Blythe & Gray: Monster Hunters of the Realm

Monsters don’t retire. Neither do the heroes who hunt them.

Blythe Wayne, former royal sorceress, and her husband Gray, a swordmaster with a lifetime of scars, once defended the kingdom from the horrors born of wartime experiments. Now they travel the realm on their own terms…until old magic and  hungry things in the dark pull them back into danger.

From cursed campsites to collapsing mountain tunnels, fog‑shrouded coasts to monster‑ridden ports, each story pits them against creatures that should never have existed. Armed with Blythe’s earth‑rooted magic and Gray’s unerring blade, the pair face down nightmares with the unshakeable bond forged between them.

Five tales of peril, magic, and seasoned heroes who know exactly what they’re capable of—and what they’re willing to risk for each other.

Available for preorder. Released June 3.

Direct: https://www.curios.com/c/02R511

Pick your bookseller: https://books2read.com/u/mew26R

Image by Nataliia Natykach / Licensed from Depositphotos (in my searches for covers, I stumbled across this wonderful picture and had to use it!)

In our busy world, sometimes it’s important to stop and reassess our processes, like epublishing. Things can work—or seem to work—and may actually be dysfunctional.

You see, I’m a one-writer shop. I do it all:

• Hunt down images for covers. I try to find one image that will be it without a lot of customization. Sometimes it’s try one image, pass on it, try another. Then download the license agreement(s).
• Build the cover. Previously I used Adobe Photoshop Elements. But after my computer failed, I couldn’t reinstall the existing program because it was too old. And even something that should have been simple—fonts—turned into a challenge. Fonts are also intellectual property and might need to be purchased as well, along with downloading the license agreement.
• Editing pass of the manuscript. AI is really handy here. ProWritingAid finds typos, but is aggravating for all the false audits.
• Build the ebook. This included the front matter, the back matter, the story itself. Decide on books I want to put in the “Also by” section, what goes in the biography, which might change, depending on the genre.
• Build a keyword list. This was always a bottleneck for me. I tried to navigate Publisher Rocket, but finding the keywords was time-consuming and littered with romance keywords. I’m not a romance writer, so mining through the ones that didn’t apply added more work.
• Build a blurb. Again, another bottleneck.
• Upload the ebook, blurb, and keywords. I did it on Draft to Digital, Amazon, Smashwords, and Kobo. Not one system matched in what they wanted. I always just published straight up, but because of all these different systems, it wasn’t always on the same day. In some cases, months or years apart.
• Publish it on my website.

My original process was cobbled together from pieces of information I got from other writers and writing conferences. Most of the writers added marketing, depending on their flavor. Social media, Amazon ads, interviews.

It all just seemed to assume that everyone was a full-time writer or had a staff.

The result was haphazard. I felt like the best way was to rush publication when I had time. Sometimes a story languished because the keywords were hard, the covers were hard (why Teddy Bear Man, the next one in the cycle, never got released), the blurbs were hard. I published some with typos in the blurbs because I rushed it, and I know I didn’t always take advantage of some opportunities because I was just trying to get it done.

AI turned out to be a handy tool for navigating how I thought about my publishing process and where I might change what I was doing. But even typing everything out, it was eye-opening how much time everything took. It’s like making a recipe; people don’t mention things that take a lot of time, like deciding on categories because none of the sites match.

There were questions, too. Ones I’d never asked.

• Why did some indie authors put blubs inside the book? Did I need one there? No, because it would take up some of the percentage of the sample. Most annoying to me is when you try to look at the sample and you don’t get anything of the story.
• Did your name on the cover need to be bigger than the title? Or should the title be bigger? Which did I need to do? This came from an influencer who said the covers needed to look like what you found in the bookstore from traditional publishers. Indie has turned everything sideways, so that is a “No.”
• How do I select the titles for the Also Written By section? I asked AI to analyze what would be best, and it recommended only 3-5 to avoid reader overwhelm (and as a reader, I have felt overwhelmed by long lists of these).
• If I release the story as a preorder, what are the benefits? What day of the week is best? Traditional publishing has a long chain of hands novels go through. They release on Tuesdays for consistency with the booksellers. AI recommended releasing Tuesday through Thursday, so I picked the first Wednesday of the month.
• What did I need for metadata? I wasn’t even sure myself. AI took the heavy lifting and generated a format for the metadata. This was the heavy lifting I needed; I always got paralyzed by trying to decide what I needed.

The biggest of all of this is that if I set it up as a preorder, I can take my time with different steps, fit it better into my schedule without affecting writing. I can create the template for the ePub, then recheck everything in a few days to make sure I didn’t goof something up. I can spend a little time working through the cover drafts until I get what I’m looking for.

I think in the rush of getting things done, sometimes it becomes getting it off the plate. Sometimes the only way forward is to stop and look at what we’re doing.

Before leaving…

Check out my short story available for pre-order March 4, 2026.

An Abundance of Wizards, short story preorder: https://www.curios.com/projects/0x83846740fa6a152df8ff1c2f61d646ee6be06e6a or https://books2read.com/u/mKnV1v

Sometimes you stumble into a genre, almost out of necessity. We’ve had so much rancor over politics. I’ve unfollowed writers who take more of an interest in snide lecturing about politics than writing, or everyday life. I’ve also struggled to find anthology calls. The majority of them seem to be on political topics, which I have zero interest writing. I don’t find them entertaining, and I can’t see anyone but activists reading the stories. Heck, a year from now, whatever trendy political thing it was will be the wayside and, if I did write something, it would be an instant retirement of the story.

