intention is to pick up Aras’ granddaughter when she is about fifteen or seventeen and move forward from there.

SEKARAN — vignettes that begin before even MARAG and continue, probably, to a point just before or during TATHIMI. Therefore, this one book will sweep through the whole series chronologically, with moments set before, after, and during the events of all the other books. That’s why it’s so hard to decide how to present this one in a list like this, and I’m sure the back cover description will be challenging as well.

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Writers Block

A good post about this at Patricia Wrede’s blog.

I like this post because

(a) Patricia Wrede immediately separates out clinical depression as something else before moving on, which I do think is crucial; and

(b) To my surprise, she also comes up with some new things I haven’t read before / thought of.

In this post, Patricia Wrede distinguishes between burnout, extreme disinclination to work on something — I think surely these two intergrade into each other, but she lists them as #1 and #4, so she considers them separate. I would also say that extreme disinclination and depression might intergrade and I would be very suspicious if more than a couple of days passed and an author (meaning me) could not force herself to make noticeable progress on a project.

I say that because I am familiar with extreme disinclination, I hate it, it happens, I agree it’s not the same thing as depression or just getting stuck, and here is where setting a minimum wordcount per day or a minimum time spent writing per day might be most helpful, imo.

She also mentions more craft-related types of problems: writing block and project block. The former basically means having a hard time picking up a new project, and the latter basically indicates that the author is stuck in the middle of a specific project.

[Maybe you should figure out everyone’s secret plans before you’re 100,000 words into the story? -ed]

Decent suggestions at the linked post, with no indication that this is a list of Magic Tips That Will Work or anything like that.

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Update: Probably tomorrow

I’m going to try to do the last of the proofreading tweaks to Hedesa today AND make a decent-looking epub file today, and if all goes well, then I’ll schedule that to drop at my Patreon tomorrow morning. If necessary, I’ll finish sorting out the epub file tomorrow and drop it as soon as it’s ready, which still means it’ll probably go live tomorrow, just later in the day.

As a perk of setting the preorder date for August, there’s no huge rush about the paperback or hardcover versions, which means that for the first time I will be making (virtually) all the corrections to just ONE file and then creating the other files, rather than having to make a hundred corrections to three or four different files. I plan to enjoy that, as it’s the only less-tedious part of this particular proofreading task. Special thanks to Linda S and Anna S, who each proofed two drafts and thus suffered through the majority of the typos. As always, I’m stunned to find things such as, oh, it should be “astrologer” but it’s actually “astrology.” Ugh, hideously obvious typo. I’ve done significant tweaking that is much less obvious, but I think is important. But, as I say, I’m about finished with that.

MEANWHILE

I really did work on other things most mornings to reduce the wear and tear of tedious tweaking and proofing, and I will just say that Sekaran keeps getting longer, as I think, “You know, I think I’ll add a chapter right here … and another one right here …”

Something that arises from writing something so episodic is that the scenes are so distinctive and so disjunct in time that I can write them completely out of order without the least difficulty. Since the whole point has been “Save Self From Dying of Boredom,” this means I’ve been kinda writing the most fun bits of different chapters, skipping around, so at this point eight chapters are completely finished and three are partly finished. There should be about fifteen chapters total, unless, I mean, I DO keep adding chapters. It’s at the 150 pp mark at this point. I expect it will most likely turn into Tuyo: Book 11, while the thing that happened in the west will more likely be Tuyo: Book 12 — that just hit the 50 page mark — and that means Tano’s next book, picking up immediately after the ending of Hedesa, will be Tuyo: Book 13.

MEANWHILE

I just got comments back on World of Tiers Not It’s Real Name, and I’m relieved that the first reaction is: Yes, it’s in good shape. Fiddling will of course ensue, but (a) the cover should be started soon, by a very fast cover artist, so soon I will have to truly decide on the title and then I will put this book up for preorder. I will look over editorial comments once more, but I expect I will set it to release at Amazon September 2, with the expectation that I will drop it at my Patreon two to four weeks in advance. This is what I meant when I said the back half of the year would have a lot more action than the first half.

