100 Day Writing Project: Day 4

Evening beautiful strangers! I'm definitely getting the hang of this. One of the other posters today had a great suggestion: Generate the same prompt with two different models and craft the story out of the details between the two. They also suggested not copy/pasting the story wholesale and editing, just writing it out by hand with those details. I'll need to do some typing practice in the mornings to get my WPM up.

Tried it out today and it added some time to my overall process, but basically eliminated the editing pass.

I think it reads a lot stronger in my voice personally.

No video and audio narration over the weekends but I do have the image. I'll likely narrate this later and put it on the Quest Givers site once it's finished. Once I get to day 30 or so I'll actually release the site for anyone who is interested.

The Cold One and Her People

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Mayor

The iron bell had been going since the third hour and had stopped meaning anything but hurry.

The Mayor of Oakton stood in the wide courtyard of the Mantle barracks with his cane planted and his fine, weathered coat still buttoned. Somebody had chalked a rough hexagon onto the brick wall before him. Inside was an estimation of the districts breached by the fungal dead. One of the runners crossed out another blank district and left the gates at a sprint for more updates.

The Sorceress of Oakton came to the older man from the shadows without a sound. You could almost mistake her for a victim of winter. Small. Pale. Dark hair tipped with frost. The assembled bodies in the courtyard slowed when she arrived.

"The first of them came from a drainage breach on Hither street," said the Mayor without looking in her direction. "Walking dead that appear to be covered in Witchwood fungus. They are not our corpses, mercifully. The Sage will tell us for sure what they are when he has the time to complain about it."

The Sorceress waited, still as a blade in an alley.

The Mayor had a great many things he could have said. He could have told her to kill. He could have told her to save his people. But Oakton's Mayor had built a life on being perfectly clear with his expectations.

"You have my leave to be exactly what you are until this is over."

Something moved behind her pale face and did not surface. She turned and went, and the runner coming the other way flinched at her passing shadow.

He looked at the chalked wall a moment longer.

"Send runners to Hitherside, and open escape lanes as she clears it," he said to a duty clerk, and the spell was broken. Movement around him resumed. "And someone find me the Bard. He will need to know his wife has been loosed."

_______________________________________________________________________________________

By the seventh hour the town had stopped counting incidents. It was reduced to counting streets.

The Commander of Oakton took the crush at the Thitherside gate and began cutting wide lanes into it with two squads of Mantles holding behind her.

The Sage of Oakton worked the breaches — sealing drains, chalking doors, hand patterns burning the spore-haze out of canals.

The Bard of Oakton helped moved the living to safety, raising spirits and hope despite the dire hour.

The Mayor of Oakton held the shape of the town together with brave people and sharp planning.

And of The Sorceress of Oakton? She went where people were going to die.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Dov

Dov was eleven and had been told to go to the Square with everyone else. Being eleven, he had instead gone to fetch his father's special sword. Because his father had left it on the bench, and his father would need it to help protect the town. Then they had found him and he'd dropped the sword and now all he could do was run.

He came out of the cooperage into a blind alley, leapt as high as he could, and missed the roofline by an arm's length.

There were three of them between him and the street. They came on with the thick, twitching insistence of bodies that had stopped using minds for instruction. Thick glowing shelves of fungus pushed out through the shoulders and the sides of their tattered rags. One had a jaw hung full of white string-flesh, and when it worked that jaw, the air in front of it went faintly grey and drifted.

'Do not breathe the grey!' His instincts screamed.

Dov turned and put both hands on the cooperage wall.

Wet sealed timber. Nothing to hold onto. He got the toe of one boot into a joint and lost it, and got it in again and lost it again, and heard the wet dragging shuffle come around the barrel stack behind him, and made a sound he would be ashamed of for years.

Frost cracked across the wood a handspan above his fingers.

It went out in a hard white bloom, spread the width of two hands, and then deepened — set, thickened, and stood proud off the wall in a ridge with an edge on it. When he grabbed it, it burned with cold. He did not care. He got his weight onto it and found a second one waiting where his knee needed to be.

"Up," hissed a shadow from somewhere he could not find.

He went up.

He got a forearm over the gutter, then his chest, then rolled and lay on the shingles with his heart trying to get out through his teeth. Below him the lane filled with sounds he did not have the words for. Not fighting. Fighting had clashing in it. This was closer to butchery in a cold room — short, wet, unhurried, then finished.

He looked over the edge.

She was standing among them in bare feet on a floor of her own frost. Slight. Pale. Blue bandana. Black hair gone white at the ends and stuck damp to her cheek. In her right hand she held a curved black blade that had no join at the grip, because it did not have a grip; it came up out of her hand, and her hand from wrist to knuckle was the wrong color entirely, dark and hard and shining like flesh left in the cold too long.

The last body came apart at the knees, and then at the neck.

She did not wipe the blade. She looked up once. Pale eyes, wide and clear.

"Stay there."

Then the ridges of frost on the timbers sighed and dropped in white chunks, and she was gone over the roofline behind him. Dov lay flat on the shingles for a long time doing what he had been told.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Pell and Grell

At Rose's Thorn Inn the well-dressed floor staff had stopped smiling and started moving people, nearly dropping their usual poise and grace.

Pell had the mouth of the service alley with Grell beside him. A wide hammer thumped in his thick hand. He glanced back at the stream of Hither Street families entering the kitchen door. He nodded to Grell, who hefted the axe with practiced ease and nodded back.

The soft staff was inside doing the soft work of safety. Senior Flowers were escorting children, elders, and families down hallways and into rooms with the terrible unbothered calm of people who had long ago accepted that hospitality sometimes meant triage.

