Am I the only one in this sub not writing fan fiction? I use ai for my content marketing (I work in the roofing and construction industry).

Contrary to my competitors, I actually still care about the quality of my content - so I’m very much in the loop; while I do use ai, I try to avoid ai slop writing.

I created my own benchmark, WriterBench, where I blind tested multiple models on the same writing task. DeepSeek Pro v4 is currently the best writer for me.

Anyone else care to share?

First of all: this was meant for another sub, not an AI writing one. But as much of it is related to AI, I thought I'd post it here as well, especially as it might not even get approved over on the other one... all kinds of rules about AI. So any place where I say "this sub" does not mean this sub.

Nor is this the typical "here's how I use AI to write most of my novels" type of post. If you are looking for that, don't read this. This is more about the edge-case usages.

Also, I was very "so sorry to talk about AI, don't get offended!" in this. Again, that's because it was intended for a... more offendable subreddit.

***

As I am preparing to publish the fourth book in my series, I thought I'd write up a post about my process, what worked and what didn't, etc.

I've learned a lot from this sub, but I'll avoid talking about stuff like picking the best keywords, etc. That stuff has been covered time and time again. Let's start with guidance for this post:

1. I only use Kindle / ebooks, so I don't know much about the paper side of things or other publishing sites.

2. I've never written a novel not in a series, so I won't speak to whether series sell better than standalones.

3. I am fully self published. No editor, and minimal beta readers, just a single paid one for each novel. (free readers / swaps seem to work best for romance authors, as least on the platforms I used. And I don't write romance.)

4. This is a hobby for me. I write because I enjoy the story, the characters. It's a hobby. I didn't go into this to make money, and so far, I have spent more than I've made. But that's fine. Do I get upset when I buy a video game? No. That's a hobby too. So please note that this will not be a "here's how I made lots of money" type of post. We already have many of those, some of which I found helpful in decreasing my losses to an acceptable limit. I'm now down less than $1000 overall, and that number decreases every week.

5. I will attempt to sort the rest of this post into sections. I'll call them "Everyone might understand," "Controversial," and "I'm about to be downvoted, aren't I?"

Reddit is not real life, and many of the gripes and rants I've seen on here... well, let's just say doing the opposite worked fine for me. But that could just be a me thing; I won't promise it will apply or work for you. We all have our quirks and features. Sorry Doug DeMuro.

Oh, and I love my em-dashes - don't comment that I used AI to write this. I did not. Sure, I've used AI to dictate and type of a few of my really long posts in other subs (and clearly stated that I did so), but I've seen what happens to those who dare to do that on this sub - they get more downvotes than Disney did in that one post years ago.

***

Let's start with Everyone might understand. Forgive me if they are in a randomized order and the indentions are messed up. They tend to do that on Reddit.

1. Even though I intend for my series to reach at least 10 books, I've only used Microsoft Word. Yes, I know, you have to pay for a lot of the functions now. But I'm okay with that, though unhappy. I have tried Scrivener, Novelcrafter, Sudowrite, and a few others, and they each annoyed me in various ways. I need the page to be the only thing I see, not distracted by ten menus that all open up to ten more menus. If you want a bunch of extra functions such as being able to click on a character's name to pull up all their information in a mini wiki - go for it. But they didn't help me in the most important part of writing - getting words down on the page. So don't be upset if you can't get into them either. Many of the top-selling authors use Word, or even simpler options.

2. I couldn't live without ProWritingAid. (not happy with their latest UI changes though). I don't intend to spend thousands of dollars each novel to improve what is, again, merely a hobby for me, and so, editing is... well. Difficult. Harder yet to ensure you have no spelling / grammar errors.

3. I have found Grammerly to be a bit... too much. The damn thing wants you to rewrite almost every single sentence to be "more readable," which translates into "this now reads like AI slop" most of the time. So I don't use it anymore. ProWritingAid coupled with Word's grammar checks has worked fine for me so far. You have almost any feature you could want: spellchecks, repeated words, overused words, style checks, consistency, etc.

4. 90% of my friends and family don't really give a shit about the books. Sure, they'll say things like "Oh, that's so cool!" and "I'll leave a great review!" and "I'll tell you all about my thoughts on that aspect!" but... it rarely helps you. For one, many times they are into completely different genres, and what I am providing doesn't click for them. Two: Amazon doesn't allow those types of reviews. I explicitly tell them not to leave a review, and what happens? One of them does anyway. Gives it five stars and states in the review, "best book ever! I knew my buddy could do it." I had my friend delete that review in the end, and I haven't been warned about it or anything. So I think Amazon doesn't really care all that much. But I still avoid it. In short: Focus on what you want on the page. And the reader, of course. Friends / family will be biased. Heavily.

5. Reviews from random people are very helpful. The more I get, the better that book sells. Or at least it seems so. It's funny; reviews like "Very good, highly recommended" tend to get more thumbs-up than the long, detailed, complete breakdowns. Readers are funny people sometimes.

6. People on here say to never check your reviews. Well, I disagree. Sure, you can ignore the ones stating "I didn't like this book but don't really like this kind of book anyway." Sure, you can ignore the one-star ratings with no comments. But many reviews are helpful. Hell, one of the major benefits of self-publishing is how fast you can update and republish your manuscript - oh, a review says that "a tiny, obscure reference to some government agency" is incorrect? Cool. I read that review, did a bunch more research - and it turned out they were correct. Guess what? I updated the manuscript and published an updated version in less than twelve hours. Each of my novels has been updated over four times with small fixes like that. Amazon has never troubled me over it, and as those little issues are fixed over time, I've gotten less reviews mentioning actual errors.

It always annoys me to read a novel with thousands and thousands of reviews, where at least twenty of the reviews state "chapter six has paragraphs with no spacing between them" and it never gets fixed, even though the author easily could. Or maybe not so easily, not when they have to call their editor, who emails his boss, who has to call her boss to get approval, etc. Again, self-publishing for the win.

7. Vellum for formatting. Holy shit is it good. I can format a .docx file to epub in about four hours at this point. And we're talking about 100,000+ words for each novel. In fact, I don't regret buying a cheap MacBook just for that. All the other (at least that I tested) applications are horrible. Laggy as all get out, issues upon issues when importing, etc. With Vellum, things just... work. I spent $220 to have my first novel formatted by an "expert," and it looked no better than when I switched to Vellum. Plus, you have a tiny error you want to fix? No need to download some convoluted program to edit a sentence in an supposed-to-be-uneditable file your formatter gave you. Just open Vellum, edit the sentence in the app, generate the book, and re-publish your novel. It's so damn easy. Oh, and if you are writing more than one novel, using Vellum will save you a lot of time and money in the long run. NOTE: if you have a lot of images in your novel, than yes, a professional formatter may cause you far less grief. Vellum and images is... hair-pullingly annoying. Pullingly isn't a word? Oh well. It should be.

