This is the first Girl Scout Cookie season in 14 years or more that we have to buy our cookies outside the family. Youngest Daughter got to the point where something in her schedule had to give, and so she opted out of Girls Scouts after her last trip last year. Diana and I were talking Sunday night about how we were going to get cookies this year, and Youngest Daughter observed that it’d be hard to choose cookies since we had to actually order them instead of going over to her sales stock and just grabbing a box.
One of her regular door-to-door customers was very sad to hear she was done selling last year. We talked to a friend of ours with a daughter in Girl Scouts though and made it a point to send them to this particular neighborhood and house.
It’s not a terrible thing, I suppose. But it’s one more reminder of my inability to slow the passage of time.
Our concrete guy was out on Monday to finish the rebar and framing for the first pour, though he left before I could ask him when he was going to try to pour. We had rain Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, and it was in the forecast for the weekend. He texted me Thursday to say the first pour is scheduled for Monday morning, bright and early. Fingers crossed, because the driveway itself is getting torn up from all the rain. Granted, we only got an inch last week, but you can see how bad things look on the slope. There’s rain in the forecast Sunday night, then it’s supposed to be sunny and very mild the rest of the week. The plan at this point is to pour the first section Monday, then the next section about a week later.
ChatGPT
I’ve started what’s going to be an open-ended series on how I’m using ChatGPT, the AI chat service/bot from OpenAI. So far, I’ve used it to generate headlines and social media content for this blog post and the previous two. That kind of thing is some of my least favorite writing work (and something I don’t think I’m good at) so I suspect I’m going to keep doing it that way.
I’m also exploring how to use it to guide me on other posts. Years ago I identified my Voice topics, what I wanted to focus on when I wasn’t talking about life. I’ve largely gotten away from those topics, and I would really like to write more in those areas. I get lots of general ideas about those topics. But I often get overwhelmed by the idea of distilling them down into manageable ideas that can be covered in 1,500 or 2,000 words. I’ve read several articles about using ChatGPT to help outline blog posts, so I’m going to be experimenting with that in the coming months.
I will not, however, generate an entire blog post via the chatbot. That’s not something I think any writer should do. I don’t think that’s what AI is designed for. If you’re a writer, then write. Can you use automation to help you with things you’re not good at? Sure. If you say we can’t, then I will assume you turn off autocorrect and spell-check when you’re writing. But if you use AI to generate entire articles or posts, then I think you’re saying you’re not a real writer. Or not a good writer. Or that you’re lazy. To that end, I updated my guest post guidelines to prohibit posts that are fully generated by AI. Yes, I’ll check them.
I’ll also make this commitment to my readers: If I use an AI model to generate content or images, those items will be clearly marked.
Reading
I grabbed Chasing Shadows: A Strange Air Paranormal Mystery by Erick Mertz on a free sale a few weeks ago. Since I’m writing a paranormal story, I thought it’d be a good idea if I read a paranormal story or three.
It was…interesting. I realized when I hit 90% read on the Kindle that the action was really going to have to pick up to resolve everything. Spoiler: it didn’t. The action didn’t pick up, and nothing was really resolved. It’s listed as the second book in a 2-book series, but the ending sure read like there was more coming. I felt like I was left hanging.
And I absolutely hate it when an author talks about someone being the sheriff of a police department. The two things just don’t go together. They are two separate agencies with separate jurisdictions. They may work together on an investigation, but they are not the same thing. Writers, if you have questions about how law enforcement works, I strongly encourage you to check out Lee Lofland’s blog The Graveyard Shift. He’s also got a book on Police Procedure, and the fantastic Writer’s Police Academy.
I had to renew Political Seduction because I still haven’t finished it after having it for four weeks. I really want to finish it, because I suspect based on the chapter titles that the better material is at the end of the book.
Writing
I missed my word goal last week by about a thousand words. That puts me behind by just over 10,000 words. I’ll have to work hard to make that up. My annual goal is 225,000 for the blog and fiction, which isn’t unachievable. I’d be in pretty good shape if I met it. That would be something close to two books and sixty or so blog posts, and maybe a short story or two. It’s all about maintaining focus, though, and that’s always been difficult for me. I’ve been taking ashwagandha for a while now and I feel like it’s helped me with focusing. I know my word counts have been shifting in the right direction.
In chatting last week with a friend who’s also a writer, we got to talking about music, specifically about Bob Seger. I had an idea when I was at TCC about doing an anthology of short stories based on songs, and he was the first artist I’d thought of. That conversation reignited my interest in the idea. Don’t know if I’ll actually get around to it, but the idea is still there.
The short story I wrote for class, “Down a Westbound Road,” was inspired by Seger’s “Roll Me Away,” and I had to write it in a much more literary style than I’m used to. I read through it last week after I got done chatting with Amber. It was okay for class—I had a 6,500 word limit and a genre specification—but I’m not sure how much I like it now, six years later. The basic concept is good, but one of the characters doesn’t feel quite right. I said before that I feel like I forced her into certain actions just to meet the beats created by the lyrics, and that’s not a good thing.
We’ll see what I do with that. It’s a lower priority because I’ve got plenty of projects to work on these days.
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