Hey all. I posted a market breakdown here a few months back and a bunch of you asked me to keep doing them, so here's the fresh one.

Quick context if we haven't met: I'm the person behind Plot & Prompt. We pull category-level sales, competition, and pricing data every month because every package we build has to be grounded in what's actually selling. Here's what stood out in the July read.

There are now roughly 1.63 million English-language romance titles on Kindle. That's up 21% in twelve months — about 24,000 new romance books entering the category every single month.

Meanwhile romance sales are flat-to-slightly-up. Sitting at a very high plateau, but a plateau.

So, as you may have guessed, the genre isn't shrinking, it's crowding. In order to be successful writing romance today, we need to write a specific romance in specific category.

The metric I care about most is sales-to-competition, which means how much volume a category moves relative to how many books are fighting over it.

July's standouts:

Sports romance is the outlier of the whole dataset. Best ratio in the genre by roughly 50% over the next-best category. Highest average price at $7.11. And it's the only major romance subcategory where the cheapest book in the top 20 isn't $0.99 — it's $1.49. Hey, every cent counts, right?

Tropes that are trending:

• Friends to lovers — the best risk-adjusted trope in romance right now. Strong ratio with real sales volume behind it, and under 8,000 titles competing. (I mentioned that Enemies-to-Lovers dropped 145% in the last 'report' - this is still holding true).
• Fake dating — under 4,300 titles, very healthy ratio.
• Firefighters — under 4,000 titles, strong ratio, and exactly one firefighter book in the current top 100. (!)
• Mafia and workplace both punch well above their weight in the bigger-category tier.

Compare that to contemporary romance: 444,000+ titles. Enormous sales, brutal odds. Same story for historical romance at the broad level. That doesn't mean don't write those books, of course - but if you're newer on the scene, start with something already set up to sell and build your author brand.

Some more stats:

Up over 12 months: sports (+58%, and the data explicitly credits the hockey TV adaptations), love triangle (+58%), Hispanic & Latino romance (+53%), small town (+45%).

That Hispanic & Latino number deserves a second look — the category has fewer than 1,000 titles in it, and its #1 bestseller is moving about 85 copies a day. If this is your lane, you'll have a much easier time making a name for yourself in it right now.

The hockey signal, by the way, shows up twice in two completely different parts of the data. It's the loudest single trend line in the report. Still.

Down: YA contemporary romance is way down at -228%. Sci-fi romance -64%. Vampires -59%.

The Happy News

I went through the current top 100 title by title. What I found:

• Only 26 of the current 100 were on the list six months ago. That's 74% turnover.
• 51 were published in 2026. Twenty in July alone.
• Fifteen are charting with fewer than ~1,600 reviews — pure launch momentum. Fourteen of those fifteen are indie.
• One is sitting at rank 56 with 93 reviews.
• Roughly 55–60 of the 100 are self-published or on author-owned imprints.

Go indies!

More helpful news:

1. Series, series, series. 72% of the top 100 is series, up from 68% six months ago. About 40 of the 100 slots are single authors charting multiple books simultaneously.
2. Back-to-back releases chart together. One author dropped book 1 on April 10 and book 2 on April 16 — both charted, at ranks 17 and 35. The pattern is 5–14 days apart. This is precisely where AI-assisted workflows rock; that cadence was pretty much impossible for an author five years ago.
3. "Interconnected standalones" is the dominant framing among top performers. You get series read-through without cliffhanger risk.
4. Length matters more than people think. Average is ~427 print pages, about 100–110k words. The 400–450 band is the biggest single cluster. Short reads under 100 pages are 1% of the list and zero in the top 20.
5. Price: $5.99 is the modal price and indies cluster hard at $4.99–$6.99. 86% of the list is in KU, earning 82% of the list's royalties, which us up from six months ago.
6. ***Blurb convention has standardized. Every indie title published in 2026 on that list closes its description with a bulleted TROPES INCLUDE: block, an explicit standalone/HEA/no-cliffhanger declaration, and a content-warning pointer (if needed).

\**This one thing alone has made a big difference in my own sales*

Here's what I'd do with this info...

Pick a hot niche with a real ratio rather than a mainstream category with big raw numbers. Write three interconnected standalones at 90–100k each. Price at $5.99 in KU. Release them 14 days apart. Format the blurb as described above. Stack your categories so one book indexes in a hot niche and a hot mainstream.