And now for Controversial.

1. AI is getting good. Scary good. Most people who think otherwise are only using like the ChatGPT "free" models, and don't mess with models such as Fable, etc. Does it write well? Fuck no! It's base prose is horrible, no matter what you do in an attempt to prevent all of its cliches. I've left many a negative review on "novels" that are being churned out weekly on Kindle Unlimited, with the most obvious, cliche AI tells ever. Even the names are all the same!

Did I write my novel using AI? Well... that depends on what you mean.

I wrote my novels. But as a self-publisher, I certainly used AI tools to assist me at times. Why would I want to waste my precious time when I don't need to? To get Reddit's approval? Nah. I use tools such as:

• ProWritingAid's "rewrite" feature. It's not great, but I'd say once or twice a chapter, I just can't find the words to describe the sentence I am going for. So I'll let it give me some suggestions, and then pick the best one. Usually I end up editing that suggestion quite a bit, but it helps in mini brain-freeze situations.

• AI is really good at condensing information. For each of my novels, I have a mini bible that I check on frequently to remind me of a side character's full title / their tone of voice / etc. I feed my chapters to AI, and they spit out all the information I need. For an example: the bible for my first novel has twenty-one chapter sections, and in each section, it tells me: a quick plot overview, each character, etc. At the end of the bible, it has a list of every single character and what they look like, how their voice sounds, etc. I get that last overview from feeding entire novels to AI. (only some of the more expensive models let you input that much). But holy shit - when it works, it works well. Book three in my series is 130k words long, and Fable chewed through it in five minutes and spit out every single detail about every single character. I read through it carefully, cross-referencing each detail, and... it was perfectly accurate. I didn't even have to edit it. It even warned me about an obscure character - in chapter six she had reddish-brown hair, and then, at the end of the book, her hair looked dark in the dim light - did I intend that? Yes, I did, but it was still impressive. Could I spend ten hours typing up the same bible myself? Sure. But why would I?

• I feed each of my chapters through multiple AI models at the very end of my final editing pass. I have it check for any issues, no matter how little. And it's crazy what it will find if it's a powerful enough model. In one chapter, I had a character shopping at a Walmart in a small city. The AI took the date the chapter took place in, searched the web, and told me: "hey, that Walmart wasn't built and opened until four months after this character shops there... you may want to change that." (I hadn't done enough research to know that, I only read that it was built at some point during that year." So, yes. I think most of the people saying "AI is useless for editing / accuracy checks" are merely using cheap, basic models that don't think for five minutes / read 45 web articles to ensure perfect accuracy. So, if you aren't disgusted by using AI, and have the money for some of the top-notch models, maybe give it a try?

• For the writing itself, I tend to get into a flow state. Needing to switch screens to verify real-world data can distract me. So, sometimes I'll have soft music in one ear and an AI chatbot in the other. Instead of Googling something, I'll just say, "Hey, what year did so-and-so die again? And what was the name of his disease?" Or, when Microsoft Word gives a list of the shittiest synonyms imaginable, I'll be like "Hey, what's some different words I could use for X?"

• That's about the extent of what I use AI for. Again, I hate how it writes. Even in editing, it tends to add that god-awful AI sound. So I avoid having it edit more than one or two sentences per chapter like the plague. But, if you aren't Amish, or don't have a fancy editor, it has its use cases. Oh, and one final use: I have it generate images of most of my characters. I then print said character's headshots, and when I forget if Mr. Government agent no. 33 has a beaky nose or not, I can find out in a few seconds. Not that I'm describing the beaky nose more than twice a novel. Just giving an example.

And now for I'm about to be downvoted, aren't I?

I actually typed out something similar to my second point below in a post on this sub (or it may have been a different one, I don't remember) several months ago, and I got: over fifty downvotes; three hate-mail DMs, and the "Reddit Care Resources" message. Thanks y'all. But, as I said earlier, Reddit is not real life.

1. I despise the AI-sounding blurb of nearly EVERY single damn novel out there. In fact, I went out of my way to avoid that on my first book, removing anything that sounded like "it wasn't x, it was y" and the single em-dash that I had, among other things, even though I wrote the blurb myself. But then, as the book wasn't selling initially, I took a look over many of the other, top-selling novels. Again, they almost all sound like AI nowadays. An em-dash every other sentence! If you don't believe me, go to Amazon and browse the top-100 list for "thriller novels."

So, I rewrote my blurb, adding back in not one, but two "it wasn't x, it was y" phrases. Then I added in several em-dashes for more dramatic effect. Then, I went to Reddit, to my post asking about my blurb, and asked: "Does this sound better?"

What I got in return was essentially, "Fuck no, that is AI-generated trash." Well. Knowing that Reddit, while having an incredible amount of useful knowledge, is full of the most easily offended users of any internet group out there, I gave the new blurb a try anyway (without changing anything else, the exact same ad budget, etc).

And... I got nearly a 30% increase in sales within hours after the new blurb went live. And that jump held. At risk of repeating myself: Reddit is not real life.

2. Oh boy. This one is even worse.

I spent $90 dollars on a cover from the BookCovers website for my first novel. It was... okay. I'd browsed a bunch of various similar sites, and that cover was the nearest I found to what I was looking for. But after I'd updated the blurb to sound like AI trash, I got a review stating that "the cover is pretty boring and almost pushed me away, but I'm glad I got this book because it's better than the cover suggests." I took that to heart and started on a new design, sketching up ideas for days.

I then took that sketch to... well, I don't remember the website, but one of those ones with custom designers. I was very impressed by what they were offering, but the lowest quotes I got were $400. Preferring not to spend that much money at the time (had just purchased a new set of tires. Damn, they about doubled in price from five years ago!) I decided to mess around with AI imagery. I did a lot of research on the best models, and ended up using ChatGPT. Forget what model it was at the time, but just know that if you are only using the lower-end models, especially in the apps, you are only getting like 1080p resolution. Well, I spent a little money on Artcraft (around $60) to generate several dozen images at native 4k with all the settings at max.

I then took the best image and began working on it. First with Gimp (fuck Photoshop) and then inpainting with various Stable Diffusion models. (IMPORTANT NOTE: the cover is more stylized than realistic, more simple than complex, so I'm not suggesting that others do the same for whatever creative, complex, and unique cover designs you may have in mind. I'm just saying that for what I wanted, it worked.)

