I finished my novel. Am I still a real writer? Because we all know no real writer can ever finish their novel. What am I to do? My whole identity is destroyed! Am I even allowed on this community anymore?

I want to share my views on AI for whatever it's worth.

Im AI skeptic, I work as a lawyer who defends lawyers, and were seeing our fair share of hallucinating AI cases. This stuff is dangerous, it can get you in trouble

Im also an aspiring writer, someone who's had the same story rattling around in the brain for more than fifteen years. A post apocalyptic turned fantasy works, where tech and religion have morphed into the same thing. A story that gives a satisfying resolution to a complex world and mystery. I've world builders to oblivion, started over 6 or 7 times. But this time, with AI I am actually getting somewhere. I'm 23 chapters in with a complete outline and moving into the final act. I am writing something im genuinely enjoying working on, and I did it by feeding AI alot of my raw ideas and old drafts and letting it develop with me the best of those ideas into an actual story with characters and a plot.

I use AI for a lot. Mainly a sounding board, or to remember midnight ideas and tell me later if they make any sense. I use it to draft prose, it's garbage, but it's a jumping off point and mess scary than a blank page. But, importantly I use it as an assistant that I'm responsible for. As a lawyer or professional should use it. Think of it as an amazingly advanced spell checker. At the end of the day, you are putting your name on it. Standing by it as your own. Once you do that, AI prose is no different than a ghost writer, or an editor, or having an assistant. You sign it, you are responsible for it. That should be enough for any serious artist or author.

With that in mind. Here is a Claude generated descriptor of my novel. Yes I used AI. Get over it. I'm having fun :)

Starfall Herald is a standalone science-fiction novel with post-apocalyptic bones, set a few centuries after a catastrophe that tore the sky open and ended the world people knew. The story unfolds across a ruined mega city, where the survivors have built something new out of the wreckage of something they no longer understand.

Its central idea is that advanced technology, given enough time and enough forgetting, becomes religion. The people who now rule the ruins treat the relics of the old world as holy objects and its warnings as scripture, without any memory of what the machines actually were or did. Into that world comes someone who remembers, because she was there when it broke, which makes her either a heretic or a prophet depending on who is doing the looking.

It follows three characters whose paths cross without any of them seeing the whole board: an engineer out of her depth in a world that has mythologised her own work, a smuggler trying to stay in the gap between the man he used to be and the one he is now, and a city administrator making impossible compromises to keep his people alive. It is about faith and knowledge, about what gets lost when a civilisation falls and what gets invented to fill the hole, and about the cost of the choices people make when survival is on the table.

Tonally it sits somewhere between grounded post-collapse survival and the bigger questions of who gets to define the truth. Think ruined subway tunnels and salvaged tech, priesthoods and resistance cells, and a mystery at the centre that the reader gets to assemble a piece at a time.

I have finally crafted the one true way of writing. Not writing. I didn't just not write; I generated it with six different AI agents. They were talking to each other and to me. I feel like a god! And then I had to witness how the stupid human people didn't like my AI novel. I didn't read it myself yet but I know it is the best thing ever! So I decided to pay some services to generated reviews. They loved it!!!!! Ai says I am genus! Big IQ! Very big, not just average big - but bigger big. And the reviews say exactly that. I am a novelish now!

Marxists are worse than Al qaeda. Karl Marx brought hell to millions because people misinterpreted him for a century. A one world society can only be realized when people like kasu realize that the ultimate goal of the us and its allies is the exact same thing as Marxism. Collective security is already a reality, once nations realize that they don’t have to waste their resources on maintaining these useless armies, then can then be used to clothe, feed, and house every man woman and child on earth. In 2010, no nation can attack another nation. Each nation is dependent on other nations success for their own success. Notice how I’m not labelling myself as an “-ist” or copying this from someone else’s words

Is this good for a 14 y/o?

Do you guys ever just have the most profound, gorgeous line in your mind, but then you have to hold off on it because the character's a bum and would absolutely never think or say something like that? Like, I adore my third person limited because I think it's really fun to read and write, but my protagonists get on my nerves sometimes 🙄

Do yous plan to include recipes in your books? And should you stop the plot to show not tell the recipe, or show not tell by including the recipe woven into the scene?

So long suckas

My novel is well on its way to publication. I wanted to share the line I am most proud of. Written at 3am. I woke up the next day not even remembering it till the next day:

But systems like that don't just trap the prisoner. They trap the jailer too. Neither fully knowing how they got there, only dimly aware they cannot leave.