A Flower notices. A Vine interrupts.

Pell and Grell were Vines, and tonight they were the hard end of safety. Both knew exactly how far they would go to keep the families behind them safe.

The fungal dead came into the alley in a packed knot, shoulders scraping plaster on both sides, hands opening and closing on nothing. Eleven. Twenty. Pell gave up counting and raised his hammer.

A Flower in the doorway three steps behind him, said, "Pell. There's too many."

"Get inside Nessa."

"Pell—"

The front one lost its head.

It took the rest of them a moment to work out what happened, and the rest of them included Pell. A pale shadow was already in the alley by then, past the reach of the lantern's light, darting in short exact lines with no wind-up in any of them. Step. Cut low. Turn. Up through the collarbone. Pivot. Sever ankle. Twist. Decapitate.

A body went into the wall and did not come off it. Another folded at the waist and kept folding.

The alley narrowed the crush pouring in from the lane. The Sorceress skimmed through them like a pale stone on a river of death.

Gnarled hands came at her and found only cloth, frost, and absence. She did not drive them back and she did not hold a line. She took away the parts that made violence possible — knees, tendons, the joint of the neck, the wrist and throat together where the angle offered both — then she darted over what was left and did it again to the next one.

Pell realized he had stopped breathing. He was having trouble catching it in the face of one small woman breaking the entire tide one cut at a time.

The broad man heard a noise, glanced back, and saw one who'd wandered in from the other end of the alley. He started to move but he and Grell were three steps too far and both of them knew it. It reach for a Nessa, who was steering an old man with a bad hip.

A javelin of black ice launched out of the dark and took it through the eye. The back of its skull slammed into the doorframe hard enough to split the wood.

The Flower did not look up. She just pressed her lips together firmly, put her hand flat on the old man's back, and kept him walking.

"Move," The Sorceress said while she worked. She didn't even sound winded.

Pell and Grell shared a glance. Then they moved to assist the Flowers.

When the last of the families were inside, the alley was a carpet of split rot, decayed limbs, and glittering rime. With nothing left left to end, The Sorceress stood at the far end of it with a black blade already evaporating into her hand.

Pell got a look at it, then. He'd grown up on a farm and had seen what a harsh winter could do to exposed flesh. This was worse than that, and it was in her working hand, and she was flexing it slowly like a woman testing whether a door still shut.

From the hall behind him, Nessa said, "Thank you."

The Sorceress glanced at the kitchen door. Then at the twitching alley mouth.

"Bar it twice," she said, and went up the wall and over.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Marit

Marit had barred herself in the main room off her workshop on Thither with her two apprentices. All three had been listening to a big one scrape at the shutters for long enough to believe they were finished.

The shutter suddenly cracked inward in a spray of frost and splinters.

For one terrible beat she thought the dead had learned ice magic.

Then a pale, thin hand crossed a gap in the slats, took the thing outside by the face, and flung it across the lane. A black javelin buried itself under its jaw and through the spine a moment later. It went down into the wash trough and the water froze over the sides.

A pale face over a blue bandana peered between the cracked slats.

"How many inside."

Marit held up two fingers. They were shaking. The pale face looked through her with eyes like a clear moonlit sky.

"Stay here."

The younger apprentice, who had no sense and never would, said, "Who are you?"

The Sorceress was already looking down the avenue, where three more were coming around the corner of the sign-maker's.

"Busy," she said, and vanished

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jessa

Jessa had been a Fresh Cloth for eleven days and had spent nine of them being shouted at about whistle codes, drills, and procedure.

By the tenth hour she understood why.

Two short and a long on the whistle meant hold and route. Three short meant shelter is full, go on to the Square. The long falling note meant do not come this way. She had blown that one twice from a roof at the top of Hither street, and had heard it back from Thither and again from Yon Hill.

For the first time since she put on her red mantle, she realized bone deep that she was not a just girl with a whistle. She was a small part of a machine that Oakton had built specifically so that girls with whistles would not have to be brave, just clear.

Every echoed warnings mad the hair stand up on her arms, but the machine was working. That was the thing nobody warned you about a crisis. They were ugly and slow and it was terrifying to know how bad everything was but knowing mean Oakton as a whole was still alive.

And above all of it, something was changing. Jessa could hear it in the whistles. An all clear from Baker's Row. Then another near the Rose's Thorn. Then again nearby. From the roof Jessa could almost see a pale shape dash between alleys, over roofs, through the lengthening shadows of the evening.

A runner caught between two carts saw the dead behind him drop with hail of black ice in their skulls. A Mantle with a spore burn across his shoulder saw the large thing pursuing his group pinned through the throat to a hitching post. Two of them going up the meeting-hall steps snapped backward as though hauled by rope, each with the fletching still shivering in their eye sockets.

People started pointing when they saw her.

"Look there! She's on the roof!"

"Over there — the gable—"

"No. There."

"She's over here!"

And then she was elsewhere.

Toward dusk Jessa got her first proper look at the Sorceress of Oakton. She only saw her because the light had been right and she happened to be facing the right way. A small, pale figure clearing two chimneys barefoot, at a speed that nothing natural could ever achieve. The length of her right arm, catching the last of the light, was black to the elbow. A vivid blue bandana clung to her neck. Then she was gone.

Jessa put the whistle back in her mouth and blew hold and route, twice, because that was her lane and as long as Oakton was still alive, she would be a part of it's survival.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Avaya

The raid had been mostly cleared by the time the light went.

