Writing Fiction – OmegaBooks

Instead of writing another Snippet-to-Spin-Off post about bad events leading to desired outcomes, this thought just popped into my mind after reading posts about writers or publishers re-working novels or non-fiction using the Artificial Intelligence AI app known as “ChatGPT” (regardless of version…I heard ChatGPT 4.0 was the latest) to rewrite the novels. If indeed this kind of activity is actually true. One thing I’ve come to realize in some online posts, is that some of it is just click-bait and some of it is only partially true. I know for a fact that folks use ChatGPT to create research or college term papers (but not myself…I don’t need AI if you know what I mean! I’m too “old school,” right?) Why pay someone who can actually write and spell correctly and do proper research to write your term paper when you can just download an app and get the app to do it? (Note: a local college student actually paid me to write a term paper back in the late 90s about animal husbandry…which I know little about, but the data online helped me out a bit…) And while this could be construed as “cheating,” it makes sense to some extent—if you can trust AI, that is. But there has been some criticism of ChatGPT, such as ‘it was created by leftist wokesters’ or ‘it isn’t equity-oriented enough’ or ‘it just writes what some tech oligarch tells it to’ or whatever, because if it’s just Big Tech then it’s nonsense, right? I know, I know…it’ll create the actual “Terminator”! Imagine…Arnold Schwarzenegger inventing ChatGPT! Or using it somehow…or maybe Sarah Conner… Bwahahahahahah! (Note: I’m joking, okay?)

But suppose I actually imagined downloading ChatGPT in order for it to actually write another Prodigal Band Trilogy spin-off novel (as is The Murder Rule I am in the process of completing, hopefully by this summer). First of all, could ChatGPT actually write a spin-off unless it actually read any of the trilogy books? Hmmm. Can this app read books by itself? Well, I wonder if it could come to this website and read all the snippet posts; then, maybe, it could accomplish that task. But ChatGPT still might have a problem considering all the spiritual aspects of this trilogy, whether good or evil—can AI actually recognize these spiritual aspects? Does ChatGPT actually think God, or Christ, or the Holy Spirit, or Satan/Corion/Lucifer, or demons, or spirit beings such as Morwenna/witch of the Hovels…does ChatGPT actually think (if it does actually “think”!) these entities actually exist? Or, since The Prodigal Band Trilogy is fiction, would ChatGPT think these entities are just fiction? (Considering many humans think these entities are actually fiction….Hmmmm….)

But here is what came into my head within the past 24 hours, roughly, starting with the fictional notion of ChatGPT writing me a message on MS Word all of a sudden. Remember—this is just a fictional event I imagined.

Continue reading “Imagine This: Would I Let ChatGPT Write Another Spin-Off Novel? Hmmmmmmm…..”

At the end of Part Two, I said that an actual spiritual incident I witnessed, which caused me to commit to Christ as Lord and Savior, inspired me to figure out a way to complete the ‘prodigal band’ story (using the Parable of the Prodigal Son as a guide) so as to create a novel trilogy that could spread ‘the message’ of redemption and salvation that anyone could accept freely, of their own free will. This incident certainly helped me to write The Prophesied Band, which ends with the prodigal band Sound Unltd being given ‘mission of God’ by the spiritual forces of Good. But would the prodigal band, having no idea about how to complete these missions, as well as being either atheist or agnostic toward Christianity and religion in general, be able to truly accept the missions and complete them?

In 1998, The Prophesied Band was published and printed (by a different outfit from the one that printed Battle of the Band), but this time I had far fewer copies printed—a wise decision! During that summer I sold roughly one-third of the number of printed copies at local festivals and writer conferences and made enough money to actually cover the cost of printing. By the following summer, I had sold about half of the book copies, and more than half by the fall of 2000. By then I had another Mac desktop and Corel WordPerfect software knowing that likely the next desktop computer would be using a Windows operating system (for one thing, a new Mac computer is almost double the cost of a Windows computer, and hubby and my kids wanted me to get one with Windows, likely with Windows 98).

Continue reading “How I Wrote The Prodigal Band Trilogy, Part Three”