Writer's Block Workshop: Editing & Revisions

In this workshop session, we discuss the process of polishing your manuscript into shape.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hey, what's going on guys? How is it?
Today we are speaking about editing and revisions.
It is a workshop for this week of the month and as we always
do, check insurance. What have you been working on?

(00:22):
What have you gotten done since the last month?
Where are you at with things? I'm editing, I'm trying to
finish up the house that Jack built.
It's so I've been sort of recording it as a final edit,
which is, which is quite the task because I record it and I'm

(00:43):
like that. I don't like that.
So I'm stopping and changing. So it's, you know, in my mind, I
somewhat hoped I was optimistic that I would be able to sort of
go in and record and be able to use that as an audio book and
kind of like do a, you know, twobirds with one stone.

(01:04):
But I'm recording a section and I'm like, yeah, I'm going to
have to re record that because I'm like, I'm so it's it's going
a little slower than I would have liked and have other
distractions. And I'm trying to edit the Fort.
So I was working on that and sort of I did.

(01:26):
I found I needed a little restructuring.
I've got a character who's goingto play a much larger role in
Book 3, and I bring him in in the Fort, but I need to bring
him in a little earlier. I'm trying to sort of move him

(01:48):
in a little bit and I've got himI have to change a couple, like
a couple of the last chapters. So there's one chat, you know, I
mean this, these, I realized this as a tight, you know, this
is normal, right? For like first drafts.
I'm sure you all are like, oh, that's not quite what I want to

(02:10):
do. So I've got to move him in
sooner and I've been sort of working on that.
And then I've got to switch a chapter where he arrives sooner.
And then, yeah, so I got to movehim around.

(02:32):
So and I, I can do it. I can structurally see where to
put him and where to have these things happen.
But, you know, it's a matter of just sitting down and doing it.
My kids taking off. He's, he's going to school in a
couple of weeks, so this is going to be a distraction.

(02:55):
I got to make sure, he said, because he's, he's not just
going to Tennessee right now, he's going to London.
So wow. What?
Yeah, he's doing as he's doing asemester.
I know, right. So I'm probably going to get a
little distracted. I'm hoping.
I don't think I'm going to get, I'd like to think I could get

(03:16):
the house that Jack built out before I leave.
I'm going to take him to Nashville and make sure he, you
know, get him off to London fromthere because he's going with a
group. But I'm, I'm hoping, but I'm,
I'm not going to, I'm going to not make that a hard deadline
because I, it just, you know, I want to make sure this goes out
right. Yeah, I feel like given the

(03:37):
nature of how the last audio book went, I would say just try
and get your edits done before you go to Nashville and then
worry about the the proper recording, you know, after you
get back, you know, don't stressyourself out, you know?
Yeah. But I will say it's super

(03:57):
helpful. Oh yeah.
Because I mean, I can't, I can'tsay enough good things about,
you know, it's, it's basically reading out loud.
But it's, it's when you're recording yourself, it even if
you're, you know, I realize thisis not going to be the audio
book, I mean, but because I'm going to have to redo it.
But even when you're recording yourself and it, it, it adds an

(04:21):
extra level to it because as youwell know, I mean, I'm, I'm
probably preaching to the choir here, but.
Well, that's OK. But you, you, you get a much
better understanding of how the,the everything's flowing.
You hear it better because you're you're you're trying to
perform it. So it you see if it works or not

(04:44):
on a different level, it really does make a difference.
I can't, I can't say enough goodthings about doing this.
I am in full agreement with you,Joji.
Do we have you back? What have you been working on?
What have you finished or what'sthe state?
So the last week since last time, the first thing I did was

(05:05):
the, you know, they worked on the mail reader sale and I took
a lot more time than I originally.
Thought this is a this is a monthly check in.
So what have you done in the last month?
Since that's true, well the the sale took about I think like 2
weeks of my time. Sure, I really enjoyed doing it

(05:26):
and it was a lot of fun. And you crushed it.
What's it? You crushed it.
I was really hoping that we'd get one of these viral fights
like John Douglas keeps getting into, and we didn't do that, but
we did seem to reach a lot of people who were looking for this
sort of thing. So that was really great.
Apparently everybody did, you know, better than expected, you

(05:48):
know, So that that was really nice.
I was very pleased that worked out.
I basically worked on it on and off for about 6 months.
So when I finally got it to, youknow, come off, that was a lot
of fun. The other thing is I'm now 6
chapters from the end of the book I'm writing and after
mulling over these chapters for a week or two and they were kind

(06:10):
of flat, I suddenly, I think on Sunday morning or or Saturday,
Saturday morning, I suddenly hadthis brilliant idea about how to
reorganize them and add one moreconflict so that there was now a
progression of building problemsrelated to.

(06:30):
I'm putting together scenes thattook place in the role-playing
game. Some of them were after the end
of the book, but I needed those events so I moved that.
This is. This is the Regency fantasy
romance. Just clarify.
So I had scenes, yeah, yeah. So I have scenes where I needed
certain things to be mentioned to the reader, but in the game

(06:54):
they took place after the climaxpoint.
So I had to like re climax. I had to make them interesting
again, you know. So I've that I've the last
couple days, that's a lot of what I've been doing is just
rewriting those scenes so that now she gets yelled at by her
friend and then her parents say we're going to go home, we're

(07:15):
leaving London. So you can't see the guy that
you're in love with anymore because she of course fell in
love with one of the two guys her father said you can't marry
of. Course forbidden love and.
Which I, I, I, I should say I amnot responsible in either of
these books for who the characters fell in love with.
It was entirely the players doing OK, but they fell in love

(07:37):
with one girl, fell one player fell in love with the guy that
the father and said no about, and the other player fell in
love with her married cousin, which I swear is the last person
I would have picked. But they both work out really
well by the end. I I did have to kill off the
wife and the second fucking heart.

(07:57):
But you know, I mean, you know, it's, it's just one of these
things. So and I, I really like that
book because the girl is is really virtuous about it.
I mean, she, she doesn't attemptto get involved with the married
guy, but you know, eventually she does get to end up with him,
so. It worked out.
It's funny how it all worked. Out for everybody except the

(08:19):
wife, yeah. Which is really sad and and she
was a character that the other player really liked, but you
know, it's one of those things so.
I'm trying to steer away from some stuff.
Gonzalo, we haven't seen you in a while, man.
Come on up, come and hang out and chat if you can.

(08:39):
We're still doing some check insurance.
Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the workshop today,
editing and revisions. JF you're up on stage, give us a
report. What have you completed?
What have you made progress on since last month?
We always do the check insurance.
How has it gone for you were? You talking to me?

(09:00):
I thought you were talking to Gonzalo.
No, I'm talking to you. No, I can talk to multiple
people. So I was just in Maine for
vacation for the last. Oh beautiful, What part of
Maine? Southern Maine.
So like the lakes region? OK, Yeah.
Because my my mother-in-law has property up there Nice, which is

(09:22):
on the lake which Kenny bunkers.We took the kids up there.
That's what I'm hearing. Could not have been more
gorgeous weather. We were really, really lucky
this year. Low humidity, nice cool nights,
warm days, sunny pretty much theentire time we were there.
It was great. However, there were times when I

(09:45):
found myself in the house by myself and I did a fair amount
of writing. So there was this one place in
in the book I'm working on whereI was really stuck.
It's like, OK, where do I go from here?
And it was one of those things where it was like I just decided
to just soldier through. I looked at the historical
background on Vlad and what was going on in this particular part

(10:11):
of his life. And it was one of those things
where it's like, I, I can't get too deep in the weeds with this
because I'm afraid that it's like, I'm not writing a history.
I'm writing a novel based on people who actually lived and
with some other stuff thrown in,which did not happen.
And excuse me, I was, so I was, I was really wondering where to

(10:36):
go from there. And then I did read a little bit
into the history and I was like,Oh, well, I can go this angle.
And then I was able to go to that angle and that got me kind
of over the hump. And then I wrote some more and
now I'm, I've, I feel like I'm, I'm back to the place that I

(10:57):
have where I've mapped out the rest of it.
And I'm, I finally got to that place where I can now continue.
So that was kind of a nice breakthrough.
I'm about 2020 K in. What's your goal?
Probably more like 50, so I'm just a little under halfway

(11:20):
there. Yeah, doing well.
We'll look forward to the next update in September.
Here's what we really want to know, though, in regards to your
trip to Maine. And that would be did you eat
the blueberry ice cream? Did you have a lobster roll?
I had, I had several lobster rolls.

(11:43):
I I did not have blueberry ice cream.
However, we did have blueberriesthat were picked earlier in the
week at that I turned into blueberry pancakes.
So yes, we did have something blueberry up there.
Nice. Yeah.
Beautiful Gonzalo, we haven't heard from you and we haven't

(12:04):
seen you in a while. Absolute ghost.
Welcome back. Glad to have you here.
Give us a check in, report on your progress.
Tell us what you've been workingon.
How are you? Hello.
Good morning. Hey, man.
Hey, Guy. Yeah, thanks for the warm
welcome. I've yeah, I've had my head down
for a while. Like up to up to July, it's been

(12:30):
basically a mix of work, just really catching up with work
like IRL work and, and writing, writing, writing.
Honestly, like up to like June, it's been more plotting than
writing, but I still consider itwriting right, world building
and, and making sure all the beats are are in place and where
they should be. And then in July, we went on

(12:52):
break and like the last few day,like the last, the last week of
July, up until basically yesterday, today, I've been on
break from work. Like my students have been on
break now. And I've taken that opportunity
to just sit down and like, I literally made a day by day plan
to be like, OK, a page of chapter 2, a page of the kill

(13:15):
box, a page of chapter 2, a pageof the kill box, like one day to
like work on some art. And I've been doing that like,
like crossing them off day by day.
I'd like, I'm like, I've only fallen behind as far as like 2
days being able to do that. And I've been really happy with
the results. I've actually finished drafting
my short story, The Kill Box, which is set in Salvador's

(13:36):
world, but has nothing to do with Salvador itself.
It's like a, like a kind of likea prequel story and I'm really
happy with it. I just have to start editing
now. So it's, it's, it's really
serendipitous that you guys are doing a workshop on editing
because I finished like I wrote the last sentence yesterday on
the story. I was like, all right, crack my
knuckles. Now it's time to start editing,
right? Well, we plan this around your

(13:59):
work. Yeah, of course, of course.
I kid, but yeah, happy to hear it.
And as I said in the chat, you know, if if there's some time
and you want to add me to like aGoogle doc or a Dropbox Paper
doc or something like that, would be happy to alpha beta

(14:20):
read it for you whenever. You know, yeah, Cool, cool.
I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll consider that right now.
I want to, I want to do like a full read like myself.
I want to do a full read from beginning to end.
Make sure that there's, you know, just do a vibe check 1st.
And I'm, I'm going to start noticing little things.
I'm going to, I'm going to startrepeating.
I'm going to, I'm going to startnoticing things like repeated

(14:42):
words and things that don't makesense.
Like, oh, wait, I forgot to like, like I, I did.
I did realize when I finished writing that I still need to
insert higher stakes, like why he needs to win so bad.
I was, I was really focused on the progression of the event so
that it still, it still needs a little tweaking, obviously, but
I'm really happy with the climax.

