Marc Nobbs: Blog

The version of this post on my website contains an image referred to in the post. SOL doesn't (as far as I'm aware) allow images in blog posts, otherwise I'd post it here too.

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When I was uploading my work to my Ream Stories page, I noticed there was a question that no other site has asked before when uploading work.

"Was Generative AI used to write this story?”

It’s a “required” answer, and I can understand why it’s being asked; I really can. But it did spark a question in my head—Is “using” AI cheating? And the answer to myself was a resounding—well, I guess it depends on what you mean by “using”.

Let me explain.

I “use” three AI Tools—Grammarly, Copilot and WordTune. And I use each one of those in different ways, for different purposes and in different frequencies.

Grammarly is, to all intents and purposes, a very, very sophisticated version of the spell check and grammar check that’s been a part of Microsoft Word and other word processors for decades, but rather than just highlighting where you’ve made a “mistake”, and offering a simple solution like adding or deleting a comma, it can restructure whole sentences or even whole paragraphs. I have it turned on in Word (or Google Docs—I use both) and, for the most part, I ignore the red lines it produces while I write. Then, every so often, I’ll go through those red lines and make a decision as a writer which I want to accept and which I reject.

And that’s the key with all AI tools, really. How are you using it? Do you follow the suggestions blindly, or do you make informed choices about the suggestions the tools make based on your personal writing style and preferences? I’d suggest that one of these is the “correct” way to use AI and the other… well…

Copilot is a completely different tool and a far more “dangerous” one in terms of “cheating”. And I don’t actually use it for writing at all, even though it is absolutely capable of generating entire articles that read well and make sense. It can even generate complete, simple stories with a beginning, middle and ending.

My personal use tends to be for image generation. I regularly ask Copilot to generate a featured image for a blog post or to illustrate a scene I’ve written.

This second use is proving to be really useful for me. It gives me an idea if the picture I’m painting with words matches the image I have in my head as I write. Let me give you an example.

I asked Copilot to illustrate this paragraph from “A Wounded Heart”…

“She was walking along the train station platform at as brisk a pace as her high heels and the heavy suitcase she was dragging behind her on its wheels would allow. She was at least smiling though. She was dressed casually, in three-quarter-length faded blue jeans, a white t-shirt with some branded logo on that I didn’t recognise and a light jacket that reflected that it was still quite warm even though it was now September. Her long blonde hair was in a ponytail that bounced behind her as she walked.”

One of the images it generated can be seen on my website version of this post. It is very much the kind of picture I had in my head when I wrote that scene and every time I read it.

Link to Image here

I’ve also, on occasions, asked Copilot to write a blog post on a particular topic. I’ve never used the text generated as an actual blog post, but I have used it as a writing prompt to write my own post. Doing this gives me a rough structure to work with and ensures I don’t miss out a potentially important point.

There is one other situation I’ve used Copilot for, and that’s song lyrics. I was writing a scene that required a song to be sung, and the lyrics of the song were important to the scene. But I’m no songwriter and could easily have wasted many hours trying to develop some lyrics. But Copilot has a plug-in for Suno, the AI music generator, and I asked it to write me a song. I then used the lyrics of that song as a basis for the one in the scene. I changed a large proportion of the words but kept the structure and the rhyming couplets. So, what’s in my manuscript isn’t AI-generated, but it is based on something that was.

Is that cheating?

Again, the key here is not just taking what the AI has generated and using it verbatim but instead using it as an inspiration to create something yourself.

And that’s how I’ve used the last tool, too. WordTune describes itself as “…an AI-powered reading and writing companion capable of fixing grammatical errors, understanding context and meaning, suggesting paraphrases or alternative writing tones, and generating written text based on context.”

In one sense, it’s a lot like Grammarly, but while Grammarly focuses on grammar and structure, WordTune is capable of adding to what you’ve already written. It has a “continue writing” function which looks back at the context of what you’ve already written and, well, continues it.

This is my least-used AI tool. In fact, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve clicked that “Continue writing” button in the past few months. When I do click on it, it gives me half a dozen ways of continuing the paragraph and what I usually do is cycle through them a couple of times, decide which, if any, I like best and insert it into the text. Then I’ll usually re-write it slightly (or a lot) to sound more like “me”.