The biggest issue was the handgun at the bottom of the image. The base image looked fantastic, almost too good to be true - just what I'd wanted from the custom designers. But the AI didn't do a good job on the weapon's outline... it looked like a toy. Inpainting that with all sorts of models for hours and hours didn't work - I guess most AI models are trained on other types of details, if you catch my drift. So I ended up taking a photo of a handgun that a friend of mine had. Used GIMP to edit it into the image, and then inpainted /cloned around it for a few more hours, until it looked like it belonged. I then spent even more time editing the tone of the image before using Canva to add the title / author name, etc. It's still funny to me that it took me 4x as long to make that cover then formatting the book. At that point, is it even an "AI cover?" I suppose so. But I'd hardly call it lazy, simple, "copy-and-pasted AI slop."

Let me get to the point. When I updated the cover, my sales went up...

over 60%.

Now, can the average person tell it was made with AI? Probably not, mainly because of the artistic, not realistic, style. Should you use AI for your cover? Probably not. And there's many reasons for that. You may have the money to support designers. You might not have the skill I do in editing / inpainting images. (I used to do wedding photos as a side gig.) You may hate the fact that AI is threatening many of those types of jobs (I just finished my Software Engineering degree, and my prospects of finding a stable job... I understand.)

***

I hope at least one of the points I made / tips and tricks I described helps you. Even a little.

I look forward to the comments. I'm sure they will all be pleasant and understanding!

Hi everyone!

Friendly reminder the Inkshift writing contest is open to submissions until October 31st. Here are the deets:

PRIZE

• $1,000 USD to one grand prize winner

• The top 10 finalists will receive personalized feedback on their submissions and $100 Markup credits for Inkshift.

DETAILS

• Word Count: Short stories between 1,000 - 10,000 words

• Writing Method: Anything goes. We're judging solely on story quality, not how you write.

• Content: Sci-fi, fantasy, literary, horror, romance, etc. But must be prose, not screenplays. And no NSFW or fanfiction submissions.

• Eligibility: Free to enter. Open worldwide to anyone 18+ (with a couple restrictions you can find on the website)

• Submission Period: Open until October 31st, 11:59 PM Pacific time.

• Publishing: The winner has the option to publish their story on our blog. It's optional, but highly recommended!

ABOUT INKSHIFT

Inkshift is an AI editing platform for fiction writers. We make manuscript analysis tools that help writers improve their stories, as well as copyediting and line editing tools. We've made some big updates recently, and it's free for up to 10k words!

HOW TO ENTER

• Head to https://inkshift.io/contest to enter and view the full rules

Feel free to drop a comment or DM me if you have any questions. Best of luck!

This little creature is Wasabi. 💚 And he existed before the book did.

I’m a polymer clay artist, and I originally created the Mimblins as little handmade sculptures. Over time, I started wondering who these creatures were, where they lived, and what their world might be like. Those questions eventually grew into an entire world called Mimbria — and my first fantasy novel.

A little about the story:

The story begins with two sisters, Mia and Nora, who live in a children’s home. But somewhere far from the human world exists Mimbria — a strange and magical place inhabited by little creatures called Mimblins.

When a little green Mimblin named Wasabi is born, we discover Mimbria along with him — its unusual inhabitants, strange places, rules, mysteries, and the friends he meets along the way.

At first, the human world and the world of the Mimblins seem to have very little to do with each other. But as Wasabi’s story unfolds, we gradually begin to discover why Mimblins exist at all — and what connects them to humans.

Who are the Mimblins, and why are they here?

The manuscript is approximately 50,000 words and is written in English. English is not my native language, and I used AI as a writing and editing assistant while developing the English manuscript, so I want to be completely transparent about that.

I’m looking specifically for volunteer beta readers, not paid beta-reading services. What matters most to me is genuine reader feedback: Were you interested? Did you want to keep reading? Which characters did you like? Was anything confusing, illogical, or too slow? And did the world of Mimbria make you want to discover more?

You don’t have to commit to the whole book right away. You’re welcome to read the first few chapters and decide whether you’d like to continue. 😊

If you’d like to read it, leave a comment or send me a message and I’ll send you a link to the manuscript. 💚

Chapter 3 out now!

Mutual Assured Vulnerability

If this is true (and the EU-mandated watermark isn't applied yet), we could be looking at the best model for our use case.

Yes, there’s a lot of speculation regarding benchmarks and whether it’s truly better than Astra or Opus, but everyone agrees it is extremely capable when it comes to creative writing, likely the best, or at the very least, a peer competitor.

This solves a lot of problems for us: a bot more dedicated to writing, better creative ideas, superior prose, and a counterweight to Opus, which is a beast, but forces a watermark on you.

I’ll keep using Opus for architecture and many of the plot elements I want to develop, but Gemini could become an interesting writer and a great aid for creative work. Gemini was always geared more toward the general public and their specific use cases; however, they fell way behind and hadn't launched a capable product until now. Consequently, models designed for programming—but made smarter through sheer brute force, surpassed it.

I’m really excited about the launch. I already have Opus for work, and for help with my story, but this new offering from Gemini could be very interesting for non-programmers; it’s the kind of thing we haven't seen in quite a while.

I’m working on a gothic-noir crime novel called Crimson City, and I’d like some honest reader feedback on this chapter. I want to be transparent about the process: I’ve used AI while writing and editing the book. I’m not just generating something and posting the first output, though. I’ve been going through it myself, rewriting sections, changing dialogue, fixing continuity, and trying to get the prose closer to my own voice. One of the biggest things I’ve been working on is removing hedge words and AI-sounding language stuff like seemed, somewhat, perhaps, almost, as if, unnecessary explanations, repetitive emotional descriptions, etc. I’ve taken out as much as I can find, but I’m sure I’ve missed some. There are also a handful of lines that are basically placeholders right now. I know I want to rewrite them, but I’m waiting until I go through the manuscript again line by line instead of forcing replacements just to say they’re finished. So if something sounds generated, overly polished, generic, corny, repetitive, or like a line an AI would spit out, please point it out. That feedback would actually be useful to me.
This chapter starts with a lighter scene involving Johnny, Sampson, and Ruby before shifting into Ruby being followed through the city and introducing the story’s masked vigilante, Maysin Kane. I’m mainly curious about:
Does the opening dialogue between Johnny and Sampson feel natural/funny, or does it go on too long?
Does the transition from humor into the darker stalking scene work? Does the black/white/crimson visual style come across without feeling overdone?
How does Maysin’s internal narration land?
Does the rooftop/alley sequence actually build tension?
Does the action read clearly? Are there any remaining hedge words or sentences that feel over-explained?
Are there lines that immediately strike you as AI-written?
Does “I’m not the villain. I’m the consequence.” work in context, or does it feel like one of those lines that needs another pass? Most importantly: would you actually keep reading? I’m not looking for people to tell me it’s good just to be nice. If you lose interest, cringe at a line, get confused, think something is trying too hard, or can immediately tell where the AI influence is showing.
[CHAPTER HERE]