(15:03):
Like how how it turned out, likethe moment that I imagined when
I started writing the story, I think came out really, really
nicely That that's that little page that I sent to the to the
group chat and I, I'm, I was really happy with that.
So I've been making a lot of progress with my writing in my
writing world. I'm really happy, glad to be
back. Yeah.
Welcome back ladies. Let us discuss the topic for

(15:28):
today, editing and revisions. Really getting into the nuts and
bolts here. We'll start right at the
beginning. You know, we've got notes, we've
done a little planning. Maybe the 1st place to think
about editing and revisions is to understand the significance,

(15:51):
Understand your writing style and your goals, genres even.
I would assume as both of you have editorial experience and
and all of us do here in some regard or another, you've got
perspective on style and how editing applies differently to

(16:15):
styles or applications and genres broadly.
I think I would just start by saying that we use the word
editing, but we actually mean a couple of different discrete
things. Not that they can't be done
together, but they can be. They're different activities, so
we can talk about them a little differently. 1 is just spelling

(16:39):
and grammar. You know, you, you left out a
word. 1 mistake I often make when I'm writing is that I write
a sentence and then I decide to change part of the sentence and
I forget that I've changed from walking to walk or, you know,
from, you know, swim to swimming.
I, I little things like that. I, I often get wrong because I,
I altered something and I didn'tread the whole sentence through.

(17:02):
So, so spelling, punctuation, basic clear errors.
We wrote the wrong word or you accidentally left the word out.
That's that's, I'll call it the first type of editing and that
kind a lot of people do eventually try to get someone
else to do also just because your your eye tends to miss it.

(17:22):
But then the second type of editing would be clarity and
grace. You're rereading not for the
story so much as the actual writing.
You're trying to make sure the writing sounds good.
Oh that was really clunky. Oh I just used the word 5 twice
in a row. I think I don't want to do that.

(17:43):
I remember I once had a a scene where I had to use the word duck
like 6 times in the same paragraph, but you don't want
that it's it's annoying for the reader.
Goose. Exactly.
I mean, there's lots of things you can do.
The bird, you mean, you know, I rewrote it.
So I know you can do a lot of things, but it just, you have to
be aware of it. When you're writing, sometimes
you're not aware of it. You just particularly write it.

(18:04):
You come back, you go get a cup of coffee, you come back, you
could pick it up. You don't reread the first part
of the paragraph, things like that.
So there's, you know, there's a type of reading where you're
editing, where you're going through and you're trying to
make each sentence in paragraph sound good.
And then the third kind is the story itself.
Am I bringing my like, like whatHeidi said earlier, am I

(18:25):
bringing my character in early enough?
Am I bringing my character in too early?
Is there a theme? Is there a, you know, a theme or
an idea or something I referred to earlier in this chapter or
earlier in this book that I can bring up again so that I'm not
dropping threads, you know, do it is, is the climax exciting
enough? Am I putting enough of the

(18:45):
internal thinking of the character on stage so that the
reader knows what's going on? You know, sometimes I go back
and I realized that I just left that out to put it in.
So I think, I think editing falls into kind of those 3
categories, the perfectly technical side, the the poetic,
you know, versus versus clunky side and then the actual story.

(19:09):
Fair. Reasonable.
Accurate I I'll you know Heidi thoughts.
You edited A periodical. I feel like there's some maybe
non fiction side of things that.In terms of editing.
Might correlate, yeah. Well, I will say this one thing

(19:32):
I learned editing, we had a a group of columnists that we
edited monthly as a monthly periodical, you know, back back
when these things were still done.
And one thing I will say is we had a group of columnists that
we edited monthly, which I already said.
So I'll say it twice evidently. And you began to realize that

(19:59):
each writer had a set of of errors they made on a regular
basis, so. It's usually like 3 or 4 things
that they always did. Like one of them always put then
instead of then. That was one I'm trying to

(20:20):
remember, it's been a while. Another one was king of what is
called the passive voice. And that's because he was a tech
guy and he wrote scientific, youknow, it's his main writing was
from science. So I mean, it would in, in
scientific writing, you're supposed to use the passive
voice. I'm not really sure why, but

(20:42):
they have maybe somebody else here knows.
I'd, I'd, I've never really thought about an explanation for
that, but that's why he did it. So I mean, things like that,
there was always like 3 or 4 mistakes.
Somebody was like, you know, I don't know, always had comma
spices. So the thing I realized is that
in general, writers and people in general have a set of

(21:03):
grammatical errors that is unique to them.
And the best thing you can do with editing is figure out what
your set of grammatical errors is.
I mean, and this is just a tool,a tool thing.
This is not a stylistic thing. I mean, well, it's sort of is,
but you just to put it simply. So if you know the mistakes

(21:27):
you're going to make when you, Imean, you're going to make them
when you're doing your first draft writing, I mean, maybe
you're aware of them and you canpull back from it a little bit.
But for the most part, you know you're going to make them,
they're going to be there. So those are the that's the
first things you should look foris that set of mistakes.
And it's usually just three or four things.
So it's it's that it or that youconsistently do wrong.

(21:52):
And so that's something to keep in mind when you're editing just
as a nuts and bolts sort of thing, because it will just help
you going forward to kind of clean that out in your writing.
So that's the that's the most valuable lesson I learned from
being an editor, periodical editor, especially because I

(22:13):
would consistently see the same mistakes from each writer.
So I don't know if that I that'sbeen.
I think that's very wise. And those are things I think
that we should all be mindful about in regards to our writing,
the things that both of you said, but particularly the

(22:37):
habitual sort of mistakes that we make, finding, finding those
patterns and then trying to eliminate them so we can make
other mistakes habitually in thefuture.
Yeah, you. Will Heidi, you had brought up

(22:58):
draft states in regards to work you're doing with the house that
Jack built and the audiobook read and perhaps even just
reading aloud as a performative function akin to editing.

(23:18):
And I would say this is a great vehicle for rehearsal of an
audio book, but also digging up little bits of stuff you maybe
you're too close to in the work.And you know, it's certainly not

(23:44):
a first draft. I've read it and it's apparently
not the final draft, right? But give us something about the
revision process. Well, I would say two things.
One, yeah, for the audio book, it's actually a way to practice

(24:08):
your performance. And I think that's the better
way to look at it because you'repracticing the performance and
you're you're you're listening for for sentences that are
clunky or awkward that you know,that may have make sound great
in your head, but when you're reading them aloud, they're just
not you're like, oh, that's a little stiff.

(24:30):
The other thing I catch like crazy for me, and this is one
thing you brought up, Jaji, is word repetition, right?
I catch a lot of my, I mean, I hunt for it right now, but
because I think, I don't know ifthat's, I think that's a common
thing. I don't think that's necessarily

(24:50):
a unique thing is like you get into your head and your writing
and you didn't realize this, Youknow, you walk away and you come
back and you didn't realize the sentence before you use the
exact same word. So.
So common. Oh yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, but that's Thething is I that's one of the
things about reading aloud. You will catch all the word

(25:12):
repetition because you hear yourself saying it over and over
again. You're like, oh, shoot, I got to
fix that. I catch awkward sentences.
I catch gerunds. I mean, what was driving me
crazy? I was doing one section of the,
of the novella and for some reason, and I, I, I know better,

(25:34):
I don't like them. I, I, but I had all these
gerunds in there and it was justpissing me off.
So I kind of had to stop recording and, and sit down and,
and take them out. And I don't think I would have
caught that if I wasn't reading it aloud into the microphone.
I just think it's, you know, we could have a discussion about, I

(25:55):
mean, you know, yeah, I'm, I'm up for having a discussion about
using gerunds in in literature. But I think they have a small
place, but they don't have a major place.
And I, I don't know how they allslipped in on me.
Yes, these are things I think about.
But I mean, does that sort of answer what you were poking at,

(26:15):
Michael? Yeah, to a degree.
There's always, there's always more to say.
I think you have a very iterative process.
You're happy to make a lot of drafts and Will.

(26:36):
Yeah, but I have to. Sorry, hammering on the thing,
You know that's OK. That's just the nature of the
way that you work. Jaji, how do you go about it in
terms of working through a draft?
How close is maybe the first draft to a final draft?

(27:00):
Or how much does the final draftresemble your outline if you use
that? Anything along those lines?
Just yesterday I was visiting with a very old friend who liked
to tell people. I've known him since before he
was born because I was 7 when hewas born and I was explaining to
him about my book and he was interested in reading it.
And I that I have this one really bad habit that, you know,

(27:23):
I finish it and then I finish itagain.
And so I'm like, well, I can send it to you when I'm done,
but I'll probably later versionsover and over again, which is my
editor crazy. But so yeah, I don't my finished
things and look very much like my first thing at all.
I think I've mentioned that other, other spices I write what

(27:44):
I think of as like the projectors that we used to use,
the overhead projectors we used to use long ago in, in
elementary school, where you'd put down like you'd have a map
of the school and then all the outside buildings would be in
blue and the inside ones would be in red.
And then the, the, you know, certain places you weren't
supposed to go would be in greenor whatever those colors should

(28:06):
be reversed, but you know what Imean.
And you'd lay down one at a timeand you'd end up with a finished
picture, but it would be different transparencies that
were being shot up on a screen one at a time.
And that's kind of how I, I like, I do original and then I
go through and I try to add thoughts and emotions and then I

(28:28):
go back and I do things like edit just for getting hair
right, because I forget to mention it or I all I have all
my fantasy books have what I call familiar edit where I'm
like, wait, doesn't that person have a pet?
I mentioned the pet. Have to put the pets back on
stage. So I go through and I thought
the one that have a plot function, but the ones that are

(28:50):
just background, you know that in fact there are other pets in
the environment, they have to bementioned otherwise they don't
exist, you know? So I do it in waves like that,
so that the main editing thing for me is to spend time thinking
about the and I do this when I'mediting up too.

