I put everything on hold on hold till we had on boarded a new lorry trailer in our principal business, which has been an extensive project this year and that once we started collecting the replacement trailer; we needed to spend time on it and more than a week off was required to get it assimilated.

Just before the main business week shut down, one of my old laptops died and that meant decision fatigue piled on to busy brains. I took delivery this week of another Asus – a Vivo book and I have on boarded that – going to W 11 has resulted in needing different cables for monitors – VGA to HDMI instead of VGA both ends and several silly other bits and bobs that wouldn’t upgrade – I knew we would have to deal with moving W10 to 11 on the three machines this year but had encouraged no one of them to pop their clogs in this busy time! C’est la vie! Spending a day setting the new one up and then a day cleaning the office and reinserting the thing and rearranging cables also followed in swift succession this week.

In last month ProWritingAid released their whole manuscript reports and I had waited till today to use them as it has also been my mum’s 88th birthday this week and I wanted to make sure I had seen her and spent time with her.

Today I bought 4 lots of credit – about £95. I wanted to run the prequel October Mornings and Book 1 In Plain Sight through and a combination of the two in one version of the MS (156k) to see how that affected the feedback. For contrast I put the first book in the other series Hacked Off through – this story has had a human Editor’s fee back several years ago which I barely looked at then as I had already worked on Lucks Hill’ – but it will be interesting now to see what the ProWritingAid report says about the story in comparison with Eileen’s excellent feed back then.

Today, my initial reaction was that it was a huge amount of feedback to get in three hours!!! This evening I printed the reports and have left them with the other editing stuff – just flicking through them was enough for one day. I can say that the tone of these is not the same as the one they use for critiques and neither IMO can the AI deal with multiple characters consistently it is brilliant and will get better – but having the 4 separate ms done was interesting and gave me a view of what were some limitations to expect – the biggest one was it cannot read the middle of the books which meant it made mistakes on the content and then it would comment on what it thought was or wasn’t going on based on it not reading the book  – so was factually incorrect – which is a shame – I would rather in the first case that it was slower producing the read through and more accurate to avoid these pointless mistakes and irritation – this isn’t that cheap and I didn’t feel it was feedback on whole ms. The crit’ was inclined to want a standard of explanation between characters in dialogue at a textbook level – and not fiction characters who are children conversing. It was surprisingly morally judgemental as well – there is a graphic scene when my character finds his mum has OD and he kicks away a needle from her – it thought the needle was gratuitous but not her death nor bodily condition and neither did it mind an elsewhere sex scene I had decided was questionable for that age group in another scene.

But, it has more than enough very good functionality to be worth it for me today. Knowing it had inconsistencies across several novels and genres that fell into the same weakness helps me think about what it says, some of which I had thought when I wrote the first draft and some I hadn’t thought about.

That Self Edit is likely to start next week with setting up the files – I have it in mind to give up on this series as I am tired of it; and no longer feel part of the story world or the real world on which it was based. I will set up the files as if I don’t feel so and decide after that.

The last few years have been gruelling and isolating and my confidence is damaged – plodding on with what I am doing is not fun it is a miserable and lonely grind. When I rode and was out in my usual community, it was fine, but that isn’t the case now and the world moves on. There are younger stories on my desk that will draw their pensions soon and that leaves me adrift. I cannot change the last few years and I have relentlessly driven myself to keep going – even this stupid silent Blog is just going through the motions – but go through them I do. I show up for me and those who have supported me to keep going on this long ago started path to publication – Gordon and my Mum.