Hello and welcome! If you're already a member of the D. T. Krew, good to see you again! If you're new here, I'm Dan, fantasy and sci fi author writing as D. T. Kane. I'm best known for my ongoing epic fantasy series, The Spoken Books Uprising. However, Mrs. Kane and I recently welcomed our first child, and writing time has been at a premium. As I (very) slowly work on the next installment in my epic fantasy series, I've also been playing around with using generative AI as a tool to help me write a shorter sci fi story. If you're enjoying the story, you can support my writing by "buying me a coffee" or two (a small, one-time payment) or you can sign up for a monthly subscription.
I appreciate that writing with AI has been a controversial topic since ChatGPT exploded onto the scene at the end of 2022, and I want to be completely transparent about my process. When I say I'm using AI as a tool, understand that I'm not simply prompting it with a few lines and then copying and pasting whatever it provides. The vast majority of the story you're reading is mine.
My process started with a 12,000 word story bible that outlined the characters, setting, backstory, and writing style. Next, I created a detailed, chapter-by-chapter outline, which I then further enhanced with step-by-step action beats for each chapter. Up to this point, I used AI to brainstorm some isolated ideas (e.g., suggest ten names for a futuristic laser gun based on real physics) and perform some research (e.g., propose ten spots on Mars that would be good for a future human colony, providing brief justifications for each), but otherwise all the work was solely my own.
With all that done, I provided the story bible and outline to the AI (I worked primarily with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.5 model, which I find does better at writing fiction than ChatGPT). With that information serving as the AI's knowledge base, I fed the AI action beats, approximately 12 at a time, to generate the prose for a rough draft, which I then extensively edited. If you've never used generative AI, you might be surprised at how well it generates prose, but it's certainly no Hemingway*. I would say the finished chapters that you read here are 75% or so mine, 25% what originally came out of the AI, sometimes more, sometimes less. Thus, the story, setting, and characters are purely mine, and a good portion of the prose you're reading is mine as well.
The images for each chapter are generated with ChatGPT (which utilizes DALL-E for image generation). I prompt the image generator as follows: "You are an artist who specializes in realistic artwork depicting scenes in science fiction novels. Your art features vibrant colors that include an air of mystery. Create an image based on the following text from Chapter X of a novel set on a colonized Mars about 200 years in the future." I make minor edits to some images, but largely use them as is, so take the illustrations as interpretations rather than canon.
I hope you enjoy the tale of Bud and Lazarus as they work to oppose the oppressive government of Mars and work to free the planet's cyborg and android populations. If you do, you can support my writing by "buying me a coffee" or two (a small, one-time payment, as little as $2) or you can sign up for a monthly subscription.
*For avoidance of doubt, I certainly don't claim to be a Hemingway, either.