(29:12):
I read the thing or I write it and then I take a day or two and
then I start thinking about it. And my favorite way of doing
this is to go roller skating, which I haven't done last, but I
used to do it because it's something about beaching in a
regular way where you're moving a bit and your body's doing
something, but there's not that much thinking you have to do,

(29:33):
you know, I mean, you don't wantto run someone over, but other
than that, you know, and just have a chance to just regularly
think there's music playing, youknow, and I go over the
beginning and the end in every aspect And, and the themes.
I'm like, OK, this character. Is there something this

(29:53):
character's doing or isn't doingthat can bring out more about
his personality? And, and I'm trying to do that
for each aspect of the story. So that's my, that's my editing
process. I also completely agree with you
guys that reading out loud is great.
And one of the most painful things in the world is listening
to your narrator read a book that's pretty and seeing what

(30:15):
mistakes you made. You're like, I can't think it's
too late. But you know, that's why it's
good to try to read it aloud yourself while you can still fix
things. Are you intending to narrate
your books at any point? No, I do not read out loud very
well. I wish I did, but I make a lot

(30:36):
of mistakes. It would be a very, very long.
OK, well, that we all do that, you know, that's literally.
No, I mean, I mean it's it's like a normal I I just I I was
reader at church I'm in and I got a lot of complaints.
I just read the wrong word. It's not intentional.
I it's the right word. I just say the wrong word.

(30:56):
I don't know what it is. It's been, you know, it's the
lifelong thing. But I have a narrator, her name
is Shayna Bucks. She's the one who came up with
the idea of putting my books on audiobook and talked me into it.
And we just used CX and it's half and I get half and she does
a lovely, lovely job. She recently redid my entire

(31:19):
first book because she had done it when her equipment wasn't as
good and and complaints about the audio quality and she did
the whole thing over again. And now we're working on book 6,
which is like 506 hundred page books.
So yeah, it's many, many, many hours.
But I the she does it and then Ihave to sit down and read it and

(31:39):
listen. And it's weird how hard that is
because listening to something we're used to doing, I can
listen to something and play like a light little game on my
computer and I have no trouble reading.
We're used to doing. And you can read and have music
playing in the background or so you know what I mean.
But reading and listening the same thing where you want to see

(32:01):
cuz you accidentally leave out, leave out a word occasionally
or, you know, and I have to catch it.
It's really difficult. I, I have a lot of trouble
getting myself to sit down and focus on that.
Once I do, it's fine, you know? But I I'm often surprised at how
I find that. It doesn't seem like it really
should be that hard. Here's an interesting one.
I've been listening to, No Country for Old Men, the Cormac

(32:25):
McCarthy book narrated by Tom Stekschulte.
I have found two errors in it, interesting ones.
Only two. And that's not the end of the
world. It's not a long book, it's only
8 hours. But they were, so they were such
glaring instances of error. I'm not reading the book while

(32:46):
I'm listening to this. I'm just listening to this that
I went back and listened back toit to be like, is that an error?
Could that error have been made here?
And it was, you know, it happens.
The stuff slips through, you know, gets through.
For the guys that are on stage, thoughts on editing, how you go

(33:07):
about it, your process, your revisions, anything that you'd
like to kick into the conversation?
I do a lot of the same stuff that you guys have been talking
about. Honestly, I read it to myself.
I try to narrate it to myself the way Heidi describes just
that I'm not recording it. Like I'll, I'll read it like I'm
doing a dramatic reading or something.

(33:28):
And, and as I go and start noticing things, I start noting
things and noticing things. Like I'll, I'll realize I used
the word twice or that it soundsweird or, or or whatever.
I, I do try to do a passive likethinking, OK, like do I have
everything set? But because I'm such a, I'm such
a plotter, proudly, I usually get that part of the editing in

(33:50):
before I start writing any actual text, right?
I'll, I'll put in whatever, likewhether it's sticky notes or, or
or bullet points. I, I usually get most of that
stuff in before I write. And so then usually my, like my,
my editing process is basically reading it and then like doing a

(34:10):
pass of like, like fixes. I don't usually have that many
spelling errors because I'm a grammar Nazi.
Not so proudly. And, and like any typos, like
sometimes there'll be a typo. I usually catch it as I'm
typing, but you know, it's inevitable.
But usually it's more about likerepeating words, redundancies or

(34:32):
something doesn't sound quite right.
Or I figure out a way to expresssomething a little bit better, a
little more intensely or, or whatever that is.
I'll go through it two or three times and then I'll and then
I'll wait that that's something I haven't heard mentioned here.
Like I'll wait maybe like a day or two or sometimes with with my
book last year, it was like sometimes it would be like a

(34:52):
couple weeks and and then come back to it with fresh eyes.
And that I think that's really helpful to come back with
different with fresh acid. Like I might edit this a little
bit today and then like leave itfor a day or two and then come
back to it because that that helps a lot more than than the
people think, I think. I would, I would, I would
champion that. Give it, let it rest and go back

(35:15):
and look, you, you catch so muchmore.
Yeah, that's that's a huge thing.
You're right, Gonzo. Bring that up.
Absolutely. That's a that makes a a world of
difference if you give it a little time and then come back
to it. Jeff, you dropped down, you came
back. Do you have thoughts on editing

(35:35):
and revision in this early stateof a work?
Yeah, sorry, I, I, I've been having connection issues today.
So I, I keep dropping in and outand, but yet all your points
here, everything that's been said so far has been good and,
and, or are things that I do like I do read it out loud.

(35:57):
One of the things that I have been doing with my Vlad book is
there is a space that I belong to.
So anyway, what I was saying waseverything that's been said here
are things that I've done. I've read stuff out loud to
listen to what I belong to a space where I read, we read our
WI PS out loud and that has beenreally helpful because then I do

(36:22):
hear the mistakes where it's like, OK, that, that that sounds
really clumsy and I'll go in and, and and fix it, kind of
giving it time to breathe. What what Gonzalo was saying
that that is definitely helped because what I've been doing is
I've been adding on like chapterby chapter to the book that I'm
writing. And then I'll go back.

(36:43):
Sometimes I go back to the big beginning and I'll read it all
the way through just to make sure that like there's there's
the continuity still works. And then I'll go in and like
finesse things. I know that like this is like
one of the big no no's that theytell you about with editing,
which is you're you know, they say, you know, please, please

(37:04):
don't edit while you're writing because but but the kind of
writing that I do is really for like grammar and flow and
continuity. Like one thing I did one of my
chapters, which actually inspired the whole Vlad book
started as a short story. And I got to that point in the
book where it's like, OK, here'sthis chapter.

(37:24):
And I had to change the beginning just so that the, the
beginning part of the novel would flow into the, what
started as a short story. And then I could go forward.
Like that was the only really hard editing I've done so far.
The rest has been just, you know, finessing the, the text.

(37:44):
I, I try really, really hard to not edit while I'm writing
because I'm, I'm afraid that I'll lose the thread.
And then I have to go back And it's like, oh, wait, this
doesn't make sense now. And then I have to edit again.
And, and so I'm just, like I said, I just do mainly the, the
run through grammatical stuff, kind of wording and flow and

(38:08):
then just, you know, once I get to the end, I'll do my hard
edit. I'm fine with editing while
you're writing, but also I'm notwriting incredibly long stuff.
So it probably is slightly a different concern.
And, and I'm very, I don't know shotgun style about writing

(38:35):
where in early drafts I'm just trying to get little bits of
stuff all over. And then I'm being a little bit
more incisive and focused on passages or the points I'm
trying to make. I'm I'm in the middle of that
with a piece I'm trying to wrap up for release next month.

(39:00):
I was going to say before that Jaji was talking really early on
in the space about different styles of editing.
And I think in terms of like maybe something that should be
done early on, but is also, in my opinion, an advanced editing

(39:23):
technique is developmental editing, right?
And being concerned with, I don't know, multiple arcs or how
the entire plot flow is going and thinking about that in a, in

(39:46):
a really detailed and nuanced way that allows writers to focus
on showing and not telling. I don't know.
What do you guys think? Correct.
What was that? I would scream with you.
Oh. It's kind of sad that when we

(40:09):
agree with each other, we don't have that much to say.
I was I was agreeing with you earlier with what you were
talking about. Extra that's true I I also by
the way, agree with the idea that that I wouldn't worry about
editing as you go. I do everything by chapter and
so I write a chapter and I edit it quite a bit before I go on to

(40:32):
the next one. That doesn't mean I don't also
edit the whole thing, but my mind works better that way.
You know, it's, I think each of us goes about these things.
I think when people warn things like that, what they, what
they're really trying to say is the same thing we say when we
say don't let yourself get pulled too much into research.

(40:53):
They're trying to say don't develop a habit that keeps you
from moving forward. But if editing as you go helps
you move forward, then there's no harm, you know?
Yeah, I would add that I'll layer my work on a chapter
saying so. I mean, I just I, I, I love, I

(41:17):
just view most of this stuff is guidelines at this point.
I mean, you, you can't, you can't just follow every single
rule. And you know, because it most of
these rules are are really just saying don't write badly.
I mean, that's ultimately what it is.
And I mean, it's just you can doanything if you do it well, that

(41:40):
we lost Jeff. But what I was, what I was going
to say in regards to that is I'll layer it.
It's kind of like doing a sculpture.
It's like or a drawing or a painting, right?
You start out with a drawing andyou go back and I'll, I might
work on a chapter or two or three times and then before I go
on to the next one. So I'm sort of writing, slash
editing it. It depends.

(42:00):
It just depends on what's going on in that chapter.
I'm a little more folk. It just depends on where I'm at
with the story. I'm still trying to develop the
ideas, but I mean, you kind of layer it up.
I mean, I think that's what you're doing with editing.
You're sort of cleaning out waste.
And you know, the other thing I'll do is sometimes I'll ride

(42:20):
around an idea like 3 or 4 times, so it's like they'll be
in an origin in a first draft chapter.
They'll be a lot of repetition because I'm saying the same
thing in three or four differentways.
Maybe not that many like say twodifferent ways.
And so I need to either I need to condense that down to how I,

(42:43):
you know, one way of, you know, I only need to say one thing
once. I don't need to say it two times
or three times. So that's, that's another thing
that that happens. And sometimes I, I go back and
work on the chapter and sometimes like I keep moving
forward and deal with it later. I mean, it's really just a
matter and I think Judge, you just you nailed it.

(43:05):
It's a matter of maintaining momentum.
And I think that's really all that statement's about is just
you don't want to lose momentum.But some chapters just demand a
tremendous amount of work. They're just, you know, to get

(43:27):
them just right. And so you spend a lot and I
always find that it's usually one of the opening chapters to a
book. Like I have like chapter 2 in
the Fort that I'm working on. That thing has taken.
I've been through that chapter agazillion times.
And I guess, you know, I'm kind of seeking perfection.