MEANWHILE

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*

*

These aren’t honeybees or bumblebees. They all appeared yesterday with a whoosh after the rain stopped and the sun came out. I think they’re miner bees. They’re extremely placid — most bees are, really — and easy to photograph.

There are 20,000 species of bees in the world, give or take a few thousand species, which is why the occasional panic about honeybee colony collapse is the single silliest ecological worry that has ever or will ever be promulgated. Honeybees — you may know this — are invasive, except people like them and support them, so no one calls them an invasive species. But they are, and they have had fairly dire effects on native bee populations on every continent except wherever they originated (different theories, but it wasn’t anywhere in America). Miner bees, however, are fine, relatively speaking. We have hordes of them around. They aren’t as pretty as the metallic blue and gold and green bees, not as cute as the tiny black bees, but I like them. Miner bees are a solitary species. Each female digs her very own little burrow and lays eggs in it with a pollen supply. You almost can’t get them to sting, always a plus for insects. Just don’t actually put your hand down on one and you’re fine.

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Chalicotheres

Today, FOR NO REASON AT ALL, I just feel that possibly it might be fun to draw your attention to an extinct mammal clade that nobody knows about, but everybody should.

Chalicotheres were Perissodactyls …

Pausing to explain what Perissodactyls are. The order Perissodactyla includes horses, rhinos, and tapirs. In the past, this order has been massively more diverse than it is today. Artiodactyls — the order that includes cows, goats, sheep, muskoxen, antelope, pronghorns, gazelle, deer, pigs, giraffes, llamas, hippos, on and on — totally outcompeted Perissodactyls, as you can guess from the sheer diversity of mammals in Artiodactyla. But for a while there, Perissodactyls were quite a thing.

The largest land-mammal ever, Paraceratherium  (Indricotherium, Baluchitherium, whatever you want to call it) was a Perissodactyl.

There were absolutely hordes of rhinos, including fleet, gracile, running forms as well as tank versions we still have today. As a rule, whatever animal you’re looking at, its clade has included wildly more species than you’d think. Did you know that there are about 900 species of rats and mice today? Heaven only knows how many have existed since the dawn of the Murid family.

But moving on.

Perissodactya also included, as mentioned above, chalicotheres, which were just weird. The only knuckle-walking animals we are familiar with are the great apes and (I just thought of this) the giant anteater, but the relevant example is a gorilla. Think of how a gorilla stands, sits, walks, and runs.

Knuckle-walking great ape, image from Unsplash

And here’s a short video clip of a gorilla moving.

This is not the anatomy or movement we expect of a RHINO or HORSE, but some of the chalicotheres had similar anatomy and movement, or in fact much more extreme anatomy and movement. They were some of the weirdest-looking mammals ever:

Just consider this a public service message, as everyone ought to know more about neat prehistoric faunas. There are dinosaur toys everywhere for kids, and I personally think we should also offer kids sets of wonderful prehistoric mammals.

There’s a great book called The Rise and Reign of Mammals that anyone interested might check out. There’s also a fantastic video that goes along with this book:

Enjoy thinking about deep time!

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Poetry Thursday: Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in 1872 — in June, yes — I thought because last week I picked Yeats, who is very famous, I would look this time for a poet whom I’ve never heard of. Here we go.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, to two formerly enslaved people from Kentucky. He became one of the first influential Black poets in American literature and was internationally acclaimed for his dialect verse in collections such as Majors and Minors (Hadley & Hadley, 1895) and Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1896). The dialect poems constitute only a small portion of Dunbar’s canon, which is replete with novels, short stories, essays, and many poems. In its entirety, Dunbar’s literary body is regarded as an impressive representation of Black life in the turn-of-the-century United States.

A lot more about Dunbar here. I only clicked on two poems before finding one I loved. Here it is:

***

The Paradox

I am the mother of sorrows,
I am the ender of grief;
I am the bud and the blossom,
I am the late-falling leaf.

