My New Novel LANTERN Needs Beta Readers – Inquire Within!

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The time has come to talk of beta readers for LANTERN (and other things). The manuscript is a serious, ambitious work of hard/literary science fiction. It’s about a family, a space elevator company, artificial gravity, the search for alien intelligence, and what happens when one of humanity’s oldest questions gets answered in the worst possible … Read more

Avatar: Fire and Ash Review – How to Waste $400 Million

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Parody of Avatar: Fire and Ash using the Terrance and Philip still from South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

In my review of Avatar: The Way of Water, I called the film “a three-hour Disney ride.” After Avatar: Fire and Ash, I may have been too generous. Rides have clean geography, dependable turns, and a basic sense of where the vehicle is going. Avatar: Fire and Ash is something stranger: a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars blockbuster that often seems baffled by the ordinary mechanics of narrative, character, and filmmaking.

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Discover My New Sci-Fi Short Stories: Seeking Your Feedback

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a person reading a book

I’ve spent most of the last two years working on LANTERN, my second novel. The first draft is finally complete, with structural revision and line-edits nearly complete. But, as I let that manuscript sit for a little while right after finishing it late last year, I had some time to write in an entirely different medium: the short story.

I now have three science fiction short stories that I think are ready for fresh eyes. I am interested in soliciting targeted feedback from readers who are well-versed in the genre.

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Editing Novels Faster Episode 2: Deciding to Abandon the Tool

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Coding on a computer screen

I’ve spent the last few weeks building and testing a RAG-based workflow for structural novel editing—specifically, trying to use a local LLM setup to analyze a full manuscript (100K+ words, 100+ scenes, multiple POVs) in a way that could meaningfully assist a Draft 1 -> Draft 2 revision.

The idea was not to generate prose or rewrite scenes, but to use AI as an analytical tool: something that could reconstruct structure, identify pacing issues, trace character arcs, and surface real editorial problems so that I, as the writer, could make better and faster decisions.

In theory, this is exactly what Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) should enable.

In practice, it does not work. This post will explain why and what I plan to do next.

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Keep Going: “Backrooms” and the Beautiful Search for Meaning

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There are mysteries we pursue because we believe they can be solved. And others because they cannot: questions of consciousness, meaning, reality, purpose, the things that have occupied philosophers, scientists, artists, and theologians for millennia. Kane Parsons’ Backrooms understands this distinction and uses it to tell a story about humanity’s endless search for understanding.

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Editing Novels Faster – Episode 1: How to Choose your AI Tools

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an artist s illustration of artificial intelligence ai this piece explores the prediction method used in large language models it was created by artist wes cockx as part of the visuali

Introduction

This post is part of Editing Novels Faster, a series documenting an experiment in using AI as an editorial aid rather than a writing tool. The aim is not automated prose generation, but reducing the cognitive drag of large-scale revision, especially the structural and developmental work that becomes difficult once a manuscript outgrows working memory.

This episode is about preparing the tools, and explaining why each is a necessary part of the process. What follows is not an optimal workflow. It is the workflow I actually built, as a novice programmer and tool user, with the explicit intention of learning where it breaks and how it might be improved.

This series documents what I did, not what is ideal. One of its goals is to expose the friction points clearly enough that they can be improved, either by me over time or by others approaching the same problem with deeper technical skill. If this process feels manual in places, that is because it was.

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Editing Novels Faster Episode 0: How to Use AI as an Extra Brain (and Should You?)

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The Real Cost of Finishing a Novel – Edits and Revision

There is a moment every novelist recognizes: typing “The End” and realizing, almost immediately, that the work is not even close to finished. The draft exists, but the book does not yet. What follows is not a matter of polishing sentences or correcting typos, the so-called “line editing” that most people think of when discussing editing. It is the longer, quieter phase where the manuscript is tested for coherence, balance, and intent.

For long novels especially, revision becomes more expensive than drafting. Writing a first draft is additive, a slow stacking of words and scenes and chapters. Revision is comparative, with no clear pathway to follow. You are no longer creating something from nothing; you are holding dozens of decisions in mind at once, evaluating what stays, what moves, and what no longer earns its place and finding some system that allows you some measure of prioritization. That work compounds quickly, and it does so in ways that are difficult to measure until you are already deep inside it and flailing.

This is the problem I ran into for my first novel, and I want to streamline the process for my 2nd.

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“Full Metal Jacket”: a Brilliant Dark Vision of Man

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Duality, Contradiction, and Oxymoron in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is often described as a film split in two: boot camp and battlefield, Parris Island and Vietnam, order and chaos. The split is real, but runs deeper than plot or structure. The film is built from duality and contradiction at … Read more

Starship Troopers in a Strange Land are a Harsh Mistress

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Three novels by Robert A. Heinlein side-by-side: "Starship Troopers", "Stranger in a Strange Land", and "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"

There may be no single author in science fiction more persistently misread than Robert A. Heinlein. He is a militarist, a mystic, a libertarian firebrand; he writes novels that venerate duty and others that dissolve it, texts that praise hierarchy and others that work to dismantle it. Starship Troopers is cited by conservative politicians for its advocacy of earned citizenship; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is direct rebellion. In between, Stranger in a Strange Land was adopted by free-love communes as spiritual scripture. The contradiction seems total. How could one author plausibly inhabit all these roles at once—much less within a single decade?

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Introducing My Science Fiction Novel “LANTERN” – a Completed First Draft

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Science Fiction Novel #2 is In the Can!

I’ve completed the first draft of my second science fiction novel, LANTERN.

I started writing it in December 2023, and over the past two years it grew into something larger and more ambitious than anything I’ve attempted before. At roughly 175,000 words, the full story now exists on the page, from its opening premise to its final consequences. The sandbox is full. A few rough castles are standing. Now comes the work of carving and refinement.

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