(43:50):
I mean, I know I'm not going to achieve and I'm not completely
insane. I'm only partially insane.
I just sort of chase after it, but that chapter took me I don't
know how many times I've been through that thing because.
And it, you know, it's like, yeah, it slowed me down editing
the rest of the book, but it hadto be right It because it was

(44:12):
this jumping off point for everything else.
So I I, you know, you know, sometimes you have to get stuck
a little bit too. I mean, you just have to, you
know, you have to understand, you don't want to get stuck, but
then understand that sometimes you're going to.
I mean, this is just it, it's just guidelines, you know, just

(44:37):
don't write badly. That's really the only rule.
I mean, right? Yeah, good one.
It's both. Don't write badly and also don't
develop something that keeps youfor right from writing.
So you don't write because you are researching or you're
editing or something like that. Yeah, I mean.

(44:57):
You made another comment, I was going to comment off of it.
Now I've forgotten, I'll come back on what I think.
I'm sorry, I was just going to say it's like, yeah, you don't.
Sometimes you're doing somethingso that you don't have to do the
thing that you're supposed to bedoing.
Oh. I remember.
So when you're talking about polishing, one thing I find is I
have to have enough of the chapter done that I know the

(45:22):
parts of it that I need to jump off next.
So in other words, you know, as I say, I, I often do the
characters reactions last just because that's harder for me.
And there was a time when I did like I, I'd write the basics and
I do descriptions. You know, I used to do it all in
many layers. And now I've gotten a little
better because I've done it for so long.

(45:44):
So I have less things that I have to do the second time.
But if I don't get the characters reactions right, then
in the next scene, I don't know the nice little nuances to put
in to kind of build on what I'vealready done, you know?
So if she's really, you know, mad at the guy who just
criticized her, I need her to beremembering that in the next

(46:05):
scene. So I think that one reason why
we sometimes will write 1 scene over and over again until we get
it right is not that we're wasting our time, but that we
haven't gotten the part we need to jump off from.
We ourselves need to know the specific words that are going to
be there for whatever we need todo next.
And that's not true of every scene, but there are scenes like

(46:28):
that. Yeah.
You know, I don't know if this is off topic so I know Michael
will steer me up right back on, but Shaji, I know you're working
on a romance right now and I sawyour sub stack where you posted
that video. I can't of of talking about
women's literature and smut. That was such an eye opener to

(46:48):
me, Oh my gosh. Yeah, it was huge.
And I'm because I know you're working on a romance and I'm,
I'm now thinking about this quite seriously and I'm
wondering how are you handling that?
How are you handing, you know, not putting butt in it?
My particular romance only had kissing anyway.

(47:09):
It's not an issue. The second book in the series, I
don't know how to describe it has it has steamy scenes that
don't have sex. And then at the very end it has
one encounter between the married couple, which will not
include much graphic descriptionof any kind, which I don't know

(47:31):
if it's going to even steamy. So I'm just trying to take a
really light touch anyway. So it wasn't that big a deal.
But I, I'm thinking about a lot because there are, you know,
there are things that in one book or another that, you know,
I could tone up or tone down. It was such a shock to me
because we, you know, I just didthis whole male reader thing and

(47:51):
everybody's talking about all these books are for women.
You know, the men are being no, it wasn't about books for women
at all. It's, they're all erotica.
And of course erotica is addictive.
Once you once you, you get into it and you getting kind of a
kick, then you want more and more and you start needing, you
know, something that's more hardcore and which is what she

(48:13):
was talking about in the video. And it kind of completely
changed my view of where the market is and what it is we're
struggling against, you know? Yeah, and that was one element
of it as well. Obviously, he goes.
And I mean, the thing that was interesting to me is in my
editing process right now, I'm trying to keep Michael from

(48:35):
shutting me down. Bring it back to editing.
I have like chapter 3 in the Fort is basically it's a sex
scene, but it's not a sex scene,but it is.
Do you know what I mean? So this.
Is I? Do I have things like that in my
next book? So this is the thing.
So if you're when you're writingsomething like that, it's it's

(48:59):
never about the actual physical sex, It's about something else.
Those are the best scenes, right?
And this is the thing that's happening with erotica is
they're they're removing that element, right, Right.
And I think she made a point in the in the video where she kept
saying, I'm not saying sex in inbooks are bad.

(49:20):
I'm saying that the way they're doing this is downplaying the
story and not playing the sex. So I mean, that's what I would
say. So, you know, if I was talking
to three different people, one had no sex and one had a lot and
one was in the middle, I would say, you know, both that
emphasize the story. And I've noticed through the
years, maybe it's just me, but I've noticed I get really bored

(49:41):
in either a fight scene or a sexscene.
If that's all that's going on, Iwant some kind of plot develop,
even a fight, a short fight scene, this doesn't count, but a
long fight scene, you want the character be trying to
accomplish something or do you know what I mean?
It's not just he punched, he's, you know, shoved.
After a while they get to me. That gets a little boring.
You want to be emotionally titillated, is what I'm hearing.

(50:04):
It's not just I want to be trying to figure something out.
Is he going to be able to get all the way across the bar to
where the girl is? You see what I mean?
I want some motion to what's going on.
It doesn't have to be emotional titillating.
My favorite sex scene is the onein the beginning, the first
Outlander book. I realized having a favorite sex
scene might be odd, but I just it stood out to me.

(50:26):
Because the wedding scene. Right after.
Yeah, right after she gets married.
Because they're getting to know each other, they're learning new
things about each other in that state, you know, So it's not
just this body part rubbed on that body part.
It's if you skip that scene, youwould miss something significant
about the characters, you know? So to me that that's a better

(50:49):
scene, you know? Yeah, she, she walks the line
with it because her sex scenes aren't always about sex.
And that's the trick. I mean, the trick, I think
that's the thing when you're when you're writing that stuff
is and this is where people are getting where you get bored when
it's just about titillation. It's ridiculous because, you

(51:11):
know, and and I yeah, Diana Gabaldon does about the best
job, but even I started getting bored with the Outland series I
just got. Hired what?
I only read the first book so I don't have that one to refer to.
But that's, well, that's probably the best one.
I love romances, but many years ago I started skipping the

(51:31):
sixteens and looking for the places where they argue.
That makes 50 Shades a very short book.
Yeah, I didn't I. Didn't bring it home a little
bit to editing and thinking about the totality of a vision,
the totality of image being consistent not only in terms of

(51:57):
editorial but packaging design, graphics, can I typesetting and
font. Does it have to do with totality
of vision or totality of image Does?
Have to do with totality of. Vision all right.
And I think that it has to do. And I mean, we're, we're, I know
we're talking very specifically,but this is a conversation I

(52:18):
want to have with Joji once I saw her sub stack.
But my reason for bringing it upalso is when you're editing even
these scenes that may appear explicit.
And this goes for anything. You really have to be thinking
about what is at what it is actually about.
And when you go back to edit, that's when you can really focus

(52:40):
on it. And I think that's an important
point to make. And I think that ties this
particular discussion in becauseif you're going to write
something that may be controversial, for lack of a
better term, although I don't think any of its controversial
anymore, you have to have reasons as to why you're doing

(53:00):
it. Sure.
So I will say that now we may move on.
I think that's the important part.
That is the important part is the moving on.
Thinking that but but doing it from the editing point of view
specifically, it's one of the things to look for as you go
back through your story. Not just the sex, but you know,
whether it's a, any kind of scene, is my scene also

(53:25):
providing a second thing going on in my fight or my sex scene
or even just my description or whatever it is.
Am I drawing out what's going tokeep the interest in this?
Am I, am I allowing some kind ofplot motion?
You know, that kind of thing is a good thing to be thinking
about for for a number of different kinds of scenes.

(53:45):
Nuance and multi layered intent.Yeah, I agree with that.
Back on to a different portion of editing.
When we're thinking about our vision, when we're thinking
about how people perceive the work, maybe in a a tactile sense

(54:08):
or just experientially, you know, choosing a font that makes
it easy to read. This is something that we also
explore kind of regularly in a group chat is cover design, you
know, and having fonts. I know Heidi is big on kerning.
It matters, you know, And I'm. Big on kerning.

(54:29):
Yeah, that's something that you always regularly bring up in
regards to cover design and words and letters and
typesetting and fonts. OK, you do you have.
I have brought it. Up.
Yeah, you. Know, maybe I, you know, you're
right. I guess I didn't really think of
it. I thought about it in those
terms. OK.
Maybe go on a little bit about that for us.

(54:53):
Well, I mean, this is just visuals.
I mean, you have to, it has to look, right.
I mean, that's really all it is.It's like, well, there was that
cover. It would be better if we had a
visual, but I don't think you can share it.
That cover that someone's working on.
Basically the title of the letters was spaced out.
Think of it, let's say it's let's say it's the OK.

(55:16):
So I'll use this example. So I don't know if you all know
a band called The Damned. There's a reason I'm bringing
this up so. I would say the example is the
old Metallica font where the M is big and the A is big.
Well, I have a specific reason for this.
So Dave Vanian's the name of thesinger.

(55:37):
So I ran into him once and at the anyway, the point is I got
his autograph. I was like 20 years old
autograph. So he now if you know anything
about the damn Dave Vanian always pretended he was a
vampire. So when he signed his autograph,
it was Dave and the D went down like a Fang and then it went

(56:00):
across and then the and at the end went down like another Fang.
So it was like his autograph wasFang was a was a teeth with
fangs because he was a vampire. Get it?
This is why I bring this up now.It was a brilliant autograph
because he had, you know, all ofhis letters spaced all tight and

(56:21):
it looked like a mouth and it looked like fangs.
It was obvious what he was doing.
And it was fun, right? I'm like, oh, that's great, you
know, And he's like laughing andit's, it was funny, but it was
also ideal marketing because it,it portrayed him in the way he
wished to be portrayed. And it, it was this perfect sort

(56:43):
of kerning situation where he used the letters to express a
quality of himself and the, the story he was telling.
So that's why I specifically bring that one up.
I, I, it would take me 20 or I might even still have the
blasted thing somewhere. But so This is why you need to

(57:05):
look at that when you're puttingwords on a cover, it needs to do
that. It needs to do what he did with
his autograph. It needs to have that sort of
expression that you're pushing forward.
So in terms of kerning and this,this feeds to an example Michael
showed me of a cover that was attempting to do something

(57:26):
similar with the, with the firstletter and the last letter kind
of making a, a little, we'll sayfor lat.
I don't know what it was trying to do, but the the letters in
between were too spread out. It was like there were too many
spaces between the teeth. What do they call those drop
caps? What is that called when the 1st
letter of a paragraph is big? Drop caps.

