This is today's substack post. Still tryign to figure out how to link everything up: A writer’s guide to getting more out of every session I used to think Claude was broken. Somewhere around message twenty-five, it would start getting weird. Shorter answers. Stranger suggestions. I’d be mid-scene, building real momentum, and suddenly my AI writing partner had the attention span of a golden retriever at a squirrel convention. A very expensive, very confused golden retriever. I blamed the tool. Classic mistake — right up there with blaming the pan when you burn the toast. Then I actually looked at what was happening under the hood. Every message you send, Claude re-reads the entire conversation from the top. Message one costs one unit of processing. Message ten costs fifty-five. Message thirty? Nine hundred and sixty-one. The cost doesn’t climb in a straight line — it compounds like a credit card you forgot existed. By the time you’re deep in a session, ninety-eight percent of your token budget is spent re-reading old context. Your actual question gets one and a half percent of the available brain. No wonder it starts writing your villain like a slightly confused golden retriever. Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you first start using AI for your writing: long conversations are expensive. Not just in the “you’ll hit a limit” sense, but in the “you’re getting progressively worse output” sense. You’re not unlocking some hidden depth by going deeper into a single chat. You’re usually making it worse — like stirring a bowl of soup until it’s just warm beige sadness. So. What do you actually do about it? 1. Start fresh more often than feels right. Writers hate this because it feels like losing progress. You’re not losing anything. Copy Claude’s last output — the scene it drafted, the outline it built, the character notes — and paste it as the opening context of a new chat. “Here’s where we left off. Now let’s do the next scene.” You carry the work forward without dragging the entire conversation history behind you like a suitcase full of every draft you’ve ever written. 2. Front-load everything that matters. Before you write a single creative prompt, drop in your story context: genre, tone, protagonist, where you are in the story, what you need this session to accomplish. One block, upfront. Then ask your question. Claude doesn’t need to be reminded ten messages in who your main character is if you told it clearly at the start. It’s not goldfish-brained. It’s just expensive. 3. Be specific about what you want back. “Write the next scene” is an open invitation for Claude to go wherever its circuits feel like going. “Write a 600-word scene where Mara confronts her sister in the kitchen, present tense, third person limited, ending on unresolved tension” gives it a target. Specific prompts get specific results. One attempt instead of three — which is also how you get better scenes and preserve your sanity simultaneously. 4. Phase your work across sessions. Don’t try to do research, outlining, character development, and drafting in one marathon chat. That’s how you end up with a conversation eating its own tail while you stare at your screen questioning your life choices. Research session. Outline session. Draft session. Each one short, purposeful, and cheap. The handoff is just copying the output from one phase into the opening of the next. 5. Save the heavy lifting for when you’re sharp. Your Claude budget and your own brain work exactly the same way. Complex creative work — building a plot structure, working through a character’s arc, drafting a difficult scene — costs more than simple tasks like reformatting your notes or generating a chapter summary. Do the hard stuff first. Push the light maintenance work to later in the day when you’re running on fumes and your best creative decision is choosing which snack to eat.

Agents Can Tell If You Used AI (Before You Query) - this video gives details about the 6 tells of AI writing: Tell #1 — Nonsensical metaphors AI writing often uses metaphors that sound poetic but don’t actually make sense when you think about them. 👉 Example: describing silence as “a thunderstorm folded into velvet” — sounds deep, but is meaningless. Tell #2 — Emotional flatlining The writing has no variation in emotional tone. 👉 Calm scenes and intense scenes feel the same, with no natural ups and downs. Tell #3 — Adjective & simile overload There are too many descriptive words and comparisons, making the writing feel forced and overworked. 👉 Nearly every noun is embellished and too many actions are dressed up in comparisons. Tell #4 — Obvious AI rhetorical patterns The text repeats recognisable sentence structures that try to sound dramatic. 👉 Common pattern: “It was not X, it was Y” or “not this, not that…” or “she did not just feel it, she became it” Tell #5 — Lack of setting & scene grounding The writing is heavy on dialogue but lacks physical details and sensory description. 👉 You don’t know where characters are, what they’re doing, or how the scene feels. Tell #6 — Overuse of the “rule of three” Sentences frequently come in dramatic triplets, making the writing feel artificial. 👉 Example: “furious, frightened, undone” or “cold, cruel, calculating”

I like K.M. Weiland's story structure database, I just checked out the entry for the movie Black Panther: https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/movie-storystructure/black-panther/ What caught my attention most was the comment, "I liked absolutely everything about this movie—theme, characters, setting—except the plot."

Just found this free course from Charlotte Duckworth on how to build your own Squarespace author website. https://www.charlotteduckworthstudio.com/build-own-author-website However the price for Squarespace after a free 14-day trial starts at $16/mo. Don't know if I'd want to pay monthly for a website just yet, so I may use Google Blogger with a purchased template and my own domain to start with. If you want the cheaper option I've used these two blogger templates before and they seem pretty good. $25 - https://themeforest.net/item/salbuta-blog-personal-responsive-blogger-theme/23549256 $23 - https://themeforest.net/item/dex-modern-blogportfolio-blogger-theme/22593918 $11.28 - .com domains from https://www.namecheap.com

But eventually I have to sleep. It has been a long day working on this.