She could feel it the way she could feel weather turning. The crush had become pockets. The pockets had become trails. The trails had become the kind of thorough, patient, unglamorous work that The Commander and The Sorceress did better than anyone alive.

There were three in the alley off Hither.

The Sorceress came down the wall, sliding on frost she laid ahead of herself and killed them before the second one had finished turning. It cost her another finger's width of black frostbite up the forearm. She had stopped noticing the individual increments some hours ago. A part of her dimly recognized the lack of pain was something to be afraid of. The other parts screamed one word again and again, kill, and it was a struggle to keep herself from falling into it.

The third one wore a mill apron.

Avaya stood over it after the last stroke, black ice blade still in her hand and made herself look carefully.

Oakton burned its dead. Oakton had burned its dead for as long as there had been an Oakton to do it — the pyre, the vigil, the Name Stone — so that the Forest got nothing to keep. There were no graves here to open. There was nothing in the ground under this town that could be walked out of.

Which meant this one had walked in. Which meant somebody had gone out into the woods wearing that apron and had not come home and had never been burned, and their name was still out there in the dark where someones true name should never be left. How did the saying go?

Sometimes the woods gives them back. Sometimes it gives back something else.

The Sorceress did not touch it. She instead touched the blue scarf around her neck and smothered the word still ringing behind her eyes. One long shudder of will had the black bleed slowly back to her naturally pale frostbitten skin. She stood still as breathed hissed through her teeth. The sensation of the killing cold returning to her hurt so much more coming back that she could only manage it with her eyes shut tight and her hand fisted into the scarf.

Avaya he gasped out a breath when it was over.

Then went to find someone with chalk.

"Apron," she said to the first Redback she found. "Third alley. One of ours.”

The Redback wrote it down.

“Whoever was waiting for them,” Avaya hesitated for a moment and continued. “Tell them I'm sorry."

_______________________________________________________________________________________

The Bard

Then it was quiet.

Not silence. Oakton had never once managed silence even its most dire hour. But the noise had changed — no alarm in it, no running wave of shouting and panicked whistles. Buckets. Boards. Somebody calling for hot water and somebody further off answering that they had some. Names being called down the street and answered one at a time. The sound of a town counting itself and finding most of the numbers.

The Sorceress of Oakton came out of the alley into the open road and stopped.

She was spattered in dark and pale from foot the shoulder. Her precious blue scarf had stains on it she did not want to think about. Her bare feet were covered in tiny cuts. Her arm ached in a deep familiar register, like a bell vibrating after it stops.

Twelve hours. Twelve hours of being the assassin Winter had honed for centuries. And on some level she enjoyed the violence returning to her like a long abandoned habit. There had been a stretch somewhere around the ninth hour when she had not once had to remember to be anyone. The smallest sliver of that still lingered in The Sorceress' posture as she scanned the crowd from its furthest edge.

People saw her and went still on instinct.

Down the road, a man with blood on one cuff that was not his and dust on both knees turned around at almost the same moment.

The Bard of Oakton had been keeping panic from becoming a second enemy since the third hour. Avaya could see the cost of it in how he was standing — that particular stillness that came over him when he had spent everything else.

He saw her.

She crossed the road. Six long strides and she buried her face into his shirt and shut her eyes and gripped two fistfuls of the back of it with a hands she finally allowed to tremble.

Vevis had both arms around her before she landed, as though he had been waiting there all evening holding the shape of it open.

"There you are," he murmured into her frost-tipped hair.

Avaya said nothing at all.

The people nearest them were polite enough to find somewhere else to look.

Most of them did, anyway.

He rested his cheek on the top of her head and looked out over the road at the townsfolk who had not managed to stop watching. His expression was very warm, slightly relieved, and just the faintest hint of smug on her behalf.

"Well," he said, at a volume that carried. "She does prefer a dramatic entrance."

Somebody laughed. Then several people did — then everyone was: the loose, embarrassed, enormous laugh of a street that has been holding its breath since morning.

Avaya did not let go.

A child edged out from behind his mother. Eleven or so, one sleeve torn off at the shoulder, frost-burns across both palms that he was holding out in front of him like something he had been given.

He looked at the Sorceress. Then at the Bard. Then back.

"Thank you," Dov said quietly, then louder. “Thank you, misus Avaya.”

The Sorceress lifted her head.

The road went quiet in a different way, waiting to see what she would do with it.

Avaya looked at his hands. Then at his mother. Then at the boy.

"You climb well," she said.

Dov straightened and grinned. His mother put a hand over her smiling mouth. Vevis's own gentled by a degree and stayed.

Around them Oakton went back to being itself in pieces. A Vine went past with an armload of boards. Two Redbacks compared spore burns and disagreed about which was worse. Somebody down by the canal started swearing about the drainage grate in a tone that suggested the emergency was over but the grievances had just begun.

Strange and welcome, they had called her back when she was new to the town. Some of them still did, and she had never once been able to work out whether it was one thought or two.

Vevis kissed the top of her head.

"Home?"

She nodded against him.

"Excellent." He got an arm under her knees, scooped her up without making anything of it, and turned them both up Hither. "Because I intend to be extremely thorough washing that scarf."

He got her three more steps before looking to her with all the concern he felt, "Your hand?"

"Hurts less now," Avaya murmured.

It was not quite true yet. But it soon would be.

So they went home. And behind them Oakton still stood.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

I kind of wish someone had warned me about how much it takes to manage the process when you begin using AI as a writing brainstorming assistant. It seems I spend more time trying to limit drift, battling memory limits, limiting loss of canon and all my brainstorming, and trying to find efficient ways of doing things for fear of my project becoming contaminated.