(57:49):
Yeah, I can't believe I remembered that.
If you used them. So usually drop caps are are
used in text, you know like the first letter of a paragraph, I
mean of an opening chapter, likethe first letter of the first
paragraph in the opening chapteryou start with a drop cap.
Typically if you're I mean this,I don't know how in the layout

(58:09):
you all want to get, but usuallyit's about 3 lines down, but
I'll leave it at that. But I mean, visually, you know,
the words are probably even moreimportant than the image on a
cover of a of a I mean, the image has to play into the
words, but it has to be. I would say they're equally
important. Well, yeah, I mean, sure.

(58:33):
I mean, I I can't argue that they're important, but the
words, I think people they get tied into and but simplicity is
really key. You can't have an over busy
image, you can't have over busy words.
It has to be balanced, it has tobe clean.
You know, Gonzalo, you're a visual guy.
You, you do really well with your, your images, you know,

(58:56):
because you, you, you, I mean, it's a, it's a very active
image, but it's clean, you know.So you know, these are things I
would just say in regards to that.
And it's all about communicatingintent.
And I know, Jaji, you, you've just, you brought a whole thing
on this with covers. Yeah, yeah.

(59:20):
He wanted to be clear. It does.
I they said before my I got explained by my cover artist who
used to draw for Marvel in DC. You can look him up and his name
is Dan Wallace. If you Google him, you can find
like, you know, Wolverine and Superman and stuff he's done.
And of course, so he knew something about how the

(59:41):
presentation and his, his comment was that you want the
picture and the letters to look like they were designed and
meant to go together. So it's not that you can't have
any aspect of the picture under the letters, but it, it needs to
be a, a perfect example of somebody had a cover up a while

(01:00:02):
ago that had lines of a, of the slats of a barn.
And if you put the letters alongthe slats, it just look better
to the eye than if it was kind of haphazardly over the the
lines between them, things like that.
And it's just a little bit of looking at the image and

(01:00:22):
matching it so that it looks like it was intended and not
having the the letters overlap each other in a way that looks
like it's accidental. You know, just little things
like that so that it looks to the eye as if the words and the
picture are intended to be together.
And I, I thought that one piece of, of advice he gave me was

(01:00:45):
just brilliant. And it's been helpful.
I mean, I've been able to, you know, share it with others who
found it helpful too over the years.
Yeah, I'm into it, Gonzalo. I wish we had you still on stage
because we're actually going to talk a little bit more about
graphics and pictorial elements inside of our work.
And for me, that's something that has been vital.

(01:01:08):
And additionally, I've been really bad at it.
You know, the stuff is in there,but it's not I wouldn't say I
was good at layout really at allin in the first couple of books.
They they should actually probably be redone for layout

(01:01:31):
concerns. Oh, hey, we got them back.
That said, the paperback I'm working on for release in
November, that is actually on myscreen even now while we're
hanging out and I've been makingsome progress on, you know, I

(01:01:52):
don't think I'm good at layout in, in in general, particularly
dealing with all of these graphical elements.
But there I would say is a, a considerable improvement over
the years. You know, at least at least
there's some improvement. There's other things I want to
do in the future that will require more improvement on this

(01:02:17):
front. And I think that it, it helps to
practice at it. And, you know, it just, it's
like anything, it's just like writing, except here, you know,
we focus so much more on writingthat some of these other design
things don't necessarily come upto the forefront as much.

(01:02:39):
Gonzalo, you came back up, you know, what do you think about
graphics and pictorial elements in regards to layout or design?
You know, when I was, when I waswriting the, well, not writing
really like, like presenting again, like getting ready to
present again, a proposal, the proposal initially for, for

(01:03:01):
Salvador, I had the like a one page description of what issue 1
was going to be about and like how the story was going to kick
off and all that stuff. But I wanted to make it more
visually appealing, right? And I had been working on a
bunch of sketches for the last few years now and I had one of,

(01:03:24):
it was just as like a like a pencil stage.
It was like a pencil sketch of Salvador like a little while
before he comes online. He's still in the lab.
He's up on like, like hung up onsome wires, lots of panels open.
I just wanted to like, you know,I was just playing around with,
with the design, how you'd look and, and to get that kind of

(01:03:46):
like, you know, his name is Salvador.
He's the saviour. He's going to, you know, he's
going to basically save the world at the end.
So I, I, I hope I'm not like, without trying to be offensive
about it, I was, I was actually trying to create an imagery of

(01:04:06):
like the world's saviors. So I put him up on, on wires,
but with his arm stretched out to the sides.
And I was just just to see how that would look and, and it
looked pretty cool. And you know, it was like wires
coming out of his arms and like the, the panels on his chest
open and like the core inside and all that stuff.
And when I was getting that textready to present, I thought we,

(01:04:27):
you know, it'd be really cool toshow something with this and not
just a bunch of text. So what I did was I cropped just
part of that image like halfway down his face and down to like,
I guess like like around the midsection and one of the arms
sticking out to the side. So like the body on the right

(01:04:47):
and the arm, his right arm sticking out towards the left on
the paper. And I put the text but, but like
just below. So they'd be like first the head
and then the arms like stretchesout into the paper and then the
rest of it. So I had space there to write
that text. I was trying to find it on my
Google draft because I couldn't find it in my, in my, in my
folder. So that the text starts with

(01:05:10):
like 1 short paragraph above thearm, but next to the head with
his look, right? And then it continues below the
arm. So it and it kind of like it, it
like the text would stop right like around like the contour of
like the arm. And then like the rest of the
image, like the robot parts thatopen panel that so that it
follows that that that contour. And it looked pretty cool and it

(01:05:33):
looked intentional. And it also added to the story
where like you could actually see what was going on, like
where he was and how and how hisexistence began, how he started.
So I guess like I, I, I tell that story to the that's
basically as far as I've taken kind of using images in, in the

(01:05:57):
writing itself, without going into comic books, of course,
right, Like an actual like actually put using images in the
text. And I thought it, it works
really well because the arm and the torso framed the text really
nicely. And the, the area above the arm
framed the, the introduction with the head really nicely too.
Like it, it, it played really well into what I was doing

(01:06:19):
there. And, and I think that if, like
if you're considering using images for your text, one should
complement the other, right? The text should complement the
image, and the image should not only draw you in, but also
complement the text like what's going on in the story.
Oh yeah, That has a lot to do with what I'm seeing visually on
the page, right? Gonzalo, I totally agree with

(01:06:41):
your points. I feel like all of that
contextualizes against the, the design aspects, the totality of
image and vision and, and all the rest.
I, I like all that stuff. And particularly I wanted to be
able to tee you up on that because you're doing multimedia

(01:07:05):
type of stuff where you're writing it as a novel, but then
you're also considering it that same story to become graphic
novel. And having to think through some
of those processes, I think is requires additional levels of
consideration that perhaps all of us are not engaged in the

(01:07:30):
same way. Well, and you know it, it's,
it's funny 'cause it actually started out as oh, I found it,
it actually started out as a manga.
Like I've always wanted to make it either a comic book or a
manga. Settled on manga a couple years
ago and and only this year I started thinking, well, this is

(01:07:52):
taking a really long time to make possible right to make
happen. So I just realized it's, you
know, nothing's stopping me fromjust sitting down and typing on
a computer. So I said screw it and I'm going
to start writing it that way. Here I found I found the tag.
I'm going to see if I can capture, if I can get an image
capture screenshot and show you what I mean.

(01:08:15):
The arm doesn't stretch out as far as I remembered.
And I do have on the bottom likeanother image of him, another
sketch of him on the left side. So it it reads a little bit like
like like like a magazine layout, but the text goes does
like an S shape like it goes from like at the top all the way
across and then only to the leftand then only to the right,
which looks like it's visually appealing.

(01:08:36):
Well, we will see it as soon as you put it in the comments.
Yeah, yeah. Let me, let me put in the
comments. Give me a.
SEC Yeah, for sure. While we are here talking about
these digital things, let's moveinto tools of the trade,
software and resources for effective editing.
There are some things that Jaji and I like, there's some things

(01:09:01):
that Heidi likes. There are some things that maybe
we don't even know about yet andwe should.
Let's start off with one of the best tools to hate Grammarly and
what it does for you. I still don't.
So hard at that. Never used it.

(01:09:22):
So I, I used to use, I use Grammarly on my browser so it
shows up on, you know, almost anything I do online because my
spelling is just really bad. Well, it's hard spelling part
typing. And it used to just correct my
spelling and I loved it. And then they added AI and now
it is constantly trying to actually rewrite what you write.

(01:09:46):
And I don't know what it's trying to do.
I think maybe like the most boring professional business
letter ever. And it is so not designed for
fiction. So I do use it, but I just tried
to, you know, only look at the spelling part.
And then even there, you have tobe careful.
Sometimes they're trying to replace words.
So I, I've written to them and complained and I've asked if

(01:10:09):
they could make it so we could turn off the, the, the, you
know, they do different colors for different types of
recommendations. I'd like to turn off everything
but the red, but they say that'snot available at the moment.
Yeah, I'm with you on that side of things.
It is not. It is not in any way considerate

(01:10:29):
about fiction. And also it's just not poetic,
broadly speaking. I mean, it can't deal with,
let's say creative turns of phrase.
You know, it just has a real tough time with that stuff.
It is what it is. But at the same time, it it

(01:10:52):
basically is going to flag thesefalse positives occasionally as
the red squiggles and then also the the blue suggestions like
you're saying, gosh, it's just squeezes the life out of some of
this stuff. That said, it is a great free

(01:11:13):
tool as a proofreader so long asyou can kind of as long as
you're not just like clicking through and letting it correct
everything and you're being detailed and hands on with it.
You know you are the the arbiterof the decision making process

(01:11:34):
for the thing then it's fine I think generally.
One of the good thing for them and that is if you complain
about them here on X, they will write you.
And when I complained that it was correcting my present tense
into past tense, they said we will fix this.

