The Sun also rises (so far, 235 pages)…

by Buzz Anderson

As some of you know, I am currently writing a sequel to my historical novel, Five Hundred Moons. The title of my new book is Ten Thousand Suns (the number of moons and suns corresponding to the timeframe for each respective novel). So far, I’ve written 235 pages.

It took me three years to write Five Hundred Moons, which is 800 pages long. At my current rate (a little less than a page a day), I’ll be writing Ten Thousand Suns for at least another year and a half. Then it goes to my wonderful editor, who lives in Austin, Texas.

I either write or do research for two-plus hours every morning. I treat this time like a part-time job. My three main concerns are: following the historic timeline, creating characters and developing an entertaining plotline, and being consistent with my voice and writing style. On my confident days, the novel practically writes itself. Other days, it’s difficult, and a lot of self-doubt creeps in. Generally, it’s something in between where I slog through with a modicum of success.

People ask me if I use AI

When I wrote Five Hundred Moons, I did not.

Now I use AI to help with some research. I can prompt a question about a particular event, person, or detail of the era and have a serviceable answer in seconds. I don’t use AI for writing content or sentence structure, or for editing or grammar fixes. I find AI paragraphs to be a bit sophomoric—sometimes too flowery—and lacking in real creativity.

I did, however, play around with AI to see what it could come up with regarding a book cover. I fed it some words and images I wanted, and the results were better than I anticipated. You can see an example here.

I realize AI is here to stay. It is an unbelievably powerful tool that can encompass many facets of our lives. I do, though, cringe when I see it taking the place of due diligence and the exercise of thinking for oneself. At a recent Rotary Club meeting, we were treated to some short speeches from academic scholarship winners. It was easy to tell which ones were written by AI—they were canned platitudes that sounded good and checked all the boxes, but they paled in comparison to the ones that were self-written and came from the heart.

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