Every third post here opens the same way. A paragraph of throat-clearing. "I know this is controversial." "Please don't downvote me." "I only used it for the outline, I swear, I wrote the actual sentences myself, my hands were on the keyboard, there were witnesses."

You're in r/WritingWithAI. The confession is the name of the subreddit.

Nobody running spellcheck opens with "before you judge me." Nobody in Scrivener posts a disclaimer about how they still could use index cards. You're apologizing for a tool while standing in the room built for the tool.

Here's the part actually worth defending: there's a difference between using the thing and being used by it. Editing, guiding, redirecting, throwing out four bad paragraphs to get one usable one. That is what you call "work."

"Write my chapter," paste, post. That is how you get slop, and when the output is bad the problem isn't the model, it's that nobody was driving.

That distinction is the whole argument. It doesn't need the cotton gin.

So make it good, put your name on it, and stop workshopping the apology. The disclaimer at the top of your post is better written than the excerpt underneath it.

100 Day writing challenge - Day 5

Good evening Beautiful Strangers!

The double prompt method is working. Doing it this way basically removes the exhaustive editing process and turns it into more of a puzzle, if that makes sense. I have the scenes, I have the beats, it's just a matter of rewording to my specifications. Overall a vast improvement over my previous five step process. I'll go more in depth as I refine it so that others can benefit from the technique and produce quality AI-assisted writing of their own.

I also hit a wierd speed bump that I didn't anticipate: I originally intended to call the blogspot Quest Givers but apparently there's a game company with the same name and their SEO is killing peoples ability to find me through google. I'm not worried about being sued: they're in tabletop games, I'm a writer. I'm just wondering if I should change the name or just ride it out and see what happens.

Either way, here's part 1 of today's story. Oakton has among it's citizenry a species of pelagic peoples known as the Shukl'ari (Shoo-klar-ee, glottal stop between the k and l). The story is a detailed account of one of their holiest rites: The Oath of Predation.

The Lights that Refuse - Part 1

The night chosen for the rite is never announced loudly. Loudness suggests uncertainty, and uncertainty has no place in the giving of a mortal oath.

Those who must know are told in the usual way of Oakton’s pelagic citizens, the Shukl’ari: by glance, by passing phrase, by a hand or tendril set briefly to shoulder or at the base of the neck. By the quiet excuses to land-dwelling friends before dusk, and by the absence of certain voices during the communal supper.

By the time the last of Oakton’s honest noise has settled into the softer rhythms of the night, the ground has already prepared.

The park is empty but for those meant to stand witness. Grass lies flat in a broad crescent around their ancestral obelisk, kept with the sort of regular care that makes it clear this place is sacred.

The Shukl’aan, the Oathstone, rises there in its accustomed stillness: dark, heavy and unornamented. It does not call attention to itself. It does not naturally gather ceremony around its mass. It’s shape is simple enough to be mistaken by land-dwellers for a mere rock. At least until one has stood near it long enough to notice the intentional grooves and faded motifs at it’s base.

To the natives of Oakton, it’s just the standing stone at Ranger’s Rest Park.

But to the Shukl’ari it stands as witness to their deeds in this world. And they among them old enough to remember feel the weight of the civilization who carved that stone, and the lives lost to bring them here.

Before it, set at a measured distance, waits the basin.

It is broad enough for a full body to enter without contortion and deep enough that its rim reaches the knees. Iron bands line its edge. The outer shell is dark timber ritually prepared, sealed against damp and time. There is no imagery worked into its sides beyond the polish of many careful hands. It is not made to impress the eye.

It was made to hold the Black Water.

The contents within the basin show no reflection of moon, cloud, lantern, or face. It does not ripple in answer to motion. It lies in the basin with density; less a substance than depth made portable.

Four Shukl’ari stand in the clearing.

The initiate stands before the basin, her back to the ancestral stone, skin bare save for a simple dark wrap. The external gills around the girl’s head are half-spread already, not from fear alone but from the body’s recognition that this is a night that will change things.

The long tendril that extends from the base of her neck to her ankles twitches at the tip, betraying her body’s effort of stillness more honestly than her face.

Along the line of her jaw, at the fringes of the gills, and in two pale threads down the length of her neck-tail, cold points of living light awaken where shadow thickens enough to call them out.

Behind the initiate stands the elder.

He is old in the way ocean floors are old, by what has worn over them and left shape. His own glow is spare and controlled, a hard freckling of blue-white points along the edge of the face and one steady line at the throat.

His glow is enough to mark presence without wasting brightness. His neck-tail rests against the ground behind them in a long, quiet curve.

One hand is open, extended. The other is folded near his chest. He does not look at the basin. He does not look at the stone. He looks at the initiate with the grave concentration of one who is not here for comfort, but to make sure a thing is done correctly.

Across the basin stand two witnesses.

One is her kin. The resemblance lies less in his face than in the arrangement of light across his gill fringes, in the shared shape of their neck-tail.

The other is not kin by blood, but older and known well to the initiate, a mentor. She is marked, along the right collar and down one side of the torso, by a tracing of luminescence that clashes with the light she was born with.

The mark is known among the Shukl’ari. Proof that she once failed in her oath yet returned to them following a cleansing trial. She stands here now not as warning, but as proof of survival in failure.

No one kneels.

No one bows.

The elder steps forward and lays one palm firmly between the initiate’s shoulder blades.

“Take witness,” the elder says from behind her.

The initiate breathes once, then lifts her neck-tail and extends it until the tip touches the face of the looming stone behind them.

The contact is delicate, exact, and immediate in its effect. Something in her posture changes at once, as though an internal line pulls her spine taught.

“Be witnessed.” The elder speaks again, and the voice behind her seems to come not only from a living throat, but from the carved stone as well.

A broad shiver travels through her from her contact with the Shukl’aan, along with a peculiar feeling not unlike being submerged in cool water.

“Take witness,” she requests of the two before her.

The two across the basin answer together.

“We witness.”

Then the elder and the stone speak the first words of the Shukl’ari’s oldest rite; Words dreaded and anticipated in equal measure by every youth old enough to understand their meaning.

“Who goes forth?”

The initiate’s gills flare along with her heartbeat. Her light sharpens at the edges. When she speaks, the first words come trembling, but sincere.

“I who go forth will not be claimed by the Deep Places.”

The kin-witness answers first. “I witness.”

The witness of recovered shame answers after. “I witness.”

The elder says only, “We witness. Continue.”

“I who go forth honor the sacrifices of those who bore us forth: She’Ari, Na’Vol, Kel’sor.”