Another trend has been dark stories. I can’t really do those, at least not to the level the editors want. When I returned back from Desert Storm, I was in a very dark place. It was just something six months of war did to me and I didn’t really understand. My writing was very dark–and I didn’t even freaking know it. Not until another writer pointed it out. Then I had to make a conscious effort to steer away. If I got an idea, I had to assess if it lent itself towards dark. Once I got away from the dark, I’m loathe to return to it.

Enter my accidental genre: Cozy Fantasy.

I’m planning on doing some “go with the flow” marketing that would help promote my Beckett Caine story. Amazon algorithms (who knew that would one day be an everyday word?) like a new release about once a month. That’s caused many writers to either write novellas–some quite superficial–and novels and release them each month. A novel’s a big thing to write once a month, especially with a day job. But I have many short stories, and I worked through the inventory, I discovered six were cozy fantasy.

Cozy is trending in 2026, in answer to all the things going on now. It’s about the people and the relationships, everyone generally gets along, and the stories are just fun. So my first story, An Abundance of Wizards is up from preorder with a March 4 release date:

• Curios: https://m.cur.io/projects/0x83846740fa6a152df8ff1c2f61d646ee6be06e6a (100% to me)

• Link to all kinds of booksellers: https://books2read.com/u/mKnV1v

On tap for the next few months:

Teddy Bear Man

A warm, magical tale about a couple, a haunted Victorian house, and the family ghosts who refuse to stay quiet.

Magic of Her Heart

A coastal fantasy about a seashell witch, her devoted husband, and the magic that binds a community together.

Scritches and Witches

A whimsical familiar‑POV adventure where two dogs and a cat must protect their witch from a dangerous rival.

One of the things that strikes me about organizing, even when applied to writing, is that it assumes a perfect world. You do all these things, then all the pieces will fit into place and work exactly as they’re supposed to.

Then…first contact with the world. Bam!

 When I was in the Army, my sergeants treated me as perpetually disorganized. I worked in an office on training schedules (a serious thing in the Army. Every day was planned out from 6:00 AM to the end of the day). My squad leader continually complained about my desk, which I never understood. His was much worse. I knew where everything was, and he did not. Besides, if I put everything away to look “neat” as I worked, how would I work?!

Especially since we also had a sergeant who was very orderly. Everything rule-straight and spaced on his desk. Always. And everyone said, “That’s because he never does anything.”

Instagram has made organization about how something looks. The perfect room (with cords carefully taped into position); the perfect planner (which is not being used for actual planning); the perfect smoothie bowl (which exists solely to be photographed).

Writing fiction has its own dysfunctional organizational aspects. Let’s take the story bible. The story bible originated in TV, where you can have multiple writers, so they need a common reference to ensure continuity. We all remember episodes where the character was given a background that was a one-off, ignored in later episodes.

For fiction writing, we get other writers advising that you need to know everything for your story (cue organizational guilt music). Unlike world building, story bibles come after you’ve written a scene, or even finished the book.

Whenever I’ve tried a story bible, I get lost on the question of “What should I save?” Which sounds stupid. The information is in the story. Why do I need to record it twice? Isn’t that more work?!

Adaptability, happily going with the flow, won’t even think to open the file. Forgets it exists.

My rules: The tools should never make more work. Just because tools are available doesn’t mean we should use them.

(Influencers are muttering because they want to sell tools.)

My solution is often just to put a placeholder in, then go find the information later. Usually right after I finish writing. I never let it sit.

I also have a sort of lexicon, which serves this purpose. Divide the page in half, write stuff in. It’s been my answer to the note-taking culture. I don’t need detailed notes; I need details. My kingdom for details.

These are some examples from my lexicon:

Convocation Members:

• Warden of the Potomac: Malachi Fletcher
• Chancellor of the Dominion: Celeste Ashford
• Magister of Secrets: Eli Keene

…because I could not remember any of the names or the titles.                                                                                     

Lake Barcroft Trees

• River Burch
• Pignut Hickory
• Black Gum
• White Oak

…because tree names really anchor the setting for readers in the know about an area.

The problem with organizing into big notebooks, spreadsheets with many tabs, or note-taking tools is that it deceptively feels productive. You get the binder, find colored tabs and Post-Its. Probably spend time drawing things, or as one writer infamously did, making the clothes the characters wore. Or, if it’s a spreadsheet, you spend a lot of time on formatting so it looks pretty.

While all this is going on, no writing is happening. All these methods of organization can become a simple procrastination method.

Creativity is about moving forward. That doesn’t necessarily mean “type the next word,” a common writing meme online. Might mean spending time thinking (if you’re high intellection).

But it also isn’t always tidy.  Organization systems always want maintenance and become a burden over time. Spend two hours wrestling with a stubborn scene, and you want a break—but that tool needs to be updated. Any system should serve the work and be invisible when you don’t need it.

The writing should always matter more.

Photo © Authoraveryanova  / Dog travel. Jack Russell Terrier is lying and playing in a suitcase

I’ve never been able to world-build the way the experts tell me. The first time I decided to write a fantasy novel, I read about how to do the world-building. The various books and websites on the topic advocated spending time before writing to create the world. A typical recommendation: buy a three-ring notebook and a pack of tabs, create sections for the different parts of the world, and answer lots of questions.

Heck, I have trouble getting pieces of paper into the rings. They usually just end up stuffed randomly in the binder. Spreadsheets, apps, same result.