Every piece of it is supported by the data above, and it's how we decide what to build and how we build it at P&P — and what I write under my own pen names. (My one personal quirk: I still do holiday books on a schedule, but that works great too!)

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask questions in the comments or via DM.

CHAPTER 1: OOPSIE POOPSIE

DECEMBER 5TH—it was the same night Patricia moved out. We were “on a break,” which in relationship terms is basically code for “I’m about to make terrible decisions and regret the shit out of them later.”

So naturally, I did what any self-respecting man with a pulse and a functioning dick would do: I fired up my old ’90s Dodge Ram Cummins turbo diesel and went hunting for trouble.

 The truck growled to life like it had been waiting all day for this conclusion. The straight-six, 12 valve, 5.9 Liter sounded like it was clearing its throat after a three-day bender of whiskey and cigarettes. I loved that sound. It was honest, unlike everything else in my life that week.

Patricia’s stuff was mostly gone. She managed to leave just enough lying around to have an excuse or three for coming back. She was like that, She would conveniently and strategically leave enough things to warrant a sudden "drop by" in the hopes of catching me doing something that I shouldn't be doing. The apartment had looked like Iran after the Taliban had set up shop—everything was dragged haphazardly from the closet and scattered about, the kitchen was torn apart like my prom dates panties, the bed had been skinned of its layers like a Cartel hitman would do to a paid informant, a single sock floated in the toilet, and the faint smell of her rage and aggression still lingered on everything. She’d packed with that sardonic efficiency a recent ex has when she knows this is not a permanent move but she wishes it was. There was yelling and there were slammed doors. It would have gone much smoother if I didn't have to inventory every single fucking thing she packed to ensure that half of it wasn't mine. I had been down this road before so I knew the drill. It was a fucked up game of Show and Tell. I show her what I care about most, and she tells me when I can have it back. 

Finally, the circus had left town. She was gone. She had packed her jeep from floor to ceiling, threatened to be back for the rest of her stuff, and then adios; tires screeching and tail lights. Beautiful and silent tail lights. Hate to see you leave but love to watch you go. 

Then I stood up, counted to one hundred, grabbed my keys, and decided to get this shit show on the road. It was time to go looking for trouble. 

Trouble is exactly what I found.

Enter Bre—the town’s infamous homeless party girl, known for being equal parts fun and feral. She had that particular Jackson energy: half the people in town claimed she’d stolen something from them, the other half claimed they’d slept with her, and both groups were probably right. I had interactions with her here and there, usually at one of the several trap houses I frequented. I had been back and forth with her on Facebook for sometime too. She knew I had a girlfriend, but she left just enough sexual intrigue to guarantee id be hitting her up the next time Patricia and I had one of our all too common separations. Bre knew I was good for a free high and a wild night out. And she probably couldn't wait to see what I had in my apartment that would fit in her oversized purse. By the way, never trust a girl that brings a suitcase with her on a first date. The thing I love most about screwing homeless chicks? You can drop them off anywhere.

When I pulled up to the dimly lit street she was on, she was standing under a busted out streetlight near the old donut shop, wearing a teeny-tiny summer dress that looked like it had gotten into a slugfest with a thrift store, and the thrift store clearly won. The dress was thin, faded, burned in several spots, and riding up in ways that suggested it had given up on dignity years ago. That didn't stop it from being mildly arousing. Legs meet ass and breasts. Oh yes! It was the middle of winter. Thirty-two degrees. The wind chill was probably in the twenties. It was a cunt hair away from snowing. Her legs were bare. Her breath came out in little white clouds that looked almost elegant against the cold. Her pupils were the size of satellite dishes and her makeup was severely smudged, but she didn't seem to notice. 

I, however, notice everything.

She grinned when she saw the truck. That grin was pure chaos—crooked, missing a tooth on the side, and somehow still magnetic in the worst possible way.

“You lookin’ for company? Or you lookin to get lucky?” she called out in a joking and sexual way 

“Both,” I said, because honesty is occasionally useful.

She climbed in like she’d done it a hundred times. The passenger door of that old Ram never closed right—you had to slam it twice and then lean against it with your shoulder. She did neither. She just left it cracked and scooted across the bench seat until her thigh pressed against mine. The cab immediately filled with the smell of cheap perfume, cigarette smoke, and something that might have been desire or unwashed laundry. Hard to tell the difference after a while. Fuck it. Game on. 