Again, it’s not using the tool to write for me, it’s using the tool as inspiration to get me over a tricky spot when the words don’t flow by themselves.

Is that cheating?

I don’t believe it is.

I think that it’s fine to use AI as long as it’s used almost like a “collaborator” or a beta reader if you prefer, the kind that points out the mistakes and missteps you’ve made and helps guide you towards a cleaner, more readable manuscript and maybe also give you a nudge in the right direction when you hit a hurdle you’re having trouble getting over.

I had a human version of this when I was writing The Lies We Lead. I gave a friend access to the Google Doc and permission to comment on it, and comment on it she did. There were times when she was “watching” me write in the sense that she had the document open at the same time as me, and because Docs works in “real-time”, she could see what I was writing as I wrote it. She could even see when I deleted sections I’d written that I wasn’t happy with and replaced them.

And she would make comments in real-time when we both had the document open, too.

In a sense, I was using her intelligence as a tool for my writing. It just wasn’t an artificial intelligence but was, in a sense, just a series of comments on the screen.

Is that really that much different from the current crop of AI tools? Aren’t they best used as real-time collaborators?

That, then, I believe, is how AI should be used. Not to generate great swathes of text and copy & paste it into your manuscript but as a genuine tool—not much different from the spell checkers we’ve all been using for the past thirty years or more or a friend looking over your shoulder and making comments as you write.

Really, it’s the same as it has been for every single piece of new technology that this species of ours has come up with since the first cave dwellers picked up a rock and used it to crack open a dinosaur egg to get to the yolky goodness inside.

In the past, I've always done my writing in Microsoft Word. This goes all the way back to Word 6.0 on my Mac LC when I was at University thirty years ago. I pay for Microsoft 365, which not only includes Office (and so Word) but also comes with 1TB of cloud storage, which I think isn't a bad deal. I have the family edition, shared with my wife, two kids, my parents and my wife's parents. For less than £100 a year. Really not a bad deal at all.

But I've been writing A Healing Love mostly in Google Docs rather than Word. I have my reasons and I won't go into them here, but it's something I've essentially been "forced" to do.

I don't particularly like Docs. It doesn't come anywhere close to the desktop version of Word in terms of features and it's "save after every keystroke" advantage is negated by the desktop version of Word if your file is saved in your OneDrive.

But I found out something else recently that's put me off Docs even more.

It counts words in a document differently to Word.

Seriously. You'd think that counting words would be easy—you just count the words. But apparently not. Word and Docs use different methods and treat different things as "words" so you end up with different word counts. Sometimes wildly different.

Now, for me, that's not really that big of a deal. But it is annoying. I have a spreadsheet with the word count of each chapter of everything I've written in it, and I've been keeping track of the word count of A Healing Love with Docs—but all my other work I did counts for in Word, so that means my comparison with other books is inaccurate. I've had to go back and redo the count for each chapter in Word.

Annoying, but nothing more.

But if you're, for example, a student with a strict word count for an assignment, or a journalist/columnist writing to a word count or entering a fiction writing contest with a word count—yeah, it would be annoying to think you're just on the limit having written in one only to find the other says your over and your submission gets thrown out.

There are some very good explanations of the different methods used bny Docs and Word for counting words. They are fascinating. But you'd think that in 2024, with all the things that corporations could use to set their products apart from the others, they'd at least agree on a method for counting words so that any confusion is avoided.

This post is an amalgamation of two posts that first appeared on my website at the end of August.
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A couple of interesting things happened recently while I was writing.

First, the character I posted about previously has undergone her second name change in as many weeks. I received a lot of feedback from readers on StoriesOnline, with some really good suggestions for the type of name I was looking for. I settled on one that I’d been considering anyway and made the changes to my manuscript with find/replace.

But I still wasn’t happy with it.

Then, a week later, I happened to be listening to one of my Spotify playlists on the way into work, and a song came on that’s been on “heavy rotation” for me for the past few months. The track is a couple of years old now, but that’s not important. What is important is that the artist’s name resonated with me as fitting the character I’m having difficulty with.

And the name could be used as a short version of a longer name and that longer name has other short versions.

It just worked.

So, the character is on her third name of the process, and I’m 99% confident that this will be her final name.

The other thing that happened was that I found myself softening on this character’s plot arc.

