When I’m in the final editing stages, I put the document into Word and use the Read Aloud feature to listen to each sentence. I’m realizing maybe I should do that earlier in the process with future books because listening is when the problems become clearest to me.

So, last week, when I started listening to each chapter, I realized the beginning of chapter 2 was dragging but also broken. I remembered something Savannah Gilbo said on her Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast: YA readers want to stay in the action. And I also remembered a core tenet of the StoryGrid method (more on that in the analysis).

When I listened to chapter 2, I realized I had set it up as Maddie reflecting on her current circumstances, not reacting to them. Chapter 2 is her opening for book 2, so it felt necessary for her to do some recap, but probably never the right answer to do that in a flashback. Enough forensics, I’ll let you read the original and the revised along with the analysis.

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Here’s the specifics:

Original opening for chapter 2:

Conditioning started at dawn.
Two faces leaned over Maddie’s bed, one with more wrinkles than the other. A woman, Maddie guessed late 40s. The nametag clipped to the pocket of her crisp white lab coat read: Dr. Rachel Hannover, Lead Researcher. The other face belonged to someone much younger, couldn’t have been much older than herself. Maddie sat up and pulled her shirt straight. Paul Jenson, Lab Assistant. He raised a sculpted eyebrow as she wiped drool from her cheek.
Disarmingly attractive.
He must not have done well in school, or his family had no connections. That Sardeth’s way of thinking, always measuring people, never accepting, but in this world, starting as a lab assistant meant a tough life. She suddenly remembered Enzo’s ruffled curls and easy smile and squeezed her eyes tight to hold on to it, but Dr. Hannover interrupted.
Up. We won’t fall behind schedule.
The assistant tossed some clothes onto the bed.

His name is Paul. Maddie picked up the white t-shirt with a Transcendia logo plastered on the front. A forbidding single T. So much pain trapped behind a symbol. Maddie pushed aside the rage building and managed a tight smile. “Privacy?” Before the word was out of her mouth, Paul headed for the door.
Dr. Hannover pursed her thin lips. “Three minutes.”
On the other side of the glass wall, the doctor tapped her foot. She and Paul kept their backs turned to the glass. Maddie pulled the navy sweatpants and t-shirt under the covers and wrestled the sheets to get dressed. She hadn’t let herself wonder what lay beyond the glass box, out of reach. The judge ordered her here for two years. Alone. Time to think about everything she could have done differently. Time to wonder who would be dead when she got out.

But she’d only been stewing here for a few months, and now Sardeth worked out a new deal with the judge. If she did what Sardeth said, she could join her mother on Mars. And Sardeth said, conditioning. The word left Maddie feeling empty. Like he’d already taken something precious, but she didn’t know what yet.*

Maddie quickly washed her face and brushed her teeth in the small bathroom in the corner of the glass cube. She’d do anything to get to Mars and find her mother. What did these people have planned? She ran a brush through her hair. Timing her laps? Her legs ached to pump pedals. Maybe they had a stationary bike. She yanked her hair back into a low ponytail. Whatever conditioning meant, it had to be better than rotting away in this tiny box.

She studied her reflection as she smoothed her hair. The girl staring out of the mirror looked so much like the one who had believed if she just worked harder than anyone else, she’d make it to her mom on the colony.

That girl had been so proud to wear the Mars Ascendance Academy uniform.

That girl had been dangerously naïve.

Analysis

The biggest issue is that Maddie was missing a crisis decision. I should have known better. My work with StoryGrid showed me that the crisis decision (and having it happen on page) is critical for every scene, especially an early one. And I had robbed Maddie of hers. That wasn’t the only problem. The prose also held the reader at arm’s length because she was reflecting on action that happened off-page. I had rewritten this scene a few times before, but her earliest scenes kept coming out this way. I’m not sure why, but listening to the chapter finally made it click for me.

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Revised opening for Chapter 2:

Two faces leaned over Maddie’s bed, one with more wrinkles than the other.
“I don’t like to fall behind schedule.” A woman in her late 40s, with a sharp scowl, tapped her watch. “We need to prep for the conditioning.”
“Conditioning?” Maddie sat up and straightened her shirt.
The woman’s scowl deepened. “I expected you to be ready.”
“For what?” Maddie asked, still bleary-eyed.” Maybe she hasn’t heard about the judge’s decision.” The young man offered. He couldn’t have been much older than she was. His name tag hung from a Transcendia lanyard: Paul Jenson, Lab Assistant.
Disarmingly attractive
He raised a sculpted eyebrow as she wiped drool from her cheek.
”What decision?” Maddie asked.
The woman tapped her fingers against her tablet. “Did Transcendia’s lawyers come to see you yesterday?”
Maddie tried to remember the day before, but it melded in with all the others. She had sat in this glass cage alone. “No one came except the waiter.”
The woman’s ID card swung out of her lab coat. Dr. Rachel Hannover, Lead Researcher. “Incompetent.” She fumed. “Here are the terms: act as a willing participant in Transcendia’s research, and you’ll be released from house arrest. Mr. Sardeth has agreed to reunite you with your mother on Mars.” She offered a strained smile that may have been a genuine effort.
Augustus Sardeth is a murderer.
On the last day of her trial, Maddie had shouted those words until her throat ached. She’d kept shouting while the bailiff carried her out in handcuffs. Why would he do anything to help her now? She desperately wanted to be reunited with her mother, but Vivien’s whereabouts were unknown on Mars. This sounded like a trap.
”What is the research?”
”To develop a regimen that will allow people to adapt more quickly to the Martian environment once they relocate.”
”Like teaching me to breathe 96% carbon dioxide?”
Dr. Hannover pursed her lips. “Obviously not. We’re talking about better adjusting to the higher radiation and extreme temperatures.” The doctor tapped the tablet again. “There are a lot of other things I could be doing right now. If you’d rather spend your two-year term in this room, just say the word, and we’ll leave. Otherwise, please sign here.”
She thrust the tablet at Maddie, who scrolled through pages of fine print. A few words caught her eye. “This says I’ll have to undergo daily treatments.”
”That’s the conditioning.” Dr. Hannover looked at her watch. “We should have started the prep by now.”
”How many others are part of the study?” Maddie asked.
Dr. Hannover sucked in a sharp breath. “Mr. Sardeth has determined that at this time you are the only suitable candidate.”
That seemed like a hard sentence for this researcher to utter, but Maddie expected it. This was about power, control, but maybe something else. If Sardeth wanted to kill her, he could quietly gas her in her cell and call it a malfunction of the new facility or poison her through the daily meals. No, her uncle was up to something very different, and she needed to find out what.*
”Sorry to keep you waiting.” Maddie signed on the dotted line with a flourish.