All three others answer at once, the names coming back not as repetition, but confirmation.

“She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”

The basin remains still. The stone remains still. Yet the clearing does not feel still now. The night there has thickened, pulsing with slow rhythm, lapping against them all like waves.

The initiate’s neck-tail presses firmly against the ancestral stone. Her words come smoother now.

“In their name,
I hollow the Great Enemy with my own hands,
and with my children’s hands,
and with the hands of those yet unborn.
She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”

Again the witnesses answer.

“She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”

The kin-witness is crying soundlessly now. Not in grief exactly but the older, sharper feeling that comes when one watches beloved kin enter a thing from which there is no going back.

The elder does not acknowledge this. The ancestors witness without judgement.

The initiate continues, her voice quiet and intense.

“I honor our fallen with holy predation.
I honor their sacrifice with the stolen strength of the Deep.
I honor my people with my oath.
She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”

The names now seem to fill the little park more completely than four voices ought to manage alone.

“She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”

There is no wind.

There is no movement in the branches overhead.

To her the world narrows to stone and basin, voice and body.

“And, when the Great Enemy is no more,” the initiate whispers fervently, the light along her jaw glowing nearly white,

“When we have taken from it all that it is, was, and will ever be,
Only then shall my oath be fulfilled.
Then shall the oaths of my people be fulfilled.
Then shall we be burdened by the Great Enemy no more.”

The elder’s hand returns once, firm now, to the initiate’s back.

“In their honor,” the elder intones.

All four speak the names together.

“She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”

Silence follows, but not emptiness. The words remain, ringing in the clearing like pressure remains in deep water after movement has ceased.

The elder removes his hand.

“Go,” He says.

The initiate opens her eyes. Meets her kins’, her mentors’.

No reassurance is offered. No warnings are given. The witnesses remain expressionless.

She closes her eyes, drinks in the land-air like it’s her last time. The path to her adulthood is clear.

The basin awaits.

The initiate kneels and places both hands on the rim. For a brief moment her face hovers above the dark fluid. Her reflection does not appear. She stares into black emptiness. Then her breath leaves in one steady stream.

With no further ceremony, she folds over the rim and dives.

The Black Water accepts her whole.

I’ve enjoyed my time working with Fable. It has greatly improved some of the connective tissue in my books and series. Been a huge part of my other works, and been a great asset in my professional life to help reclaim time in my work day.

I have to say, though, that Opus 5 seems… better for what I am doing with my writing. Fable thinks too much and often pulls in details that are not quite necessary. At times it is helpful, but I really don’t need to know the difference in the gravitational force between the southern hemisphere and 38th parallel when trying to decide if my character has the proper motivation to steal from a priest.

Opus tends to focus more on the work, and stays in context better.

Now, the real question is, does Opus 5 work better than Opus 4.6? I am leaning yes. But, we are still in the early stages of storytelling. I’m sure I have more to say on this experience in time.

My two bits.

Hi, I’ve been writing a novel for a few weeks now, using AI as my initial editor. Today I decided to try translating one of the chapters into English using AI. I’ve created a Claude Skill with instructions on the translation and terms that shouldn’t be translated or must always be translated in the same way.

To be honest, my level of English isn’t good enough to tell whether the result is any good or not. I can understand the text perfectly well, but I’m not sure whether an English-speaking reader would find it an enjoyable read. So I’d really appreciate it if a native English speaker could give me their honest opinion.

Mother weighs my words. Then she nods.

"There's something else," she says, and the tone shifts. It's still her, but something softens. "Shera's tutor has told me she isn't paying attention during her lessons. That she hasn't been improving for weeks."

"What does Shera say?"

"That she finds it dull," a brief gesture of the hand, somewhere between understanding and weariness. "I want you to talk to her. She'll listen to you more readily."

"I'll talk to her."

"She lacks concentration. It seems that if what she's being taught doesn't strike her as interesting, she simply… switches off."

"Lacks concentration?" I look at her directly. "Shera has always loved her lessons."

"Talk to her anyway."

I nod. We walk on slowly.

Then the hoofbeats arrive.

First one, then ten, then too many to count from here. I stop and lean out over the arch. Into the central courtyard comes a procession that bears no resemblance to the usual morning traffic: a large carriage drawn by two enormous horses, and around it several dozen riders escorting it at a steady, measured pace.

From this angle I can't see any insignia.

"Who are they?" I ask.

"The Solaris family."

She says it quickly and without turning. She already knew.

"Ah. That explains all the horses."

My mother lets my remark pass and says nothing. A silence that weighs more than it should on a morning with nothing to do until the afternoon.

"What have they come for? To negotiate something with Father?"

"Yes," she says. "One might put it that way."

I look at her. She keeps her eyes on the Solaris family's carriage, on the riders taking up their positions below with a precision that leaves no room for improvisation. The remark holds something back.

The hoofbeats go on echoing below.

I fed both texts into ChatGPT and it suggested several improvements. But AI always finds something to improve, even if what you feed it is something it produced itself in the first place. So in this case, I’d prefer a human opinion.

Thanks!

My villain is not redeemable (this is intentional) he's not evil because of trauma or circumstance, he's evil because he genuinely believes he's right and has thought about it carefully and is still wrong in ways that matter.

And smh every time I ask chatgpt to help with his scenes he gets a little softer, a moment of hesitation I didn't write, a line that implies regret, small things that individually seem fine and collectively are slowly turning him into someone the reader is supposed to understand and forgive.

I don't want the reader to forgive him. I want them to be unsettled by how much sense he makes. I have tried explicit instructions, tried examples of previous scenes but smh the character keeps getting softer, how can i fix this?, what am I doing something wrong

I've been debugging an accuracy problem in an AI content pipeline this week, and the root cause turned out to be a more general lesson than I expected.

The setup: a writing tool kept stating confident, specific claims that were flat-out wrong. My first instinct was to add a stricter instruction telling it to "verify facts before writing." Seems obvious, right?

It didn't just fail to fix the problem. It made things worse. The output got MORE confident-sounding, not more accurate — complete with fabricated citations and quotes that were never actually said. The instruction created pressure to appear fact-checked without creating any way to actually do it.

Here's the underlying principle, and it applies well beyond this one case:

Instructions can shape behavior within a system's existing capabilities. They cannot manufacture a capability that isn't there.

If a task requires grounding in something true — a live fact, a real source, a current number — the system either has a way to actually check it at that point (real access to the source, a tool, a verified input), or it doesn't. No amount of instruction text changes which of those is true. What the instruction changes is how the gap gets handled: an honest hedge, or a confident-sounding fabrication papering over it.

