Thank you for subscribing to updates for A Whim Away's next project, codenamed Project SS. In the past few weeks, I looked at some tools to help with my writing and my self-publishing business.
Blog: Anna Asks ChatGPT
My business mentor, Sara Berry from Marketing Sense, suggested that I start a blog to improve the SEO of my business website. So here is my new blog, Anna Asks ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chat platform that has been making waves in the writing world. It’s so good, that some writers are screaming that their jobs will be taken over by machines. So I decided to give it a try.
You need to register first. My first search was something about time travel. Then I broadened it out to dog training, self-publishing, and recipes. So far so good.
What impressed me the most was the language structures that have been very accurate so far, and understandable in its expression. A few fellow writers and I have cottoned on that this would make a good research tool for writing fiction, better than Google.
There are still limitations, however. Sometimes part of the information is inaccurate. With recipes, there’s a caveat that ChatGPT doesn’t know how things taste like, and that it only gets info from the web. The current version of ChatGPT allows you to report when this happens, so they must still be training the AI.
In my blog, I ask ChatGPT a question, and I respond to the response. Let’s see how far this blog goes.
Emotion Thesaurus
Speaking of AI, Amazon’s AI suggested a writing book to me in the middle of my cookbook purchases (which was kinda weird). But the suggestion turned out to be a good one. It’s called the Emotion Thesaurus, and it describes how someone acts when they’re feeling a certain emotion.
It’s good for authors like me, who are minimalist in their descriptions. This tool allows the implementation of that well-worn writer’s adage, ‘show don’t tell’. I would still have to figure out what the character is feeling, but this handbook allows me to see a summary of the behaviours associated with that feeling.
I won’t be showing all the time, though. I like to leave certain things as an exercise for the reader.
Get Off My Lawn! promotion
I’ve had some interest from a private K-12 school in the USA about Get Off My Lawn!. I will be speaking about my novella at their upcoming book club meeting, and they will promote it through their network. It came about because of a Facebook post that I responded to, looking for children’s books.
'Til next time!
Anna Ceguerra.