(01:11:55):
It's only happened once since then.
So it's actually. Is that why it's your fault that
it changed that well? They, they were taking present
tense stuff that was supposed tobe present tense, you know, not
things that were supposed to be past tense.
You know, it's one thing if theyflag the, you know, the tense
when it's out of keeping with everything else.
But like they, they were trying to make the dialogue and the non

(01:12:16):
dialogue agree or something likethat.
And, and they, they noted that it was wrong and they were, they
were going to fix it. But I mentioned this just
because if you do see a regular problem, they they seem to
trying to be responsive. If more people complained about
the same things that are not that good for what we're using
it for, they might listen. Yeah, no, You know, it's funny

(01:12:37):
that you bring up that point because I have this thing that
is a lot of kind of going back on present and past tense, and
it was changing all this stuff to past tense.
And I've decided I like it in past tense, but now it's not
suggesting those things anymore.And I know who to look at for

(01:13:01):
this. I'm just teasing.
It's fine. I can do that.
Manually, that's my fault. I apologize.
That's fine. But it was, it was not the I
mean, I was not trying to write a scene in that in present
tense. I was writing an e-mail and I
was trying to correct my presentation.

(01:13:23):
Yeah, that doesn't make sense atall.
Heidi, how do you feel about Prowriting Aid the software as a
service? You're a user.
Sort of. I haven't been using it.
I technically, I've literally been just screwing with Grok and
ChatGPT to see how well it does with editing, and it's done

(01:13:44):
pretty well. Yeah, I, I used Pro Writing Aid.
I never used Grammarly. It always seemed like it was
going to get in my way. And from everything I've heard
from you too, I I feel that I made the right choice.
No, it's fantastic. I know so, but pro writing aid
that I used another one too and I can't remember the name of it.

(01:14:07):
They were more designed for fiction writers.
I didn't really like the other one as much as I liked Pro
Writing Aid. I used Scrivener, so I was able.
You can close the document in Scrivener and literally open it
in Pro Writing Aid and it edits your Scrivener doc.
Oh, that's nice right there. Yeah.

(01:14:27):
So you can it. It is actually really nice.
I probably should still be usingit.
The thing that it doesn't do, which like Chachi BT will do, is
it has a tati TP has a, has a more nuanced understanding of
sentence structure. Then then pro writing aid.

(01:14:51):
You know, pro writing aid is still kind of mechanical.
It's still got that mechanical quality that you're seeing with
Grammarly where it's just like universal, this is wrong, this
is right. You know, this is a fragment.
This is a this, you know, I mean, it catches stuff for sure.
But the thing that was driving me nuts is it's like, I would

(01:15:12):
say, no, I'm, you know, ignore that I'm doing that on purpose.
And then it would still not calibrate to that.
It would just, you know, you'd go back and it would say this is
wrong. It's like, no, I told you, it's
not ignore that you're you're I'm doing that on purpose.
And then it was a no, this is wrong.
So that was getting on my nervesa little bit about it.

(01:15:33):
I mean, there's no perfect solution.
It's easier to use and say ChatGPT because I the AI when
you throw like something into that, it just wants to change
everything. And I'm like, oh, no, no, you're
not. You're not changing anything.
I will make the changes and you can make suggestions.
You know, if you see an actual grammatical mistake, let me

(01:15:56):
know. I will make the changes, which
is, you know, it's more challenging process.
But I think that gets me to the point with all of this is yes,
it will catch things, but you absolutely have to monitor every
single move. You you just can't allow any of
these to just make blanket decisions, as which you've also

(01:16:17):
pointed out. And I, you know, anyone who
thinks that they can do that is not actually interested in
writing. There, I said it.
Fight me. I told you guys before about how
I use grok to change the tense on a bunch of things.
And I found out that occasionally it just changed a

(01:16:39):
word to prove and only in certain files.
But it's one of those files was when I gave to a friend and
she's been fighting with it and she mentioned it when I found it
in one of my files. It the word is, which is changed
to the word prove for no particular reason.
You know, in the middle of the dialogue that I had told it not
to touch. So you have to be careful with

(01:17:00):
these things. I also had the thought that I I
saw an article recently that said that all of writing is
beginning to look more like AI writing that that there was a
kind of a trend where it looked like people were communicating
more the way a is do. And I suddenly realized, I
wonder if that's because of things like Grammarly.

(01:17:21):
If if a person has Grammarly on their e-mail and they start
following the suggestions ratherthan ignoring them, every e-mail
they sent would look like it'd been written by the AI, you
know? That's a great point.
Yeah, I bet. And I mean, the the the attack
on the M dash breaks my heart. You know when you know how to

(01:17:43):
use something. Yeah, I love the M.
Dash and you understand that theM-IS, you know, a secret weapon.
It's not for every sentence. You do not have pages full of M
dashes. I mean, I remember this back
when I was editing, we had our technical editor discovered the

(01:18:05):
M dash. It was really funny.
He discovered it like for the first time and he wrote this
entire article. It was just, it had like, it's
like a 15 maybe and probably wasn't even that like a 750 word
article. And he had like an M dash
practically every paragraph because he was so thrilled with
his discovery. And this guy's a techie.
He's not a writer first. So, you know, and we're just

(01:18:28):
like, pay her the hell? It's like, OK, you can use it
once. You can use it once in 750
words. That's it.
Make it count. Brutalizing them.
I agree, I love them. They really are good for
clarification, particularly if you're writing a complicated
fantasy background and you want to put in a little bit of

(01:18:51):
clarification about what something means that the
character would know and the reader doesn't.
But, you know, I was trying to make sure that I'm not putting a
lot of one thing gets confusing to the eye.
But, you know, then you're not using them that often, you know?
But it irks me that somebody would see that and then go, oh,
this was written by an AI. Just because they oversimplify,
you know, because it's such a good tool, we don't want to stop

(01:19:13):
using it. It's just frustrating.
I know. Well, I mean, if you're using it
correctly, then it you know, which is for emphasis, for
extreme emphasis and and you don't you don't want to
extremely emphasize every singlething, right?
I mean, that's really the thing.And it's just I know it's like
I'm still going to use them, Butit's it's frustrating though,

(01:19:36):
because I will say, if you show like what do you think of this
paragraph or something, you know, seeing how the AI does it,
it will literally M dash the whole damn thing and it's like
you got to stop. You got to stop.
And I don't know. It hasn't attacked the semi
colon yet. I think that's still in sacred
space, but it. Goes the other way too.
Grammarly now tries to take out every M dash.

(01:20:01):
It's false positives all the waydown, you know, is what turns
out. Think Chad GPG has effectively
ruined the M dash for everyone. No, no, we're, we're going to
keep using it. We're not.
We're not letting these clankerstake our tools from us.
Well, I mean, I'm still going touse.

(01:20:21):
It, but you have to really know when to use it because if you
overuse it, then it's going to be like, yes, because like as
soon as I see on like us anywhere online, as soon as I
see like, you know, it's not XM dash, it's Y I'm like, even
though I, I, I, I enjoy the end.I like using the M dash when
it's appropriate. That's always, well, this is.

(01:20:44):
That's always been the case of the M-1 might argue that the AI
doesn't know how to properly useit.
Yeah, yeah, You know what's interesting?
And, and this is kind of an editing thing.
Yesterday I got. So I've discovered when somebody
DMS you, if it's actually an AI,you can discover it by asking

(01:21:05):
just a completely unrelated random question.
And the AI will answer the question, but a human being
won't, you know, I mean, he's like, what in the world are you
asking me that for? But you can purify with a.
Dot and they will do it. Yeah, and I, but I begun to
notice that I'm beginning to notice when it's an AI, which I

(01:21:25):
didn't originally. And I thought, you know, I
wonder if in a little while, do you hear about the old movies
like King Kong? Women fainted in the aisles on
King Kong because it was so realistic.
Well, it doesn't look realistic to our modern eye, which is used
to special effects. Doesn't look realistic at all.
We can't believe anybody would have believed it, but they've

(01:21:47):
never seen it before. They they didn't know how to
notice it wasn't real. And I'm wondering if we're all
going to just get a lot more able to notice when it's an AI
and and much more able to to distinguish it than than we are
at the moment. Debatable.

(01:22:07):
Again, I think that there's so many false positives that now
people are thinking that they'rereading AI when they aren't.
So it kind of goes both ways, but at at the same time, like
here's an interesting example too.
When we look at maybe like computer generated imagery,

(01:22:31):
we're not in a situation where computer generated imagery is
infused into our natural world. Whenever we're watching a movie
or a television show or looking at a computer screen, there's we
don't have to like we don't haveto like note to ourselves that
we're looking at things that arecomputer generated.

(01:22:54):
That might be a a key point of difference and and like an
inflection point on that stuff. Now if if if in the real world
someone here's this is an interesting way of thinking
about this. If you had somebody who was

(01:23:14):
speaking to you in real time dialogue that had been created
by an LLM and they had it piped into their ear via, you know,
Earpod or something like that, that that's a wild example and,
and totally feasible at this point too, right.

(01:23:36):
And that I think is a bigger consequence because we then have
to start really questioning the nature of our interactions with
people as well. Something to think about, I'm
not telling. My husband argues with the phone

(01:23:58):
because the robot calls. He's like, are you a human?
And he'll ask it questions. And I'm like, you know, if it
hasn't answered by now, it's nota human.
But he's annoying it. Well, he's doing it to himself
on that one. I don't want to steer us off the
AI conversation. I feel like at this point it's a
it's a valid conversation. And here I am, a creative who

(01:24:21):
uses AI pretty heavily and broadly.
And you know, I'm not going to stop.
I'm not. I have no intention of not using
the stuff that I have, mostly because I like what it enables
me to do, whether that's like editorial stuff or pictorial

(01:24:43):
stuff, video, audio, you know, even I'm, I'm fine with it.
That said, I mean, I think people know like I'm using this
stuff. I'm not going to like sit and
disclose every single time that I'm doing something with AI just
because that's arduous, you know?
And also, if you don't know me well enough, then maybe you're

(01:25:10):
just getting to know me and that's OK.
But you know, at the same time, if you're looking at maybe some
of my video shorts and thinking like, gosh, this shirt looks
like AI. Well, maybe you're not that
familiar with AI because it's explicitly AI.
It's, it couldn't be anything but that.

(01:25:32):
And the same thing kind of goes for editorial inside of
copywriting. You know, I'm fine with it.
It's been something that's been sneaking its way in over the
last like 3-4 years and I would say is here to stay and not
going away. And also the computers are

(01:25:55):
talking to each other as they have been for longer than LLMS
have been around. We've been using machine
learning to parse the data on websites and then inform how to
create the data and information that we put on websites.
This has been going on for 10 plus years, you know, in a

(01:26:16):
significant way and longer than that in a search engine back end
way. So, you know, I think when
people have these sort of chips on their shoulders about this
stuff, if you want the all humanmade artisanal experience for
media and content and entertainment, well, you know,

(01:26:38):
you have to be prepared to pay for it.
You know, that's that's the tough part about it.
If you want something every day that's fresh and new, there's
probably only one way of experiencing it at this point in
terms of like high quality homespun handmade entertainment.