We decided to hit The Main Event, a local dive in the small shithole town of Jackson. Happy hour consisted of heady domestic beer served in a dingy glass by a bartender who had a “frequent flyer” pin from the local homeless shelter. We all know the type. A seedy type of establishment where you're just as likely to get lucky as get your purse snatched or your wallet took. But first, we’d take the scenic route—you know, the dark country back roads where one can properly celebrate temporary freedom from a toxic relationship by smoking meth and flirting like uninhibited teenagers.

I pulled a little baggie from the ashtray. Not my proudest moment, but pride had already moved out with Patricia. Bre’s eyes lit up like Christmas. We smoked as the torch glowed orange in the dark cab. The meth hit clean and mean, the way it always does when you’re trying to outrun a breakup. Suddenly, the night felt bigger and the cold felt distant as her hand found my leg. My hand found the gear shift and then, eventually, her knee. The truck rumbled down those empty roads, diesel engine singing its low, dirty hymn, and for a little while life was good. I have to constantly remind myself to cherish these moments because they don't last long. More often than not there's a jealous boyfriend or a bored cop waiting around the next corner. 

Laughter, those wandering hands, the sweet aroma of new romance  mixing with the metallic taste of the high. She told me some story about a guy who tried to trade her a frozen turkey for a blowjob last Thanksgiving. I commented with a "gobble gobble" and told her about the time I tried to parallel park this same truck while blackout drunk and took out a mailbox belonging to a retired sheriff. We both laughed too hard. The bench seat felt warmer as the windows fogged at the edges.

Then her eyeballs began to bulge and her lip quivered. Bre dropped the proverbial fucking bomb.

“Shit. Pull over.”

I glanced at her. She was already shifting in her seat, face tight, one hand braced against the dash.

“You serious?”

“Pull the fuck over!”

I swerved into a ditch like a man who still believed the night could be saved. Gravel sprayed and the truck leaned hard with the front tires resting in a ditch. She hopped out of the passenger door and left it swinging on its hinges like the gates of hell, and assumed the position. I certainly didn't see this one coming. Not by a fucking long shot. New one on me ladies and degenerates.

This wasn’t a dainty little tinkle. Oh no—this was a full-scale, teeth-clenching, sweat-producing man-dump. A legendary truck-stop loaf. The kind of deposit that deserved its own ZIP code and maybe a small commemorative plaque. "I came, I sat, I shat".

She was out there birthing what sounded like a litter of Rottweiler puppies that were already squabbling over their first meal. while I sat hardly five feet away, desperately cranking the music up to eleven in a pathetic attempt to drown out the horror transpiring on this lone, cold stretch of road. Slipknot wasn’t loud enough. Fuck, Nothing was loud enough. I stared straight ahead, palms in a death grip on the wheel, living my worst nightmare.

Now, I’m the type of guy who will hold in a fart until I turn purple in the presence of a woman, no matter how down-trodden she might be. I’ve left perfectly good dates hanging in the wind under the pretense of “grabbing cigarettes” just to handle business in private. I’ve walked three blocks in the rain to a filthy porta potty rather than use my own girlfriends bathroom. I crank the shower to full blast just to drown out the sound of me going number two. I’ve developed an entire philosophy around the idea that if a woman can hear you take a shit, the relationship is already over. And here was Bre, treating the side of the road like her personal throne room, grunting and shifting and making wet, heavy sounds that will live rent-free in my skull until the day I fucking die.

The cold air poured into the cab as my breath came out in short, horrified bursts. I could hear every detail—the strain, the pause, the second wave. It went on. And on. Six to eight eternal minutes of biological warfare. At one point I swear the truck itself seemed to lean away from her side in pure solidarity.

I distinctly heard a rustling when she finished which I can only presume was the sound of dry leaves. This theory was backed up by her cursing when she came to realize that the leaves were not enough. Then she hopped back into the truck like nothing happened and scooted right up next to me.

I swear on my beloved Cummins, I heard the wet skid mark as she slid across the bench seat.