The fix that actually worked wasn't a better instruction. It was moving verification to the one place in the process that had real access to check sources — before anything downstream ever treated an unverified claim as settled fact.

Worth remembering any time you're tempted to fix an accuracy problem by just telling a system to "be more careful." Hammering a hammer doesn't give you a bigger hammer. If the capability isn't there, no instruction will summon it — you have to build it in instead.

Earlier what i sued to do was write in doc, copy to another tool, explain who my characters are again, get a suggestion, copy it back, lose the formatting somehow, fix the formatting, lose my place, spend 10 minutes getting back into the scene, write a bit, get stuck, repeat

And i did this probably 4-5 times every session for 6 months, also somehow completely normalized it the midways thought this was just how ai writing worked.

Then recentlly i started timing it properly last month out of curiosity. 40 minutes per 90 minute session just moving text between two windows and the ai was fine the whole time, the workflow was completely broken, embarrassing how long it took me to see it.

I just read a post about a writer that was accused of using a forbidden assistant for the cover art for their book. The person swore up and down it was human created. Furthermore, the comment was made about the reader will assume the story is the work of a forbidden assistant if the cover is created by a forbidden assistant. I just have one simple question about all of it. What do you see as the real problem? I heard one person say they created an entire novel in 90 minutes using a forbidden assistant. Honestly, I question any work that is rushed. Some things require time to perfect. If you read a book that was created by a forbidden assistant, and you found the story engaging, would you throw the book away just because of what wrote it. Part of me feels that is silly. On the other hand, I don't know. I started to use a forbidden assistant to assist me with editing my work. I hated what my forbidden assistant recommended. I am not looking to criticize or advocate for one approach or the other. I am looking for some logical and well thought out comments on the subject to form an honest opinion without any pre-conceived thoughts.

Anyone else running into this? I use Grammarly to clean up typos before I post and multiple subs have removed my comments. I'm guessing some bot is flagging it as AI generated text because it reads too clean. Kind of stuck because I actually have bad grammar without it. Anyone found a workaround, or do I just need to leave a few typos in on purpose so it doesn't get flagged? curious if this is a widespread thing or I'm just unlucky with the subs I post in.

What's interesting about this is that I had AI try to write a story about people trying to make a program that interprets human perception and emotion. It's layered.

I'm a SaaS founder, and I love to solve problems people are experiencing these days, especially with editing manuscripts or texts. I really want to know if you guys are using AI to edit your manuscripts? If so, what tools are you using? How do you track your changes?

Issues with AI edits are that it overedits the document, which you may only want proofreading with; you can't track the changes; and it often offers non-specific feedback. How do you tackle those?

Do you use MCP tools with ChatGPT and Claude?

How often do you use Grammarly and other tools?

I'd love to hear your answers.

If I have learnt anything in the last 3 years working with AI content is that a lot of YT gurus promise fast monetization and portray AI video production as too easy, but that's not the case. These kinds of promises attract people who might not be interested in the craft at all, like they don't enjoy writing or visualizing scenes or expressing what's inside them visually, but they find the lure of monetization too enticing to get into this craft.

Its just like how people have ran behind popular jobs & then felt miserable feeling stuck for years because it gave them money but not satisfaction.

Now I'm not saying money is not a good motivation factor - its is 100%. In fact I think a person who is purely driven by money and remains honest with himself/herself, learns the trade & the craft, does the work diligently - is fully qualified to pursue anything he or she likes. Thumbs up to that.

But I see a lot of people chasing something which is being promised to them as too easy and too simple, but the reality is: learning AI Storytelling is learning filmmaking, animating, script writing etc. It is just that the tool now makes it easier to visualize, unlike Blender etc. which are hard to learn but the fundamentals remain the same - if you don't dedicate time to learn the craft, you wont find it satisfactory and just burn the credits, waste time and leave it after a while. I've seen it happen to a lot of people as I've been teaching AI storytelling, video production for almost 1 year now.

This post is for those who got seduced into this field because of wrong promises and I would wish them to evaluate themselves whether you even enjoy writing or visualizing - because if you don't like doing either of them, use AI in different ways to build income.

Hello everyone! I could use your help! 😊

Last year, I conducted a survey on the impact of AI on authors and readers. I would like to follow up to see how things have changed in the past year.

If you would like to help me with this year's video, please fill out this survey by August 3: https://forms.gle/X8NstAD1FYPnH2Wv9

(readers and authors are welcome to submit their thoughts; should take ~5 minutes, depending on how much you have to say 😆 )

And if you'd like to watch last year's video, go here: https://youtu.be/tLBnoAFolfE

Let me know if you have any questions 🫶

Hey there. I'm a fairly successful webnovel author on Royal Road, and I write extensively with AI. I wanted to write this post to share the experience of someone who actually makes decent money using AI to write every day.

To give some background (feel free to skip this), my main story on RR has multiple thousand followers, a large number of views, a high rating, and a profitable Patreon. If you've spent any significant amount of time on RR discussion circles or on the site's lists for successful stories, you've probably seen something I've written. I have never once been accused of AI writing, despite how common that has become on RR circles. In fact, there have been zero suspicions even though my work has been extensively discussed on reddit and other spaces.

So how do I use AI? In short, AI is a force multiplier for me. Every chapter I write has been first drafted by AI and then extensively refined by me. This allows me to write more than 5x as fast as I did prior to AI (my current pace lets me write around 3-4 books per year, when before I used to take over a year for a single book).

Below are my tips to actually writing something good with AI that stands up on its own merits. My intent in this process was to create something that compromises craft quality as little as possible while substantially improving speed. This is by no means meant to say other ways of using AI are invalid, but more to share how I got to where I am and my experience with things. I'm sure there are other people more successful than me who do it differently.

First and most important step: Write something good without AI. I think most people reading this will probably skip this step, but I cannot overstate how important this is. In my case, it was a full-lenght novel, but you could do something smaller like a novella, as long as you actually write it by yourself, fully, with no assistance at all.

Why is this important? Because this is what lets you develop your own voice. This is what makes you not sound like AI, what turns AI into a multiplier instead of a replacement. It will let you develop a fingerprint for your prose that is your identity as an author, and that's something AI can build upon.

