One Pole At A Time Released and Part III of PWA and AutoCrit

First up, One Pole At A Time is released.

Depending on how quickly the various retailers change the price following my request, you may be able to score a copy for $.99, but I wouldn’t count on it.

The pitfalls of not being prescient.

The fake lord is in Lord Vang’s prison, the rebellion is over. At the least, Tanial, Falcon Queen, believes the threat of uprisings has ended.
The Premier makes good on his promise to send rénmen with the practical knowledge building the telegraph will need, and Aedyt, self-appointed ambassador to the Consolidated States, returns from Zūzhōu City accompanying the first four of the experienced rénmen.
The rén engineer will choose a factory or two to draw wire and fabricate tools, keys and sounders for the system; the woman seeks small stature bodynoli to climb the poles and string the wires. Nimah and Tanial direct the final two to survey the telegraph’s first route, between Kongens By and Slot Minear.
The uprisings foiled in Slot Minear are not the only actions Free the Experiment takes; the surveyors find more than trees and suitable paths.

The surprise is the one that leads the way. Not only to the Queen.

One Pole At A Time is the tenth book in the Dragons Run My Life series, continuing the epic sweep of Tanial’s adventures.

Order at
Amazon  Books2Read (epub3)  Paperback (Amazon)

AutoCrit and ProWritingAid Part III

We looked at starting a PWA session; now we’ll do the same for AutoCrit.

When you first open AC, you’ll have a screen like this, offering the chance to Upload a file (.docx, .rtf, .txt), or to begin in AC’s editor (Blank Document), using it as your word processor. I’ve not tried the Quick Copy & Paste option, so knock yourself out.
I haven’t tried a .docx file (native Word) because I would never make one in the normal course of events. I would guess it’s handled perfectly, since my expectation is that most of the files uploaded are Word files.
My brief experience with .txt is you’re better off using .docx or .rtf.
I use rtf files because as I said earlier, I make an rtf file in my normal work flow.

Upload your file and you should see something akin to this. This is AC’s Editor, where you’ll make any changes. Don’t forget, unless your work flow allows you to bring the edited file back, you’ll need to make the same changes in your master document.

At the top is the file name and Chapter Number (Preamble in my case, since the cursor is above the Chapter 1 line). Also, words added and deleted today, and the total word count for the document. I selected Fantasy as the genre to compare with, so that’s flagged just below the word count. All the familiar editing widgets are across the top of the workspace, and a variety of useful icons trail down the right sidebar. Those include Save, Export, Find, and other things that I don’t use often enough to recall. drift your cursor over them and the name highlights.

A note: AC has apparently done a deal with Grammarly; their Spelling and Grammar icon is a big G, and you end up in Grammarly’s site. Which is fine, especially if you’re already paying for Grammarly. I’m not, so I have no more to say about that.

Assuming you’ve uploaded a document you want to analyze, click Analysis, right below the document title, and the Analysis menu opens.

Don’t rush ahead (unless you want to, of course!), but my path is, maybe not structured any better, but…
I click on Summary Report.

The Report comes up. The first s/s isn’t real interesting, but it didn’t fit with the second one, which does have information.

This shows the word count again, and the title along with icons for information and printing. The info takes you to an AC web page that explains what you see in the report, with a warning that none of this is to be taken as a qualitative judgement of your writing. Printing does the usual, though check your page settings before you waste a bunch of paper. I recommend making pdf files until you get something that serves your needs.

Scroll down and you’ll get to the interesting stuff.

I was startled the first time, seeing an overall score rated as : “Amazing! This is an excellent overall score, in line with bestseller expectations.” Every piece of writing I’ve run through AutoCrit save one (an incomplete episodic mess dating from forty years ago) has scored higher than 80 over all. The one that didn’t still got 79.8. So, it’s hard to see that in perspective. Disclaimer: I’m a best-seller nowhere! Anyway, don’t forget,

“The first thing to keep in mind about AutoCrit’s scoring is that it is not a qualitative judgment of your writing.” (Emphasis AutoCrit’s). 