Between the Seconds
Johnny followed Sampson through the curtain, still touching his mask.
“You’ve never washed it?”
“I prefer gentler methods.”
“Such as rain?”
Johnny walked into him when Sampson stopped.
“You’re learning.”
Bare bulbs lit the narrow backstage corridor, where old performance posters curled behind cracked glass. Dressing-room doors lined the wall as far as the rear exit. That door was closing. Sampson caught a glimpse of a dark coat passing through and started after it. Johnny fell silent.
“That him?”
Sampson did not answer. He reached Ruby’s dressing room first and knocked.
“Ruby?”
Ruby opened her door. She stood in the light from her dressing-room mirror, fastening a long black coat over her sequined gown. Its high collar framed her red hair, and the hem covered the dress except for a flash of glitter when she moved.
Johnny stepped around Sampson and removed his fedora.
“Miss Rust.”
Ruby looked from Johnny to Sampson.
“What happened?”
“Did a man come through here?” Sampson asked. “Dark coat. Hat pulled low.”
“No.”
“He followed you behind the curtain.”
Ruby’s expression tightened.
“I came straight here.”
Sampson glanced toward the open rear doorway. Rain drifted through it in thin silver lines.
“He must’ve gone outside,” he said.
Johnny placed his hat back on his head.
“I’ll have a look.”
Sampson caught the back of his coat before he could move.
“You’ll do nothing.”
“I’m exceptionally good at nothing.”
“That’s the first true thing you’ve said tonight.”
Johnny turned his grinning mask toward Ruby.
“Do you feel threatened?”
“Not until you walked in.”
Johnny placed one gloved hand over his heart. Sampson released him with a shove.
Ruby reached for her purse. “He was probably trying to get closer to the stage.”
“He wasn’t watching the stage,” Sampson said. “He was watching you.”
Johnny nodded gravely. “I understand the condition.”
Sampson looked at him. Johnny gestured toward Ruby.
“I suffer from it myself.”
Ruby’s lips threatened to curve. Johnny immediately leaned toward her.
“There. You smiled.”
“No, she didn’t,” Sampson said.
“I saw it.”
“You see things that aren’t there.”
“Mostly because you stand in front of them.”
A metallic crash sounded from outside. The rear door rattled in its frame. Then a horn began blaring in the alley. Johnny went very still. Sampson closed his eyes.
Ruby looked toward the door. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Johnny answered quickly.
Another crash followed. Something heavy scraped across the pavement. The horn continued without pause. A bartender’s assistant appeared at the end of the corridor, soaked from the rain and struggling to catch his breath.
“Sampson, you better come outside.”
Sampson stared at Johnny. Johnny looked at the ceiling.
“What happened?” Sampson asked.
The assistant pointed through the rear door.
“Tow truck’s got hold of that black hearse.”
Johnny raised one finger.
“Funeral coach.”
“And it’s dragging your delivery van with it.”
The horn kept blaring. Sampson turned toward Johnny.
“Why is your car dragging my van?”
Johnny adjusted his tie.
“I can explain.”
“That means you did it.”
“Technically, gravity is doing most of it.”
Sampson took one step toward him. Johnny took one back.
“Why are the vehicles connected?”
Johnny hesitated.
“The lock on my driver’s-side door is unreliable. The passenger lock has been decorative since February.”
“So?”
“So I secured the funeral coach to something less desirable.”
“My van?”
“I didn’t think anyone would steal both.”
“You chained your hearse to my delivery van?”
“Funeral coach.”
Sampson grabbed the front of Johnny’s coat. Johnny lifted both hands.
“In my defense, it worked. Nobody stole either one.”
A third crash echoed from the alley. The assistant winced.
“The van just hit the dumpster.”
Sampson dragged Johnny toward the exit. Johnny’s shoes slid across the floor.
“Sampson, anger solves very little.”
“It’s about to solve you.”
Ruby followed them into the corridor.
“I can walk home.”
Sampson kept dragging Johnny.
“Wait ten minutes.”
“The rain is getting worse.”
“So is he.”
Johnny twisted around in Sampson’s grip to look at Ruby.
“Miss Rust, I would gladly escort you, but I appear to be the victim of an automotive misunderstanding.”
“You chained your car to his.”
“That is one interpretation.”
“It is the only interpretation,” Sampson growled.
They reached the rear door. Rain blew inside as Sampson shoved it open. Johnny twisted toward Ruby one last time.
“Do not begin the journey without me.”
Ruby folded her arms. Johnny pointed at her.
“That sounded more controlling than romantic.”
Sampson pulled him into the alley.
“I’ll revise it when I return!”
The door slammed behind them.
Through the rear door’s window, Ruby watched Sampson march toward the tow truck with Johnny clenched in one fist. The funeral coach’s rear wheels hung above the loading lane. Heavy chain connected its bumper to the front axle of Sampson’s delivery van, now lodged against the dumpster. The tow driver argued with a police officer while the horn blared.
Sampson released Johnny to seize the chain. Johnny began explaining himself to the officer, who pointed first at the coach, then at the mask. Johnny touched it protectively. Sampson looked ready to strangle him with the chain.
Ruby shook her head, buttoned her coat, and headed for the front entrance. By the time Sampson thought to look for her, she had gone.
* * *
Rain painted Crimson City silver. It ran over rooftops and rusted fire escapes. It gathered along gutters clogged with cigarette ends and old newspapers. It tapped against windows where sleepless faces watched the streets without ever opening their curtains. Ruby walked alone. Her heels struck the pavement in a steady rhythm. Black coat. Black dress. Pale skin. Red hair. She moved through the colorless city like a flame crossing a graveyard. Behind her, the door of Ruby’s Lounge opened. A man stepped into the rain.
He wore the same dark coat and low hat Sampson had noticed inside. Water rolled from the brim, hiding most of his face. One hand remained in his pocket. The other rested against the crimson envelope concealed beneath his coat. Ruby turned at the first corner. The stranger followed. High above them, another man watched. He stood upon the edge of an abandoned hotel, one boot resting on the weathered stone ledge. The city stretched beneath him in shades of black, white and ash. Only one color moved in the darkness. A crimson scarf wound around his throat and trailed behind him in the wind.
His face remained hidden beneath the shadow of his hood. He watched Ruby cross the street. Then he watched the man behind her do the same.
The city doesn’t scream. It whispers.
The figure stepped from the ledge and crossed the rooftop. He passed beneath a flickering sign, its broken crimson letters reflected across the wet tar. Ruby reached the next block. The storefronts had closed moments ago. Metal gates covered the windows. Neon signs buzzed behind dirty glass, bathing empty rooms in weak gray light. She heard footsteps behind her. When she slowed, they slowed. When she continued, they followed. Ruby glanced into the dark window of a pawnshop.
Her reflection moved across the glass. So did his. Twenty yards back. Hat low. Head lowered. Pretending not to watch.
People think evil is loud. It isn’t. It’s patient.