I am thy priest and thy poet,
I am thy serf and thy king;
I cure the tears of the heartsick,
When I come near they shall sing.

White are my hands as the snowdrop;
Swart are my fingers as clay;
Dark is my frown as the midnight,
Fair is my brow as the day.

Battle and war are my minions,
Doing my will as divine;
I am the calmer of passions,
Peace is a nursling of mine.

Speak to me gently or curse me,
Seek me or fly from my sight;
I am thy fool in the morning,
Thou art my slave in the night.

Down to the grave I will take thee,
Out from the noise of the strife,
Then shalt thou see me and know me—
Death, then, no longer, but life.

Then shalt thou sing at my coming,
Kiss me with passionate breath,
Clasp me and smile to have thought me
Aught save the foeman of death.

Come to me, brother, when weary,
Come when thy lonely heart swells;
I’ll guide thy footsteps and lead thee
Down where the Dream Woman dwells.

***

Here’s another —

***

Ships that Pass in the Night

Out in the sky the great dark clouds are massing;
I look far out into the pregnant night,
Where I can hear a solemn booming gun
And catch the gleaming of a random light,
That tells me that the ship I seek is passing, passing.

My tearful eyes my soul’s deep hurt are glassing;
For I would hail and check that ship of ships.
I stretch my hands imploring, cry aloud,
My voice falls dead a foot from mine own lips,
And but its ghost doth reach that vessel, passing, passing.

O Earth, O Sky, O Ocean, both surpassing,
O heart of mine, O soul that dreads the dark!
Is there no hope for me? Is there no way
That I may sight and check that speeding bark
Which out of sight and sound is passing, passing?

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Would You Turn the Page?

One of Rhamey’s posts at Writer Unboxed: Would You Turn the First Page of this Bestseller?

“You understand what that means, don’t you, Rob?” Ryder murmurs as he straightens his suit, not that it was even wrinkled in the first place. Fucker always dresses like he’s ready to walk a runway. Though the cold calculation in his gaze lets you know he’s not just a pretty face.

I told him once I could scar his face for him, it might make others take him more seriously. I don’t know why he said no.

I, on the other hand, am covered in Rob’s blood, so is Garrett for that matter. His scarred, tatted up knuckles bleed from the punches he delivered to our unhappy host. Munching on the guy’s crisps, I watch in glee as Garrett delivers another brutal blow before stepping back. There’s a reason they call him Mad Dog in the ring—you don’t even see the big bastard coming. I’d know, I’ve fought him a couple of times. They were good times, even if I did break some bones.

Blinking, I look back at the man in the chair opposite Ryder. Rob’s eye is ballooned shut, his lip split and cheek already bruising. And those are only the wounds you can see. I know there are a few blisters forming under his shirt from where Ryder let me have some fun.
Kenzo is leaning against the wall opposite me, his dice rolling between his fingers like always. His face, similar to Ryder’s, is locked in a death stare with the man, waiting for something interesting to happen. It was Kenzo who brought this man to our attention, after all. But Rob looks only to Ryder—good. Let him think Ryder is the only one in charge, we like to keep it that way. To have him as the face of our … company.

I did not stop in the middle of a sentence, as Rhamey did, because I think that’s unfair. The first page is however long it is depending on how you set the font size (if you’re reading an ebook), so it’s artificial to stop in the middle of a sentence, and worse when the last sentence is interesting.

Rhamey says he wouldn’t turn the page. Neither would I, but not for the same reason. Watching someone getting beaten to death on the first page is a big, big turnoff for me. Who is this author and why is this a bestseller?

This is Den of Vipers by KA Knight, whom I’ve never heard of. This person has written a huge number of books, though. Here’s the description from Den of Vipers:

Ryder, Garrett, Kenzo, and Diesel—The Vipers.