The problem is that world-building in this manner forces me—like outlining—to know everything up front. Much of my discovery process results from the characters interacting with each other and their setting. And I don’t know that without writing the story.

I do cheat. As I write, I start the world from a place I already know. Cuts back on the amount and type of research. Instead of trying to research everything about Hawaii from tour books (which I have done on a past project)—a place I visited on vacation twice—I picked where I live. The heavy lifting was done with everyday personal knowledge, and I filled in with details that I researched.

The question—though I didn’t actually ask myself this—was what if Washington, DC and magic met? It just kind of worked out that way as the story developed. Everyone wants an itemized list of steps. Sometimes it doesn’t work that way.

DC is political ground zero. When I was getting out of the Army, I attended classes in preparation. The instructor told us that if we went anywhere else, we would be in “culture shock” over the lack of politics.

It is on extra strength, double steroids here.

Or, as one of my bosses said, everything is framed from the perspective of how it will look on the front page of the Washington Post. The Federal government could no longer book conferences in Las Vegas in the middle of summer when it was dirt cheap because of front-page scandals. My boss said that the rest of the country would immediately think, “Government employees are being paid to gamble!”—not attend a conference.

I’m finding it surprisingly fun to make up politics as part of my world (better than the real-world nonsense). It’s mages vs. Congress. How would Congress react to an official Convocation of mages in Virginia? They’d hold a committee and subpoena people! Of course, the media would have talking heads, including a group of mages to comment on magic with fancy titles from Georgetown University. I learned what a “senior fellow” is with that question.

There are also all kinds of weird and fun and sometimes downright bizarre things that I can pull from. Like when the DC government misspelled “Capitol” as “Capital.” Whoops. Or during a blizzard, they discovered they had no operational snowplows and needed volunteers with four-wheel drives for the hospitals. A driver who was ticketed for parking took a picture of conflicting signs (on top of each other) to show that he was legally parked according to one of the signs and not the other.

Though DC itself is a small diamond-shaped area with a weird wagon wheel inside and a horrifying number of one-way streets, Northern Virginia, Maryland, edges of West Virginia and Philly are all part of the commuting area. I thought it was interesting for magic when I discovered that the Potomac River outside the Alexandria Waterfront has all three state borders. Ah ha! Confluence! Or at least people can think it is.

And we mustn’t forget the traffic. We have a traffic culture here. Every weekday morning, the traffic pours into downtown DC. Many workers live as far as 50 miles away. Driving in rush hour from Virginia to Maryland can translate into 2 hours one way. We have a freeway interchange called the Mixing Bowl and many, many places that you have to be familiar with to get through them. One is the 7 Corners, which my father, who is from L.A., was horrified over. Another is a section of freeway that is the DC line before you cross over into Maryland. Every local knows exactly the section I’m talking about. DC told the Federal government, “Give us money and we’ll fix the sign.” Over ten years later, and the sign’s still wrong.

A writer friend also pointed out that the Convocation location should be one of those places everyone says is in DC, but actually isn’t in DC. We have three now: the Pentagon, Reagan Airport, and CIA Headquarters. All are in Virginia. The Pentagon does have a Washington, DC address, but it’s in Arlington. I decided to use Tyson’s Corner.

Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out where my main character lived. Everything in the area is well, ugly. Builders have put these big two-story monster houses to fill lots. No backyard, a scrimpy front yard, and you could open your window and ask your neighbor for a cup of sugar. No personality to the houses other than “I have a huge house, so I’m important” vibe.

But I remembered a place I’d driven through a few years back…just turned down the street to see what was there and found a lake with private beaches (darn). I thought that might be a good place, so I returned to it to investigate further. The houses were all different shapes and sizes. I was surprised to see ones with carports. You just don’t see those in this area. And no curbs, Yup. That was the place.

It’s an organic view of world building. I didn’t set out with a specific view of how the magic should work, or how it would be governed; I simply followed things that ignited my curiosity, or made me laugh at the absurdity—and added bureaucracy that comes with the area. Sometimes that’s all you need.

Photo © KostyaKlimenko. For this post, I tried creating an AI image from CoPilot. So awful. Real ones = much better. Gots to have floof.

Sometimes things are meant to happen. My computer started acting up…little things over time. Bang! BitLocker error. I was pretty sure it was toast, so—three days before Christmas, I was off to the office supply store and bought a new laptop.

The sales clerk hovered while I made my decision between two. I mentioned I had a BitLocker error. He launched into a spiel about how he’s fixed many BitLocker errors (probably $200+). I politely told him if I needed the help, I would come back. And if I thought it was fixable, I would have. Then he told me he could do the install (no doubt another $200), and I finally told him, “I work in the IT department.” I’ve always troubleshooted my own problems first. If I go to Plan B, it’s not an easy fix. New computer took 90 minutes to set up, old computer was indeed toast.

Sometimes you have to stop fixing and start with new. Like fixing writing process instead of taking the harder path of a new writing process. Here, it’s moving edits.              

What Moving Edits Are (and Aren’t)

Moving edits is my term because there is no official term. Some writers do it; some never do it. The first writer I saw talk about it was Wen Spencer; she referenced in an old blog post as smoothing out the sheets. If I read between the lines of Nora Roberts’ process, she does a version herself. Dean Wesley Smith called it “cycling,” though his version has very specific rules.

Online culture drives writers to follow “rules” of someone else’s process instead of finding your own. Which is challenging and can take years. Moving edits gets caught in the middle of that. Unlike plot or setting, there is no official definition. The result has been writers defining it themselves and demanding other writers follow the definition—even if it doesn’t work.