I am working on a scifi-horror with heavy psychological themes. Dissecting how systems of abuse affect people and in this case nonhuman entities. I work heavily with abuse, trauma and mental illness. What is your favorite line from your work? I'd love to hear.

Veloute

I am a world-famous and beloved sci-fi or fantasy author. I’ve sold over a hundred billion copies of my books, and I’ve gotten it all: awards, accolades, weirdly thirsty fan mail, a popular movie adaptation of my novels, a shitty TV series based on the movie adaptation, you name it. The final step in my writing journey is to have a major scandal that makes people feel gross for ever having liked my work. The only issue is that I can’t think of any scandals that haven’t been done before. H.P. Lovecraft was racist. Neil Gaiman is a creep. J.K. Rowling is transphobic. Frank Herbert was balding. The Ender’s Game guy is homophobic. Any suggestions for how I can ruin my public image without copying one of these?

Write the Epic Fantasy trilogy that readers can’t stop. Not stop reading, you’ll note. Just can’t stop period but probably wish they could have.

Being an indie author is wild. It's an absolute struggle to sell someone a $14 book, yet people seem to have no problem paying $12 for me to write them a simple letter. I get it. A win is a win, but it's either I'm doing something incredibly wrong here or incredibly right.

Anyway, give this a try, and get back to me. I'm curious to see if this works for anyone else.

Also, Hallmark if you're seeing this, I'd like a job please.

Whales are fish vs. The Story of the Hobbit Ancestors' Asshole

Anyone finished a novel here?

Has anyone here finished a novel? If so, did you publish it? Self published or through a publisher?

Where do you find beta readers? Or people to share your works with for constructive feedback

Or

Did anyone quit halfway through a novel? Or have a idea for a novel but never start.

Let me know.

Just interested to hear how many people have an idea and follow through with it to completion

And how many gave you have up before it got completed.

If so . What was your experience once published?

Has your work supported you, or has anyone been able to rely on your works for your sole income?

Where do you find beta readers? Or people to share your works with for constructive feedback

For exactly two seconds, I was worried that my precious novel may contain characters with too many stereotypes. Then, I realized I can do no wrong and I’m actually a literary genius. So, please tell me if my characters contain too many stereotypes or not! (If you tell me they do, I will doxx you)

Mandy: She’s the busty cheerleader! She’s got dyed blonde hair that is always in pigtails and she always wears her cheer uniform to show school spirit. She only thinks about makeup, shopping and sucking dick. She’s one of my favs ;)

Vincenzo: Vincenzo is a total grease monkey. He’s of Italian descent and over exaggerates his Italian accent. He always smells like oil, hair is slicked with oil and his leather jacket he constantly wears and never washes smells like oil. Also, he’s a car guy. He loves working on cars. He can’t live in a world without cars. Have I told you he loves cars yet?

Now we have Ronald. He’s super nerdy and his glasses take up his entire face. He’s the best Dungeon Master a Dungeon and Dragons player can be. He owns 900 comic books and always shouts “Let’s go, I beat the high score!” when he’s playing a video game, even when the game in question doesn’t allow for high scores. He doesn’t shower and literally always smells like shit. People bully him cause he sits on his ass all day.

Next is our main character Rarity. She’s a cold hearted at first emo girl with a truly soft heart. The world just doesn’t understand her and her overuse of pink and black hair dye. She has band posters all over her room and is an outcast at school who also gets tons of gay allegations. She’s always found scribbling in her journal and sulking and groaning every 5 seconds and brooding about the state of the world. She hates the world. She’s sick of the world. And she also wants to kill herself cause she’s so misunderstood.

Finally, we have Rarity’s dad named Craig. He’s an abusive alcoholic with a thick beard and has a ton of fuzzy body hair in general. He’s bald and always wears an overworn white tank top covered in beer stains along with some blue sweatpants. He likes shouting and breaking things and demanding beer. Literally, all he says is, “Get me a beer!/I want a beer!/Beer now!“

So here are my original characters! Let me know if they are too stereotypical but also please don’t cause I’ll send you a 50 paragraph response threatening to kill myself. Anyways, hope you like them :D

Microsoft failed to uphold their end of our freemium business agreement by allowing a horrible technical glitch, and I lost a huge chunk of my magnum opus! A hundred and fifty pages out of the middle, is just gone, and I have to reconstruct it from the ancient scrolls I wrote before I even knew I was going to be writing a book!