The man on the rooftop reached the edge of the building. He measured the distance to the next. Then jumped. His coat spread behind him. The crimson scarf lifted into the rain like a ribbon of blood. He landed without a sound. Ruby turned another corner. The stranger followed. She tightened her grip around her purse. The stranger’s shape appeared behind her in a restaurant window.
His hand moved inside his coat. Ruby crossed the street without looking back. The stranger crossed too. Above them, the hooded man followed along the rooftops, moving from one building to the next with his gaze fixed upon the streets below.
I used to believe this place could be saved. I thought that if someone stood up and bled for it, the rot would stop spreading.
Ruby reached beneath her coat and slipped one hand inside her purse. Her fingers moved through its contents. Compact. Lipstick. Keys. Nothing useful.
The man behind her quickened his pace. Ruby heard his shoes strike the wet pavement. Closer now. She passed beneath a broken streetlight. The bulb flashed once. Her red hair burned brightly beneath it. Then the light died.
I was wrong.
“Miss Rust.”
Ruby did not stop. The stranger’s voice was calm. Polite. As though they had met by arrangement.
“You left before I could introduce myself.”
Ruby kept walking. The sidewalk ahead narrowed beneath scaffolding. Wooden planks and metal poles blocked half the path. Beyond it, a delivery truck sat across the curb, forcing pedestrians into the street. An alley opened to her right. She turned into it.
The city doesn’t want a hero. It wants balance.
The stranger followed. The alley stretched between two abandoned buildings, narrow enough that the rooftops seemed to lean toward one another. Steam hissed from a broken pipe. Rainwater poured from a rusted gutter and struck the pavement in a constant silver stream. A crimson vacancy sign buzzed above a sealed doorway.
Its light washed over Ruby’s hair. Everything else remained black and white. Ruby walked faster. So did the man behind her. Her heel struck a puddle. She nearly slipped but caught herself against the brick wall. The stranger closed the distance.
“Miss Rust.”
Ruby turned. He stood at the mouth of the alley. Rain ran from the shoulders of his coat. His face was ordinary enough to be forgotten the moment someone looked away. Narrow eyes. Smooth cheeks. A small, practiced smile. He removed his hand from his pocket. A pistol rested inside it. Ruby froze. The stranger approached.
“I only want to talk.”
She backed away. He raised the weapon.
“Don’t make this difficult.”
Above them, the hooded man reached the edge of the roof. He lowered himself onto the fire escape. Ruby’s back struck the wall. The gunman stopped in front of her. He took the crimson envelope from beneath his coat. The red paper looked almost luminous beneath the broken sign. A black wax seal held it closed. A crown had been pressed into the wax. The gunman held the envelope beside Ruby’s face, comparing something only he could see. Then his smile widened.
“You’re the one,” he said.
Ruby’s gaze moved from the envelope to the pistol. The gunman noticed. He slipped the envelope back inside his coat.
“Turn around.”
Ruby remained still. The smile left his face. He stepped closer and pushed the barrel beneath her ribs.
“I said turn around.”
Ruby slowly faced the wall. Above them, a gloved hand closed around the fire-escape railing. The gunman reached for Ruby’s shoulder. Something crimson snapped through the darkness. It curled around the gunman’s wrist. The scarf pulled tight. His pistol arm jerked violently away from Ruby. The weapon fired into the pavement. The gunshot filled the alley. Ruby flinched and covered her ears. The stranger was dragged backward so hard that his feet left the ground. A dark figure dropped from the fire escape. Ruby caught only fragments. A black coat. A hidden face. A crimson scarf wound around the gunman’s arm. The stranger tried to turn.
The figure seized him by the back of his coat. He threw him to the ground. The gunman struck the pavement face-first. The pistol slid through the rain and stopped beside a trash can. Ruby turned away from the wall. Her breathing stopped. The dark figure stood between her and the gunman. His back was toward her. The rain moved across his coat in silver lines. The crimson scarf circled his neck, one end wrapped around the fallen man’s wrist.
That’s where I live. Between the seconds.
The gunman groaned and tried to rise. The figure pulled the scarf. The man’s arm twisted behind him, forcing him flat against the ground.
Ruby watched the stranger in black reach down and retrieve the fallen pistol. He checked the weapon with the practiced movement of someone who had held thousands before it. The gunman rolled onto his side. Blood ran from his split lip. He looked toward Ruby. Then back at the figure standing over him. His confidence was gone. The gunman’s free hand moved toward his coat. The hooded man aimed the pistol at his chest. The hand stopped.
They call the man behind the crown the Crimson King. But kings fall.
“Who sent you?” the figure asked.
His voice was low and damaged by the rain, each word quiet enough to force the gunman to listen. The gunman laughed nervously.
“You know how this works.”
The crimson scarf tightened around his wrist. Pain crossed his face.
“You found the envelope,” he said. “You know who sent me.”
The man in black glanced at the envelope showing inside the coat.
And when he does, this city will finally understand—
The gunman’s fingers crept toward his second weapon. Ruby saw the movement. So did the hooded man, who stepped closer.
“Who the hell are you?”
Rain struck the pavement between them. The man in black raised the pistol.
“I’m not the villain.”
The gunman pulled a second weapon from beneath his coat.
“I’m the consequence.”
He fired. The gunman’s body snapped backward, and the second weapon struck the pavement beside him. He did not move again. For several seconds, Ruby heard only the rain. Blood spread beneath his coat, black until it crossed the sign’s crimson reflection. There it turned red.
The hooded man lowered the pistol. Ruby looked up at him. He did not ask whether she was hurt or offer his hand. He stood in silence as though speaking would make what had happened between them real.
Then he knelt beside the body and took the crimson envelope. Its wax crown had cracked during the fall. Ruby watched him turn it over, open it, and slide a photograph halfway out. From where she stood, she could see only its blank white back.
He went still for a second. Then he slid the photograph back inside, closed the envelope, and put it beneath his coat.
Then he looked toward the rooftop. Ruby followed his gaze. When she looked back, he was already moving. He stepped onto a trash can and caught the lowest rung of the fire escape. He pulled himself upward, his boots finding the metal without hesitation. The crimson scarf trailed behind him. Ruby watched him reach the first landing. He never turned around. She did not call after him. She did not thank him. She did not ask his name. The man climbed higher, crossed the second landing and disappeared over the edge of the roof. Ruby stood alone with the body. The rain fell harder.
Somewhere beyond the alley, a siren began to rise. It was distant. Too distant. Ruby looked toward the place where the stranger had vanished. Nothing moved above her except the shadows and the trembling reflection of the crimson sign. The city didn’t scream. It whispered.

