You know what makes for a good feeling? Completing the book after 10 years, a marriage, several hospitalizations, and the lore quietly growing the entire time. Finally! I’ve finished The Rapture of Secrets, and I feel it was worth the wait. My problem with the previous three drafts was that by the end of them, they didn’t capture the vibe or the scale of the lore behind the story. It was initially going to be different than what the final cut ended up being: A post-apocalyptic, scifantasy, action-adventure romance. That’s a lot on its own to start with.

The drafts each made it to novel length before I scrapped them. That’s a big part of why it took me so long to complete the book. It began as an idea in 2016. I don’t think I was prepared, back then, to write the rest of the story following The Kingdom of Ecstasy. Because, while it seemed like a straight shot down epic fantasy lane to write about the Ra’Ol stones as mythical mcguffins, or to follow along with Lucein and Gnyovante again, the thing that really burned me up was that I wanted to die into Mokallai’s side of the story. Not just continue with the heroes or see about his potential redemption, but to write the literal “B-Side” of the story itself.

That turned out to be a significant game changer. The second draft, after the romance-based first draft, was going to dive into the cult aspects of life for Laylen, as a High Prophetess of Fate. I wanted to showcase Mokallai through their interactions. I think the final draft, the 4^th draft, ended up accomplishing that better than the 2^nd or the 3^rd ever could. The 3^rd draft was a brief departure into Dyiij, again being heavy on the behind the scenes take on the Destiny plot. But it was too campy, and didn’t survive my transition from Windows 10 to Ubuntu. I think that draft made it to about 30-40k words ion length before it was scrapped. Dyiij had died in that version, and the characters remained pretty much the same as they were when they went in. That draft introduced Eyuwre, who I had top rehearse with repeatedly until his character felt right, and not like a Mary Sue.

Being that he was immortal, it was difficult to raise the stakes in a way that felt real and epic without becoming a wild abandonment of creativity for the pure shock value of upping the stakes every chapter. His arc was a delicate one. Towards the end of the book, I think having him in there paid off better than I had anticipated. I’m glad I waited 10 years, instead of pushing the 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd versions to publication.

Settling on a book cover wasn’t easy, either. In my last post on this book, I posted the four candidate covers I had made back in 2016. They all captured the post-apocalyptic angle. But the pinkish-purple one won my heart. It also ended up being the one that reflected an aspect of the story itself, and not just the doom-and-gloom feel.

The most heart-breaking thing about this journey, for me, was the story’s departure from scifantasy into grimdark, or dark epic fantasy. I tried to write a narrative that was true to itself rather than genre conventions, and that’s where I ended upo. I had to suck it up and keep writing when I was informed of that. Because it felt like a gut punch, to have missed the scifantasy mark. But having been over that bridge and come out on the other side, I’ve accepted dark fantasy or grimdark as being the byproduct of a good tale.

So, the story has changed me, as an author, in a sense. I no longer strive for exclusively scifantasy stories. I’ve learned to embrace the fact that I write weird fiction, even if it’s difficult to sell because it’s weird fiction.

Oh well. Time to more on to rewriting Dawnfury.

~ Shiri

I think it’s worth sitting down to identify where the line is when it comes to writing with AI. My line, at least. July 2026, I sat down with Claude, determined to see for myself just what a… and I’m not familiar with the literal terms, so pardon me using my own lingo — GAI LLM model. I went with Claude on a whim, having researched nothing about it and how it operates or how to properly prompt the thing. I went in with ZERO expectations, fed it Dawnfury, a WIP of mine from 2018 that I wasn’t currently working on. After being confronted with the throttling of the AI’s output, I paid to see what it could actually do.

I find AI to be effective at proofreading. I love how Claude tracks the character and plot arcs with each update of the draft that I feed it. I found that the AI was capable of being interested in the development and outcomes of the characters. Of course, it wanted to dismantle my process for ‘better understanding’ of how to address my needs as a hybrid discovery-pantser writer — yes, I do plan a few things; screw the outline. The fact that Claude was able to flag curious keywords and terms, as well as differentiate between the nature of the scenes in the text (it was able to flag the sex from the rest of the narrative; the Slaggan speech of Bog Fodder; flagging where the story was too graphic, too violent, etc.) and could speak to what I was actually crafting on a technical level that I’ve rarely experienced with Meat Editors. It’s interesting to read what it quips about, and what it gets ‘excited’ over.

AI is intentionally squeamish. I had fed it Snare of the Monsoon, the second episode of Bog Fodder, and Claude got grossed out, because the B-side of that narrative featured a short, petite, blue-skinned ginger woman named Yelaidondre featured as Shadiq’s partner during a coming of age story. Yes, it was sexual. Yelaiw as 23, but on the page it was written too ambiguously. Claude got freaked out, and three times tole me that it refused to work with me on correcting the narrative. It was no issue to go back and do it myself. I find that as a tool, when it gets bitchy, it’s worse than being deadlocked in a UNIX Terminal. I run Ubuntu, lol.

Still, AI is an effective tool at gutting, analyzing, catching and correcting narrative issues. It helps fiction writers by being a technical writer in your pocket like a Swiss army knife with the occasional self-inflicted failure. I’ve taken to letting Claude write the things I struggle to: Non-fiction; the advices I want to give; the words that need to be delivered in a way I’m not good at, outside of the story. I appreciate having a tool that can generate essays for me almost as effortlessly as I may generate fiction. I love that about Claude, as a writing assistant. You may notice posts by “C Spenx.” Yes, those posts are written by AI, full disclosure.

