I finished writing this book a few weeks ago. And I found an editor, and she gave me over 1800+ comments on the first four chapters. Today she told me she is nearly done with the fixes I made. I'll then send her the next few chapters(30k words, give or take) for her to correct.

I've been busy creating a little shop + collecting feedback from beta readers and putting it all on the website worstparty.com.

I just finished answering/correcting the 1800+ comments on the first few chapters.

Now the editor told me she's nearly finished with this first batch(each batch has around 30k words). While she's working with this first batch, I've already started fixing similar problems on the latest chapters. At least grammar issues will be far fewer now, and punctuation should also be better.

I'm tweaking some chapters and then listening to them again before sending her the next batch.

Not much else to say about the edition at this point.

I've created a little shop with T-shirts and illustrations based on characters from the book. I'm out of ideas(and time to think about ideas). So I'm open to any suggestions you friends might have. Let me know what you think would be cool to sell as a T-shirt, a mug, or a plushie(one is already on its way lmao).

I made this, and if you want to support me while the book is not yet published, that's a way you can do it. Either suggest things to sell based on the story or buy one of the wares in the shop.

GalleyRoom is the name of the app I built to edit the book. I built it cuz I hate Word and Google Docs crashing when there are too many comments in it.

So I built this, and differently from google docs, I can use an AI agent to analyze the prose and tell me grammar errors throughout the book, suggest changes(like for example it has a rule to check for places in the book where I write “Sola heard the sound of an explosion" vs “Then, and explosion…"). From now on, I'm using more em dashes; please don't think of me as AI. All words I write are mine; it's just that em dashes look cooler than parentheses "()”.

One specific rule, for example, that AI helps me with is using “in/on/at". It is a very telling sign someone grew up on a Latin language when they mix these up in English. And I grew up in Brazil. So the AI agent knows to look in the prose ahead and tell me when I mix these up.

This app helps me both correct these issues and also learn how to not make the same mistake twice. More often than not, when I read the chapter, I can already tell where my mistakes are before even an AI highlights them — which is pretty cool; it means I'm learning.

The elephant in the room: let’s talk about this and how I use it.

I know a lot of people hate AI these days. Last night I showed my wife how a song she loves was made by AI, and it made her hate the song instantly(this song, the first one in the playlist, but I'm sure the others are too).

I have used AI extensively these past few years, and I wrote about how I use it here on my AI Manifesto page.

Here's the gist of it. I made songs using AI with scenes from this book; 90% of those songs sound absolute trash, but there are 8 that I really, really liked — I might even share a few in this newsletter.

I'd love to be able to perform those songs, but my skills on the guitar aren't that good yet. Nonetheless, I will be upfront with everything I use AI for because I don't want to raise doubts with regard to my main focus, which is writing this book.

I said it before on my manifesto page, and I'm repeating it here. Every single word in this book was written by me. I've used AI as an assistant(generating images, songs, etc.) but never to write words for me. And it's not a moral stance; I just really, really love writing. I've been writing since I was 13, nearly every single day in journals, other fantasy novels, and even some detective novels — all unpublished.

AI is a new thing, and nobody really knows what's going to happen. I know some people will hate me for even generating songs and images, and that's fine.

I think I'd have the same reaction my wife did with the song if I read a really good book only to find out it was a book 100% written with AI.

Luckily, I don't think we are there yet; no song, image, or book that has been fully generated with AI has been that good.

It still takes a lot of effort to at least select the good from the bad generations, and the more skilled you are at something, the better you can wield AI in that area of expertise.

I'm sure musicians would listen to the songs I generated and go, “Yeah, this isn't good; replace this instrument with that one, etc etc".

In any case, now you know what I use AI for; GalleyRoom is a huge part of it, and to be frank, it mostly replaces Grammarly for me — while giving me a great Markdown editor at the same time.

That's it for this week. I hope you have a great rest of your day, and I also hope you had an awesome Halloween.

Obs: If you haven't seen it yet, this is the video about the characters.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you in a future post talking more about the lore and the process I used to write the book!

If you liked this, please share with a friend!

If you're experiencing screen fatigue, please email me at [email protected]. I wanna talk to you and help you!

Thanks, y’all, for reading, and I'll see you in the next one!