Whatever you call it, it’s a tool used to write a story in one draft. Instead of fixing major issues on revision, you fix them as your story evolves. Great for pantsers, and probably why it’s not discussed widely, or even has a name.

Where I Went Wrong

I started using it naturally almost as long as I’ve been writing. I’d go back and tweak something. I found it lent itself to procrastination, especially on my first attempt at a novel. When I got stuck—and there was a big sticking point—I moved back and “fixed” the story. I thought that would solve the sticking point, but it never did.

So I had to reel it in quite a bit, make some rules. You know, things like I couldn’t fix things “just because.” Unfortunately, it’s easy to tell yourself that you’re making progress on the story when all you’re doing is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I stopped doing it for a while because other writers called “Revising as you write.” I thought I shouldn’t be doing it, but it caused poor drafts that required massive revision because my thought processes are rather messy. So I returned to doing it.

Cycling became the popular kid for a while, probably because indie writing was about getting stories out fast, fast, fast. Now, indie is shifting from production to craft, so that may make cycling fall to the wayside eventually (my Futuristic is making predictions). But with cycling came “rules”; there was exactly one method that you were prescribed to follow. Reactions of other writers to my not following the “rules” kind of soured me on it.

So during the Author Nation conference session on updating your writing process, I wrote down one of the targets: Moving edits. I wanted to know whether I could eliminate it.

There were several problems with how I did it:

Fixing craft issues

I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve had a terrible time figuring out how to do story structure. There just isn’t anything for pantsers. Just some hand-wavy stuff and advice to outline.

The result is that I kept doing moving edits because I instinctively felt that the story was off, but I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

Fixing typos

I always used it to fix typos. I’m a typo-making machine. If I went back to Chapter 2 to add a line of foreshadowing, I went through the chapter for typos as well.

Too much time

The result of the above eats up time. It also can invite procrastination because it feels productive when it may not be.

Once I understood where the problems were, it allowed my Intellection to do some intellecting on the problem. This is the workflow I’ve evolved into doing…

My New Workflow

I’m ignoring the typos. I have several forms of AI that can track them down for me. No need to waste my time fixing them as I go along. This is hard because it’s such a habit, and people are stupid about typos. I’ve had people do drive-bys, jeering because they caught a writer making a typo. Never mind there are a whole lot of businesses that can’t figure out apostrophes…

The whole chapter is considered part of the creation. It doesn’t matter whether I’m typing the next sentence at the end of the chapter or typing it after the first few lines. So I write wherever my muse takes me (my muse is a Golden Retriever, by the way).

Like in my current chapter, I’ve been doing a month of opening the file first thing in the morning (rather than email or watching the news). I had finished the last chapter the previous day, so I had a new chapter to start. I typed the first sentence. Then I had to stop to think about the rest of the scene and consult with what should be in Chapter 4 in the Plot Module. Mostly there, I read the section, put it away, and do the writing. I need both a smidgeon of structure and to think for myself.

I returned to the chapter the next day or two (traffic has been so bad my brain’s been fried this week). Just had the character change clothes. Since I’m thinking where he needs to be, moved him to that location. But I didn’t do some setup needed because my brain sometimes jumps ahead to the thing that will be going on and skips other things that are important in connecting action / reaction in the story.

What I Thought vs. What Was Actually Wrong

So I bounce all over the chapter as I write. Once it feels settled, I hit AutoCrit for an AI analysis. AutoCrit started out as a grammar program and now has a developmental editor that’s very good. For me it doesn’t catch anything big; instead, it’s things that aren’t obvious to me:

• Magic rules, magic rules, magic rules. This is a continual flag every single time my main character uses magic. Usually a single sentence addition, but I’m having to shift my brain to think about what I need to add. Big learning process. I think that’s my Adaptability speaking. Just wants to go with the flow—wait, there are rules?!
• Missing pieces of information. This is also usually a single sentence to connect two parts together. Without the sentence, it looks like I goofed things up continuity-wise. Yet, I look at those sections and can’t see that.
• And setting. Of course. Mainly, it’s adding another sentence or two. AutoCrit flagged my opening and thought I needed to add more signs of animal life.
• Authorial exposition: I was surprised to see this one. It had to do with a scene where I was trying to hide a piece of information. I had to go back to it twice because I couldn’t keep any of the things in there without crossing into this territory. So I ended up calling attention to the thing I wanted to hide, then used a sleight of hand.

Cycling focuses primarily on adding more setting. My moving edits have been, in hindsight, more about trying to fix what I thought needed to be fixed. Looking at the above list, what I thought was a problem and what actually was were two different things!

Of course, when we rely on other people to tell us how to do things, we get their version of what they need, and may miss what we need. If we are to survive as creatives, we cannot rely on someone else’s “method.” Using someone else’s rules did me no favors, and I had to take a hard look at what worked for my brain so I could get back into the flow.

Corgi butts on dogs in doorway of home / Deposit Photos. I found this image by searching on “dog doorway.”

Especially after writing a short story a week for a year, I’ve concluded that the opening of any story—short or a novel—is the foundation supporting the entire work. The reader needs to be grounded into the story, not thrown into it like tossing someone into a swimming pool. Without that grounding, it’s easy for the reader to put down the book and not pick it up again.

Without the foundation, plot takes on too much of the load.