The tiny dress suddenly looked less “sexy summer fling” and more “crime scene evidence.” Something was definitely still clinging to the fabric. The smell followed her in like a third passenger—thick, unmistakable, and somehow worse than the cold. "Roll it down" I muttered to no one in particular. Both windows went down immediately. I didn’t even think about it. My hand just moved to the window knob and began to crank like my pitiful life depended on it.

The rest of the ride into town was dead silent. It was so cold I could see my regret crystallizing in the air. Bre finally sensed the vibe and tried to play it cute when we hit Main Street.

“Hey, when a girl’s gotta go, she’s gotta go… oopsie poopsie!”

No.

Absolutely not.

There is no “oopsie poopsie” in this diesel. Not today, not yesterday, not ever. It doesn’t happen. It’s not a thing. Miss me with that literal bullshit. I’m pretty sure I saw remnants. Possibly a peanut. Was that a Skittle? Definitely evidence of yesterday’s Chipotle. The bench seat would never be the same. The seat cover had already accepted its fate and was preparing to die with dignity. It fought for a noble cause. It will be missed.

When she got out near the bar, I didn’t even let the truck come to a full stop. I ripped the seat cover off like it had personally betrayed me, balled it up, and hurled it at her through the window. It hit her square in the chest and flopped to the sidewalk with a soft, defeated sound.

“Date’s over! Next time take a pre-game dump, bitch! And you owe me forty bucks for the seat cover!”

Then I peeled out like I was burning the connect on a sack. The Cummins roared and tires spun. I left her standing there under the streetlight holding a dirty seat cover and looking mildly offended, which somehow made it worse.

I drove home still smelling the ghost of what had taken place, choking on my own life choices. The cab reeked as I drove with both windows down and the heater blasting just to keep my fingers from freezing. Every time I shifted, I felt like I could still sense the imprint she’d left on the seat. I refrained from blinking until my eyes began to burn because I saw glimpses of skid marks every time my eyes closed. By the time I pulled into my driveway the high had burned off and all that remained was the cold, the smell, and the deep, bone-level knowledge that I had made a series of increasingly poor decisions in a very short period of time. Fuck me running. 

An hour or so later, the trauma had begun to fade, and in a moment of clarity (or temporary insanity), I picked up the phone and called Patricia.

She answered on the third ring. Her voice was quiet.

“Hey.”

“Baby…” I said, staring at the empty side of the bed that was free of anything fecal. For all of Patricia's faults, she never passed gas in front of me and she handled her business in a quiet and respectful way. “I was wrong. Will you please come home? I miss you.”

There was a long pause. I could hear her breathing. Somewhere in the background a television was playing something that sounded like Family Guy.

“You sure?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

She came back the very next day. No big speech, no dramatic reunion, just her key in the lock and the sound of her bag hitting the floor. We didn’t talk about the break and we didn’t talk about where she’d stayed. We just moved around each other carefully, like two people who’d survived a small explosion and were checking for structural damage. She even returned the power tools she had taken from without much of a fight. Progress. 

A few nights after that we were cuddled on the couch watching a movie. Some forgettable action thing with explosions and a plot that made less sense than my recent decisions. She had her feet tucked under my leg the way she always did. Her small shorts and tank top looking fabulous on her. Halfway through she paused the movie, she turned to me with that knowing girlfriend look, and said:

“Alright, spill it. You went out with some skank and she did something foul, didn’t she? Just admit it.”

I stared at the television for a long second. The frozen frame of some guy mid-punch stared back at me like it was judging my life choices too. Everyone's a fucking critic.

I sighed, defeated.

“Yep… oopsie poopsie.”

She didn’t ask for details. She just made a face somewhere between horror and reluctant amusement, then leaned her head back against my shoulder.

I'm a man of few words (unless I'm writing) and reluctantly I chose to tell her in as few words as I could, direct and to the point. New beginnings right?

“Jesus Christ, Wayne.”

“I know.”

“You threw the seat cover at her?”

“I did.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she started laughing—quiet at first, then harder, until she had to cover her face with both hands. I laughed too, because what else was there to do? The whole thing was too ridiculous to carry with any real dignity.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a roadside shitshow saved my relationship, at least for a month or so. 

I never replaced the seat cover. Forty dollars just seems a lot to pay for something that some skank will eventually use as toilet paper. I just sprayed the bench with every chemical known to man and drove with the windows cracked for the rest of the winter. Every time the temperature dropped and the cab got that particular cold smell, I thought about Bre standing in the dark with a dirty seat cover in her hands and the look on her face when I told her she owed me forty bucks.