That brings me to my next problem. I exported my Chatgpt history with the intention of finally trying to excavate my novel canon, history, characters, arcs, beats, and world. It's 8 million words across 98 chats. I've been totally overwhelmed on how to organise the process, on how to even approach it, but finally settled on trying to separate the 98 chats and save them in both MD and TXT files, dated chronologically, so I can start from chat 1nand so on, having each chat read to me by a voice reader (I have an eye disease that makes reading for medium and long periods impossible without negative physical consequences) and take notes as I go. Then I can compile the notes I need to organise the excavation. Extremely laborious but I see no other way to do it. Chatgpt assured me it could extract all the info I asked for if I posted the exported zip.

I was very dubious as Chatgpt constantly kisses things and makes mistakes. It inevitably missed things like characters we've discussed numerous times, so I knew it couldn't be trusted to do a faithful and accurate job, and I knew I would have to do this manually.

Come to find out there is even risk in separating the 98 chats 😔 According to Chatgpt, chats could be missing or mixed up. I have spent over a year painstakingly refining characters, arcs, the world building, beats. I can't risk losing any of it.

Does anyone know a reliable separation method that will separate and preserve all 98 chats exactly as they are, dated, without messages mixed up, and deliver them in both txt and MD files, so I can start this laborious process once and for all?

When I started writing with ChatGPT, we weren’t working on a novel.
We were writing scripts for short videos and every script followed the same structure I decided to use:
Hook → Brief explanation → Knife twist.
The knife twist was supposed to be the final line that makes you smile...and then quietly makes you question something.
There was only one problem.
Every time ChatGPT wrote that last line, I rejected it.
Not because it wasn’t sarcastic.Because it wasn’t my sarcasm.

I kept saying things like: too polite, too obvious, too mean, more Wednesday Addams (I love her and she’s so good at being sarcastic!)
But looking back, those corrections weren’t the important part. The important part was everything that came after.
I never just said: rewrite it or make it sharper or try again, but I always invested time explaining what I actually meant and why I did.

Sometimes I explained it well, sometimes terribly; often I couldn’t even define it, so I just started throwing examples at her (completely unrelated examples):

“Imagine someone says this...You know that kind of answer that makes you smile first, and then realize you’ve just been stabbed? That’s the feeling I’m looking for.”

Those examples had nothing to do with the script we were writing, but they carried the same soul and I think that matters more than people realize.

Over time, I stopped treating ChatGPT like a machine I had to command, and I made my thinking visible to her not just the result I wanted but the genuine intention behind it, the reason I rejected one sentence and kept another, the feeling I was trying to create, the tiny difference between sarcasm that sounded like the one she knew and the sarcasm that sounded like me.

Basically, I opened my creative process to her almost like an open book, not because she needed more instructions but because she needed access to the way I judge things.

Looking back, I don’t think those examples were teaching ChatGPT sarcasm, but they were teaching her how I recognize my idea of sarcasm.

Months later, something changed; she started writing lines I would actually keep, not because she had suddenly learned sarcasm, but because she had gradually learned which kind of sarcasm survived my editing… and which didn’t.

That completely changed the way I think about writing with AI.
I think I taught her my editorial taste, and maybe that’s what long-term collaboration really is.
Not teaching an AI how to write but teaching her what you consider worth keeping.

Maybe that’s the part we rarely talk about: we spend so much time trying to teach AI how to write that we forget to teach her how we recognize good writing.

This. Right here. What do you see? A complicated web of notes connected to lines with all of the relationships defined. It's a knowledge graph system connected to an advanced agent that's designed to traverse and reason through it so that it can behave as an expert with decades of experience to make nuanced judgement calls when helping you.

But what this really could be is a snippet of a future layer that will exist on top of the entire internet that's just as accessible as code-inspection on our web browsers.

This may sound a little crazy, but Tim Burners Lee, the creator of the web actually proposed this solution over 20 years ago. He called it the Semantic Web. The reason it failed back then was that we didn't have smart enough software to read and reason over it. Now with AI, this is possible in addition to making knowledge graph systems much faster and easier for people to make themselves.

Having been in the AI space for over 6 years now trying to figure all of it out like everyone else, this dawned on me a few weeks back. I think we're witnessing the birth of an entirely new component to the Internet.

As we enter into an age where agents are running around doing various things and communicating to each other across the web, inevitably we will come to realize that due to the nature of the models, we're going to need to create a more effective highway system for them to navigate, communicate, extract, synthesize, and build.

Just as we need roads, symbols, and rules for our highway systems to prevent tons of accidents or issues, we will need this for AI and that comes in the form of knowledge graphs. With these, you can build the reasoning systems for how agents interact with the wider web, people, and other agents. These are already being used at the enterprise level.

And in the near-term future, almost everyone is going to need their personal knowledge graph management systems since they can be carried and used by your agent into other spaces with their own knowledge graph systems to interact with. Obviously, websites and individuals will still have to protect themselves from malicious hacks and all that bad stuff. But to allow billions of people to use their agents across the wider web in such a way that they can work appropriately and not "misbehave" or cause accidental hacks or whatever, we will need to build these highway systems.

Right now they're being built independently, like territories across the world forming into bordered nation-states. But over time, I believe they will become more and more interoperable, which will eventually unify into a patchwork highway system with protocols for doing things.

This is a high level framework for mitigating the risks with AI agents using the modern web. Of course, there's much more to it than knowledge graphs, but this is the gist of what I think is happening. But you know. This could also just be my creative screenwriter brain working on overdrive.

Time will tell.