It’s an area of craft that is both discussed a lot and not discussed well. People describe it with step-by-step instructions, and it’s not a one size fits all. The result is quite confusing. Just look at this article from Bookbub. I was exhausted reading this.

I’ve always had trouble figuring out how to start a story. Much of the advice available says, “Begin with an outline” or assumes that without telling you. The advice also assumes none of it is coming naturally into your story.  

 So I asked a well-known pantser, “How do you tell where to start the story?” He merely pointed to the advice he’d already given: character + problem + setting. Others recommend: Read, read, read. But my brain fires up like a pinball machine. Sometimes it doesn’t go in the “proper order.” Sometimes I’m missing the slingshot to launch me to the next step. (Input alert: The Anatomy of a Pinball Machine).

Consequently, I still didn’t know exactly where I should start the story or what I might be missing or have too much of.

This has been my goal for the Beckett Cain Urban Fantasy. Using The Plot Module as a basis for my structure has been eye-opening, helped along because I read a book where I could see the formula in the opening.

Of course, I still started in the wrong place. But I kept looking at this other book and thinking about it, and I started in a different place. I had to ask myself questions like:

1. What’s going to show the main character’s occupation and be something easily resolved in the first chapter? (He’s a private investigator)
2. What’s going to show the main character’s magic and how it works? So, whatever crime-type thing in the first chapter also had something to do with magic. It’s urban fantasy, so that must be established immediately. But it also takes the heavy lifting off making story events at the same time.
3. Where was I going to set this scene? I already had the bigger setting—Washington, DC. Who does urban fantasy set in DC? No one!

Setting is the biggest influence of these and has been the most troublesome for me. It’s a challenging craft skill to learn because it’s connected to so many things. Yet, it’s always played down as not being that important. I ran across a traditionally published book that advocated not bothering with the setting at all!

What setting actually does

Establishes your genre

You don’t need to be writing speculative fiction for this to affect your story. If you’re writing a cozy mystery, you must show the reader the small town setting. Or if the story is a noir mystery, you must show the gritty underbelly of a big city like Las Vegas. A local writer offered a class on researching history in the DC area for fiction. Three books published. I read the samples. If I had not known from the blurb that they were set during a specific period, I would not have known they were historical. Setting is part of every genre, and every scene.

Uses foreshadowing

I took an Autocrit class on this topic and realized I should do a little more. Since the character is about to get into a tough situation, having an October storm spitting rain sounds like great foreshadowing. You don’t get this kind of use unless you think about the location, the time of year, and the weather. Piling on top of that, Dave Farland talks not just about having rain, but what it feels like.

Vehicle for character emotions

 We’ve all seen writers online trying to figure out how to show anger, usually by waving a fist. A character can slam a knife down on a cutting board in a kitchen. Or it can show up as how they describe something in the setting, like fiery red. But you kind of need to have the setting. There’s a series I’m still reading, set in a secondary world of Ancient Egypt in modern times. The author clearly is an expert on Ancient Egypt and yet doesn’t have enough of the world to make the character emotions ring.

Grounding setting in time and place

C.S Lankin’s blog talks about being more deliberate with the setting. Pretty much, it can become a generic detail all too easily, especially if little thought is given to it. I read—and stopped reading—another book where the character entered a cafeteria-style restaurant. Someone must have told her she needed to describe the location, so she added details like four top tables and a tray conveyor belt.

Boring! It’s not like we can’t steal details from other places we’ve been. Add a fountain. Or pull in your world and what your character is doing. Think about what time of the year it is—very few books do this. Think about the weather. It’s 30 in DC with windchill that puts us at 20. We had a meeting at work, and everyone talked about how cold it was in their areas. How would the cold impact magic? Since we’re now headed into Christmas, how does the upcoming holiday impact the story? I always laugh at NCIS when they talk about getting from the Washington Navy Yard to Quantico in 30 minutes. It’s 37 miles. Add the ugly Christmas shopping traffic…

Perhaps we think too much that the opening is setting up the plot (story events), not about setting up the things that lead to the plot: the character, his job (because that’s usually a part of the story), the place where he lives, and the world itself.

The opening isn’t the start of the plot; it’s an entrance into the story itself and lets the reader step inside.

One of my biggest challenges in writing is setting, and as part of that, world building. In my early stories, I barely mentioned setting at all. I remember reading Donald Maass’ book that discussed “telling details”–believe it was his workbook—and thought I could never do that. I didn’t even understand how to get there.

I took an online writing class on how to do it. Very eye opening. I started seeing improvements right away. However, the writer/influencer lectured me that I should let my subconscious naturally add those details in. I knew that if I followed that advice, I’d still have no setting in my stories (conspiratorial whisper: I did not tell the instructor I hit setting with a battering ram.).

Been eleven years, and that has not changed. I’ve gotten better at getting it into the story, but I sometimes have to research elements before I write, then add them after I’ve finished writing them. Even when I have them in advance, they still don’t jump into the story. Five senses? I’m always leaving them out.

Enter AI.

It rightfully gets a bad rap from writers. When it was originally populated with data, the programmers grabbed everything without asking. But then, businesses have been doing that since the internet started. I read in a business book that the goal of businesses is to get 100% of all data.

Data is information. Data is money. That’s the reality.

I steered clear of it for a long time because of all the initial bad press. But after I heard Jason Alexander speak about AI at Superstars, it made me think, and I started playing with it.

The first thing to remember about AI is that it’s programmed to be helpful. It will always give you an answer, even if it’s a wrong answer. It’s also only as good as the information that is available.