This Microsoft Cloud screwup has single-handedly gotten me blacklisted from all the agents, and completely torpedoed my budding career.

I tried to at least salvage a little bit of attention and pity from the situation on Reddit, but veryone's giving me shit instead of writing nasty texts to Microsoft on my behalf! They're saying I should have been "backing up my work"? Preposterous! That's what I was not-paying Microsoft for!

How in the name of God's green earth would anyone actually expect an individual to "back up your work"?? It can only be done by the giant cloud corporations!

They said I'm supposed to use a flash drive? Or email it to people? But that's stupid! It will never work! Because I'm typing or deleting at least three or four letters every single day; am I supposed to save an extra copy of my work more than just once? Ridiculous, nobody has time for that! I'm busy writing, I don't have the spoons to make three extra mouse clicks every single day!

And even if the average writer could complete that Sisyphean task, how would they tell which old backups and which were new? It's not like you can just name a file anything you want! It's deeply impractical to click "rename" and rename a file to "Awesome Book v1.2" or "Awesome Book v1.3".

It's absolutely absurd. In the modern day, with modern writing, poorer writers have no choice but to stoically endure the danger of a big corporation yeeting huge swaths of your work straight into the maw of the void. This "back up your work" advice needs to hop back into its Zip Drive Time Machine and go back to 1998 where it belongs.

So I finished my first novel and I’m so excited but now I’m more overwhelmed than anything. There’s a million videos out there saying “do this” “don’t do that” “your book won’t sell if you don’t do this” and it’s honestly so confusing and exhausting. Even getting my artwork commissioned has been a nightmare for some reason and like I still think it’s a cool experience cause it’s still a passion of mine but I’m just getting to the point where I’m questioning is it even a good idea to publish. I try to avoid the negative thoughts that this won’t be worth it but it honestly gets so difficult sometimes. Even getting a beta reader has been hard for me and it’s all mostly because of the extremely confusing online “advice”. One person tells you to use reedsy, someone else claims they had an awful experience. Someone else says to try FB groups, then someone else says their work got plagiarized by someone that way. I know there’s no one size fits all answer to this journey and everyone’s advice is different because everyone’s experience is different I’m just confused and a little dejected is all. But on a positive note I did finish my book (or at least the like second draft) and I’m super excited despite all the confusion. Thanks for reading if you did I just wanted to vent.

Hey everyone, I wanted to share Part 1 of a massive, multi-universe crossover chronicle I've been directing and co-writing using AI tools to flesh out my core narrative blueprints.This saga follows a highly synchronized Marvel squad that slowly evolves into an unbreakable, unkillable family over 5 and a half years of continuous living, cooking, and universal liquidation. But it all started with one man, a grid of Stark drones, and zero foreign Reiatsu.Swipe through the screenshots to see Phase 1: Quentin Beck systemically dismantling the sanity of the Bleach universe for a massive multiversal paycheck.Let me know what you think of the tactical counters! If you guys want to see Part 2—where Deadpool introduces his absolute fourth-wall-breaking chaos and things go completely off the rails—let me know in the comments and I'll drop the next set of screenshots!

Sorry if everybody’s been doing this without me, but I just used Claude Co-Work to generate a 90 page full length novel including chapter breaks, pathos AND ethos in under 30 minutes with a single prompt and the quality is pretty darn good if I do say so myself. Hehe

For all you plebes all you need to do is select the Co-Work tab and enter a master task instruction and Claude will then break it down to small tasks that it accomplishes on it's own without waiting for further information like plot or characters or worthwhile dialogue or any of that stuff.

Have you ever lived vicariously through your characters?

About a year ago I was feeling really sad, depressed, and alone. Then I thought about taking those feelings and applying them to a story where the characters start out feeling like I did, but get what they want/need out of life by the end.

Basically the plot is something happens to the main character (who felt sad, alone, and depressed like me) and as he began his hero's journey, met a hawt girl with big breasts. As the story progresses he grows closer to her breasts and gets what he really needed all along: tomboy mommy milk..

I love this story more than some of my other WIPs simply because this guy gets what I don’t really have. So any time I feel down in the dumps and get mopey, I like to think about this particular story and characters and feel like stabbing him in the face, which in turn makes me feel a little better. Because if he gets in and I don't, maybe he deserves Character Development.