They run this town and everyone in it. Their deals are as sordid as their business, and their reputation is enough to bring a grown man to his knees, forcing him to beg for mercy. They are not people you mess with, yet my dad did. The old man ran up a debt with them and then sold me to cover his losses. Yes, sold me. They own me now.

I’m theirs in every sense of the word. But I’ve never been meek and compliant. These men, they look at me with longing. Their scarred, blood-stained hands holding me tight. They want everything I am, everything I have to give, and won’t stop until they get just that. They can own my body, but they will never have my heart. The Vipers? I’m going to make them regret the day they took me.

This girl? She bites too.

Which sounds extremely uninviting, especially since this is evidently a reverse harem violent kidnappers-to-lovers romance. It has, I will note, 70,000 ratings. I have no idea how Rhamey picks the bestsellers he features, but, well, not really my cup of tea.

***

Let’s try a different first page.

Three of the yard-long bean seedlings had their first true leaves. They’d unfurled like green hearts overnight, and Andrew Uchida — if that was really his name — was delghted.

The long bean seeds had arrived as a single dried reddish-orange pod the length of Andrew’s forearm. He’d cracked the papery husk to find eight pale kidney-shaped seeds. Mathematics, skill, a little wild invention, and the magic of geometric progression had finally put Andrew’s goal within reach.

He’d planted the seedlings in deep clay pots designed not to disturb the sensitive roots of the young plants. Andrew had spent the entire winter pouring over diagrams of magnets and wire coils, painstakingly constructing a water wheel turned by the irrigation canal that ran by his seed shed. In January, he’d turned on the first Edisonian incandescent light in Wedgeford. Those combined gave him a two-week start to the growing season.

He had kept his long beans a secret. Five of his eight seeds had germinated. He’d consulted calendars and done math: the fruit of these seedlings would go to seed themselves in 12 weeks, and he’d start the next wave of seedlings hopefully a hundred strong. By the time those went to seed in late August, he’d have enough for everyone in Wedgeford to sow a row of yard-long beans for a November harvest.

I just thought the extreme peacefulness of this opening made a delightful contrast with the brutal first page of the first example. Does anyone have a guess about who this is? This is Courtney Milan’s latest, The Earl Who Isn’t. Here’s the description:

Nobody knows that Andrew Uchida is the rightful heir of an earl. Not his friends, not his neighbors, not even the yard-long beans growing in his experimental garden. If the truth of his existence became public, the blue-blooded side of his family would stop at nothing to make him (and anyone connected with him) disappear. He shared one passionate night with the woman he loved…and allowed himself that only because she was leaving for Hong Kong the next morning.

Then Lily Bei returns, armed with a printing press, her irrepressible spirit, and a sheaf of inconvenient documents that prove the very thing Andrew wants concealed: that he is actually the legitimate, first born son of the Earl of Arsell.

What’s Andrew to do, when the woman he’s always desired promises him everything he’s never wanted? Andrew’s track record of saying no to Lily is nonexistent. The only way he can avert impending disaster is by stealing the evidence… while trying desperately not to fall in love (again) with the woman he shouldn’t let into his life.

Quite an illustration of the extremely broad spectrum of Romance novels!

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The Costs of Using AI Editing Tools

I’m immediately predisposed to believe there may be significant costs, but this blog post’s title actually comes from a post at Jane Friedman’s blog:

The Hidden Costs of AI Copyediting Tools: An Editor’s Review

Here is what the author of this post, has to say:

To more objectively gauge the abilities of various AI tools, I took a fantasy short story and performed developmental, line editing, and copyediting on it, then compared my edits with the feedback generated by different AI-powered editing platforms. To round out the review, I also considered other criteria, such as user experience and external factors like the terms of service and how users’ work is stored. For copyediting tools, I specifically evaluated Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, ProWritingAid, and AutoCrit.

I think this editor was missing the boat if she didn’t also evaluate ChatGPT, but let’s see what she concluded. She was using a short story written by her sister, she says, and she declares this was a good quality story.