For example…

I was wrestling with meal planning. Thanks to my combination of strengths, it’s skill that’s another planet away. So, I asked AI to generate a meal plan with about 130 grams of protein a day. Told AI this was two servings.

AI generated a list of meals for me, and the numbers were way off. It stated that it had fit everything to the macros. But the plan included an eight-ounce serving of protein per meal. There’s little information online for solo plans, so AI took four servings and made it fit.

Don’t trust “factual” information and double-check everything.

Second, not everything is available online. I just put down a book because the author believed everything could be found online. Her characters handily jumped online and dug out research on family lines from the 1700s in about five minutes. I’ve done genealogy. While there are sites with records uploaded, we’re still limited by what people recorded. The information is sometimes wrong, hard to read, misspelled, or nonexistent. We have a relative who did not exist before he got married. We think he might have changed his name (rumor after his mother booted him out of the house), but we don’t know if that’s true or if it is, what the name is.

AI can help you with getting through some of the information, but it does not replace the writer knowing how the information works.

Where AI shines, though, is helping you with brainstorming. Like with setting.

Alrighty…

I’m a big-picture thinker and visual-spatial. You’d think that the visual-spatial part means that I would put too much description in my stories. Instead, the combination of those two elements makes it challenging for me to break description into “telling details.”

I’ll take a walk on Theodore Roosevelt Island (making the effort to be specific!). Dirt walking paths, lots of trees. Someone else would identify the various trees as oaks, maples, sycamores. Me? I look at the trees, and I see…trees.

Referring to a master list I made for a short story, someone else would see the mountain laurel, witch hazel, and poison ivy as the understory. Me? A lot of plants growing on the ground.

Every one of us has something different that doesn’t quite work the same as everyone else. Peggy mentioned she needed a floor plan of a house to visualize an interior setting.

I usually need some kind of map, which I hand-draw:

I also often need to see the place. But AI turned out to be a useful tool.

My main character Beckett Cain has a mentor that he meets with. Where did this guy live? Decisions, decisions. The story is urban fantasy, set in Washington, DC. I picked a place I’d found by wandering, Lake Barcroft. Maybe Beckett could live there, too. If I’m going to write fiction, I might as well pick a place that I would enjoy.

I drove out there to have a look. Lake Barcroft is a private lake for residents of the area only. The houses were built around it. What surprised me was that it didn’t look like the other housing areas in DC. Nearly everything is now dominated by a combination of big box, ugly houses and those gigantic apartment complexes with grocery stores. Everything is very sanitized.

These houses were all different. Some big box houses that were clearly added later, but a lot more houses that I thought might be post-World War II. One-story houses with carports—you don’t see many carports here anymore. Everyone’s got two-car garages and a driveway with a third car in it.

Wandered back to ask Copilot:

Beckett lives at Lake Barcroft, Falls Church, VA. What kinds of older house types would there be? I’m looking at a [one] story house, not remodeled. Maybe a carport.

It responded with a list of the types of houses there (mid‑century single‑story ramblers, split‑levels, and brick ranches from the 1950s–1960s). That gave me a detail of terminology that I didn’t have in my brain. I saw houses. I saw houses with garages. I saw houses with carports.

AI, being ever helpful, spit out a suggestion for Beckett’s house (a rambler because I wanted a one-story house). Then it asked if it could give me a floor plan. The floor plan was in text, which was helpful for me.

Then, as I’m writing a scene set there, in October at dusk, I was having trouble with the five senses. Curse those five senses!

AI prompt:

Beckett and Ray are standing outside on a two-lane street in Lake Barcroft, near the lake. The sun has set. Ray has his Golden Retriever Princess with him. But I’m having trouble with the five senses for the scene. Suggestions for what I might use?

The AI is pulling from my saved history, so it knows this is early October (though I’m surprised I didn’t include that in the prompt).  It provided 3-5 things for each sense, including the sound of crickets chirping. Gibbs head smack. I know that. I like listening to the crickets with a bit of sadness because summer is ending. As I was writing, it never occurred to me to use crickets. Nor did it occur to me on a moving edit pass.

Sometimes, we all need a little help. AI doesn’t replace me as a writer. It helps nudge me towards details I would completely miss and continue to learn about fiction writing.

I’ve always written, as long as I can remember (though technically, I started when I was eight). Along the way, I’ve had transitions where I had to unlearn all the things I had previously learned. Sometimes the lessons were painful. My process has to fit me today, not the me of ten years ago, or even last year.

The Writing Challenge

The most recent has been over the last three or four years. In 2021-22, I signed up for a challenge to write a story a week for a year. The prize was a lifetime subscription to online writing classes. Lots of learning!

I eagerly jumped in and wrote about 25 stories. I tried genres I’d never written before, like cozy mystery and sword and sorcery. Had fun writing the stories.

At the halfway point, it became a slog. Instead of the story, I focused on minimum word count (2K) just to get the next story done. The challenge became about checking the box on making word count, not about enjoying the idea, the characters, and the story.

The Cost of the Slog

I didn’t realize it, but I’d broken my writing with the second half of the stories. Nor was it helpful that about two months after I finished the challenge, the writer sponsoring it discontinued the workshops.

Disappointing, to say the least.

So I’ve struggled with writing. I wrote stories for two anthology calls and struggled to get to 2K. That’s also affected novels as well where I kept getting stuck.

After one where the story never worked right, I realized the problem might have been caused by the writing challenge. What could I do to fix it?