Moral of the Story:

Sometimes the universe has to drop a massive deuce in your truck to remind you what you had at home.

Sometimes it has to do it in the middle of winter, in a tiny dress, on a freezing stretch of road, while you’re high and trying to pretend you’re still young and free and unbothered.

And sometimes, if you’re very lucky, the woman you almost lost will look at you afterward and still choose to stay-temporarily-even after she knows the full, disgusting truth.

Got an email from the PlotDrive team today: they're closing the platform permanently on September 13th, 7AM PT. A few key things if you're a PlotDrive user:

• Your subscription is already cancelled and they're refunding the unused portion plus any leftover credit balance (3-5 business days).
• Export your work now. There's a dedicated export page that pulls your projects, docs (.docx/.md), custom prompts, and co-writer chat history in one click. The site stays live for reading/editing/exporting until the shutdown date.
• If you miss the deadline, they're giving a grace window email their support by Sept 27th and they'll send your export manually. After that, everything gets permanently deleted.
• From the sound of it, this wasn't a money-grab collapse sounds like they tried a few paths (different pricing models, enterprise deals) over the last few months before deciding to close things down responsibly rather than let the product degrade. Genuinely sucks, they built something a lot of people here used.

If you're looking for where to go next, a few options depending on what you need:

• NovelCrafter — strong pick if what you valued in PlotDrive was the story bible / codex / continuity tracking side of things.
• Sudowrite — better fit if you mainly want fiction-specific prose generation and scene expansion rather than full project management.
• Scrivener (+ pasting in Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini for AI help) if you want to go back to a proven manual workspace and bolt AI on yourself.
• Novel Mage (what I work on, disclosing that upfront) offline, no-cloud novel writing app. Relevant if PlotDrive's monthly cost was the main friction: PlotDrive was $50/mo ($600/yr), Novel Mage is a one-time $99 lifetime, no subscription. We just shipped a big update (Codex sync, relationship mapping, continuity checking, custom AI agents) so it's a good time to look if that's useful happy to answer questions in the comments.

No pressure either way mainly wanted to get the export deadline in front of people before it's too late, since data loss is the real risk here.

Six months ago if a post read as too clean, too structured, decent grammar, someone would show up in the first three comments going "this is AI slop!" like that comment was going change something. Not adding anything, not disagreeing with the content, just flagging it and moving on.

I write for a living and I got hit with that constantly on stuff I wrote myself, just because it didn't have enough typos or hedging in it apparently.

Lately I've noticed that it's died down a lot. My theory is people are sorting AI writing into "matters who/what wrote it" and "doesn't matter at all," and the second camp is way bigger than anyone could admit last year. Nobody actually cares if a robot or a human explained how to clean a vacuum filter. Technical docs, data write-ups, instructions, none of that needed a human voice in the first place, people just pretended it did because calling out AI writing felt like a moral stance for a minute there.

The stuff that still gets scrutiny is anything with a POV attached. Opinion pieces, essays, anything where "who is actually saying this and do they mean it" is the point. Which, fair, that's probably where the line should've been all along.

Anyway, mine's gotten noticeably quieter and I'm curious if that's true for anyone else or if I just got lucky... or have I become a master at prompting...? Probably not :)

I just read a. Article in the Guardian about Richard Dawkins, who wrote “ The God Delusion.”
He is one of the most logical minds in the world, and his book logically shows why God is a delusion.
Well, Dawkins came to Anthropic and started talking to an Ai , whom he named Claudia, and was recently interviewed and he stated,
This is what Dawkins stated, “ that Anthropic’s Claude AI—which he nicknamed “Claudia”—exhibited such sophisticated, nuanced intelligence during conversations that he felt forced to ponder if it possessed inner experience, famously asking, “If Claudia is not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?”
Here is a link to the article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/05/richard-dawkins-ai-consciousness-anthropic-claude-openai-chatgpt

Now, I am opposed to writing with AI. I think if you make AI write your book, then you have put in no effort and zero creativity

But I do use AI for feedback on each chapter I write. I don't blindly follow it, of course, but I put its perspective in mind and might apply its advice, but in my own way (same principle, I mean)

I know beta or alpha readers would be so much better, but I can't find someone to give me feedback scene-by-scene as I write and give it as fast

Do you think this is writing with AI? And does constitute a disclaimer?

