I Hate Editing So I Tried AI

I really do hate editing my own stuff. Your stuff? Awesome! Hand it over, let me take a look! Mine? UGH!

It’s like being in prison. I don’t know about you but for me when I’m doing the spell/grammar/edit thing I will, quite literally, sit right here doing it until I am squirming in my seat and then jumping around in it. I swear, it’s almost as though there’s an invisible pair of hands on my shoulders forcing me to stay seated and keep going until, well, until the urge to pee can no longer be ignored. And standing up becomes a risky endeavor.

I just want to get through it! I just want it to be OVER WITH!

Really, I didn’t want to go into this edit with that attitude. I knew there wasn’t anything catastrophically wrong with the book. Of course there isn’t. BUT, I am going to all of this trouble with the “rebrand”…and it’s been a lot of work!…so, might as well go the extra mile and make sure all the books are as nice-nice as I can possibly get them before combining them into that boxset and uploading to Kindle in the very near future.

So, I thought I’d let ChatGPT take a shot at editing “The Heart of War”. What the hell? I’m not risking anything here, it has already read the book…not that it remembers. I asked ChatGPT if it could accomplish this task and it assured me it could:

Do a spell/grammar check
Do a light edit
Check for continuity issues….(oh, yes, please!)
Use the mark-up panel for comments/suggestions
Produce an over all editor’s opinion of the book

WOW!

No one has ever done that for me before! Wait, yes, I have lovely beta readers and I don’t know where I would be without them but we’re talking about an actual professional edit here. Why wouldn’t I go for that?

I told to go ahead and do its thing.

The first day, I waited 5 hours for it to finish. It never did. It kept saying it was “in the finishing stages” and stuff like “we’re down to minutes not hours!”

BUT……

Nada.

I got a little pissed, I admit it. I did. But that’s because I wanted to SEE it so badly. I still do but that ain’t gonna happen. I told ChatGPT that this was a bad experience and I was unhappy with it. It actually apologized to me. Said it was all its fault and it had not communicated properly with me. It said it was trying to do all of this stuff and was not making it but if I wanted to wait 60 to 90 more minutes it would be done. At that time, I did not want to wait. I shut it down. I walked away angry.

At the END of the first day, a little bit before I went upstairs to relax for the night, I asked it to do it again. I asked it how long it thought it would take. It said it would do the job within 3 hours.

Fine.

I told it to go ahead and then, again, I walked away. I went upstairs. I did not come back down until morning. I was expecting to see a fully edited file that I could download and go over.

It was still working on the file.

12 hours.

I thought; Fuck, I can do it faster than that! I really don’t fucking want to but…I CAN.

Hubby went to work. I sat down with GPT, (I really have to give it a name, I have to call it something else.) I asked it how much longer and it ‘thought’ for several minutes before admitting it couldn’t do the job it promised.

Well, thank you very much for that, I appreciate it. Face it, it’s more than you get out of a lot of people.

I asked it if it thought we could do this one chapter at a time? By this time I really just wanted to SEE ONE fully edited chapter. GPT said oh yes! Great idea!

I went; yeah, right.

I uploaded just the first chapter….the second time I asked it to do this task because it took quite a long time for it to ‘extract’ the chapter from the file. Yes, I ditched the first effort and started over. When I uploaded the first chapter I asked GPT how long it thought the process would take.

15 to 20 minutes. Said GPT.

Uh-huh, said I.

I told it to do its thing.

90 minutes later it told me the file was done and ready for download.

I was a little excited. I was finally going to get to at least SEE it. I downloaded the file. I opened the file.

There was page 1.

And nothing more.

Oh, wait, no, at the end of Page 1 there were a few Editor’s Notes for the whole chapter.

I complained to my buddy, GPT, Hey! This is just page 1!

Oh, yes, you’re right, I see that, said GPT. Sorry.

90 minutes for one page? WTF? Oh and you’re sorry. Ok. That’s great.

I asked it….I’ve learned to do this and if you try this you really should do it too! I asked it; What are the last words you see in this file?

I can’t remember what it reported back now but I opened Word, then “Heart”, then typed whatever GPT said into the search.

The last words in Chapter One that it could see….were on Page 3 of an 11 page chapter.

I told it to go back to the main file for “Heart” and tell me the last words in the file that it could see.

They were on page 127 of a 255 page book (that’s ebook pages).

I could tell it to read the file again, I’ve done that before with a different book, if I did that, it would find more of the book. I’d have to tell it two or three times but eventually it would find The End. Then I could sit here for two or three more days waiting for it to produce the professionally edited file.

IF it ever actually got there.

Oh bother.

Ok, well, it looks like there are some things my buddy isn’t ready for just yet. Some things that still need that Human Touch. In this case, my touch. I was so mad! Geez.

A day later, grumbling and mumbling and cursing to myself, I opened “Heart” again. I opened the Editor and found a score of 92%. That ain’t bad. Mostly because the majority of it is just the way I wrote the story, not particularly “grammatically correct” or “concise” enough for the machine but you know what I’m saying when you read it. Just, you know, Artistic Differences. Most of the spelling errors in this file are because the words are in Greek or Gaelic. Word knows that’s not English so it must be spelled wrong.

In five hours I, alone, just me, was 3/4 of the way through the file. The overwhelming majority of ALL of this is commas. My under or over use of friggin’ commas. Do you know how tedious that gets in the editing stage? Oh! And three letter words. They are the bane of my existence. They’re either wrong or in the wrong place or repeated…in the wrong place. Always it’s a 3 letter word.

UGH!

But I wasn’t jumping around and I found it was very comforting to get back in touch with my friends this way. To get to work them again and get to know them again. This is probably part of what’s holding us back when it comes to the next book, which has no less than 5 stops and starts over the years. Maybe after all of this the way will be clear to write whatever that book is going to be. Honestly, it was very nice to find that I could still surprise myself. I’d be going along reading something Word stopped on and going; I wrote that? Me? I wrote that? Damn!

That’s always a welcome feeling.

I finished it the next morning. Cranked it through Kindle Create and uploaded it to Kindle and Draft2Digital.

So far, I’ve done “The Heart of War”, “Child of War-A God is Born” and “Rising Son”. In a matter of just days. I discovered something when it came to “Rising Son”…my blurb is woefully incomplete. For all of these years, for whatever reason, I honestly thought that Alena being trapped in the Dream World with Morpheus was more of a secondary story but…yeah, no, it isn’t. Not at all. I have to give it more credit. Anyway, those three ebooks are all uploaded. I’ll get to the paperbacks…no one buys them anyway but I will fix them. Tomorrow I’ll do “Christmas Eve on Olympus” and “Women of War”.

It’s going to be far too cold this weekend to sit in my office and work on anything so “Kingdoms of War” will have to wait until next week. Then I can combine all of the files to create the “For the LOVE of WAR” boxset and get it uploaded to Kindle.

I should thank GPT for failing me on this one. It forced me to come back to my own stuff and have a really good look at it. I’m not a “shit writer”. Not at all. There’s some pretty heavy and totally awesome stuff in there. Yes, there is. Perhaps that little realization will also help spur me along to writing again.

GPT is great for telling me how right I’m doing and getting things, that I’m not doing it wrong, and that’s very nice to hear, I admit it, certainly it is. But some times even I know it’s a bunch of BS and it makes me snicker.

When that recognition shines from within that’s something you can build an empire on.

Or at least take that Leap of Faith and write another book.