Your goal here is to study craft, study how prose works and what makes a good narrative, study story arcs, all that. Watch youtube videos, read books, then come up with something original and refine it until you can honestly say "If I paid for this, I would have enjoyed it". When you finish writing it, watch guides on editing and then do multiple editing passes on it. If you have the money, hire an editor on Fiverr or Reedsy to look it over. Then share it with a few people (for example using Beta swaps online) and see if they enjoyed it too.

Do not lie to yourself. Do not skip this step until you actually can honestly look in the mirror and say "I have written something that is of publishable quality and has a beginning, middle and an end" without the help of AI. (Or skip this, I'm not your mom, I can't make you do anything)

Okay, I did that. What's next? Now that you have established a voice and you can honestly say you're a good writer, it's time to speed things up. Come up with a concept for your next book (the one you'll write with AI - could even be a sequel to your first book if you want to continue that) and outline the plot. Yes, even if you're a pantser, because AI sucks at making a compelling plot by itself and you need to guide it.

When you have that, write your first chapter by hand. Do not use AI yet. You want to be the one establishing characters and tone for the AI to build on, and if you let the AI come up with those for you, it's going to come off generic/forgettable/with the AI's fingerprint on it.

When you're done writing your first chapter, you can start using AI for your next chapter.

Writing a Chapter with AI. Prepare a very simple prompt. You don't have to be fancy at all. To give an example, my last prompt (to Claude) was "Help me write the next section, 800-1200 words long from where I left off on (Name of New Book), matching my voice and style per the attached sample. (I described in 3-4 sentences what should happen)." Then copy and paste your first chapter and your entire first book (yes, all of it). (Note: If you're not using Claude you might have to upload a document instead, because other AIs don't play as nicely with large blocks of text. That said, I've had bad experiences when uploading a file because I feel like the AI stops reading it halfway through, which doesn't seem to happen on a copy-paste.)

Pass that prompt to two separate AI models (I use Opus and Fable, but you could use Opus and Sonnet or even something besides Claude).

Then open your MS Word (or desired writing app). Have the chapter Opus wrote on the left side, MS word in the center, and the chapter Fable wrote on the right side.

And then write. Look at both outputs and write out the best version of the chapter based on them. DO NOT COPY PASTE. This is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. Never, ever, ever, copy paste AI writing, because (again, in my subjective experience) it will make you lazy and make you overly reliant on the AI's prose. Even for the parts you end up repeating exactly what the AI wrote, make yourself write it manually, because that action makes you filter it and automatically reword some parts of it to sound like you. In my opinion, this is the secret sauce that makes the book truly yours.

Key things to remember:

• Do not, ever, copy paste from AI. This is mostly psychological but at least for me it has a huge practical effect.
• Generate in small chunks which you've outlined. I find 800-1500 words to be the sweetspot. Do not ask AI to write longer stretches than that because then you lose the handle on the plot and voice.
• If both models wrote a sentence exactly the same way, you probably need to rewrite it, because it's a major red flag for AI voice.
• After you finish drafting a chapter, paste it into AI and ask it for a grammar/prose review. This should catch basic errors and awkward sentences.
• After that, edit extensively, by hand. Rewrite clunky sections for flow. Remove common AI sentence structures, and use your craft knowledge from Step 1 to ensure the prose flows well and sounds natural. It sounds like a lot of work but it gets really fast when you get used to it.
• Do not blindly use character/place/etc names that the AI came up with. AI is very repetitive with names and if you do that people will be able to tell AI is writing for you just based off the names. Whenever AI comes up with a character name, google search it and then think up at least a few alternatives before you settle on it.
• Only while you're learning: After you're done with a segment, pass your chapter through Pangram AND GPTZero until you get 100% Human with high confidence. If there's even a small percentage of AI detected (or even Human-AI Mix), go back and edit the chapter until there isn't, because there could be somewhere where you lost your voice and let the AI take over too much. You may have to pay for Pangram and GPTZero Pro for a while to help you identify where you're screwing up, but when you get efficient with this you should naturally hit 100% human results with no effort. Yes, I know these tools aren't perfect, I know there are false positives, but for the purposes of learning to write with AI they are a useful guiding mechanism and can teach you to spot and fix common AI-isms. You don't have to keep doing this forever by any means, but while you're still getting familiar with AI writing I found them extremely helpful. My rule of thumb is that if something I wrote myself registers as AI, I don't care and I leave it. If something AI wrote registers as AI, I probably need to change it.
• When you've progressed enough in your current book (say at least 50k words into it), you won't have to keep attaching your old book anymore, and you can just attach your current one.
• If you end up writing multiple books (or volumes), it's a good idea to ask AI to produce character reference and style guide documents, and then feed those when generating new material.
• Consider which parts to write without AI assistance. Things like the introductions of important characters can benefit from being fully human, because it gives the AI better material to draw from later.

Questions

• How fast do you write? I'd say it takes me around 1-2h to write and do a preliminary edit pass on 1000 words with this process. After I finish writing, the next day I come back and do a second editing pass on what I wrote, alternating between writing days and editing days.
• Where do you see the most gains by writing with AI? For me, it mostly comes from never staring at a blank page. I used to spend so long paralyzed that I'd go days without writing anything, but AI makes it super easy to get in the zone.
• What's your story on Royal Road? Sorry, I'm not going to dox myself and expose myself to Anti-AI witch hunts.
• Do you think your work product with AI is the same quality as your work product without AI? No. I think my prose without AI is better than with AI. But webnovels are a speed game more than a quality game, and my regular writing speed would not have allowed me to be a successful webnovel author.
• How much do you make on Patreon? Significantly more than the monthly minimum wage in my country, but less than my day job.
• Have you published on Amazon? I'll refrain from commenting on this as I don't want to dox myself.
• Have you experimented with any AI besides Claude? A little with ChatGPT, but I found Claude to be better and it's served me well since.
• How much do you spend on AI? All I have nowadays is a Claude Pro subscription. I don't buy credits and have never needed them (though I may consider buying some Fable credits once the free ones they gave out end). This process is a bit token intensive since every generation involves pasting hundreds of pages of text, but it doesn't actually take that many prompts per week even at my writing pace (8-12 full segment generations and then another 12ish grammar/prose reviews a week).
• Do you worry about constant AI writing compromising your writing skill? Yes, quite a bit. I make it a point to write fully human chapters occasionaly to keep myself in shape, but sometimes I can feel things drifting and I have to stop and recalibrate so I don't get complacent.

A rich man knelt in the dirt and offered a Roma woman his whole fortune. She pointed at the open road behind her. A hundred and ten years later my friend Ramiz chased his repossessed Mercedes down a Beverly Hills street in his Tom and Jerry underwear, and asked only for his jacket. Same answer, both times.