Sparks from Author Nation

Enter the Author Nation conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. I like in-person conferences because not only do you hear from disparate writers, but I also start getting ideas for things I can do. Sometimes they’re story ideas, and sometimes they’re other types of ideas.

Two things popped up:

1. Business edits. This was from Becca Syme. She said that we should review things in our business and take something off our plate. It might be a social media channel we’ve abandoned but still have, or a project that we never finished. This idea paired well with Cal Newport’s discussion about “administrative overhead.” We can get too much going on. Even if we’re not doing it anymore, having it hang around sticks in the back of our heads.

2. Reviewing your writing. From T. D. Donnelly. I went to two of his sessions and thoroughly enjoyed them. He made me think more than any other session. He commented that writers often stick with the first way they learned how to do something and never change. Maybe. But we all change over time, and maybe the process needs to change with us.

Business Edit

The first thing I thought of was deleting all the workshop materials from the writer I took the challenge from.

That made me twinge a little. I had invested time in these courses and the folders included my notes. However, it became apparent that I needed to unlearn what I’d learned because it was no longer helping me. Shedding the files was an important step in that direction.

Clearing business issues is only half the problem. I still have to tackle the writing process.

Process Change

This is an area that became thorny over the last few years. The writing community has tended silo around writer/influencers. Outliner writers and discovery writers have prescribed methods they insist are required to write.

It’s not good. It makes writers feel like they’re doing things wrong when they’re only doing things that work better for them. I’ve been influenced by both ends of that. I’ve had to reassess my writing process and exorcise outlining techniques that had gotten in, since I can’t outline at all. Never has worked for me, but everyone assumes that everyone outlines. Now I must do it for the discovery writing as well. Ugh.

So that started me looking at my process from a different perspective. What did I need? What didn’t I need to do anymore?

On the plate:

My Clifton Strengths include 1, Intellection 2, Ideation, 3 Input, 4 Adaptability, and 5 Futuristic. Intellection means I need to do a lot of thinking about the story. Previously—and this showed up during the challenge–I had to keep writing the opening of the story over and over. It was a thinking process to help me get into the story. Very time consuming. Thinking takes the time it takes, even if can’t be tracked with word count.

There were also areas that I have consistently had problems with. I like writing speculative fiction, but I have trouble with the world building when I do Discovery Writing. I get stuck a lot trying to come up with basic setting details, and world building is setting on steroids. Even when I’ve thought about the details in advance, or written them elsewhere in the story. I still manage to leave them out. It’s just something that’s me.

Pretty much, I thumbed my nose at everything.

If someone said I needed to do X, I would do A.  So I started asking what I could do differently and came up with the following:

• Spend time thinking about each scene before I wrote it. I’ve struggled with structure long term. Outliners explain structure by describing outlining. Discovery writers explain structure with beats, which to me, is another form of outlining. So I’ve been experimenting on a current project with The Plot Module by Jason Alexander. For a Discovery Writer, Jason’s Plot Module can be done by looking at the requirements for the next scene, and in my case, thinking about them, before writing.
  
• Use AI to help me with setting and brainstorming world building. This is pretty fun to do. For the setting, I asked AI something like, “The story is set in XYZ. What are five common trees? What’s something unique about each one? What do they smell like? What color do the leaves turn in fall?” I also found this part of research very frustrating because it was hard to narrow down the amount of information.
  
  World building starts with my rambling about my thinking. Then AI gives me suggestions. I do more thinking, working out what I need. And sometimes, directions I want to avoid. There always has to be agency from the writer.
  
• Using placeholders. I didn’t want to spend time in the initial chapter coming up with a name of an organization, so placeholder. When I was doing death by writing, I couldn’t remember the name of the main character’s dog. Placeholder. I hadn’t developed a character enough to decide on a reaction. Placeholder. I needed to research a piece of information. Placeholder. I’ve been assured by other writers that placeholders are very bad, so I’m being bad.
  
• Reviewing if I need to do moving edits or can limit them. Moving edits going back to a different chapter to make a change caused by a later chapter. This is called cycling in other writing circles, but moving edits is my term because I’ve done it long before I heard about cycling. Moving edits are surprisingly time consuming. If you’re driving 400 miles, technically it takes eight hours. Then you stop at the rest area. That’s fifteen minutes. Stop at the gas station. Another fifteen minutes. Eating. An hour. Those forays back to add something to chapter 2 cost time. Might still be necessary, but the typo fixing will go because that can wait. I’ve purchased a tool to offload that to AI, since I really hate hunting for typos.

These are not about finding the “right” method and never changing. These are about finding what works for me, right now.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that no single process fits every writer.  Nor does it fit them forever. The best thing we can do is question everything, keep what works, and let go of the rest. That’s how we keep writing alive—and keep ourselves writing.

My next step is simple: keep looking for business and process changes. Delete what doesn’t serve me. Writing is a long game, and I’m playing it on my own terms.

I’ve struggled with writer’s block over the years, but this has been different. It’s the sheer volume of noise. Not the physical noise, but the noise from anger and fear.

Creativity thrives in safety, but how do you find safety when everything around you feels like a rope bridge on a windy day?

Over the past year, I’ve had to learn how to write despite the chaos, not wait for it to pass. I’ve had to redefine definitions of productivity and rethink my writing process. I’ve also had to discover how to nurture my creativity when it feels impossible. This cannot be about forcing words onto the page—it’s about survival as a creator.

I hate the discussion on writer’s block because it’s often presented as “your fault.” You let the inner critic dictate to you. You should be able to come up with ideas. You should be able to type the first word and everything flows out.

