Over the past year, the development of generative AI has impacted the literary world significantly, though its influence has been neither surprising nor drastically different from any other period of tool adoption in the creative process.
After thorough testing and usage, we’ve reached two key conclusions:
- Guiding AI software through prompts and editing the output can sometimes be more time-consuming than writing the story yourself.
- Utilizing AI as an advanced research tool and a sounding board for ideas can enhance the joy and satisfaction of the writing process.
While there are writing tools that fully leverage AI, we believe it’s not necessary for us to emulate their approach. This stance is shaped by my own writing process, the experiences of my friends, and feedback from the Asengana writing community.
1. Introducing the Asengana Research Assistant
The Asengana Research Assistant, powered by Chat GPT, offers a monthly allocation of free tokens to facilitate your research needs. Subscribers receive 100,000 tokens (about 65,000 words) each month, renewed on the first day of the month. Your token count covers both the prompt you input (up to 640 words) and the response generated (up to 2,500 words).
It’s important to remember that this tool is not designed to write your book for you. Its main purpose is to speed up research and allow you to easily save your findings as Working Notes. These Working Notes are saved and editable just like standard Research Notes. Like any generative AI, it has its limitations, including occasionally providing incorrect answers – a trait shared with traditional search engines. Ultimately, it’s just a tool. We encourage you to test it, enjoy its benefits, and share your feedback with us.
2. Other updates
We did a lot of incremental and backend updates to the platform reaching a stage where further enhancements now necessitate the development of an entirely new version. Excitingly, this major upgrade is also on the horizon.
A short list:
- We’ve added a Beat structure page which allows for early planning.
- Integration of one page editing for the Chapter list page. Now chapters and scenes can be edit in an overlay screen without leaving the page.
- Improved process of duplicating projects when you need to reuse characters and location for another book in the same series.
- Editor improvements.
3. Asengana community spotlight
With this newsletter we’re also starting to promote writers from our community and their published work.
Today we will introduce you to Costi Gurgu.
Costi’s fiction has appeared in Canada, the United States, and Europe. He has sold 6 books and over 80 stories for which he has won 27 awards.
Green Corrosion “Richly imagined post-apocalypse of mutations, humanity, and wild action.“ – BookLife Review |
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Servitude “A disturbingly realistic dystopian future that will get under readers’ skin in all the best ways.“ – BookLife Review |
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