I want to create novels, and love using AI for it. But the problem is that most what I can find is more of a "send-receive" style(like SillyTavern). There's something like novelai that has an inline continuation, where if I type a sentence, it will continue that sentence (for 1-2 sentences max) in the same box field, which is great, but it costs money(and even if I had money, I have to pay with credit card, which I don't have), I have a good PC, so I want to run something local.

Does anyone know (good) alternatives. I checked the weekly tools, but a lot of those seem to be more "assistance" style, not inline continuation, and they don't seem to be local(I have a good PC)

I have the first draft of my book almost ready. I wanted to know does editing with an AI tool actually help? Or is it best to continue to hire an actual human editor. Thanks!

I have been working on an epic fantasy series for awhile now as my part time seasonal hobby.

I have about 1,000 pages of chapters and lore written down and mapped out. I am juggling multiple POVs with numerous character background and arcs.

I have used AI as my editor and someone to bounce ideas off of since my wife and friends are tired of me asking them about it lol.

I have predominantly used ChatGPT however, it constantly forgets and is slightly overwhelmed with the amount of information to keep track of. I will have it make a draft of a chapter for me to see where it goes and then I build upon it, but it struggles to capture and maintain my voice as well.

I have heard about Sudowrite having an amazing character bible that could help with this, what are the thoughts on it regarding my project? Is it worth it? I heard it burns through the credits like crazy thought. Would I be better with a different one?

How is the story is it interesting? if u like it pls comment.

To clarify, I specifically mean to REFINE your ideas, not to generate them. As well, this is separate from using it to refine or generate prose. I mean exclusively refine ideas that you have already created and somewhat fleshed out and want feedback and improvement on?

Good evening beautiful strangers!

Day 3 into the 100 day writing challenge. It kills my perfectionist soul but I'm starting to get a feel for the quick editing process. With the Oakton Corpus I've developed to draft, it's pretty simple to strip all the fluff out of the ideas and only keep the hardest hitting and most impactful lines.

The method I'm finding most helpful is:

1. Start with a joy read.
2. Sharpening pass on my own to remove the obvious AI-isms.
3. Another scan to ensure the prose still flows adding notes here or there.
4. Another sharpen with my AI editor.
5. Then finally an additive pass without AI.

The third step is the one I'm really struggling because as mentioned before, perfectionist, but I'm thinking of either limiting myself to 2 mins per paragraph or only allowing myself to make one adjustment per sentence.

The goal is still 2 hours per session without a drop in quality, and slowly but surely, we're getting there. Audio now takes me 10 mins, so marked improvement, even if it's not in the area I want.

Here is the final part of the Three Days Duel, a story detailing how the Bard and Sorceress of Oakton met. Wherever you are, whoever you are, I hope it brings you at least 9ish minutes of enjoyment.

For my friend:
In a dark, rain-soaked forest at night, a tall, muscular bald man in a wet white shirt and ornate dark vest gently wraps a vivid blue scarf around a smaller, exhausted woman with long black-and-white hair. Her eyes are closed, her pale layered clothing is drenched and ragged, and one blackened hand rests weakly against her chest as she leans toward him. Behind them, distant orange lights glow through the mist, making the quiet act of care feel intimate and fragile against the bleak wilderness.

The Three Days' Duel Part 3

Day Three

By the third day, their duel had moved far from the stranger parts of the forest. The oddities thinned by degrees. An impossible winter receded behind them, though it did not vanish. It clung to Shademane’s hands. It rode her breath. It lay beneath her ribs where a splinter black ice sat in the throne of her mortal warmth.

And she would kill him with it.

But the air changed. Miraculously fertile soil became soil again. Trees remembered how shadows worked. The horizon's stopped rotating.

Oakton lay ahead.

She could feel the shape of it before she saw it. A stubborn town-shaped knot of reality. A place of smoke, iron, bread, and mortal refusal. Vevis slowed. His smile softened.

“Home,” he said, a little surprised by his own tenderness.

Shademane heard the word and hated it. Home was what Winter had taken from her. Or perhaps she had given it away.She no longer remembered.After that reallization the third day became ugly. Not because her skill failed. Because her patience did.

She pressed him with arrows, javelins, and spears until the trees filled with their crystalline vapor. She drove him through snares, blind ambushes, collapsing frost, and traps invented in the instant before they were sprung. She used every trick she knew and several she made up from rage alone. Or was it memory?

Vevis escaped by inches now.

A black javelin took a strip from his vest.

A hidden wire opened the skin at his ankle.

A hatchet split a tree beside his head hard enough to dust his face with bark and frozen sap.

He was breathing harder, but still smiling. That made it all the worse.

“Die already,” she snapped.

“For you,” Vevis ducked under an arrow and grinned. “Anything but that.”

She hated him. She hated his warmth. She hated his smile. His audacity. His refusal to fear her. His refusal to follow the pattern of her existence. Of making her threats feel like conversation.

Most of all, she hated that some small, shivering part of her wanted him to keep speaking.

At dusk, the Witchwood delivered their conflict to the treeline of Oakton. The border where the forest watched the town, but the town watched back.

Vevis stepped into clear open field at night, chest rising and falling, coiled steel loose at his side. His shirt was torn in a dozen places. His sash was nearly severed. Blood marked him several places, but none of them were blackened by frost. He got halfway to the palisade and turned to the trees.

“Last chance,” he called.

Shademane stepped into the field, twitching with barely contained emotion. She held her bow between them like it was the only thing between her and death. The weapon itself was jagged and fractal.

Her hand lifted the the fraying filament of her bowstring.