No one teaches you how to be creative in a chaotic environment like this. No one teaches you how to coax your creativity to bloom like rose-pink primrose. In some situations like a big life event, you must stop until the situation passes; in others, it’s not changing soon, so you adapt.

So I’ve been learning as I go along.

Managing External Chaos

A lot of chaos comes from external sources. Activists are noisy and aggressive on social media. They live and breathe screaming, “The sky is falling” every minute they can. Unfollow them. You can tell who they are because this is all they talk about, and they also insult the other side. There is absolutely no sense in having all this toxicity right in your face. Better to look at cute Jack Russell terrier pictures (and once you do, the algorithm gives you more. Win-win.).

Adapting to Chaos without losing yourself

There’s a temptation to want to plow ahead and ignore the problems. I’ve been guilty of this, adapting to the problem, then the next problem and then next. Suddenly everything stops working. You must step back, thinking through what your options are, and try them out. This is also likely to be dynamic because the outside world keeps shifting, along with your reactions.

Reimagine Productivity

The writing community has a history of encouraging extreme productivity levels. Writers discuss production goals or streaks to keep the pace, some using dictation to produce even more. We tracked and measured. But we’re not computers cycling to another algorithm. Creativity needs to be treated gently, like yellow Black-Eyed Susan flowers growing, not like a machine that runs non-stop.

This one’s been the hardest for me because of the culture in writing. I cringed every time I caught sight of the word count tracker (placed by the tool so I would always see it), advertising my lack of progress. There’s been some push back with “slow productivity” discussions, but that’s often framed as if writing fast means the book is garbage. Sorry, but you can’t insult people to prove your point.

Reframing Writing Goals

Pairing with the productivity culture, writers also are encouraged to have word count goals or finishing a book within a specified time frame, such as a novel every six weeks. I was always terrible with word count goals; they seemed more of a way to make you feel guilty for not getting enough done. But I had to rethink the actual project I was working on. Did I need to work on a novel now? A novel is a big project. Even if I broke it down into scenes or chapters, it’s still a big project. So I decided to work on short stories for now.

This might not be an easy decision. A little voice in the back of my mind nags, saying, “But you’re not finishing the novel.” That’s the productivity writing culture talking. Sometimes the muse needs an entirely different direction. Soil needs crop rotation to stay healthy. Why not the muse?

Use Creativity Shortcuts

This pairs with writing short stories. Use the shortcut so you’re not starting from scratch. Essentially, you’re letting something else do the heavy lifting in one place for your muse.

• Look for anthology calls on specific topics. The anthology is giving you a starting place for your muse to work with.
• Use an existing series and characters for the story. Since you’re doing this, you’re not inventing a character from scratch. Nor are you having to hunt down names, which is always a pain to do.
• Use an existing world for the setting. If you’re writing a story with a urban setting, use the place you live.

Add Thinking Time

This is another idea that gets lost in the productivity culture. Productivity is about producing the next word, because that can be measured. Thinking can’t. Thinking is every bit as valuable a tool as the keyboard. It gives your muse time to water and feed the ideas.

Now the controversial one…

Use Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Writers demonize AI. But it’s a tool that’s not going away. It’s up to you how you use it. Yes, some people feed it an idea and some details and generate a complete story. But that’s not the only use.

You can use it to come up with ideas.

Non-writers think of writing as 1) Come up with a fantastic idea 2) Somehow that turns into a bestselling story. Whereas that first idea gets the story started, and then your muse has many, many more during the writing. That fun rabbit trail? An idea. That new direction for the character? An idea. A backstory for the antagonist? An idea.

AI helps with that. Not create the ideas for you, but be a partner in the writing. AI can help you brainstorm the ideas, but you are the one who decides what idea to use, what parts not use, and what direction to take it. You may even look at what AI gives you and decide, “Naw,” and then your muse pops up with one because AI gave it a nudge.

I started using an AI fiction tool after I attended an AI presentation at a writing conference. The results you get depend on what you put into it. If you plug in a general idea like “Generate a story about a murder in a restaurant. Main character female, a restaurant owner”–you’ll get generic results. If you plug in your series character name and background, genre, add the world building setting, and the subject prompt from the call, the results are much more interesting.

I did this with a science fiction story I wrote, specifying also that it could be on a planet or a space station. The ideas I received were all stellar enough for a novel. I still spent several weeks thinking about what I wanted to use and how. I didn’t use the exact idea; the AI simply gave me a starting point, and a helpful hand–one of the anthology requirement topics was not a strong point for me.

After that, I used it throughout the writing process. My primary use was every time I got stuck. Sometimes I got stuck with the five senses. Though I was told this skill would improve in time, I get stuck a lot here. Most of the time, I just needed the suggestions to jar me out of it. But I was also surprised at how often I got stuck–about every 200 words. Can you imagine trying to write in a chaotic environment when you frequently get stuck?

The story still took a lot of time to write. A writer said it took them a month to write a short story and another saying, “What took you so long?” I started this story in February and finished it in April. As I got into April, I was concerned about meeting the anthology deadline. I had to remind myself that missing didn’t matter; there were other places I could send it. I did finish it in time and am working on two more with the expectation I might not finish those in time.

Dealing with chaos and creativity is very much of a learning process. It isn’t about mastering the perfect system—it’s about learning what works for you and to keep evolving your process. Your stories may take longer to write and the muse may need extra nurturing. But writing, like survival, is about persistence. It’s about finding ways to move forward, even when the world feels mired in mud.