(01:27:02):
It's going to take a lot longer and that's just the way it is.
There's a thing we haven't necessarily touched on, and I
don't know that it is critical to.
We're doing it here. In fact, being a community,
having the discussions, sharing resources for improving our

(01:27:23):
writing skills. How do you guys think about
that? Ladies, gentlemen.
I know that when I was first getting going at writing, I was
in a writing group and it was invaluable to me.
Just having somebody who is interested in what you're doing,
you know, can be so invaluable. Getting a little feedback.

(01:27:48):
So you have an IE, you have to be careful.
You don't want to be, you know, if you're talking to human
beings, sometimes they're all you know, all you must use AI or
never use AI you. Need to be a little a little.
Wise in what you do, but I thinkgetting a little feedback,
getting an idea of what's normal, discovering that certain
problems you have or just everybody has them.

(01:28:09):
I mean, there's a lot of things along these lines that you can
learn by interacting with the writers that I think are really
valuable. Yeah, I think I would agree with
you. It's like when you first start
doing this, it's like you need input.
And I think you always need input.
And yeah, I mean, people are ideal for input, aren't they?

(01:28:33):
Right. Because that's really, they're
the, they're the best machine out there.
But you know, I will say with the AI now you can use, you can
use it to get to kind of push yourself to the point where
it's, it's, it's more polished before you get it to humans.

(01:28:55):
So I mean, ideally what you wantfrom what you want is to get
something to the point where I mean, this is how I view it
doesn't work. Like, yes, this is finished.
And then you show it to a personand they're like, but what about
this? What about this?
What about this? And I think you can do that, you
know, by getting input from the AI first, so you're not wasting

(01:29:18):
people's time because it when itwhen, when there's a human, it
takes longer for them to respond.
They have a life, they have other things they're doing.
Maybe the only person you can get to read it, you have to give
them money. I mean, these are all things to
consider. So I think it's, to me, the AI
is just another tool to make things better.

(01:29:42):
It's not something that writes for you.
I mean, Georgie, I think you're the ultimate definition.
If it's something you would pay someone to do, then it's still
you being the writer. And I mean, you can get input
from them. Pacing beats all this stuff and
I and you can torment them endlessly, you know, like, you
know, that girlfriend who who's would you still love me if I did

(01:30:04):
this or you know, that kind of thing.
I mean, so that that is one of the advantages that we have
right now with AI that that didn't exist even five years
ago, which is crazy if you thinkabout it.
I mean that is such a small piece of time.
It really is the the degree to which it's suddenly changing
things, and people are really overestimating whether they it

(01:30:28):
can do and underestimating what it can do.
And some people are so against it.
Oh, we want authors to swear they'll never use it.
And other people I know are completely gung ho.
But I do agree. I mean, I, I do the same similar
thing with Grammarly. I, I, I try to run my book
through Grammarly thinking, well, why don't I catch the
mistakes I can catch so that my poor beta readers or my editor

(01:30:49):
don't need to do any more work than necessary.
You know, and, and I, I do thinkthat's, that's, you know, a nice
thing to do. But so that, you know, if I know
I'm making a certain mistake andit can help me catch it, you
know, then, then I don't have tohave you, you mentioned earlier
how people have certain mistakesthey make over and over again.
If we can, you know, use these one things to help us catch

(01:31:11):
these things, we don't have to impose on our poor editor to
correct the same mistake 50 times.
Where do you find the new stuff?Right.
Well, this is the thing, right? What you want the human for is
the high level stuff, you know, you want them for that higher
level stuff, all the grammar andall that stuff.

(01:31:32):
If you're asking humans to do that, I mean, obviously stuff's
going to slip through. It just does.
But if you're asking humans to do that, that distracts them
from giving you more valuable input, you know, and, and using
their time effectively. And I, I think that's, that's

(01:31:53):
the part about it that I like isit's like, if I can, if I can
remove as much of this as possible before I show it to a
human being, then they're not distracted by, oh, you have a
comma splice here, you know, andI mean, and you still do and
it's a work in progress and I still, you know, we'll send out
drafts and it's got crap in it and I'm like, damn it.

(01:32:15):
But you know, what do you it, it's still, that's the goal,
right? To to keep the human reader
focused at the highest level, I think.
And that's how I view it. I don't know.
What do you guys think? I think you're right.
Yeah, like if I get something tosomeone to read, it's it's, it's

(01:32:39):
going to be after I've gone through it and check for
spelling or typos or redundancies or any stuff like
that. Like I want them to tell me what
they think of the story. Like, did it land?
Did did it make them feel nasty?Did it make them feel like sad?
Did it make them cry? Did you know that that's what I
want from a beta reader? Not, you know, did I make that I

(01:33:00):
spell. They're wrong.
You know what I mean? Right, Yeah, I completely agree
with you. I mean, obviously we want them
to catch if we did spell something wrong, but if we can
do that, then they can catch the, you know, I often say to to
beta readers, just put awk for awkward, you know, next to any

(01:33:25):
section that that, you know, if you think there's something
wrong here, but you don't know why, just mark it.
Often I can figure it out by looking at it.
Oh yeah, I can see how this doesn't make sense.
You know, and a lot of time a reader, if they're not also a
writer and editor, they don't know why they don't they don't
like something or it's it doesn't work.
But if you just tell them, you know, just mark that this
doesn't work, you know, you don't have to necessarily figure

(01:33:47):
it out. I found that can be very useful
in in, you know, getting them totell you where you know
something and you'll read it over you go, OK, I see that I
didn't really have this sentencefollow properly from that one or
I'm leaving out an important thought that needs to be there
for that to work or something like that.
I do the same thing when I'm editing.
I say, I often rewrite things orwrite suggestions, not because,

(01:34:11):
and I, I have like this huge disclaimer where I say this is
not me giving you word, putting words on your page.
It's just easier for me to get the idea across, you know, if I
put it in a little, you know, a lioness or a scene or something.
But I, I say, you know, don't don't worry about how I put it.
But even if you disagree with me, read it over because

(01:34:34):
something here wasn't clear to me or rubbed me the wrong way.
And you might, you know, often like, I'll get back a manuscript
that someone will ask me to lookat, you know, can you see if I
got this right? And they went in a totally
different direction to fix the problem than the one that came
to me? But they identified because of
my comment that there was a problem and they fixed it, you

(01:34:57):
know, so that so I try to emphasize to them, you know,
here's here's where I'm seeing aproblem.
You know, it's your muse. You do it the way you know
you're inspired to do it. But don't just discount it and
don't just use what I'm suggesting because, you know,
sometimes I'll actually write two or three different lines.
Like if I'm putting, you know, it's like, so make it clear.
I'm not telling them to do it myway.

(01:35:19):
I'm just trying to clarify something or, you know, bring
out some quality or something like that.
But I, you know, I think, I think both as writers and as
editors, it can be very valuableto just know this just isn't
working. Cancel.
Go ahead then, we're going to move into the lightning round A.
Couple a couple years ago, I waswriting a chapter for a new

(01:35:43):
book. I eventually dropped because I
decided to just focus on one project, but I was writing a
chapter book for kids. That's anyway I was writing, I
was writing. And because it's for kids, I
printed out the chapter that I wrote and I gave it to my son.
And I said, you know, check thisout, you know, tell me what you

(01:36:06):
what you like. But what I did was I told them,
if there's anything that you really like, put like I give him
a pencil, right? Put like an exclamation mark
next to it. If there's anything that's a
little boring, put like I can't remember what it was like some
kind of other symbol on it. If there's any part that's
confusing, put like a question mark on it, you know?
And then I let him read it and Iwatched him like I watched him

(01:36:29):
as I was reading. And whenever I noticed that he
would look off to the side or start talking to someone or
something like that, I'd be like, where were you exactly?
And I've marked that part because I know that part didn't
grip him enough. Like it was, it was a little bit
boring because I know he's an avid reader.
So, so there's a section that bores him.
Then I know it's, you know, it's, it's, it's bad.

(01:36:50):
So, so that's what I did. Like I would, I would tell them
like if you can have someone do it like with a hard copy, it's
really cool because you can, youcan ask them to mark on the
paper. You know where I think basically
the, the, the, the best, the best kind of feedback is what
parts were really gripping, whatparts got you a little, a little
distracted, a little bored and what parts were confusing.

(01:37:13):
And that's a great base to work from, I think.
Good points. I think that's really brilliant,
but you just have to make sure, if you're watching him,
sometimes think people will stopand look to the side because
they're actually thinking about what you wrote, you know?
But that's really brilliant. Well, look, what I did was like,
I, I didn't, I didn't watch him like I didn't like hover over

(01:37:35):
him or anything. I'd be like just like walk by
outside his room just like occasionally and just check it
and check in. And whenever I asked him that it
was because he just started talking to his brother or
something and they just started talking about something else.
And then you come back to it eventually.
But I was like, all right, what's this?
I just, just to, just to get, you know, data on, on the text,
Like what part allowed you to take your eyes off it and talk

(01:37:57):
about something else to someone next to you, You know, so
there's something trivial because I'm, I'm aiming to make
it as dripping as possible. So I'd like to get that those
little data points. I think they're really useful.
That is really cool. Sure, fair.
And also maybe for the next round you build out a completely

(01:38:17):
white room and you put a camera up in one of the corners just
staring down at the table where they read and you record it.
You can watch it remotely. You're meeting under this light
in the third degree. One day.
You do raise a good point here about the concept of self

(01:38:38):
editing, whether or not that is a reflection of other people's
appreciation of our work or merely just part of the process
that we go through. In terms of writing, we've
already kind of addressed using an audio book read or reading
aloud to edit and revise our work, but there's lots of other
things that we could talk about in the sense of biases or

(01:39:02):
inconsistencies, areas that we can improve.
And I think what you were sayingis a great jumping off point for
this. You know, how do we do those
things? How do we remove our biases or
just identify them in general, Remove the inconsistencies or
discover the places that need improvement?