Now, what are the takeaways? The author of this post considers these tools useful for avoiding repetition, such as cutting down on the number of sentences beginning with “I.” She also noted:

However, [Hemingway] also suggested many things that were either not incorrect in the original or would be an error to introduce. For example, it recommended a hyphen in the verb “half dragging.” However, the Chicago Manual of Style recommends leaving verb forms with “half” open. It did not recognize that “keen” is a verb as well as an adjective and thus flagged it as an error. It suggested changing a period at the end of a line of dialogue to a comma. However, what followed was not a dialogue tag, so the original period was correct. 

I used to prefer hyphenating half- constructions; then I had a copyeditor who was death on hyphens for half- constructions. She re-trained my eye, and now my preference is to hyphenate with half- if and only if it is used in a two-word adjective construction, such as, here, this is a half-moon gateway, whereas that up there in the sky is a half moon and this is my half brother. I don’t know how other style guides handle this, but I presume the copyeditor who pushed me away from hyphenating half- was probably following the Chicago style.

For ProWritingAid, the author of this post notes that ProWritingAid offers an almost ridiculous amount of tools, and I have to say, I flinch when someone who says she is an editor uses “amount” in this sentence. I wonder if ProWritingAid would point out that this is an error? The main problem with ProWritingAid was apparently the flood of suggestions, many of which were irrelevant or wrong.

During my review, I found that for every one potential problem that I actually addressed or reworded, there were easily thirty that were not problems at all. For instance, in the cliché check, it flagged the word “ginger” for me (in “ginger tea”). In the diction check that searches for vague or abstract words, it flagged “all” in the phrase “all too well,” which I would not consider too vague. For the phrase “some of her concerns,” the suggested replacements for “some” were “the,” “this,” and “that,” none of which work in context. 

… the of her concerns? … … … this concerns? … … … that concerns? Too right, none of them work! That’s a dire sort of mistake! Every possible usage I can see for this would be nonsensical!

[I]n one place, it suggested that a serial comma was missing, but the sentence it highlighted wasn’t a list. It highlighted two dialogue tags as being the present tense, but they were actually past tense (and therefore matched the rest of the story). It did flag a sentence with an error but identified the error as a possible wrong verb form when the error was actually a missing word. It didn’t know the word “fletched” and did not correct “snowdrift” to be a single word.

This sounds pretty terrible to me.

Grammarly was able to suggest some solid grammatical suggestions, but the feedback was often inconsistent, sometimes suggesting a comma should appear before a conjunction that joins two independent clauses and then in other places recommending that I take it out. Commas with restrictive and nonrestrictive phrases were also inconsistently recommended or corrected. Suggested changes often included errors, the most common error being the introduction of a misplaced modifier. For more complex sentences, it often had difficulty with subject/verb agreement. … many of the issues flagged in the short story were not errors but simply words or phrasing that weren’t how Grammarly would say it, pushing me to make changes that would conform to Grammarly’s preferred simpler, skimmable writing. Changes that it suggested to me included using “daily” instead of “every day,” “silently” instead of “in silence,” …

And so on, there’s more, but this gives us an idea of what Grammarly is like as a tool. Or “tool.”

Here’s the overall conclusion:

As an editor, I find the drawbacks to using AI copyediting tools to be greater than their offered benefits at this time, particularly the risk of losing personal voice. I have edited several heavily AI-assisted texts in the past year, and though the authors did not disclose their use of AI, they didn’t have to. While the text was grammatically sleek, I never had the sense that there was someone speaking to me, someone on the other side of the words, and it was very easy to identify places where the author had accepted a change they did not understand.  

Bold is mine, because I think this is what we’re going to see: a nigh-unto-infinite flood of fake text, produced by people with inadequate writing skill who are following suggestions they don’t understand, produced by AI that does not understand anything, least of all effectiveness in writing.

An interesting post! I don’t plan ever to feed a story into any AI editorial “tool” because — and the linked post does say this — the risk that the tool is stealing your work is 100%, and no thank you.

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