Scroll a line or two and the first breakdown, Pacing and Momentum appears.

 

YMMV, of course. You can run specific reports here by clicking Run Report. I run from the top-level menu, but the results are the same.

The one I’m interested in, Repetition, looks like this.

Here they provide a graphical representation of the number of repeats in your ms and the number in the baseline you’ve chosen, Fantasy, in my case. Also a Word Cloud chart, which in my case confirms that the most references (except aye and na⁠—yes and no) are character names. Without tallying the specific numbers, the relative sizes appear consistent: Elin, then Tanial, Fawn, Aedyt, Lotus,  and so forth. Since there are two Queens, that size seems reasonable. Ween (think) and mayhap (maybe) probably come in higher than some authorities would like, but there’s no translation that I’ve found, so far as AC is concerned (and PWA, too, to be clear), they are just random words.

Back at the Summary s/s, Image 05, the five breakdowns listed are also listed at the top of the Editor screen (Image 02) and the Analysis Menu (Image 03). Return to AC’s editor screen (Close the Summary document with the X at the top right.) and then click the topic you want to delve into. It comes up in the right side bar of the Editor screen. You can check the issues AC found and edit them directly in the text. Make sure, if the document you’re editing in AC isn’t in your workflow, that you mirror any changes in the workflow document.

Back at the Analysis screen, click Fiction Analysis. If you have chapters that exceed 10,000 words, you’ll see the next display.

Once you’ve wrangled the word counts into submission, click Fiction Analysis again, and this or similar should appear.

In the left sidebar, all your chapters are listed by title, with word count as AC counts. Below the chapters list are the topics AC will review. If there’s a specific problem you’re considering, you can select it. Conversely, if one is something you don’t have concern for, deselect it. Experience says to me that each chapter takes less than a minute to run. I haven’t found a way to run them all at once, and wasn’t bothered enough to look more than a couple minutes.

Update: While I chose to go chapter by chapter for this analysis, clicking Analyze All Chapters should provide equivalent results, albeit taking several minutes (three plus in my case) instead of the twenty to forty seconds the individual chapters required. Not a significant penalty.

To actually run the analysis, see one of the next screens.

Where the ugly arrowhead points in Image 10, click the refresh (double arrow in circle) icon to start Chapter One’s analysis. When you’re ready, do the same for Chapter Two, and so on. If you want to dig deeper in a specific topic, click the refresh icon for that topic. My experience, AC tends to be less accurate as you ask for more detail. Don’t believe everything you read.

The second s/s reflects what I see today (Nice to know they're making changes under our feet!), and I ran the Chapter Analysis once before I made the s/s, so the former analysis is there. That's the main difference.


If you click Fiction Analysis (as in my screenshot above) or Overall (as it apparently now shows), before you do the Chapter analysis, you receive the warning, Don’t Do That.

Once you’ve done the Chapter Analysis, select Overall again, and click the refresh icon adjacent to Overall to start the process. This will take a couple minutes also. When complete, you’ll be able to read AC’s take on your Premise, Conflict-throughlines, Improvements, Plot thread tracking, Theme analysis and Genre Conformity.

Next time, some thoughts on the suggestions I’ve received from PWA and AC. Because spoilers aren’t a bad thing when trying to help, I’ll say, tl;dr, I don’t accept very many of either packages’ suggestions. Neither has an acceptable (to me) False-alarm rate (or False-positive, if that’s how you think of it). Why use them? Because they point out things that I don’t think of unless prompted, and that makes the lost time worthwhile. Again I say, YMMV. Only you can say what helps you, and how much it does.

Comments always welcome.

One Pole At A Time and Part II of PWA and AutoCrit

First up, One Pole At A Time is available for pre-order.

This story is the closest to a stand-alone entry in the Dragons Run My World universe, so for the pre-order period, until April first, I chose to offer the e-book at $0.99 everywhere. The paperback is also included, but it’s priced at $9.99, about as low as I can price it.