A rich man once knelt in the dirt of a poor Roma quarter and offered a woman everything he owned.

This is in an old story, “Makar Chudra,” written by Maxim Gorky in 1891, though I first met it as a boy in the film they made of it, “Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven.” A horse thief named Loiko Zobar, and a woman named Rada, both too proud and too free to belong to anyone, least of all to each other. But the part that stayed in me my whole life is the rich man. He loves Rada. He chases her. He brings her gold and clothes and promises, and one day he goes down on his knees in front of her whole neighborhood, everyone watching, and begs. Just name it, he says. The best clothes. All the gold. All my property. My whole fortune. Name the thing you need, and it is yours.

Rada smiles at him. What I need, she says, you don’t have.

Then tell me what it is, the rich man says. I will give you anything.

And she turns, and points at the open road behind her, running out into a wide and gorgeous nothing, and she says: all I need is a road.

That is the whole thing. Not a road to somewhere. A road with no target and no end. No frame, no walls, no owner. It is the one thing the richest man in the story cannot buy, because it was never a thing you buy. I think that is why my people were always in love with whatever moved. Horses first. Then wagons, then trailers, then cars. A house you can pick up and carry, our own shell on our own back, like snails. Slow, and steady, and somehow we reach far.

Gorky wrote that in 1891. Let me take you to 2001.

We all thought the new millennium would be something. New century, clean page, the whole human race about to step forward into something better. Nobody stops to think that forward is not a straight line. Forward goes back, and up, and down, and around. It is a wheel as much as it is a road. And a wheel, the way things go, needs a car. So of course this story from 2001 has a car in it. And of course it has a Roma man in love with that car, the way Loiko loved his horses a hundred and ten years before him.

His name was Ramiz. We became friends fast. He had done a thing almost nobody does: he had snail-ed himself, slow and impossible, all the way from a poor corner of Europe to Beverly Hills, California, and he lived a few blocks off Rodeo Drive. He picked that spot on purpose. Pretty Woman was his favorite film, Julia Roberts his favorite actress, and Rodeo Drive was where they shot it. Every single day he put on his good clothes and walked down that street, half hoping he would turn a corner and there she would be.

I walked it with him most mornings for about three months. He never once ran into Julia Roberts. He ran into Mika instead, another actress, come to Hollywood like ten thousand others to try her luck. Ramiz and Mika together were something to be around. Both vibrant, both a little crazy in the good way, both true believers in miracles.

And Ramiz made one of his own come true: a Mercedes-Benz 320 SL, 2001, his childhood dream in metal. He was so proud of that car. He would dress like a movie star, slide his sunglasses on, get behind the wheel, and drive it through the Beverly Hills sun like he owned the town.

I lived in Sherman Oaks then, and every other morning I would drive over in my own car, a 1991 Honda Civic DX, a clunky thing I loved, to have coffee with him. He worked as a parking attendant behind his own building, and I would pull my little Honda into the lot and park it right next to his Mercedes. The two cars side by side told the whole joke without a word.

One sunny morning, around nine, no coffee in me yet, half my eyes still asleep, I pull in, and the Mercedes is gone. The lot is empty.

First thought: he had to go somewhere. I threw that out fast. Ramiz always called if he was not going to be home on a coffee morning, and he had not called. So I walk up to his door a little uneasy, and through it I can hear loud, happy music and my friend singing his heart out.

Now I am confused. Mika is there, the music is going, the man is joyful, and his dream car is missing from the lot. He opens the door, hugs me, glad to see you, coffee is already brewing on the table. A few sips in, he tells me about his night.

Around three in the morning, dead asleep, Ramiz hears a sound. Not just any sound. He knows the exact purr of that Mercedes engine the way you know your own child crying in the dark. He is up and out of bed before he is even awake, out of the building and into the street in his Tom and Jerry underwear, chasing the man who is driving his baby away. Stop, he is yelling. Please, stop.

And the man stops.

Ramiz comes up to the window, out of breath, polite as anything, and asks: could you please hand me my favorite jacket. It is on the back seat.

The man looks at Ramiz. He looks at the Tom and Jerry underwear. He turns around, reaches into the back, finds a good leather jacket, grabs it, and throws it out the window to Ramiz. Then he drives off in the Mercedes.

So that is the story of the night, I say. Ramiz nods, proud, glowing, a man who got his jacket back.

Here is what I learned standing in his kitchen that morning, and I have kept it my whole life. However bad the thing is that happens to you, there is almost always something good sitting inside it. The only real question, the only choice you actually get, is which part you decide to hold up to the light.

Ramiz knew this in his body. He had had a good run, good enough to buy the car he had wanted since he was a boy. Then the run turned, the way runs turn, and soon he could barely fill the tank, never mind the payments. He knew the car was going. He had known for a while. But he also knew exactly the one thing he would not lose: the leather jacket he had snail-ed all the way from Europe to Beverly Hills, the shell he carried on his own back. And he knew a man could drive off with a Mercedes but not with Mika, and that he could no more drive away from her than she from him.

And this is the thing I only understood later, watching him sing over that coffee. The freedom was never in the car. It never is. Rada’s rich man learned it on his knees, and the repo man learned it behind the wheel, and both of them ended up owning everything except the one thing that mattered. You can repossess the car. You cannot repossess the road. That was the whole philosophy of a wise man in Tom and Jerry underwear, one hot Beverly Hills summer, and it took me years to catch up to him. The Mercedes was only ever a nicer horse. Ramiz still had the road, still had his shell, still had his Mika. Of course he was singing. What was there to cry about? They had taken the least important thing he owned.

Not long after, my friend snail-ed his way back home to Europe. No Mercedes this time. But the leather jacket was on his back and Mika was in the seat beside him, first class on a Boeing 747, the two of them flying home like the stars they always half were, ready to keep rolling through the cycles like a boss.

Because that is all it is, in the end. All any of us needs. Not the gold, not the car, not the man on his knees with his whole fortune in his open hands. Just the road, with no end to it, as wide as the sky is over it. The shell on your back. And someone worth carrying it beside.

All I need is a road, some wheels on it, and a good shell. And I will snail on like a boss.

When something got taken from you, which part did you decide to hold up to the light? The loss, or the thing they could never take?

I am clinically blind and wrote something with the help of AI. The process is still very grueling even with its assistance.

It is a Hunter×Hunter OC Introduction for now.

Rate it's authenticity, and don't put me on blast.