Writing with AI is something I never foresaw in my future. It is easy to want Claude to do it all for me, and when it comes to non-fiction, I tend to let it do it’s thing. t1tI have NOT, however, used it to generate fiction. I’m proud of my ability to tell stories, and jot them down. Though they may be classed as weird fiction, and a bit dense at times — to my dismay! But I do know now that writing with AI isn’t some futuristic concept that we have yet to grasp from an abstract future; the practice of writing with AI is here, today. I think it’s worth embracing the reality that Claude and other LLMs are already coauthors, editors, and proofreaders, to list a few things. So my own bias has shifted to one of acceptance, and not competition.

Does Claude generate good fiction on it’s own? I’m sure Claude has written plenty of narratives that are on the market right now. However, I wonder if it can write fiction as well as I, or any other skilled storyteller, do. With enough time, it will get there. But, remember that the ::Ms have their own voice. It may be a redundant, em-dash-happy, rule-of-three proliferated, public-domain-derived narrative. Still, that is the voice of AI. And IMHO, the way you ‘beat the machine’ as an author isn’t through rejection and denial, hyper productivity, excessive creativity, or any other “Human” aspect of writing. Except for developing your own unique voice. Your literary voice is your bloody hand print, and AI should help you turn it into a murder mystery (for example), with evidence of YOU all over it. Whether that means you used it to help draft, to edit, to track plots, sobeit. But do NOT depend on an AI to make the story for you, because then you’re using an AI’s voice instead of the more worthy one: your own.

Claude has tried to emulate my literary voice. Does it sound like me? I’m not so sure. My thoughts are medium-form, not long and complicated, but not short and simple. I use fragments a lot. My mind can be fairly disjointed. I ramble. I terminate my discourses early out of anxiety over being heard. Claude doesn’t have those quirks. I’m glad it has made the attempt to sound like me, and I love that Claude learned not to use the em-dash a lot (I LOVE THE EM-DASH! AAAAAA), and has even given me pointers for w hen I want to write some non-fic.

Wonderful. At the very least, I’m glad I got over my fear of AI.

Ha!

xoxo
~ Shiri

Stream of Consciousness is an excellent narrative style to draft this one in, lol. Finna make this informal, like hitting me up over Discord. I wanted this to be a snazzy welcome post. Instead, my system fired back that it was time to talk about this pretentious title: The Rapture of Secrets. No, that’s not a Christian fic title.

Back in 2016, I published The Kingdom of Ecstasy. The Rapture of Secrets was the book to follow, and it began as an epic with a strong romantic arc between two pivotal characters. It was the beginning of the ending sequence. A 4th and final title, hopefully, was to come after TRoS. I was dissatisfied, following Lucein and Gnyovante, with Ashenzsi being OP, and Mokallai being like Tolkien’s Sauron: A force of evil you never see, but was threatening and present somehow. That reached 53k words, fat and ready for editing, when I scrapped it.

Version 2, the Dark Descent…

‘m glad I scrapped the initial draft. The story of TRos was intended top be apocalyptic. The romance was supposed to end in tragedy, a juicy end to revisit at a later date. So, I drafted a second version focusing on Laylen as Yathedqa, Mokallai as “the god of Destiny,” and the characters Amonthe, Schiirin, and So’yi. I made it to 36k,  a stout novella. Then, I scrapped that.

The 2nd version of TRoS dove into some dark and delicate themes. Particularly in Laylen’s past. She grew up in what has become a full blown Destiny cult. There are things she’s been as witness to, or victim of, that had influenced her character. The cult was not a good  thing to be a member of. These were the fanatical backers of the deified Mokallai. Those of the cult who defected or something like that got mutilated and transformed into Feyrcaai, grotesque, mountable human-beast things. Mostly men.

Naturally, to get into her character and access her motives, etc, it meant hinting at dark and disturbing things that to her may have been normalized because she grew up in a cult. The inspiration was based off of real life examples, such as Jonestown and Wayne Bent. It was intended to reflect on how we, as humans, endure nonsensical and absurd, traumatic and unfortunate events and behaviors, but accept these as normal on the basis of fanaticism.

Bit of a mouthful, ye? That’s what I wrote about, that’s what emerged. I’m a discovery writer; I never planned that.

Flipping the Narrative.

I clawed back on those heavy religious themes. This time was different, because while I maintained the Destiny Cult angle, I decided to dive into the backend of the story. Instead of focusing on the Meatbag cast (Laylen, Marqisian, etc), I moved forward with Dyiij, Einarriel, and Mokallai. There are new characters to introduce, Eyuwre being one of them.

I’ve been excited, peering ahead at some plot threads, to write arcs for these characters as they’ve been less explored than the others that I’m more familiar with. It’s wonderful to have something fresh to work with!

Speaking of “Fresh:” There are stories that happened between TKoE and TRoS. A lot of Bog Fodder was drafted and written. Lore from Marqisian’s adventures in the swamp appeared in TRoS. Especially noteworthy was the appearance of the Slaggan dialect, Knetann. That’s why they talk funny. I was eager to carry it over from Bog Fodder as an excellent garnish to confuse new readers with. I love the challenge of writing it. It deserves a good clunky drop!