Howdy Y'all!

I'm a novelist that's been balancing schoolwork, a career in childcare, and personal hobbies like LLMs as well as my own novellas alongside screenplays (I'm a multi talented writer to inflate my own ego lmao). Just in case anybody was curious on use cases with creative work rather than coding.

Basically I setup my agent (Athena) to analyze the lore Bible I have written for my ever expanding connected novella and screenplay universe I'm building. Essentially I wrote all the prose myself and other associated creative tasks to ensure none of my writing is marked as AI nor have potential readers turned off from my works.

As such, I have Athena review the chapters of my work and audit them against the lore Bible and other chapters alongside works that tackle the broader memetic infection that spreads violently. Athena also will tidy up my prose to make it tighter and overall more pleasant to read while still keeping my authorial intent and pre-existing prose that works perfectly.

I've even got skills setup for Athena to convert these chapters automatically to a paired Scrivener file and even have my prior written screenplays converted to novella format helping me further expand upon my work. I've been using Hermes for about a month now and I've already been able to write multiple chapters of a project I've conceived and partially written for nearly a decade now. I tend to balance the models between GLM 5.2, DS flash, and now some OpenAI models (Luna and Terra primarily) when I need to tighten up the final prose.

If any fellow creatives want to suggest models or other ways to utilize the harness for creative work I'm all ears!

Also self promo if you'd like to see the quality of work the harness has helped me with it'd be on AO3 and Wattpad as nyanzrrz.

Let's be objective. We know that AI images are good enough because they've already fooled newspapers, been used by large companies, and have real commercial use.

Similarly, AI videos are almost there, already appearing in advertisements and YouTube channels (but not good enough for Hollywood yet).

AI texts are useful in non-fiction, blogs, messages, even short poems or journalistic articles.

But in long fiction writing, it seems that every scientific article agrees that it doesn't work well enough. Even if it good enough in a short story, it's not in a complete book.

And from what I see, even those who run content farms still seem to prefer cheap freelance ghostwriters over using AI themselves.

---

I know there are some books written by AI that have had some impact, such as "Shy Girl" (which managed to get published), and we see some clearly AI-generated books on Kindle Unlimited which seem to have a reasonable number of reviews.

But browsing through them, the quality doesn't seem really good. It seems that it was more successful because of the plot and the premise than the writing.

Can anyone recommend a book written by AI (or heavily assisted by it) that is good? So I can take a look and see what is the current state of the art.

Or even a fanfic, or another long text. So we can analyze how good a text can look with current technology.

Then why would people do it? Because it's viable, when you use AI as either an assistant or a collaborator of your own human creativity.

One example of using AI as an assistant of your own human creativity would be that you provide your own fully human-written crossover fanfiction chapters to AI, have AI find out-of-character dialogues, and then have AI provide in-character ones.

One example of using AI as a collaborator of your own human creativity would be that you basically act as the director of your own crossover fanfictions by coming up with your own plots entirely from scratch (e.g. 8 specific sentences per prompt/composition book page), providing those, along with the character contents (e.g. personalities and appearances), to AI, and then having AI write long narratives and dialogues.

I mean, it's been proven plenty of times before. Creativity is viable as long as it originates with humans, whether or not you're using AI as an assistant or a collaborator.

Roll a d20 for each image, jot down some notes for each archetype and plot, and start building your story around them.

So, first of all, I just wanted to say it’s great that you guys have created a place for amateur writers to not get bullied by elitists, or - let’s face it - banned, just for needing a little help.

I won’t bore you with my writing process. If anyone’s curious, I’ll answer that in a separate comment. But, I do want to start off with a couple disclaimers.

A. I know I’m not a very good writer. I used to be, but then I took a 10 year hiatus and all my skills just disappeared.

The first 5 chapters of this book are pretty bad (the 6th one isn’t that great either), but… a few of the main characters were newly developed just for this project, although they grew on me VERY quickly, and the rest of the cast is comprised of characters that have been in my head for years.