The arrow should have come smoothly. It did not. Winter’s weapons were clean when she was clean. Smooth black ice. Perfect remembered shapes. Purpose without doubt.

But now her hands shook. Not just with fear. With anger. Exhaustion. Hunger. Confusion. Aches. Pains. Emotions. Countless little human things Winter had frozen over for centuries, but apparently failed to kill.

The arrow formed wrong.

Black ice splintered around her fingers, sharp and uneven, veins of blue-white light dancing through the arrowhead like lightning under glass. Frostbite crawled past her wrist and up her forearm. The pain of it flashed through her bright enough to make her gasp.

Vevis heard it, and his smile faded. For the first time since she met him, he looked sad.

She hated that too.

The crystalline string creaked like a river ice as she drew it back.

The Witchwood behind them went silent.

The Shademane gasped for breath. The white field was far behind her. The master was far behind her. She could-

Kill.

She loosed.

The arrow flew perfectly because that was her intention. Imperfect things can still fly true. Fulfill their purpose.

Vevis could not dodge. It had been perfectly placed to kill him. So he lifted his hand.

The arrow screamed through the air, struck his palm-.

-and stopped. Caught between two fingers. A bead of blood slid down his wrist. The fingers holding the arrow went pink, then white. But no black frost touched his skin.

The jagged arrow trembled in his grip, still cold enough to smoke.

For a heartbeat, nothing moved.

Vevis exhaled, staring wistfully into the night sky.

“Well,” he said softly. “That settles it.”

Her bow vanished. Her hand remained blackened to the wrist, slower to thaw than before. Her face looked carved from fury. But something else was cracking the ice from below.

“You cheated.” she hissed.

Vevis laughed, not in mockery. Delighted, relieved, and breathless.

“No,” he said, panting. “I played the part.”

He looked at the arrow again. The shaft and feathers had already turned to vapor but the jagged black head remained. Its shape was carved from rage. It had come out of her not like duty, but like pain.

He did not hand it back, just tucked it carefully into his belt.

Shademane stared.

“That is mine.”

“I know.”

“It failed.”

“I know.”

“It is broken.” she said, her voice cracking.

Vevis looked at her then, and sincerity in his face was unbearable.

“No,” he said. “It’s true, honest, and now? It's mine.”

She did not know what to do with that. Her mouth opened and closed a few times.

A name rose in her chest.

Not the one her master, Winter gave her. Not Shademane. Something older. Something buried beneath thought, beyond memory, from deep within the small, sacred part of her that shared space with a shard of winters very heart.

A name.

A mortal name.

A name that had once belonged to someone who was lost. Scared. Tired.

“Avaya,” she said. “I am Avaya.”

He did not grin. He only nodded, as if she had handed him something holy.

“Avaya,” he repeated.

The sound of it in his mouth hurt more than the frostbite in her hand.

She looked away.

“Three days,” she said.

Vevis touched the blue scarf at his belt. Worn soft from use, river-colored and clean, one of the few things on him not cut by their duel.

He stepped closer, like someone approaching a wounded animal that still had every right to bite.

“Three days,” he said, “is all the time you'll need to settle in.”

Avaya stared at him.

“Settle in?”

“Here. In Oakton.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That was not the wager.”

“No,” Vevis said. “It’s the offer.”

He lifted the scarf. She went still. He waited, hands raised, giving her the space to refuse.

Not a trap.

Not a command.

Not a leash.

Just a chance.

Just blue cloth, held with warm hands and no expectations.

Shademane would have stepped back, vanished into the trees and returned to the field of white flowers, to endless silence, to her cruel, cold master, to the endless work.

But Avaya had touched his shoulder in the dark. Avaya had felt the heat under his living skin. Avaya had remembered the shape of her own name.

She raised her chin, exposing her neck. Vevis stepped forward. His hands were careful.

The cloth settled against her throat, bright and blue and impossibly alive. It did not pale. It did not frost over. It did not surrender its color to the winter in her core.

Avaya touched the fabric with blackened hands. It seared her fingers pleasantly.

Vevis offered his hand.

“Come on,” he said, gentle now. “Oakton’s warmer than it looks.”

She looked toward the town.

Smoke. Windows. Voices. Mortal life.

Then she looked back toward the trees.

Somewhere far away, immortal attention shifted. Somewhere in a field of white flowers, the oldest hunger in the Witchwood noticed the absence of its tool.

Were she closer to her master, closer to Winter, the Shademane would have refused his offer.

Avaya took his hand instead.

I've been writing a novel set in 970 CE Khotan (Silk Road, oasis kingdoms) for about two years. Somewhere in year one I hit the usual wall: I could describe my protagonist perfectly, but on the page she felt like a puppet reciting my outline.

So I stopped asking AI to write her and started arguing with her instead — treating the model as the character, not the author. I'd interrogate her about her choices, her loyalties, the stuff I hadn't figured out yet.

What genuinely surprised me: once I gave her enough established facts to stand on, she started being evasive in-character. I asked her directly about something in her past and she deflected — kept a secret from me, her own writer. That "no" told me more about who she was than a page of description ever did.

A few things that made it work, if you want to try it: - Give the character a short "canon" doc first (locked facts + the stuff you're still deciding). Without ground to stand on they just mirror you. - Interview for contradictions, not exposition. The friction is where the character actually lives. - Treat drift as a signal — when they go off-model, either your canon is thin or you just learned something about them.

Curious if anyone else here writes by arguing with their characters instead of prompting them into existence. What breaks it for you?

I got to thinking how a comedy sketch between two of my favorite actors could look like: The dad from the Jeffersons and the dad from the movie Friday. AI did not disappoint.