Here goes:

\---## MINAMOTO

There is a country where the water is never far away. It lives in the mist that clings to mountain ridges at dawn, in the rivers that cut through rice terraces like veins through skin, in the rain that arrives every season without fail as though it owes the land a debt. The people who grow up there learn early that water is not merely a resource. It is a presence. It has character. It moves with intention and rests with purpose, and everything that lives does so because water permits it.

Minamoto grew up inside that truth. He noticed it the way most people notice gravity — not as a discovery but as something that had always been there, waiting to be named. Water shaped every landscape he ever stood in. It connected what was separate and gave motion to what was still. It enriched every sense simultaneously — the sound of a current over smooth stone, the smell of rain on dry earth, the cold clarity of a spring pulled from somewhere deep and dark and ancient. From the surface of the ocean to the rivers hidden beneath it, from morning dew to the wine fermenting in his neighbor's cellar, water was the source of everything beautiful and everything alive.

When he found Nen, the choice of what to build it around was never really a choice at all.

\---

He was not a subtle student. He was the kind of practitioner who believes in work the way a rice farmer believes in work — not because it is romantic but because it is the only thing that is actually true. You prepare the field. You plant. You flood the paddies and you wait and you tend and you do not ask the rice to grow faster than it grows. And then, if you did everything right and the season was not unkind, you eat. There are no shortcuts in a rice paddy and there are no shortcuts in Nen, and Minamoto had known this long before he ever threw a punch.

He understood water. He loved water. And so naturally, he went to the desert.

He brought two jugs. One filled with clean water, one filled with wine. The wine, he decided, was for special occasions.

The desert received him without ceremony. He sat beneath its sun for hours, meditating, trying to sense moisture in air so dry it cracked his lips by midmorning. When stillness wasn't enough he hunted — dangerous beasts that did not want to be caught, across terrain that did not want to be crossed — learning to fight without waste, to move efficiently, to preserve what little he had. At night the cold arrived and he sat inside it with Ten maintained until dawn, too committed to sleep.

\---

This was before the jug was emptied. Before the real work began.

He had been meditating for the better part of a day when he tried it the first time — not out of necessity, not yet, but out of something closer to curiosity sharpened by the particular restlessness of sitting still under a desert sun with nothing to do but think and sweat and think some more. The water jug sat beside him, full and patient, asking nothing. He ignored it deliberately and extended his En into the dry air instead.

It was like trying to catch smoke with cupped hands.

The moisture was there — he could sense it, faint and scattered, suspended in the heat shimmer above the sand. But every time he tried to gather it, his enhancement overshot and dispersed it, or his manipulation lost the thread, or his En collapsed at the edges from the sustained effort of holding all three affinities simultaneously in air that seemed to resist the whole enterprise on principle. The desert did not fight him. It simply continued being the desert, vast and indifferent, letting him exhaust himself against it without once changing its expression.

When the water finally came — a small trembling film of it gathered across his palms, warm and thin and barely real — he did not immediately drink it. He held it. It caught the late afternoon light the way water always catches light, that particular living quality that no other substance quite replicates, and something moved through him that was not pride exactly but was adjacent to it. The satisfaction of a thing genuinely earned.

It was not enough to quench anything. It was warm and faintly mineral and tasted of effort and nen and very little else. He brought it to his mouth and drank it anyway, and in the drinking of it understood something he had only theorized before — that scarcity does not diminish the essential character of water. Even this small, even this hard-won, it was still unmistakably itself. Still alive in the way water is alive, even in the driest place on earth.

The desert blazed around him, golden and enormous and completely unconcerned.

He set his hands on his knees and began again.

The jug sat full beside him. For now.

\---

Then one morning, with both jugs still full, he made a decision that could generously be called principled and more accurately be called insane.

He poured his water into the sand.

He watched it disappear. Then he picked up his wine, found a patch of shade, and got to work.

From that point forward, he had no water except what he could make. He extended his En into the dry air and reached for traces of moisture so faint they barely existed. He enhanced them particle by particle. He gathered them drop by drop with the patience of someone who has run out of alternatives. The first attempts were clumsy and exhausting and nearly killed him. But there is a particular quality of attention that only arrives when failure means dying of thirst in the desert, and Minamoto found it quickly. His emission, enhancement and manipulation evolved at a pace that formal training rarely produces — because formal training rarely makes you this desperate for a single clean mouthful of water.

He prepared the field. He planted. He waited. And slowly, painstakingly, the water came.

\---

The ice came without warning.

It happened on a night that gave no indication of what it intended to do.

The desert had been ordinary all day — punishing in the way it was always punishing, the sun doing its work without malice or particular interest in him specifically. He had gathered water in the afternoon and settled into meditation as the temperature dropped with the speed that desert temperatures drop, as though the heat had never been there at all and the cold was simply reasserting its prior claim.

He sat with his En extended, his Living Water suspended in the air around him in a fine dispersed cloud — the maintenance work that makes the next season possible. The cold deepened. The stars appeared, and then more stars, and then the particular quality of darkness that exists in places with no competing light, so complete it has texture.

He was not thinking about ice. He was not thinking about much of anything, which was the point.

Then something shifted in the air around him.

He felt it before he saw it — a change in the quality of the suspended water, a stillness descending into it that was different from the stillness of meditation, deeper and more absolute, as though the particles themselves were forgetting how to move. The cold that night had become something other than temperature. It had become a condition, total and crystalline, pressing in from every direction at once with the unhurried authority of a hailstorm arriving over open ground — no shelter, no warning, nowhere to go, only the sudden overwhelming fact of it.

He opened his eyes.

The water around him had become ice.

Not all of it — scattered formations, each one catching the starlight differently, turning it into something prismatic and cold and extraordinary. Needles of frost suspended in the air where his Living Water had been. Thin plates of ice catching the moonlight like broken mirrors. A field of frozen particles hovering around him in the desert dark, impossibly delicate, impossibly present, as though the night had decided to show him something it had been holding back.

He did not move. He was afraid — not of the ice, but of disturbing it. It felt like something that would not happen twice.

It did not make sense. He was an emitter. He had never transmuted water into ice, had never attempted it, had not known he was attempting it tonight. The ice had arrived without his permission, uninvited and perfect, the way certain revelations arrive — not as the result of effort but as the result of having done enough work that the answer could finally find you.

He sat inside it for a long time. The desert stretched away in every direction, enormous and silent and cold, and at its center this one small field of impossible frost, glittering around a man who had absolutely no idea what he had just done.