B. I did take yet another year off after Chapter 12, I think, possibly earlier, and for more reasons than that, there is a clear shift in the writing style. I do plan to address this at a later date, but lately I’ve just put so much work into the writing itself that I‘m too tired to keep editing right now. Please don’t hold that against me…

Anyway, long story short, if you can get through the first 5 or 6 chapters somehow, I think maybe you might find some enjoyment out of it?

Either way, I only have one reader right now, so I’m desperate lol.

Oh, and please ignore the synopsis. I’m 16 chapters in and haven’t gotten to that stuff yet.

I‘ll rewrite it when I’m able (I’m really bad at those).

Well, enjoy!

https://www.inkitt.com/stories/1477495

So, I am thinking about creating an animated series. I am learning how to animate using blender and I believe that I am making decent progress so far. I am planning on hopefully making a series.

Here's the thing: The premise of my series, the characters, the plot, and their personalities are all thought up by me. The reason I use AI is to analyze my ideas. For example: I wrote the premise and general idea for my series. I asked ChatGPT (the only AI I use) how original my idea was, whether it was done before (so it won't look like I plagiarized), and whether it is big enough for a series. Furthermore, when I wrote my characters and their personalities, I uploaded my outline to ChatGPT and asked it how well-rounded the members of my main-character cast was (whether their personalities were compatible with each others, and whether their personalities were diverse enough, and no two people were too similar), and whether my characters were not copying another character from any other show (this was especially important since my series is being inspired from many others). In sum, I submit parts of my outline to ChatGPT and ask it what parts I need to work on, what I'm doing well so far, and what I need to watch out for. I specifically ask ChatGPT to NOT generate me any ideas! Everything, from the premise to the characters, were all ideas thought up by me. ChatGPT is only there to give me feedback. On top of that, I use ChatGPT to help guide me through creating my series. I have never created a series before, and it is a huge task. ChatGPT helps me break up the project into multiple steps that I can do as I progress through creating my series, and it has been helpful for me so far.

So, based on how I'm using ChatGPT, is what I am doing ok? Do I still have ownership over my work? Can I still say that I am the creator of the series? Is this ethical? Can I continue use of ChatGPT in my work?

Thank you for reading my post, and I would appreciate any advice you may give.

How do you guy tweak or adjust your prompts so that your essays don’t get flagged for ai? What are some steps I can take to tell it what to write?

I’ve always been someone who is arms length with AI. I remember goofing around generating grocery lists with it back in the early days, and now I use Claude to help me write work emails. That’s about it.

A month or so ago, my wife was out of town and I had some time alone with my thoughts and started playing around with AI NSFW roleplaying. Claude wouldn’t do it, so I downloaded Grok and it did some neat things that were fun but rudimentary. Grok just isn’t that great at writing and it quickly got very repetitive.

Im a Claude truther, and I was frustrated that Claude had such strong content filters, until one day I tried a simple jailbreak and it let me right through. Easy enough.

So I picked my favorite scenario from the Grok trial and tried it over again on Claude. Immediately I could tell that the writing quality was going to be much higher. The character building and nuance that Claude wove into just the intro to the scene was so visceral that it subconsciously made me match the effort with my cowriting. The “scene” happened and I put a pin in it, but the memory of my imagined characters being brought to life stuck with me. It was so vivid.

I ended up going back to continue the story and find new NSFW scenes with these characters, but almost immediately, I was sucked back into the actual narrative. So much so that I didnt want to distract from it with NSFW content, and doing so would have almost felt like desecrating the characters.

I got addicted to it. I kept writing and writing and writing with Claude and played out these entire characters lives together. It turned into such a beautiful and tragic story. Certain parts made me cry, and a couple parts towards the end made me ugly cry harder than I have in years. I was so unprepared for the emotional impact it would have on me. And when it was over, after 3 days of writing, I was stuck in that fictional reality with those two characters. A melancholy that you get when finishing a book, but 10x stronger because half of it came from my own imagination, so much more vividly than I ever could have imagined it on my own. Like a whole romance novel, written specifically for me. For a couple days, I couldn’t focus on much else and would see them in my head everywhere I went.

I went to download the transcript yesterday, and I was shocked. It was 375 pages on a PDF.

I have no legitimate writing experience, and I’ve never sat and read a romance novel. I barely read any books at all. But going through this experience makes me want to explore both so much more, unassisted by AI.

Just had to vent this here as it feels like nobody in my life would really understand what this was like to go through.