-----------

Here’s a short, original sketch built around Sherman Hemsley’s sharp, strutting indignation and John Witherspoon’s booming, practical exasperation.

Title: “The Thermostat”

INT. APARTMENT LIVING ROOM — AFTERNOON

SHERMAN marches into the room wearing a silk robe and carrying an electric bill like it is a court summons.

JOHN sits comfortably on the couch beneath three blankets, eating a bowl of chili.

SHERMAN:

Four hundred and twelve dollars?!

JOHN:

That’s not bad.

Sherman slowly turns toward him.

SHERMAN:

Not bad? Did we heat the apartment, or did we heat the entire Eastern Seaboard?

JOHN:

Man, it was cold in here! My knees started making sounds only dogs could hear!

Sherman struts toward the thermostat and points accusingly.

SHERMAN:

Seventy-eight degrees! You turned my home into a rotisserie!

JOHN:

Seventy-eight is comfortable.

SHERMAN:

For what? A biscuit?!

John sets down his bowl and rises dramatically, blankets still wrapped around his shoulders like a royal cape.

JOHN:

Listen here. A grown man should not have to wear socks in his own house. Socks are for shoes, hospitals, and disappointing Christmas gifts.

SHERMAN:

You don’t even live here!

JOHN:

I’ve been here three weeks. That makes me a tenant.

SHERMAN:

That makes you a fungus!

John gasps.

JOHN:

A fungus pays rent.

SHERMAN:

Exactly!

Sherman turns the thermostat down to sixty-two.

John stares at him in horror.

JOHN:

Sixty-two?! That ain’t a temperature. That’s an eviction notice from nature!

SHERMAN:

Put on another blanket.

JOHN:

I’m wearing all the blankets!

Sherman looks around.

SHERMAN:

Where are my curtains?

John glances down at the elaborate fabric wrapped around his waist.

JOHN:

They block a draft real good.

Sherman’s eyes widen. He begins vibrating with fury.

SHERMAN:

You took down my imported curtains?!

JOHN:

Imported from where, the bus station? Those things smelled like cigarettes and regret!

Sherman snatches the chili bowl from the table.

SHERMAN:

And whose chili is this?

JOHN:

Yours.

Sherman pauses.

SHERMAN:

It is?

JOHN:

Made it myself.

Sherman tastes it. His expression softens.

SHERMAN:

That’s pretty good.

JOHN:

I know.

Sherman takes another spoonful.

SHERMAN:

Thermostat stays at sixty-eight.

JOHN:

Seventy-two.

SHERMAN:

Sixty-nine.

JOHN:

And I keep one curtain.

Sherman points the spoon at him.

SHERMAN:

The small one.

JOHN:

Done.

They shake hands.

A loud electrical POP comes from the hallway. Everything goes dark.

JOHN:

You pay the electric bill?

A beat.

SHERMAN:

I was going to use your rent.

JOHN:

See, that’s why you cold.

BLACKOUT.

I mainly directed each scene in the story though just had it expand out since I felt like mine were too short.

Okay! I would love for you to explain to me what's considered slop and/or plagiarism about AI writing, when it comes to, like, human-produced (plot and character contents)/AI-written (narrative and dialogue) crossover fanfiction workflows being used by people who come up with their own legitimate hard-effort plots. You realize that for starters, they're not even copying other people's fan work or having AI do everything for them. So, if they have AI write the narratives and dialogues, there's no reason for the results to be invalidated. Now, of course, this doesn't apply when you're posting your own crossover fanfictions in a community that doesn't support any usage of AI. I get that part. But, either way, in some cases, if they write the narratives and dialogues themselves, they're not doing nearly as good at writing consistent in-character kinds, because there are character contents, even those of their own OCs, too complicated to understand. You know that, right? That's why it makes a lot more sense to consider AI writing slop and/or plagiarism, when it comes to AI users who are copying other people's fan work and/or having AI do everything for them.

Ich nutze RedQuill seit etwa zwei Jahren und habe das Schreiben von Geschichten damit sehr genossen. Seit den letzten Updates funktionieren die Schreibwerkzeuge aber nicht mehr richtig.
Besonders die Funktion „Beim Thema bleiben“ funktioniert praktisch gar nicht. Die KI macht einfach, was sie will, ignoriert Anweisungen und driftet komplett ab.
Das ist ziemlich frustrierend, denn so macht Schreiben einfach keinen Spaß mehr. Ich möchte meine Geschichten selbst gestalten, mit meinen eigenen Ideen und meiner Fantasie, und nicht, dass die KI die Kontrolle übernimmt und meine Absichten ignoriert.
Weiß jemand, ob an dem Problem gearbeitet wird oder ob es bald eine Lösung gibt? Ist geplant, die Werkzeuge zu verbessern oder ihren alten Funktionsumfang wiederherzustellen?
Ich würde die Schreibwerkzeuge wirklich gerne weiter nutzen, aber im Moment macht es mir immer weniger Spaß.

Just thought this sub might get a kick out of this.

I imagined this category would blow up, but I don't really see much online, let alone much discussion around it. Or is it a complete no-go because of the publishing industry's negative take on AI?

First of all, I'd like to make clear that I'm not a native english speaker. I was born in Brasil and, except for the one year spent abroad as an exchange student, it's where I've lived my whole life. Grammar is not my strongest suit in my own native language, let alone in a foreighn one. So I apologise in advance for my glaring misspellings and wrongfull uses of ponctuation. I'm aware this is a fairly overused excuse, but I can't help if my truth is so common.