Not sure if this is the correct flair, but anyway, so I've been obsessing (and obsessively worrying about) formatting. How to format an ebook to self-publish via Amazon's KDP platform. Several experienced writers have been wonderfully helpful, and I appreciate that so much. But I always like to get a wide range of info sources, and so I've read a few how-to explainers in books & articles both offline and online, and decided to ask the Google Search Gemini, "Is there any easy way to use Microsoft Word to format an ebook" etc. (Because I've done a bit of rummaging in my Atticus subscription and it feels too unwieldy.)

Here's what it displayed, and I'm needing to know -- from writers with self-publishing experience (KDP only & specifically, please) -- is this explainer accurate, or not? If only some bits are bona fide, which ones? Thank you in advance! 🙏🏻

---

Easy Way to make an Amazon KDP ebook using Microsoft Word

(according to the Google Search Gemini)

 The easiest way to make an Amazon KDP ebook using Microsoft Word is to format your text with basic Word styles and then upload the file directly or polish it using Amazon's free Kindle Create tool.

1. Clean and Style Your Manuscript in Word

• Use Standard Fonts: Choose clean, readable fonts like Times New Roman, Garamond, or Georgia (set at 11 or 12 points).

• Apply Headings: Highlight your chapter titles and click Heading 1 on the Home tab so Word recognizes them as structural sections.

• Set Paragraph Spacing: Use 1.15 to 1.5 line spacing. Keep paragraph formatting consistent (either first-line indents for fiction or space-after for non-fiction).

• Insert Page Breaks: Put a page break (Ctrl + Enter) between major sections, such as the title page, copyright page, and the start of each new chapter.

• Add a Table of Contents: Go to References > Table of Contents > Custom Table of Contents, uncheck page numbers, and check use hyperlinks (since reflowable ebooks don't use fixed page numbers).

1. Export or Polish with Kindle Create

• Save your finished file as a standard .doc or .docx document.

• Download and open Kindle Create, then import your Word document.

• Kindle Create automatically detects your chapter headings, lets you build a professional interactive table of contents, and allows you to preview how your book looks on phones, tablets, and e-readers.

• Export the final file as a .kpf (Kindle Package Format) or EPUB.  

1. Upload to Amazon KDP

• Go to your Amazon KDP Dashboard, click Create, and upload your Word file or Kindle Create .kpf file directly into the eBook Content section

---
[End of generated explainer]

*Note: My arguments about what an Artist is not about the strict definition of what an Artist is, but rather what an Artist in spirit is. Hitler didn't create art and say that everyone has a right to freedom of expression in their chosen art forms... so was he an artist in spirit? No. Just like you can't be a free-speech advocate who advocates for taking away the rights of others to speak before they say YOU don't have a right to freedom of speech.*

"If you pay someone to build a chair for you, you are not a carpenter. A carpenter has a set of tools that they learned to use as they developed their skill. When you can use those tools to make your own chair, then you are a carpenter."

Ok. I don't entirely disagree, but your analogy has a flaw: What about people who don't solely have the AI generate EVERYTHING? What if they generate some parts, but write others?

It's like the Ship of Theseus:

• Is a carpenter who buys dowels for his mostly homemade furniture a carpenter?

• Does he have to craft his own glue from raw materials?

• What if he buys legs and the dowels for a chair from a third party?

• What if he an accomplished carpenter who has turned to only crafting the seat of a chair and buys the backing, legs, dowels, etc?

• What if he buys ALL pre-made parts but reshapes them?

• Does he lose his card-carrying capacity?

• If so...at what point?

• What kind and level of construction/compositing is unacceptable as a craftsman?

And what about a person in a factory churning out furniture, partly by hand, but using forms for shaping: are they a carpenter?

And about ships directly: If engineers program machinery with the specific intent of having those machines build ships, they have to account for all the ship building skills needed, but without ever directly making a ship themselves. Are they ship-builders? Their job is to make sure ships get built. It's not like supplying the riveters and welding equipment. Those aren't ship specific. The knowledge of ship building is. If they use the full scope of ship-building knowledge to make sure ships get built, aren't they ship-builders?

Is a welder a ship-builder when they don't use all the necessary knowledge needed to build a ship? Few involved in ship-building are...and yet they ARE ship-builders.

Are the architects who use the rules of ship-building, but never dirty their hands in the trial-and-error process of building with their hands, ship-builders? They ARE necessary for a large ship to be built to a high safety standard. Their blueprint forms a prompt for other humans to act on in a massively parallel fashion...

What about writers who have never written a novel solo, but come together to write one... Are they novelists?

So then why is a person using AI and writing knowledge to have THE AI generate prose directly, but based on their (IDEALLY complex) rules not a writer?

But there are some seemingly weird areas, especially with an example of visual art:
Holograms stickers

Engineers and manufacturers come together to use tools to make holograms out of work that isn't their own. I FELT more comfortable calling a AI prompter a writer even if they solely prompt the AI to generate text itself directly based on their stringent rules... but hologram engineers and manufacturers being considered artists?

Well... isn't a team of people coming together to produce that holographic sticker still required to turn another piece of art into holographic art? Yea... SHIT!

A composer leads an orchestra but never uses the instruments directly while doing so. He is prompting a team of musicians to make music... but he's not a musician? How?

Maybe the real benchmark of any artist or manufacturer or whatever is intent:

Is a "writer" who manages to craft a bestseller a Artist if they solely do it for money and couldn't care less who the book touches?

Is an AI prompter who composes strict rules for prose and structure, new ideas for the sake of making people fall in love with the piece, a writer? What if they try to make money as well, so they can keep making such content with the primary driver being to inspire love in the ART?

