I finally finished a first draft of my upcoming cosmic horror novel, The Last Delgado. 38 chapters and 132k words took me a little over six months writing 2-4 hours every single day. Although I had an outline already completed, I didn't start writing intensely until I came across Jason's channel on Youtube. I used AI heavily (you can see my tools used below) but also had to HEAVILY edit it. AI is only as good as the instructions you give it, and I had to keep it on a very short leash to achieve what I wanted. For those curious, my tool usage and process is listed below. Tools: Novelcrafter Claude 3.5 Sonnet via Openrouter Google docs Pro Writing Aid Process: 1) Build outline - this was done months prior to learning about AI tools. It will be interesting to see how I change my approach to outlining for my next novel. 2) Populate Novelcrafter Codex - since I had an outline already, and knew all the characters who would be in the story ahead of time, this wasn't too bad. I used AI to help me better flush out the character details and add subtle traits to make the characters have more depth. I also put in locations, lore and objects into the Codex as well. This definitely helped with consistency in the AI generated prose. 3) Write the scenes in Novelcrafter. This was basically a two step process. First I would quickly get prose generated by using Novelcrafter's chat function (scene beats really didn’t work well for me) telling what was supposed to happen in the next several hundred words. If this was the start of a new scene, I would include the previous scene in the context, explicitly telling the AI in the prompt that I wanted to create a new scene after the current one. Otherwise I would just include the current scene in the context. Then, once the full scene was generated, I would go line by line and edit the prose. This was where the majority of my time went. In some cases I would just edit the prose directly. However, I would ask the AI what it thought of the change, and this would often lead to a back and forth conversation which usually produced a hybrid result. I found it was very important to tell the AI why I was making the change, as this would often spark the AI to propose additional changes to achieve the result I was going for.

I do not know if this is allowed, but this might be a nice community to let each other know when we have published a book, so if any members are interested they can go an potentially read and leave a review. Perhaps we can have a channel for this purpose.

Hi Everyone! My name is Tripper (yes that is my real name lol) and I live in New Hampshire. After twenty five years as a Software Engineer, I took an early retirement and am now working on my first novel, The Last Delgado, a Lovecraftian, horror mystery (eta 3rd quarter 2025). I've been following Jason for about 9 months and have gotten loads of useful tips. Looking forward to interacting with you all! Tripper