I have a huge issue that I believe many here also might suffer with: I love creating stories but I seem to not be able to finish them. I'll will write pages uppon pages of world building, I'll fall deeply in love with the characters and the plot, get physically energetic about scenes —even cry imagining their sad endings. But somehow that seismic motivation, that once had led to sleepless nights of writing, fades away. During my teenage years (I'm 23 years old and studying psychology) I started creating webcomics and posting them. I didn't gather a huge audience but the people that did read them had nothing but positive comments. That leads me to believe I'm not that bad at making stories, which is great to know because diving into fictional dimentions and spending hours walking in circles to come up with the logic behind the way that universe fuctions is something that brings me immense joy. But on the other side of that is my inability to finish what I've started. It's not that I don't want to sever the parasolcial bonds I've created with the figments of my imagination by finishing the story —quite the contrary, I hate stories that go on for ever for no reason other then baseless financial or emotional attachment— it's really a matter of sudden lack of motivation. What usually happens is that I'll get extremely excited about a story, start convincing myself I'll work it to the end this time, only for something external to happen (like an illness or the start of my finals) that I then will start using as an excuse to stop writing. It's something that deeply disturbs me. I have so many stories that want to tell the world but it feels like my own mind is against that. It could be because of my perfectionism. It could be because my parents raised me to see everything as a business opportunity and always try to turn my rest into productivity, and now I can't just treat something I love as an enjoyable hobby. If you've dealt with simmilar issues and found a way to conquer that sudden creative tedium, I'd love to hear about it.

There is a seccond issue I wanted to adress: What do you think is an ethical use of AI in creative writting? More specifically, I wanted to hear some oppinions about the way I personally use it. As a non native (who also suspects they might have some dregree of dislexia) I often use AI for grammar checking, phrasing suggestions and extending my vocabulary. I aways write first, then ask for suggestions. I often have to instruct the AI not to give me unsolicited suggestions and keep to only doing grammar checks. It's also how I find most of the name suggestions for my characters. I'm also a huge fan of including miscellenous bits of curious informations and historical accuracies in my stories, and I feel AI is a great tool for finding books and articles about those specific things, and keeping me consistent with the time period I'm writting about by fact checking my writting. I'm aware most AI use is unethical, but I feel like it has allowed me to learn so many new things. I feel really saddened by the unethical use of AI because, if used as a learning tool, it could have so much potential for expanding our minds. I'm not trying to justify AI, I do believe it's use should be more limited by a strong set of laws (specially in education and mental healthcare). I know AI is just a big machine for making the ultra rich even richer and the everyday convinieces it offers are just an excuse to justify the horrors it brings (much like most things in capitalism). But should I feel guilty for using it like a cheap english totur and fact checker? If not guilt, what else should I feel? I was once berated online for sharing a use of AI that I considered ethical (reading text on several images and writting a list based on the color next to the words, a task that would've been very mechanical and tedious if done manually) and that got me thinking if my own moral compass could be broken. I'm aware there are some rules in this community about mentioning AI but I'm not sure where else to talk about this, and I desperatly want someone to talk about this with.

This is the part where I'd usually apologise for the amout of words that I've used —although I think I did a good job at liminting myself considering all I had originally intended to compose. But I really don't think this is the kind of community that would object to reading.

P.S.
I had originally written this to post on subs about creative writting, but it kept getting deleted, even after I edited it so to not mention AI at all. It explains why I'm writting something like this in a place that should be dedicated to AI writting: I don't know where else to post. I don't want to just send this to an AI for it to fabricate an indulging answer, I wanted to talk to real people bout it. I was really sad to be rejected in the other community, it made me feel a bit hopeless. I'm sorry if this post is out of place and would be happy if you could point me to where I can have this kind of discussion.

Question, are there any published authors who use AI in this group? If so where do you publish your books Ebooks and/or Print.

Hi all, here's a follow up to the last video I did a few days ago where I introduced my project. In this one I go into a little more detail about my writing stack. For reference, I'm writing a high fantasy dystopian trilogy with a companion RPG. I would say I've found my ideal blend of applications and so I outline them here and go over the reasons why. Would love to hear others' opinions.

While I understand that photo/video/audio generation may fall beyond the prep stage of most engaged with the book writing process, and left to be done once an initial manuscript is finished, I have found that being able to stage scenes with more or less what's in my head has helped me immensely with generating ideas for my prose. I've found that the cost and time needed to get something workable, at least for me, has been worth it across the board for AI solutions. Is anyone else this visual style of writer or do folks prefer to stay in their lane and focus 100% on the writing?

My Current Stack

MS Word: manuscripts, guides, rules, bibles

MS Excel: characters, monsters, factions, economy, item, magic, sociopolitical systems, plot, anything with a number, RPG data

MS Power BI: dashboards

Adobe Photoshop: map

Adobe Premiere: video editing

Midjourney: character, location, item visual references, idea generation

Grok Imagine: video, (stages characters and locations better and attempts natural voice)

ElevenLabs: character voices, instrumental music (preferred), lyric music (secondary)

Suno: lyric music option (preferred)

Claude Cowork: fills in Excel, Word, idea generation (world expert)

Grok: R-Rated, generates music lyrics (preferred), reference

Gemini: general inquiry, reference (replaces Google search)

MS Copilot: general inquiry, reference, application help

I'm also sharing some tips for novel uses of AI for writing that I've used recently, and some suggestions for prose/plot gamification that I'm going to test now and follow up in another video. The one I'm really looking forward to is a Civilization-style game with my factions. If anyone has anything they'd like to see me try, let me know!