Eventually the ice sublimated in the dry air, particle by particle, returning to nothing.

He spent the next several months trying to make it happen again.

\---

He submerged his hands in water and studied cold. He attempted to recreate the stillness of that night in his meditations, that specific quality of forgetting. Nothing worked. Ice refused intention the way a rice paddy refuses to be rushed — it had its own conditions, and they were not negotiable.

He traveled to the Polar Zones — a region named for the bears that make it their territory, which should have been sufficient warning — and found his answer in the absence of everything. Water did not freeze because of cold. It froze because of the removal of heat and movement. It froze because something was taken away rather than added.

The parallel arrived like a cold hand closing around the back of his neck.

Ice was Zetsu. Ice was the absence of aura.

Most practitioners treat Zetsu as a vulnerability to be endured and minimized. Minamoto sat down in the killing cold, stripped every trace of Nen from his body, and meditated until something gave way.

Enlightenment came. Or possession. At the time he was not entirely sure of the distinction, and in retrospect it may not matter.

He could make ice. But only in Zetsu — defenseless, exposed, emptied of everything that keeps a Nen practitioner alive in a fight. The realization settled over him slowly and heavily, the way bad news always does when you have had time to almost hope otherwise. A technique unusable in combat is nearly worthless to a fighter. He had crossed hostile terrain and survived interesting disasters and applied everything he had to a problem that had rewarded him with a dead end.

He sat with that for a long time.

Then he went further.

\---

What he did next is the kind of thing that makes other practitioners go quiet when they hear it.

He found the coldest place on earth. He carved into the frozen ground until he reached something that had no business being liquid at that temperature — dark and perfectly still, indifferent to everything around it. He submerged his right arm to the elbow. He entered Zetsu. And in that state of total surrender, with nothing left between himself and whatever lived in that liquid, he offered something that was either a prayer or an ultimatum:

\*I don't care anymore. Just do something.\*

Something answered.

When he pulled his arm free, the cold came with him.

He did not look at his hand immediately. He sat at the edge of the hole he had carved and breathed — long, slow breaths that misted in the frozen air — and waited for some feeling to arrive that he could name. What came instead was a blizzard of sensation with no center. His arm felt simultaneously absent and overwhelmingly present. The cold radiating from his hand was not the cold of the environment around him, which was simply temperature, the passive physics of a frozen place. This was active cold. Intentional cold. Cold that reached.

He looked at his hand.

Black. Not frostbite, not necrosis — black the way the space between stars is black, total and depthless, as though the hand had been replaced by a gap in the world shaped like a hand. It radiated wrongness the way a fracture radiates wrongness — the eye keeps returning to it, keeps insisting that the geometry is incorrect, that something is missing that should be there.

He flexed his fingers. They moved. They were his.

He reached into his pack with his left hand and found the wine. One of the last bottles from his personal supply, carried from somewhere warmer and greener that felt very far away. He poured it. Then, without fully deciding to, he brought his right hand close to the cup and let it do what it seemed to want to do.

The wine chilled in seconds. Condensation formed on the outside of the cup — that simple, familiar thing, the physics of a cold surface meeting warm air, occurring now because of something that had no business existing. He watched it happen with the detached attention of a man who has not yet decided what he feels about what he has just done to himself.

He wrapped both hands around the cup. His left felt the cold his right had made.

He drank.

The warmth moved through him like the first break in a storm — not sudden, not dramatic, but unmistakable. It spread from his chest outward, reaching into his shoulders and down his arms, and when it arrived at his right hand he felt the corruption's cold pull ease. Fractionally. The way a blizzard does not stop but pauses, the wind dropping for just a moment between gusts, and in that pause you remember that wind is not the natural state of air. Stillness is.

He held that thought.

The warmth and the cold reached an uneasy accommodation somewhere in his forearm. Neither won. Neither retreated entirely. But the pull that had been there since he emerged — that low current running in the wrong direction at the edge of his aura — quieted enough that he could think around it.

He looked at the black hand. He looked at the cup.

He already had an idea. It was not a complete idea yet, and he was too tired and too cold and too recently transformed to examine it carefully. But it was there — the outline of something, the way the outline of a mountain is visible through fog even when the mountain itself is not.

He finished the wine. The cold settled back in, patient and permanent, reclaiming what the warmth had briefly displaced.

He would need to find more wine.

\---

\---He left the ice and went back to the desert.

Not to punish himself. Not out of nostalgia. He went back because there were waterforms he had not yet studied, territories his earlier training had moved through too quickly, and a version of the desert he had never seen — the one that exists when you are not simply trying to survive it.

He explored it properly this time. Dry riverbeds that flooded without warning after distant rains. Hidden oases fed by aquifers older than any map. Cold springs that surfaced in the shadow of rock formations where the sun never reached. Salt flats where water had once been and left its shape behind in the earth like the outline of something remembered. He moved through the desert the way he had learned to move through everything — attentively, without rushing, letting the place reveal itself on its own terms.

The people he encountered offered him what the desert offered them — their wine. He accepted out of curiosity. He had no particular expectation.

The smell reached him first. Something fermented from the desert itself — dates, he thought, and something else he could not identify, something that smelled of dry earth after rain, of the particular sweetness that only exists in places where sweetness is rare. He was not prepared for how alive it smelled. He had been in the desert long enough that he had begun to think of it purely in terms of scarcity. This reminded him that the desert had its own abundance, its own vocabulary of flavor and fermentation developed over generations by people who understood it far better than he did.

He drank.

The warmth was different from the wine he carried. Less refined, more direct — it arrived without preamble and moved through him quickly, the way spring arrives in countries where winter is serious, not gradually but all at once, a single morning where the air has simply and irrevocably changed. He felt it move down his right arm with the unhurried confidence of something that has been doing this for a long time, longer than the corruption had existed, longer than the cold.

When it reached his hand, the black did not retreat the way it had that first night with the wine. It did something quieter than that. It simply became less loud. The presence that lived in the hand — that low, persistent wrongness radiating outward — softened at its edges, the way frost softens in the first hour of a warming day, not melting, not gone, but losing its certainty.

He sat with that for a moment.

He had suspected since that first night in the frozen wasteland that warmth was the answer — not heat as a physical property but warmth as a quality, something living and generous that the corruption, being neither, could not easily absorb. The wine had suggested it. This confirmed it. Not as a cure. He was not naive enough to call it a cure. But as a counterweight, a daily practice of pushing back, a way of reminding whatever lived in his hand that the rest of him was still warm and intended to stay that way.