When I conceived of her, I had a very clear plan for her purpose in the story. And had I gone through with it, she’d have been one of the least likeable characters in the series. But as I’ve said before, I’m more of a Pantser than a Planner when it comes to plotting. I write by the seat of my pants. I take the plot where the characters guide me even if, in the end, I get them where I want them to end up.

And that’s what’s happened her. I’ve already said that her original name didn’t suit her. And that’s because, as I’ve been writing her, I’ve sort of grown to love her and her personality. And I can’t make her out to be an unsympathetic character. I just can’t. In this case, she’s not going to end up where I had originally planned. She’s not going to do what I originally planned.

At least, not in the way I planned it.

I’m not particularly worried about that, if I’m honest. The way I’ve set her up and what’s she’s doing in this story will still lead to what I need to happen happening, it will just be in a different way.

And it might even make the story better—if I can execute it well, that is.

Moving on, let's speak about titles. I've always struggled with the titles of my novels and short stories, but I think I may have found the right titles for the next Paul Robertson book.

I recently joined a Discord server aimed at helping independently published authors grow their audience, and as part of the “initiation”, I was required to write a short introduction to myself. I began by mentioning that I’m approaching my fiftieth year on this blue and green globe we call home and the recent realisation that it means I’ve now been writing “smut” for almost thirty years and that it’s nearly twenty years since I sold my first piece for actual money.

And in all that time, the one thing I’ve always struggled with is coming up with titles for my work. In fact, I’m so bad at titles that when I was writing The Lies We Lead, I ran a competition on Facebook asking readers to make suggestions for the book’s title.

When I originally wrote A Good Man back in 2011—thirteen years ago now—I came up with what I thought was a clever title for the series. Tutelam Venit. Which, let’s be honest, is pretentious bollocks. I got to this because Paul’s story was going to be a Coming of Age story, so I put that phrase into Google Translate and asked it for the Latin and used what I got out. That was in 2011 though and it was a crap translation. A better translation now is “He came under protection”, which still sort of fits the story, but not really.

Anyway, I ditched the pretentious series name after A Tortured Soul came out. Now it’s just The Paul Robertson Saga, which is a much better name for it.

The titles for the three books in the series actually follow a definite pattern.

A Good Man
A Tortured Soul
A Wounded Heart

The pattern is clear.

A/an Adjective Noun

All three of these titles were planned from the beginning because the story was planned as a classic trilogy. But, of course, it didn’t turn out that way because as A Wounded Heart approached the same length as A Tortured Soul—already the longest book I’d ever written—I found I had a hell of a lot more story still to tell.

So, as you know, I resolved to write a fourth and possibly fifth book, which meant I had to come up with one or maybe two new titles. And for my own sanity, those titles had to fit the pattern of the other three.

Interestingly, I started a thread about this in a Reddit group for erotica authors and was told that the best titles are some variation of VERBed by the NOUN, which isn’t the pattern I’ve got for the Paul Robertson books, but you live and learn. I was also told that most readers don’t care about clever title patterns in series.

But I do, so I’m going to stick to the pattern, no matter what.

Unless I can’t think of anything. Which, for a long time, I couldn’t.

I did have a title. It was a good title, and it fit the final book in the series.

An Everlasting Love

The problem, of course, is that book four isn’t the final book. At least, it won’t be unless I can somehow shoehorn what’s left of the story I’ve got to tell, which I estimate may be as much as two hundred thousand words worth, into seventy-five thousand words.

Not happening.

So, I’ve had to change the title of this fourth book. I had hoped I could hang on to An Everlasting Love for the fifth book, but I don’t think my desire to stick to the pattern will let me. And that’s because the title of this fourth book is…

Wait for it…

A Healing Love

There you have it. The title of the fourth book in the Paul Robertson Saga. A Healing Love.

The reason it means I can’t keep An Everlasting Love as the final book’s title is that it will feel wrong to me to have two books with the same noun in the title. I’d like to keep the “Everlasting” part, but I’ll need to find something else that lasts forever rather than love.

Unless I can think of something else that is Healing for Paul other than love. Passion? An Affair? I don’t know. There’s no urgency; I need to finish writing the book first.

I'm trying to tell three different stories all at once with the fourth Paul Robertson book and it's proving to be quite a challenge.