(01:39:24):
Ladies thoughts? The thing that I find the
hardest and, and it's not exactly a bias, but the thing
that I find the hardest is recognizing where you worded
something in a way where it's ambiguous.
So the person might be confused when they read it.
I could give an example. Sometimes if you don't use the
word that there's two and you know, you do, often we take it

(01:39:47):
out because we want it to be a little sleeker, but sometimes
you have to put it back in or there's two different ways of
reading the sentence. And anytime a person has to read
your sentence twice to understand it, it probably needs
to be changed. So I think there's there's.
In my experience, there's only two ways to find these things,
because obviously we're already reading it the way we think it
should be, and we don't notice. One is to ask someone else to

(01:40:09):
read it and the others to put itaway for a while.
Often if you put the manuscript away and you do something else,
work on another project for a little bit, you, you know, you
get on to your next project and you come back after it's not as
quite as clear in your mind, then you yourself can sometimes
find those places where you've made that kind of mistake.

(01:40:30):
Also for the people hanging out,if you guys want to raise your
hand, this is an open conversation.
We've only got about 10 minutes left, I'll warn you, so we're
not going to go into great depth.
But at the same time, if you want to raise your hand and come
on stage or even just to give a progress report, we do that in
these monthly workshop sessions as well.
Heidi. Yes, I was in the white room.

(01:40:54):
Were you if you were? In the white room and there was
a camera on me. You would have seen me drifting
away. Not because of what Jaji said.
I I drifted a moment before that.
There was a small distraction. What?
What question would you like to ask me to answer, Michael?
OK, you know how do you your. Question was about biases.

(01:41:16):
And inconsistencies. Areas for improvement.
From in regards. In regards to self editing, oh
boy. While Heidi's thinking, I'm
going to say a really short editing fail story, which I
think I may have told one son, but but as an editor, I mark my

(01:41:38):
spot so I know where I left off.And I used to do it by putting
three question Marks and one dayI left it in and my poor writer
was really traumatized by why I was like so dramatically asking
him what was wrong with the sentence.
So now I use slashes instead of question marks.
I felt so bad for the guy. Great stuff.

(01:42:00):
OK, well, I'll tell you one thing that I do that makes me
crazy. When I'm editing, I'll be
reading a a sentence. I don't know if anyone else does
this, I'll be reading a sentence.
I'm like, oh, I need to say this.
So I'll rewrite the sentence, and then I'll go to the next
sentence where I'd said the thing that I just rewrote.
Oh my gosh, I do that too. It's and so one of the things I

(01:42:23):
have to sit on my hands and readthrough the whole section before
I start changing things because I tend to screw up my parent, my
paragraph or whatever because I what what's happened, I think is
I, I know what's coming next, but my mind is remembering it
like, oh, I need to say this even though I'm about to say it.

(01:42:44):
That gets me in trouble. That would be a delightful
editing fail. I had literally have to sit on
my hands like plea, because I'lldo that makes me anyway.
I don't know. The thing that makes me the most
upset about this is that I I do this.
I won't say often, but it often enough that it's very
recognizable and nearly every time I go oh, she, you know, she

(01:43:07):
should have said this or this should have happened.
The one I originally wrote when I was writing the first time is
like 10 times better than the one I just.
Wrote while I was. Editing.
That's exactly the point too, right?
That that. That's the other part that makes
me nuts. And if it wasn't for the undo
button, I'd be screwed. That I will share.

(01:43:32):
So be mindful. Be mindful.
Make sure you haven't already said it when you're trying to
rewrite something. I like Michael's question about
avoiding biases, but I'm not sure what the answer is other
than asking for other people's opinions because I mean, I think
there's some biases that we knowwe have and we can look for

(01:43:52):
them. I don't need to put my opinion
about X in this, you know, my, maybe I, you know, only like 1
flavor of ice cream. It doesn't have to go in my
story or whatever. You know, it's not true, but you
know what I mean. I'm just trying to use an
example. If the screen biases we have, we
know we have them, we can look for them.
We know we don't need to give them to our characters, but
there's other biases that we don't know we haven't.
I and I don't know how to stop that except for asking for other

(01:44:14):
opinions. Well, I mean, that's that goes
back to the the, the human reading it because the AI, I'll
say this AI will support your biases for the most.
Part it, really. Will.
I mean, especially if you call it out, it's like it says, oh,
I, you know, my favorite you, you need to give your female

(01:44:36):
characters more agency. They're not boss girl enough.
It's like, well, we're not doingthat.
Oh, OK. But then maybe I've veered too
into something else. So I mean, humans will, will
point out your biases. AI will not.
And I think that's something to be aware of.
AI will support them. They'll they'll point out biases
sort of. But I've noticed there's a

(01:44:58):
tendency to want to compliment you more than two, you know, and
it's fine. I mean, it's hard to tell.
I mean, it's, it's hard to tell what the AI biases is the AI
bias to create an algorithm based on what you want it to do

(01:45:19):
so you continue to interact withit?
Or is it's biased to make you a better writer?
I, I don't know, right. This is something you consider
when you're playing with AI. I was talking with someone about
the good and bad of AI and one of the goods that I listed was
well, you know, they're, they'reso positive that they really
encouraging that could be reallygood for someone.

(01:45:40):
The next time I looked at the news, I saw an article about
somebody who went crazy because their AI companion was a person
who was already on the spectrum already but was so positive and
so reinforced everything that itit produce some kind of
psychotic episode. I was like, OK, maybe nothing is

(01:46:02):
100% good. Even encouraging a person
apparently can possibly have a downside.
Well, someone, I mean, I don't know if I'd even I would say
that probably has more to do with a person than the AI to be
perfectly honest. It it may be, but it was funny
that it was right after I said that was one of the absolute.

(01:46:23):
Positives. It is funny.
I mean, it triggered it maybe, but I mean there's all kinds of
triggers for people who who who have have those types of
triggers, shall we say. But I don't.
But yeah, I mean, but that is the thing you have to consider.
You have to consider how well it's flattering you.

(01:46:43):
And with writing, if you're showing it fiction writing and
it, you have to take into mind that it's going to look at it
mathematically. So it's going to say, is this
pacing hitting certain beats at this particular numerical point

(01:47:04):
is, is this happening? You know, it, it's not
necessarily great with nuance. So I mean, you, you have to take
all those things into consideration if you're getting
feedback from AI, it it, it's not ultimately a person.
All it's really doing is equations.

(01:47:27):
So, and I mean, you know, you could say it does really good
equations and it does, you know what?
You can do though. If you want to mitigate those
things, you can. You can put that into your
instructions. You can say, identify any biases
that I might have. Or you can say like what I like,
what I do like. If I ever put a paragraph that

(01:47:48):
I've written into ChatGPT, I'll say, how can I make this
tighter? How can I make this hit harder?
How can I make this more suspenseful?
Or what, what, what can I end this sentence with?
I've never really worried about biases because I'm writing about
robots, but but you can do that,right?
You, you can, you can say, you know, identify this, identify

(01:48:10):
that and just listen to the suggestion.
It's just another voice. And, and if you're aware of the
things that it can be that that it can do wrong, then you can
include that in the instructionsand just watch out for those
things. And you know, it's like, like a
tool, you know, you use a hammerto build a house.
You, you could hit your thumb. So you you know to be careful

(01:48:32):
not to hit your thumb. You know you're not going to
stop using hammer just because you can hit your thumb.
Well has gone swimmingly. Any remaining thoughts or things
you haven't said that you feel you must in regards to editing

(01:48:53):
and revising or large announcements for the coming
month before we get to the next workshop when it'll be review?
You know, let's hear anything along those lines, you know, are
you giving yourself deadlines toturn out some work or do you

(01:49:15):
have anything interesting comingup to be released?
Anyone. I just have the minor comment
that I'll be on vacation next week, so I'll miss you guys, but
I'll look forward to seeing talking to you all when we get
back. We'll miss you.
Yeah, that's unfortunate. But you know, everybody's got to
do their thing as it is. It should be fun, but yeah.

(01:49:35):
Yeah, yeah, No big deal. You'll be back the following
week. I.
Will. Let's, I haven't said any, I
haven't said any specific deadlines for myself because I
don't do well with those. But with the schedule that I've
got for myself, like what I'm going to be doing, well, I mean
I've tried it. So what I'm going to be doing

(01:49:56):
now for the next few days is finished polishing up my short
story so that I can set it up asthe welcoming gift, like the
welcoming e-mail that that you receive when you sign up for my
sub stack. And immediately I'm going to be
finishing as soon as I finished chapter 2 of Salvador the, the

(01:50:16):
book version, I'll be publishingthat there as well As for a
timeline. I, I hope that by the end of the
month, I should, I should have that ready like I should have
the kill box ready by this week,like there for when it for
anyone who subscribes. And then and then chapter 2
should, should, should, should be ready by the end of this

(01:50:39):
month. It's a lot longer than chapter 1
so I'm struggling a bit with enjoying it so much.
Dig it. Heidi, Oh, hello.
Hi, how are you? I'm thinking that I would like
to probably have the house that Jax built out.

(01:51:01):
Maybe September seems reasonableright now.
Let's see if I stick to it. It's pretty close.
I don't know about the audio book, but I might be able to get
the heart out and gonzo. I'm going to send you a code for
the desert audio. I know I've been a little
distracted if anyone else would like a code for the free audio
to have the audio book for free of the desert let me DM me and I

(01:51:23):
will I will send you one. I still have some.
I'm very jealous of Joji going to Chincoteague because I I want
to go see Misty, but but I'll I'll survive and and I will, I
will. I will enjoy it for through you.
My curious appreciation. That's an I'll, I'll bring back
some wonderful I, I every time we go to Shanky Take.

(01:51:48):
I spent a lot of time thinking about writing because I have a
friend who often goes. So she's in Japan this year and
we talk every time we're there about doing a writing workshop
there in the building. If we could work it out where
Misty of Shanky Take was, was written.
So I'll be thinking about writing things and maybe bring
some good ideas back for you guys that.
'D be excellent. I would, I would.

(01:52:10):
I might. I might.
I might, you know, do something dramatic to be able to attend
that if you ever do do that. I might, I might beg borrowers.
I'm just saying. Hey, appreciate all the
discussion today. We'll be back on Tuesday.
We're going to be talking about tropes while Jaji is out.

(01:52:32):
Gonzalo, if you're available andinterested, maybe you want to
guest Co host for a week. I know that's something that
you're good with tropes and those ideas, so we'll pitch it
out to you if you'd like. Awesome.
Yeah, I, I would love to, I lovegetting on spaces with you guys.

(01:52:53):
I would love to talk about it. I can't guarantee that I'll be
available though. So let me let me check.
Let me get back to you on that. Yeah, checking.
I thank you for. Yeah.
Thanks for the invitation. We do a planning session on
Thursday afternoons, so that would be also, you know, it
doesn't take long, but we can run over the notes that we
generate and just kind of kick some ideas around on Discord.

(01:53:15):
As for today, you know this has been nice and we will talk again
before too long.