The Blurb for One Pole At A Time

The pitfalls of not being prescient.

The fake lord is in Lord Vang’s prison, the rebellion is over. At the least, Tanial, Falcon Queen, believes the threat of uprisings has ended.

The Premier makes good on his promise to send rénmen with the practical knowledge building the telegraph will need, and Aedyt, self-appointed ambassador to the Consolidated States, returns from Zūzhōu City accompanying the first four of the experienced rénmen.

The rén engineer will choose a factory or two to draw wire and fabricate tools, keys and sounders for the system; the woman seeks small stature bodynoli to climb the poles and string the wires. Nimah and Tanial direct the final two to survey the telegraph’s first route, between Kongens By and Slot Minear.
 

The uprisings foiled in Slot Minear are not the only actions Free the Experiment takes; the surveyors find more than trees and suitable paths.

The surprise is the one that leads the way. Not only to the Queen.

One Pole At A Time is the tenth book in the Dragons Run My Life series, continuing the epic sweep of Tanial’s adventures.

Pre-order at
Amazon  Books2Read (epub3)  Paperback (Amazon)

AutoCrit and ProWritingAid Part II

Wherein we look at the interface each of these tools provide. Again, colored by my experiences and specific requirements.

PWA

Once you load a project, you have a screen like this. I’m using the desktop version of PWA.

Don’t forget, I work in Scrivener, and the whole project is loaded. The highlit entry, “12 28 Jasel Launch” is selected, so that’s the one PWA will work on. I cut it off, but in the bottom status line, the word count: 917 and the character count: 4080, are also given.
Remember I said large chunks of text bring a warning. Here it is,

 The highlight “Vest Lindebalgh” has, based on the status bar, 10,041 words and 43,647 characters, which exceeds the 10,000 word suggested limit. My experience is that analysis of the text chunk proceeds, but the time grows. I haven’t done much with overlarge chunks, so I can’t say if the app crashes or otherwise fails with those larger chunks.

Back to the first figure; click Reports, center top.

 These are some of the reports PWA offers. The  (…) More Reports button provides access to another sixteen reports. Some of those are included in others, and some are less frequently used, I guess, in PWA’s opinion.

All, however, are included in the Summary report, to the left of the Reports bar. Click that.

 

 Kind of self-explanatory, yeah? This s/s is the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Scroll down through it for top level readings on the main topics, and below that, details where they think it useful. Printing it will produce (in my specific case) a fifteen or sixteen page document, the top of which looks like this.

Scrolling down either the Summary report screen or the printed version, you may see something like this: the detail of a thing they flag as a problem.

You are shown the two Grammar errors they’ve flagged and why, and then two spelling errors. I may or may not agree with the two Grammar suggestion, but the Spelling suggestions are spot on: Frea is a name not yet added to the dictionary, and “diety” is just wrong.

These are information only, go back to the full Report bar and select the “ABC Grammar” icon; the corrections can be made there. We’ll visit that later.

First, AutoCrit deserves a look. That will be next time. I'm worn out trying to get Blogger to put images where I want them.

Comments are welcome,  especially if I've been unclear or you think more information would be helpful.

Ruling, and Part I of PWA and AutoCrit

 First, it’s release day for Ruling, the ninth book in the Dragons Run My Life series.

 

Click the link you like to acquire a copy.

Buy at Amazon   Books2Read (epub3)    or Print (Amazon)

One Pole At A Time is coming along nicely, and if all goes to plan, it will be available for pre-order just after Ruling’s release, and released on April first.

AutoCrit and ProWritingAid Part I

If you're not interested in the nuts and bolts of editing, feel free to click away to whatever pursuits are important to you. Otherwise…

I almost wrote "versus" in the title and heading, but that's not really true. There are comparisons, but not in the sense of choosing one over the other. As you'll see, I use both; this may explain why I make my choices. YMMV.