I’m now at sixty-seven thousand words in the fourth Paul Robertson book and it’s just a few hundred words away from being my seventh longest manuscript, overtaking The Lies We Lead. I can’t (or rather won’t) say at this stage how long I think this book will end up being, but I’m now fairly certain it will not be the final book in the series. If I want the book to be a similar length to the other three (and I do), then I’ve got about sixty or seventy thousand words left and I’m certain I’ve got more than sixty or seventy thousand words worth of story left to tell.

I’m not actually going to worry about it. I’ll just write the story and if I can find a way to wrap this book up without telling the whole of what remains of Paul’s story, then so be it. But if I find that there isn’t going to be enough of a story left to fill a third book, then this fourth one will just have to be a bit longer than the others.

We’ll see.

In writing this book I’ve got three very distinct, very separate and yet intertwining threads of Paul’s story to tell. Two of which I can’t really write about here because it would give too much away. I will say that both of those threads are to do with Paul finding the Happy Ending that Chloe wants him to find. I dare not say more than that.

The third thread I can talk about and that’s Paul’s business life. We already know from the prologues to books one and three (I need to write about this too at some point, because it’s a change I plan to make) that Paul goes into business with Will Brown and we found out in book three how this starts to come about. In this fourth book (and possibly the fifth) I’m telling more of that story and it’s a story that doesn’t just include Will, David, Bobby and Chris – it involves at least three other characters that we’ve other come to love or at the very least met in the series before.

And trying to weave these three plot threads into the one novel is a challenge. I sort of did it in A Wounded Heart but it’s much more at the forefront of my mind in this book as I write it because it’s so important to the conclusion of the series and the three threads are so different. Obviously, Paul’s business life is very different to his Happy Ending story, but even the two threads that are related to that are different. One of them is a *now* story. It’s happening *now* and it’s the main plot for the time period that I’m currently writing. The other is a *then* story. It’s a slow-burn, long-term story. One is about the white heat of passion, the other is about the slow burn of love.

I’m really enjoying the challenge and I hope that when I’m ready to release this story to the world, you’ll enjoy me efforts to knit these three plots together and weave them into a satisfying read.

(This post first appeared on my website - all blog posts appear there a few days ahead of StoriesOnline. There is no charge for my Website - it's not a "Patreon")

I've always been poor at naming characters and titling books and chapters. Which is a worry when it's crucial to get one particular character's name right.

One of the biggest problems I’ve always had in the twenty-plus years I’ve been writing fiction is naming characters. I’ll frequently change a character’s name halfway through writing a story. And it’s not unusual for me to change it a second time, or even change it back to my original choice.

The problem is that sometimes, once you’ve written a good chunk of a story it becomes clear that a name you’ve given to a character doesn’t really fit that character and how they have developed while writing the story.

Now, this may be nonsense. It could well be that the character name “Greg” is fine for everyone who reads the story, even if for me this character isn’t a “Greg” at all. He was, when I started writing him, but his actions since and the way he talks means he’s not a “Greg” now.

My characters are alive, you see. They live in my head, but they are alive. And as much as I might want them to be this way, or that way, or have this personality trait or that one, they frequently have their own ideas about who they are and how they would behave.

And that means that sometimes the name I originally gave them, isn’t who they really are.

I have a problem like this now with the fourth Paul Robertson book. There’s a new character I’ve introduced. I won’t tell you anything about her, but the name that Paul uses with her is a shortened version of a traditional old name. That’s all fine—nothing wrong with that, happens all the time.

Clarissa, for example, was Clarissa to her mother, ‘Rissa to most of her friends, but ‘Riss to Paul.

Similarly, different characters called Vanessa either Ness or Nessa.

In Lost & Found the female lead, Beth, short for Elizabeth after her Grandmother, made a point of confronting her father over him (and only him) calling her Lizzie.

So I have a character who needs a name that’s short for an old, traditional name, but—and here’s my real problem—could also be short for another, more modern name. I can’t tell you why at this point, but that’s what it needs to do. It’s quite important for a plot point that I would find it hard to change or write around.

Only thing is, right now, I can only this of one combination of these three names and, honestly, I don’t really like it. It doesn’t fit the character I’m writing. So I need to change it. But what to? That’s the problem. What can I change it to?

It’s a dilemma.