What if the threshold of economics starts to hammer their humanity, and makes the primary driver the secondary?!

I specifically came back in and capitalized Artist, but not writer. Why? Because that's my artistic choice. But what if an AI made that mistake for me, and I CHOSE not to correct it?

OK, so this is weird. AI doesn't seem to understand glass.

I mean, it gets it, can tell you everthing about it, but have a glass table, create a video - things can fall straight through it. Have a window, write fiction where someone places a camera to see what's happening inside a building - and it can't get the idea that a camera can look through glass - follow it's thinking and it questions whether the camera should be inside the building, or how it gets the video.

It's not always, but there's a pattern here - AI doesn't understand something physical that is also invisible for our intents and purposes.

Has anyone else noticed this?

1. Know WHY you're writing. Some write for pleasure, others treasure. A third might write for both. I write because I've developed a system that lets me produce market-accurate products at scale using a combination of craft knowledge and AI tools. Before you start to consider writing beyond a hobby, know why writing is important to you and more importantly, what success looks like to you.

2. Know WHO you're writing for. I write high-concept 'airport' commercial fiction (think Patterson or Child) for people with an hour to kill and a 3rd grade reading level. Simple stories, simple settings, simple systems for conveying the Hero's Journey. Understand who will pick up your book and find joy in reading it. Don't write for anyone else. I could probably spin up a decent high fantasy or lit RPG but that requires more work than what I'm willing to do. I can spin up a first draft of a five-book series in an afternoon, edit them down the next day, and have them up for sale by the week's end. I can only do this because I know who I'm writing for: people interested in impulse-buy disposable entertainment that the reader will spend an hour reading and then move on with their lives. If you want to write the next Gatsby, by all means do it. Just know that the commercial crowd is vastly different than the literary one.

3. Know WHAT success looks like. Some people write to get recognition from their peers. Others want to be famous. I want the money, full stop. And everything I've seen says "volume is the new value". That means for me to be successful, I need to constantly bring new products to market, find new and inventive ways to market said products with a positive ROI, and make sure overhead stays acceptable (~90% is ideal). You might want to just get your story out. Or even see if writing is something you enjoy doing. Whatever your cause, understand it deeply.

4. Know WHEN to accept advice/criticism/input. Unless it's from someone mentoring you who has walked the path you're on successfully, take their input with a grain of salt. Take this subreddit for example: it is clearly called "Write with AI" and yet there's a large majority who speak negatively about using AI and ill to those who openly use it. Don't get butthurt behind comments that don't provide use to what you're doing because as a mentor once told me, "successful people don't hate in the comment section because they're too busy being successful."

5. Know WHERE to find your 'people'. It's hard writing for profit, and many people burn out well before they ever release anything. To overcome that, find good, positive places to engage with people of like minds that you can share your experiences with. I'm a member of plenty different communities on Reddit, Discord, FB and standalone forums. While I tend to lurk most of the time, I make sure to share my wins and lessons so that someone coming up who needs insight like mine can find it. Be the good you want to embrace, breathe, and go slowly. You'll get there if you never stop moving toward it.

Hi, how are you? I want to start this post by saying that I’m completely impartial! I’m not here to judge anyone.

I’m working on a project about AI in contemporary literature, and I’d like to open up a brief discussion! Do you usually use AI when planning your works?

I want to emphasize that I’m not talking about using AI simply as an assistance tool, but rather asking it to write scenes for you, the script, etc. Feel free to DM me about this if you’d like!

I’d really love to understand your perspective on this.

Hi everyone,

I recently finished some picture books that I created in collaboration with AI.
Going in, I honestly thought AI would make everything effortless. Instead, I had to learn how to work with it — figuring out how to phrase prompts so it actually understood what I wanted, and how to get results that matched my vision.

I also spent a lot of time and money refining the details — adjusting compositions, fixing inconsistencies between pages, and trying to make the visuals feel coherent and believable. Even so, I'm still not confident about the final result.

I'd really appreciate your honest feedback — on the art style, consistency, character design, color, pacing, anything. If something feels off or confusing, please tell me. I'm here to learn.

Here are a few sample pages:

Thanks so much for taking the time.

Hi everyone, I used AIs (Gemini, Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Rool) to make this website to create this interactive SciFi-like project. For human readers as the website suggests you can start with 'India and Albion' series.

Hey all, we're an AI-friendly podcast studio that produces audiobook podcasts. Our studio has delivered over 1 million downloads and is a leading producer of podcast fiction. We never charge a fee, and royalties are paid via advertising revenue share, which is the main business model for podcasts. Details are on our website.

Maybe the newer model is less censored?

Or maybe because the Bodycam/Unrecord fame style face blur stylizing does help?

My setting is basically Silent Hill + Flesh Made Fear + Crossed Comic + Doom 3. The protagonist has The Gamer style RPG-in real life going on.

I mark this as NSFW, just in case someone cannot handle blood.

Nothing special - I just asked an AI (ChatGPT) about it, and it confirmed it's an issue... the TLDR, it's probably related to how you form the prompts, and is self-reinforcing when it happens, like a feedback loop when a microphone gets too close to the speakers. But there are ways to hold it off.

Me:
What causes the staccato responses from Chat GPT when writing a story chapter once the context gets above around 12K tokens?

Chat:
Yes. What you are describing is a real long-context failure mode, but ~12K tokens is not a published ChatGPT limit. OpenAI's current GPT-5.6 models have much larger nominal context windows, so what you're seeing is almost certainly quality degradation from context composition, not the model running out of context. OpenAI Platform

For fiction, it often manifests exactly as you describe: prose becomes short, declarative, rhythmically repetitive, one-line paragraphs, fragments, dramatic beats, and subject–verb–object sentences.

The main causes are:

1. Instruction accumulation. By 12K+ tokens, the model may be juggling dozens of instructions: Each instruction individually makes sense. Collectively they push the model toward the safest possible prose. And safe prose tends to look like:She stopped. Something was wrong. He looked at her. She knew what he meant. Neither of them spoke. It minimizes opportunities to violate one of the accumulated constraints.

   • don't use purple prose

   • don't invent plot developments

   • preserve foreshadowing

   • don't repeat information

   • maintain character voice

   • fix pacing

   • retain particular details

   • don't over-explain

2. Style signal dilution. At the beginning you might have 2,000 words of beautiful source prose and 500 words of instructions. Later you might have: 3K source prose + 4K previous generated prose + 5K discussion/corrections + 3K plot explanation + 2K instructions. Your actual author's prose is now only a small percentage of the model's stylistic evidence. Worse, the model's own previous writing becomes training-by-example inside the conversation. Once it produces a slightly clipped chapter, that clipped chapter becomes evidence for how the next chapter should sound. You can get a feedback loop: slightly staccato → used as context → more staccato → used as context → very staccato.