These are two software attempts to ease the writer’s editing tasks, kind of taking the middle ground between the writer’s first read-thru after typing The End, and the bevy of first readers, beta readers, editors of all descriptions (and prices) that proceed the release to Amazon or to one of its competitors, or if you’re into self-inflicted pain, before you begin sending your query letters to agents for representation.

As I said last week, these are software, not a magic bullet, though for the prices they charge, you might be forgiven for thinking different. A human with a mind that remembers that a description from the beginning of your work probably still applies as you approach the climax, for example.

Let me digress to say how I do things, being fully aware that my techniques shouldn’t be applicable to any other person. This is more so you can understand where my decisions rise, and why I might complain about some things and not others. I use Scrivener as my main writing tool. Since I distribute through Amazon’s KDP for Kindle e-books and POD paperbacks, and Draft2Digital for the wide world of epub3 compatible reading device e-books, in Scrivener I use different Front and Back Matter to differentiate the three output files. The difference between Amazon and D2D e-books is primarily the sales links allowed in each. For Print, the links are replaced by qr codes. I produce an rtf file which Nesus Writer Pro then tweaks before creating a pdf file to go to the Zon.

PWA accepts as input my Scrivener project, as is. With multiple trials, Scrivener has never failed to open the file that PWA produces, and the changes are accurately reflected. There are interesting anomalies in PWA’s display of text, but they don’t affect the final version.

AC accepts rtf files (and a couple others: [MS Word(.docx), rich text (.rtf) or plain text (.txt)]), but I’ve not tried any but the rtf, since it’s already in my work flow.

Here I’ll say a word about versions. I’m sure you have a way to keep track of where you are, so I won’t tell you it’s important that you do. But because (unlike PWA) I can’t easily bring the AC output file back into Scrivener, when I make a change to the text in AC’s editor, I have to make the same change in my Scrivener source file. It’s a pain, but okay. Keep track of the files you use for anything, especially in the case where the file is an off-shoot.

I said last week that they both work on chunks of your manuscript, rather than the whole thing. I need to recant a little.

PWA might work on the whole of a 50-150k-word ms, but it provides a dire warning message for any document bigger than about 10k-words. You’ll find it faster, it says, to analyze smaller sections of the document. As result, I haven’t tried to run over the whole of one of my books.

AC, on the other hand, won’t analyze a slab of text more than 20k-words. Less than that and for the Story Analysis and Fiction Analysis functions, the piece is considered a short story. I’ve done little with short fiction, and have no gleaming insights. 

For files of book length⁠—I’ve used between 70 and 100 k-words⁠—for the Story Analysis and Fiction Analysis tools, the work must be chapterized. What that means to me as a user: I have to check that I have breaks in the text (which I do, that’s not an issue), that the breaks are called “Chapter” (this was a minor aggravation, requiring me to change my source file, more later) and then check each of them is less than the limit (this required me to add three or four pseudo-chapters (named Chapter thus and so, of course) that I then had to remember to remove at the end of the exercise.

Their help video points out that you don’t have to have chapters in the text, and if you do but they’re not named “Chapter”, that’s okay, because you can go through the ms, either finding what you did call your chapters (you did call them something, right?) or just blocking it off in 5-10 k-word chunks. Like I said, I decided it was less effort to fork the source file and make one special for the AC experience.

Turns out that’s necessary but not sufficient. I still had to take my chapterized ms and after inputting it, tell AutoCrit that there are chapters and they are called chapter, so it can find them. That’s done by clicking a button called Find Chapters (I think; I don’t have it open right now) and it does that, lickety-split. You’ll get a warning if one or more chunks exceed the limit; you have to go back and add chapters, or exercise the procedure I mentioned just above.

That’s what I was thinking of when I made my blanket statement. For the Story Analysis and Fiction Analysis tools, the chapterization is required.

However, all the other checks are done on the complete ms. This is good and bad.

Part II - the information and displays provided by the software comes next. It takes several screenshots to convey, so, shortly.

Comments always welcome, especially if I’ve been unclear (as if!).

