From One to Another
In Today's Journal
* From One to Another
* The Writing
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
From One to Another
A friend asked a few questions via email yesterday, and I thought some of you might benefit from the responses:
"I was shocked and pleased to note that you had stopped submitting to Smashwords directly (but not to their retailers). ... On the flipside, it seems that Draft2Digital has expanded everything it does very nicely. That's good."
Yes, I stopped submitting my work to Smashwords a few years ago because even the submission process was clunky. But a year or two later D2D bought Smashwords and made the whole issue moot.
"Do you still advocate that tedious process of stripping all formatting from a Word doc and then combing through to replace what's needed? Wasn't that a Smashwords thing? That was always bloody awful."
Re "stripping all formatting" from a Word doc, I vaguely remember advocating that (I called it "nuking" and I did so by copy/pasting from Word to Notepad) but I haven't done so in years, and I don't recall at the moment why I ever did advocate it. Something about stripping bad formatting, I'm sure.
"Have you decided on your final wording for the "disclaimer" that states that the story is NOT in anyway AI derived and that AI did not contribute to it in any way?
"Also, I glanced at some wording that also forbids "the use of [my] writing to teach AI systems" but cannot now remember who (or where) had the best advice in this regard. Do you have any recommendations?"
Here's what I put in the end matter of every novel or short story I write:
Disclaimers
This is a work of fiction, strictly a product of the author’s (my) imagination. It is the result of a partnership between me and the character(s) I accessed with my creative subconscious as I raced through the story with them, trying to keep up. Any opinions expressed by the character(s) are their own. I am only their recorder.
Any perceived resemblance-to, similarity-to, slights-of, or offenses-to any persons living or dead, and-or any events, groups, places, organizations, and so on are products of the reader’s imagination. Probably. In my world, intent still carries considerably more weight than perception.
In no part is this story the block-by-block, purloined construction of any sort of generative AI or even the artificial construct of any conscious, critical, human mind, including my own. What you read here is what actually happened there.
Finally, neither the author nor the publisher consents for any person, entity, or organization to use this work to train any form of generative AI, large language learning modules, or any similar technology that exists now or will exist in the future.
Please feel free to use the above, either as-is or modified to suit your purposes. It covers both not using AI to generate stories and not allowing AI to "learn" from what I've produced with what's left of my own bad mind.
"I have had one novel [the third in a series] ready to publish for some time, but I want to include those two above tidbits in the publication data."
When you finish writing the final novel in your trilogy and it's toddling-about for a month or so, I hope you will consider publishing all three in a "boxed set," which is basically nothing more than an omnibus with all three manuscripts, preferably in the correct sequence, stacked atop each other.
If you do so, at the bare minimum that will give you four publications from the writing of that trilogy vs. only three. This is very good math.
"Now on to Writing into the Dark and other related matters. Real writers don't outline. Period. ... Even Patterson started out writing this way before he became an assembly line manufacturer."
The problem today is all the other crap is taught as Gospel in schools—those edifices in which children are taught no matter what they should NEVER believe in themselves, that it always "takes a village"—so that's what the children believe from the time they graduate from the 6th grade on up.
I've taken on the arduous task of teaching them differently. Not that I actually make the slightest difference, especially with a following of only around 200 out of Carl Sagan's "billions and billions." But I seldom grow weary of my own voice. As, no doubt, you can now tell if you'd forgotten in the first place.
The Writing
No writing yesterday. A trip to Tucson to pick up our son who's visiting from Indiana.
Of Interest
Here's a Crazy Thought: Charge What Your Books Are Worth
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 780
Writing of Blackwell Ops 44: Sam Granger | Following the Ghost Trail
Day 1…… 3613 words. To date…… 3613
Day 2…… 2893 words. To date…… 6506
Day 3…… 1824 words. To date…… 8330
Day 4…… 3025 words. To date…… 11355
Day 5…… 3697 words. To date…… 15052
Day 6…… 3428 words. To date…… 18480
Day 7…… 1013 words. To date…… 19493
Day 8…… 2993 words. To date…… 22486
Day 9…… 3310 words. To date…… 25796
Day 10…. 4379 words. To date…… 30175
Day 11…. 3952 words. To date…… 34127
Day 12…. 3809 words. To date…… 37936
Day 13…. 2497 words. To date…… 41047
Fiction for May………………………... 69300
Fiction for 2025………………………. 447713
Nonfiction for May………………........ 18700
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 119790
2025 consumable words…………….. 560993
Average Fiction WPD (May)……...... 3300
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 10
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 26
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..... 114
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 296
Short story collections……………………. 29
Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.
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Questions are always welcome at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. But please limit yourself to the topics of writing and publishing.
Oh, and here's the link for the D2D EPUB Validator. You don't have to have a D2D account or be logged in to use it.
https://draft2digital.com/book/epubcheck/upload
I like to run my EPUB files through it before I upload them. It's a quick check to make sure everything is working smoothly. It works quickly. If it finds errors or fatal issues, click on the link they provide below their note, and you'll find a complete list of the issues.
My guess is that the recommendation for "stripping all formatting" was related to Smashwords. Their "meat grinder" was horrible about picking up any odd formatting marks and throwing the whole thing out without really explaining why they'd rejected a file. When I still used them, I had to take my documents through the same "nuking" process. That's why I stopped using them, actually. I got tired of wasting all that time for a distributor I sold very little through. It just wasn't worth the time and frustration. I never missed Smashwords.
As a side note, D2D has a great validator you can use even without logging in. It scans EPUB files and lets you know if there are errors AND what they are and where in the file.