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. Yesterday I just sent her the four chapters back to see if she likes how it is now.

I just finished answering/correcting the 1800+ comments on the first few chapters. My editor commented a lot about staging and how she was lost around some scenes in the book. So I worked on describing places a bit more before letting the dialogue take over.

Just out of curiosity, the first chapter is on version 169. When I started writing the book, it had nothing but dialogue — not even dialogue tags.

You can imagine how disorienting it was.

Now there's a lot more staging, and future chapters don't have as many problems as the early ones.

I sent the updated chapters to my editor yesterday(Sunday). And in the meantime, I'm going to edit the future ones.

For fun, I also made a new landing page. This is what it looks like now:

I also played around with Grok to generate “selfies" of the characters during the chapters. I posted quite a few on my X account.

Here's one:

Besides all this, I'm brainstorming the new books.

Oh yeah, I built an app(right now unpublished) that I use to edit the book. This is what it looks like. It allows me to edit like in Word, generate prose comments using AI agents, and fix grammar issues on a separate screen.

The prose comments screen:

The “craft"(grammar) screen.

The good thing is that it works with Vim motions so I can go over each one, read, and with simple keystrokes accept or reject the AI suggestions.

The app also takes in human comments(like my editor's; you can't see any in the screenshots cuz I finished them all).

I originally built this app because Google Docs crashed with the 1800+ comments the editor sent me, + google docs doesn't easily let agents add comments on the prose.

Because I saw how much pain it caused the editor to see all my grammar issues, I'd rather have AI handle most of them and tell me where to fix them than have the editor add quotes inside “," and things like that.

Another cool thing this app does is AI voiceovers.

I added AI voiceovers per chapter; that way I can walk around the house listening to the book to see if anything sounds weird or not. Also, I can listen to it as an audiobook while washing the dishes.

This is something the editor told me: to listen to the book to catch things that might sound off to a reader.

The audio is fully generated on my Mac; I use Kokoro to generate the audio; it takes an hour per chapter, more or less, and the audio sounds really, really good. Sure, there are some hiccups here and there that make it obvious it's AI-generated, but for what I need it to do, it does it well.

I also have a new section on the website for reviews. So far, there have been 2 people to read the book in full. A couple others are still on their way.

Both people who read it in full said they read past 3 a.m.; that's a good sign, innit?

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!