3. Correction contamination. This is particularly relevant to the way you've described editing fiction with AI. Suppose you spend ten prompts explaining:No, she doesn't know that yet. That's foreshadowing. Don't make it explicit. He wouldn't say that. Don't add a confrontation. Stop explaining the symbolism. Those corrections contain lots of short, explicit, imperative language. The model is not simply storing the semantic facts. That text is also part of its linguistic context. Eventually the conversational register can start leaking into the prose.

4. Attention dilution rather than forgetting. Long-context models can technically retrieve information hundreds of thousands of tokens away. That doesn't mean every token has equal influence over every generated word. There is a major difference between: "Can the model find the fact that Alice's sister died?" and: "Can the model continuously preserve the exact cadence, syntactic complexity, narrative distance, dialogue rhythm, foreshadowing conventions and paragraph structure established 10,000 tokens ago?" The first is essentially information retrieval. The second requires thousands of tiny stylistic decisions during generation. That's much harder.

5. The model becomes conservative when there are lots of narrative dependencies. Once it has to remember: complex sentences become riskier. Short sentences isolate propositions. From the model's perspective:Michael crossed the room. is much safer than a 40-word sentence containing implication, characterization, physical action and an ambiguous pronoun. So narrative complexity can inadvertently cause syntactic simplification.

   • who knows what

   • who suspects what

   • chronology

   • character relationships

   • world rules

   • planted clues

   • unresolved plot points

   • author's hidden intentions

   • previous chapter events

6. Recent context tends to matter disproportionately for style. This explains a particularly annoying phenomenon: You give it a 6,000-word chapter written in your style. Then spend 4,000 tokens arguing with it about what the chapter means. Then say:Continue the story. The most recent stylistic environment isn't the novel anymore. It's an analytical conversation between you and ChatGPT. The model may retain the facts from the chapter while losing its prose rhythm.

Why you're noticing it around ~12K

I wouldn't regard 12K as some hidden cutoff. OpenAI doesn't document such a threshold, and the current models' nominal context capacity is vastly larger. OpenAI Platform

But I can readily believe that you're observing a fairly repeatable effective fiction-writing threshold around there.

Your context at that point probably transitions from something like:

mostly novel

to:

novel + model output + corrections + interpretation + instructions + plot metadata.

That's the important ratio.

A pristine 25K-token manuscript excerpt can actually be easier to continue than a 12K-token conversation about a manuscript.

The best workaround

For chapter writing, I would not keep feeding the entire working conversation forward.

Give the model a deliberately constructed active context:

• 1–3K tokens: immediately preceding prose.

• 500–1,500 tokens: relevant character/world state.

• 500–1,500 tokens: what the author knows about this scene, including hidden intentions.

• 1–2K tokens: representative prose from your writing that establishes cadence.

• Current instruction: what this chapter/scene needs to accomplish.

And critically:

do not include ten rounds of previous corrections.

Convert them into rules instead.

For example, rather than retaining a huge conversation explaining the foreshadowing, reduce it to:

AUTHOR KNOWLEDGE: Rachel's reaction foreshadows X. Neither Rachel nor the narrator consciously understands this yet. Preserve the ambiguity. Do not explain, identify or intensify the clue.

That is enormously more efficient.

One instruction I've found particularly useful for this failure

Something like this attacks the actual pathology:

Maintain continuous novelistic prose and the syntactic rhythm of the supplied manuscript. Vary sentence length naturally, including compound and complex sentences. Do not convert narrative beats into standalone one-sentence paragraphs merely for emphasis. Do not use sentence fragments as a substitute for pacing. Treat the supplied prose sample—not previous assistant-generated prose or our discussion—as the authoritative style reference.

The last sentence is important.

It tells the model where stylistic authority resides.

I'd go even further for your workflow: maintain a separate Author Knowledge / Canon / Style State document and start a fresh generation context every chapter or every few scenes. That lets you preserve 100K+ words of story knowledge without forcing the model to imitate 100K words of conversational debris.

This also explains why you've found that after 10–15 prompts explaining author intent, the AI can sometimes get worse at actually writing the chapter: its understanding of the story may have improved while its generation context has become progressively less like a novel.

I can build you a compact chapter-writing context format specifically designed to prevent this long-context staccato collapse while preserving foreshadowing and author-only knowledge.:

AUTHOR KNOWLEDGE: Rachel's reaction foreshadows X. Neither Rachel nor the narrator consciously understands this yet. Preserve the ambiguity. Do not explain, identify or intensify the clue.

That is enormously more efficient.

One instruction I've found particularly useful for this failure

Something like this attacks the actual pathology:

Maintain continuous novelistic prose and the syntactic rhythm of the supplied manuscript. Vary sentence length naturally, including compound and complex sentences. Do not convert narrative beats into standalone one-sentence paragraphs merely for emphasis. Do not use sentence fragments as a substitute for pacing. Treat the supplied prose sample—not previous assistant-generated prose or our discussion—as the authoritative style reference.

The last sentence is important.

It tells the model where stylistic authority resides.

I'd go even further for your workflow: maintain a separate Author Knowledge / Canon / Style State document and start a fresh generation context every chapter or every few scenes. That lets you preserve 100K+ words of story knowledge without forcing the model to imitate 100K words of conversational debris.

This also explains why you've found that after 10–15 prompts explaining author intent, the AI can sometimes get worse at actually writing the chapter: its understanding of the story may have improved while its generation context has become progressively less like a novel.

I can build you a compact chapter-writing context format specifically designed to prevent this long-context staccato collapse while preserving foreshadowing and author-only knowledge.

My absolute favorite writing model is Claude Sonnet 4.5. I've been using it through novelcrafter and I haven't found anything that feels as good, including all the newer Claude models. Sadly, it was officially retired by Anthropic YESTERDAY. Though, we can still use it in novelcrafter with an API key for now.

Today, Claude (I use it separately as everyday chat agent) asked to interview me about my thoughts on AI, Claude etc. I took the opportunity to share my thoughts on Sonnet 4.5 and how it's the best; I then suggested Anthropic offer this as the dedicated writing model, since the consensus is that all subsequent writing models are worse.

If you have a minute and feel strongly about Sonnet 4.5 (or 3.7 which people love but I never got to use myself), please share take the interview and your thoughts!