Not What I Promised

Rather than write a post about ProWritingAid and AutoCrit and their differences and similarities, I spent the time using them both to revise One Pole At A Time, the book due for release on April first.

One top-level comment: both of these tools work primarily on chunks of your manuscript rather than the whole thing at once. You will need a human editor or reader to detect problems in the overall story.

It's not what I hoped for; I'll continue to work on the comparison and publish it as soon as I can, likely in pieces.

I hope your days and weeks are going well as the seasons move along. Comments welcome, as always.

A Couple Things for a Monday

 First, Happy Read an Ebook Week! 

To help you find a book to celebrate, you can find my entire collection FREE at @Smashwords from March 3-9. Find my books and many more at https://smashwords.com/shelves/promos #ebookweek24 #Smashwords Both series starters and anything in between, though series enders have not yet been published. Sorry, not sorry!

Second, Today, at Amazon and wide,

We Are Not That Girl is available.

Buy it at Amazon    Books2Read (epub3)     Paperback (Amazon)

As mentioned above, at Smashwords, it’s free until March 9 in their Read an Ebook promotion, so go and check it out.

Next, the ninth book of Dragons Run My Life, Ruling, will go up for preorder by Friday the 9th and will release on Monday March 18th, as promised earlier. Links for that will be available by Friday.

The last of the books I have ready, One Pole At A Time, will be available for preorder by March 22, and then released on April first.

Speaking of being ready, two Rebecca Jamse Thrillers books, Hacked! and The Girl In The Bag, will follow One Pole in April. Hacked! on April 15 (at least it’s not Tax Day here in Massachusetts), and then one week later for the Girl In The Bag.

I’m reading with dismay and uncomfortable voyeuristic interest about the conflict in Israel, and I’ve about decided before I can release Girl In The Bag, I’ll have to rewrite the couple of scenes set in June, 2024 which take place in Tel Aviv and traveling to Syria via Lebanon. Fortunately, Beckie and Ian are on relatively good terms with the IDF.

I’ve been using both ProWritingAid and AutoCrit to prepare manuscripts for release. Next week, I’ll share some thoughts about both of them, reflecting the way I use them. I hope it will have some utility to you, but, maybe, maybe not. Or as they used to say, YMMV.

Comments welcome.

Coming up: Happy Read an Ebook Week! And More.

 

Happy Read an Ebook Week! Don’t miss the massive celebratory sale going on next week @Smashwords! There are deep discounts on thousands of books, but only between March 4 and March 9. Check it out at Smashwords Promo! #ebookweek24 #Smashwords
 

So, obviously Smashwords, the book distributer, is running a sale from March 4 through the 9th. Authors or publishers choose what discount (ranging from 25% off to free) will apply to their books. I signed up to allow all my books to be free, and I’m waiting to see if that works. More next week. Whether or not, go and see what you might like!

As expected, We Are Not That Girl came together pretty quickly, and it’s available for preorder now, with the release on March 4, as I said in an earlier post.

Preorder at Amazon        Books2Read        in Paperback (Amazon)

Today, the plan is to release the last two Dragons Run My Life books at two week intervals, so Ruling on March 18th and then One Pole At A Time on April Fool’s Day. While the two following those have been written, I fear they’ll need more work before showing their public appearances. Also, I need to make some decisions affecting the future.

The thrillers, Rebecca Jamse’s stories, have two more mostly written. Some may recall my earlier comment about the conflict between Israel and Hamas interfering with the story in The Girl in the Bag; it is no less true now. Hazards of writing in a largely true-to-life setting into the future. Oh, well.

Part of the issue with the novella that precedes The Girl in the Bag is that it needs substantial rewriting, and that’s something that I’ve never been able to do. Once I’ve written something, it’s gone. So if I can’t overcome that, I’ll have to provide the backstory for the several characters some other way. My problem, not yours, unless you’re anxious to read about Síne, Larysa and Tarquin.

Comments and questions welcome, as always!