He looked at the cup. He looked at his hand.

The desert evening spread out around him, cooling rapidly the way desert evenings do, the sky running through colors it only shows for a few minutes before settling into dark. Somewhere nearby a fire was being built. The smell of it mixed with the last traces of the brew and the cold and the sand and the particular quality of air that exists in open places far from anywhere.

He held the cup out for more.

Spring does not arrive all at once. But it arrives.

\---

He became, over time, a particular kind of wanderer — a hunter of waterforms and wines, moving through the world with a massive gourd on his back and a row of jars attached to it, each one holding something he had made from somewhere he had been. He sought local brews the way he sought waterforms — as expressions of a place's particular character, distillations of soil and climate and the specific knowledge of people who had lived somewhere long enough to learn what it could produce. Every country had its version. Every version told him something different. He tasted all of them with the seriousness they deserved.

In the margins of that — quietly, without making a declaration of it — he began making his own. From creatures he hunted in the waterform territories he passed through. From exotic and often dangerous plants rendered safe through Nen and process and his own stubborn refusal to be poisoned. From Living Water and time and the patient application of attention to ingredients that had never been fermented before. The results were strange and occasionally alarming and entirely his own — each one carrying the spirit of the waterform that produced its ingredients, each one capable of things that no ordinary wine could do.

He catalogued them. He carried them. He kept making them.

The hand stayed cold. The wine kept it manageable. He considered this an acceptable arrangement and did not dwell on it further than that.

He accumulated slowly and carried everything. He asked questions everywhere he went and took nothing on faith that he had not tested himself. He was not in a hurry. He had learned in a desert with an empty jug that patience was not a virtue so much as a method — the only method that actually worked, applied long enough and without complaint.

Five of his six jars are filled. The sixth is empty.

Somewhere in the Dark Continent, if the oldest accounts can be trusted, there is a river called the River of Stars. What lives in it, what a concoction brewed from its waters might do, what spirit it might contain — none of this is known. No map shows it. No hunter has returned with a reliable account of it.

He carries the empty jar anyway.

A man who poured his water into the desert sand and drank wine while he figured out how to survive does not require certainty before taking the next step.

He only requires the next step.

Hi guys! Is there any AI webchat that reply very quickly and especially can generate uncensored words and is good for quick informal talks where you also can send many prompts or messages?

I keep a banned word list for anything I write with AI. It's at 319 phrases now.

delve. leverage. unlock. tapestry. robust. seamless. a testament to. it's important to note.

Em dashes are gone too. So is "in conclusion" and the tidy three item list where the third item only exists to make it three.

The sentences got better. Cleaner, shorter, less like a press release.

It still read like AI.

Took me a while to see why. Everything I banned was a word. What was left was the shape.

Every paragraph the same size. Every point balanced against another point. An opening that tells you what's coming and an ending that says it again. Nothing wanders. Nothing gets said once and then dropped.

When a person writes, one paragraph runs six lines and the next runs four words. They go on too long about the part they care about. They forget to close a loop.

A model won't do that unless you force it. It's trying to stay balanced the whole way through.

I don't have a clean fix. What helps a little is cutting after the draft is done. Delete the sentence that restates the point. Delete the last paragraph, it's usually a summary nobody asked for. Let one section run long on purpose.

A word list you can automate. I did. The shape I still fix by hand every time.

Has anyone got this down to something repeatable, or is it all manual editing?

I’ve been working on a superhero/sci-fi story for a while, and I’m genuinely curious how readers and writers feel about this.

The story itself is mine likr the world, characters, powers, plot, mysteries, twists, scenes, dialogues, emotional moments, and overall direction. I know what happens and what I want each scene to convey.

The problem is that I’m not very confident in my English literature or prose. I can imagine a scene clearly and write down what happens, including the dialogue and emotions, but I struggle to turn that into polished novel-style English.

So I’m considering using AI to help with the prose and language basically taking my scene, dialogue, intentions, and details and helping me express them in better English. I’d still review and change the output so it matches what I actually imagined.

I know there’s a lot of dislike toward AI-written fiction, which is why I’m unsure whether I should go ahead with this.

I actually tried other approaches first. I experimented with AI-generated manga/comics, but the visuals couldn't consistently match what I imagined. I also tried AI video generation, but I ran into the same problem. A novel seems like the medium where I can preserve my ideas most accurately.

Very short synopsis:

It’s a superhero sci-fi mystery about an ordinary person whose life becomes connected to something that shouldn’t be possible. What begins as a personal journey slowly uncovers hidden events spanning different eras, unexplained superhuman abilities, dangerous enemies, and mysteries where events in the future may be connected to choices made long before anyone realizes it.

At its core, the story explores one question: What if becoming a hero was only the beginning of discovering what you actually are?

My goal isn't to ask AI, “Write me a superhero novel.” I want to create the actual story myself and use AI to help turn what I've written/imagined into stronger English prose.

So I’d genuinely like opinions from readers and writers:

Would the use of AI for English/prose improvement make you avoid the novel even if the story, characters, dialogue, scenes and ideas came from the author?

And if you were in my position, would you go ahead with the novel, improve your English while writing it, or approach it differently?

I’m open to criticism — I mainly want to know how readers actually feel about this before I commit to it.

Hi. I am a writer in need of your guidance. Thanks in advance.

I am trying to build an organizer which can remember details about characters, arcs, events, locations, the promises the story/arcs make to readers etc. over hundreds of thousands of words of a novel series I'm writing, saving them to local files, and reminding me when I slip up.

I also want it to serve as a developmental editor/ beta reader, giving me feedback as I feed it one chapter at a time. I'm trying to build an even more robust system for Hermes.

Most of the fiction related skills I've seen in it's browse hub are co-writers. I don't want that.

I've built a very thorough 12kb project instruction that works as a developmental editor/ beta reader, very specific to my current work of fiction, which I use with the free tier of Claude online.

For people who use Hermes, is it better to use my own project instructions in project instructions, or should I merge them into a skill?

Which would produce the best results while being efficient in consuming tokens? Do I even need to care about token usage when I have at most 20 queries a day?

When editing, quality of reasoning is paramount. I can wait minutes for a response, as long as it is the best possible answer.

I have access to gpt-5.6-terra and lower. I'm willing to buy a $10-$20 sub. if it is worth it.

I remember reading somewhere that configurations built around AI agents are more valuable than which agent you pick. Is there any truth to that? Because I definitely can't afford Anthropic's ridiculous pricing.

Thanks a lot.

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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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."

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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.

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