Analysis

Now Maddie has a on page decision. Agree to the trials or not. Before, that decision wasn’t even hers to make (at least not actively).

Here’s something else for us to consider: If your character knows something important before the scene starts, ask yourself — is there a version where she finds out *during* the scene instead?

Does the revised version pull you in? Was this helpful for you? I’d love to know.

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The edit math or Colony Exposed (my current WIP) tells me that I have 49.5 hours of editing left. I can say that because I am at the final final stage of listening to the manuscript, making the final line edits and grammar fixes. With today’s pace, it took me 1.5 hours per scene. That is not fast. One might even say that it is slow. But that’s ok because I’m also drastically improving the writing, and I continue to tell myself I have all the time in the world. I do. I have all the time I need to finish this manuscript. And so do you. You have all the time you need to complete your project. BUT, I am also telling myself that this book will be in my ARC readers hands by the end of June. Because, I have all the time I need to write this book, BUT I also need a deadline, or it will never be finished.

I saw a post about a study where the researchers made a man repeat the phrase “I am too late” over and over, and after a few days, his organs began to shut down. That may be bullshit, but it doesn’t really matter. The words we tell ourselves do matter. So, tell yourself that you have all the time you need to do the hard thing that you want to do, and then also give yourself a deadline.

That’s where I’m at, swinging in the middle of the pendulum.

If sci-fi thrillers set in a Mars Colony with cyborgs sounds like your jam, well then, hit me up if you’d like to be an ARC reader.

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My sister has been a copywriter for more than a decade. She’s great at it and she’s built a career for herself. She also just lost a major client because they ran a piece she wrote through an “AI Detector” and decided the piece was written by AI.

She doesn’t know I’m writing this, but I’m pissed. If you hate AI, fine. If you love, AI, fine. But I need us all to agree that AI detectors are bullshit. One program trying to guess whether a piece of writing was written by a human or another program is just that—guessing —and no one should base a business decision on a guess, educated or otherwise.

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All Writers Need Mia Ballard to Sue

If you’ve just come back from a trip to the moon, then I will catch you up. Mia Ballard just had her contract with Hachette terminated after the NY Times published an article alleging that her book, SHY GIRL, was written (at least in part) by AI. The NY Times doesn’t have proof that her book was written by AI. Hachette doesn’t have proof that her book was written by AI. Ballard says she did not use AI to write her book. But they canceled her contract based on a rumor, and that’s why she should sue.

All writers should want her to sue. Because if a contract isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, then what is the point of going through all the work of querying, getting an agent, and getting excited when you finally get a deal, if all it takes is for someone, anyone, to put your book through an AI detector that spits out a probability guess and poof it’s all gone.

Here’s why the detectors are 100% bullshit

(At least right now, maybe one day they won’t be). LLMs were trained on good writing: marketing material, novels- classics and contemporary. We all know that. So, if your writing includes the hallmarks of “good writing,” it will be flagged with a probability measure for AI-generation.

A quick Google search of how AI detectors work gave me an AI-generated definition from CoPilot. (And yes, I assume they are not all the same and some are more sophisticated, but if any of them use the measures CoPilot says, then they are garbage).

Co-Pilot explains that detectors measure Perplexity in sentences and Burstiness (WTF?), which refers to variation in sentence length and structure.

Right away, it says it’s looking for typos. So, if you have a typo-free piece, that counts against you. But I hope you’re sitting down for the Perplexity examples, because they are truly perplexing.

This is straight from Co-Pilot:

Can we pause for a moment to take in that the most “human” sounding option here is complete nonsense? And also, the low and medium perplexity versions have completely different meanings. It is 100% valid for a human to write “I couldn’t get to sleep last night,” and it’s not the same as talking about last summer, and it has nothing to do with the word salad of the last option.

Does this mean every Hemingway novel would be flagged as over 80% probability that it was written by AI? Very possibly, but I’m not going to waste my time checking.

It is so unbelievably stupid for anyone to make a business decision based on this nonsense that it makes me want to run screaming into the woods. Literally, my pressure is up.

Here’s my position: If the article taught me something, great. If I liked the book, great. I’m not going back to the author to grill them on their process, and I’m certainly not going to put their writing through some bullshit AI detector that really only detects cogent writing.

Somebody get Mia a lawyer.

Disclosure: This article was 100% human-written, with grammar assistance from Grammarly, which 100% uses AI, and good for them.

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