At 54 years old, I finally and whole heartedly embraced the author in me that I should have been since a teen in the 1980’s. But hey: “Better late than never!” as they say…

It is Christmas of 2025 as I write this, and I am a little over 2 months into working on my first ever manuscript. In that time, I’ve progressed from having walls of text as paragraphs, to knowing how to use Em Dashes, when to start a new paragraph of dialogue, and so much more, including something simple as changing the layout of my word processor (LibreOffice Writer) to standard book format (“5.5×8 trim” as they call it).

Anyway, I asked AI (Google Gemini) to give me a tweet-sized blurb about what it thinks of my book thus far without spoiling anything:

“An unpredictable, unconventional journey. Captures the spirit of Pratchett & Adams with a cosmic Lovecraftian vibe and a personal core.”

And the funniest part is, I’ve never read any Pratchett! LOL! I barely know about his book Discworld which I think involves a flat earth on a turtle’s back? That’s it. That’s all I know. No offense to the author.

This… thing… has gone from being a simple 100 page or so collection of my unpublished writings from the early 2000’s, to… well I can barely say without spoiling… something just… bigger. It is now more reader-oriented than just “here’s a little about me, and here’s my writings from 20 years ago”.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my…. experiment… ;)

P.S. And yes, I use AI, but not to help me write or come up with ideas. It’s merely a thesaurus/research assistant/writing guide tool thing.