Well, it's been a couple years since I updated this thing, huh?

The usual thing happened.  I was in a schedule of writing a little bit every day, but then one day I was really tired, and I didn't want to do my daily writing, so I skipped a day.  And then, once I had allowed myself to take a day's holiday, I thought why not take 2 days off?  After all, I had already broken my streak of daily writing, what's another day?  And then it was 3 days off.  And then 4.  Et cetera.

I was always meaning to get back into the habit of writing.  Once my normal life had settled down, and once I got caught up on my to-do list, and I finally had time again.  But of course, that time never comes.  You just have to decide to make time for it.  Now that a couple of years have gone by, I've decided I want to give this another try.  

So that's the first update--that I'm going to try to get back in the habit of working on this story again.

The second update is about AI.

If you follow me over on my main blog, you'll know that I've been making a lot of use of the Google Gemini Storybook feature in my English lessons.  

One day, out of curiosity, I decided to see if Gemini Storybook could illustrate chapters from this story.  So I fed it chapter 1.  My original hope was that Gemini Storybook would keep my text completely intact, and just create illustrations to go with it.  (Gemini Storybook is a bit unpredictable.  Sometimes when I feed it a prompt, it keeps my original text more or less intact.  Sometimes it modifies the text a lot.)

In this case, Gemini Storybook modified my original text a lot.  You can view the storybook at this link here, and the chat at this link.

Anyway, Gemini Storybook misunderstood a lot of the story--which is unsurprising.  It is just AI after all.

But I couldn't help but notice that despite getting some of the story elements wrong, the prose that it did produce was better than my own prose.  And there suddenly appeared a temptation to borrow some of the AI generated prose in order to improve my own writing.

I am, like most people of my generation, suspicious of AI, and worried of the impacts that the widespread use of AI will have on society.  (A subject that I have touched on many times over on my main blog--for example HERE.)  So I doubt that under normal circumstances I would ever have tried to modify my own writing with AI.  But in this case, I had only intended for AI to create illustrations, and AI had modified my writing by itself.  And now that this modified prose was sitting right in front of me, I thought it would be silly to discard it just because of... because of what?  Ethical considerations?  But what was the harm?  I'm not a published author.  I am writing this story simply as a hobby.  As far as I know, no one else is even reading it instead of me.  Who would be harmed if I used AI to improve some of my prose?

So, I've decided I'm going to experiment with using AI to modify my writing.

At the same time, because I don't want to give into AI brainrot, I'm not going to give over the reins to AI entirely.  I will still write the first draft myself, and then only use AI to improve my writing once I've reached the limits of my own abilities.  And just for the sake of transparency, I will make it clear on this blog which versions of the story are written entirely by me, and which ones include modification by AI.

We'll see how this goes.

Update March 30, 2026

[As promised, here is Chapter 1 again, but this time time with some additions that come curtesy of Gemini Storybook.  

...although, actually, as it turns out, in the end I borrowed very little from the Gemini Storybook version.  Most of what Gemini Storybook wrote was just different enough from my story that the sentences didn't fit into my version.  Of the sentences that I could steal, upon closer inspection, I decided that maybe they weren't all that great after all.  They were a bit over-written--too heavy on adjectives, and unnatural words.  In the end, I decided that in most cases, it would not be an improvement to import the Gemini Storybook version.  (Which is not to say that there aren't flaws in my prose, just to say that upon closer inspection, having Gemini Storybook rewrite it was not the quick fix that I thought it would be.)

To the extent that this version differs from my earlier version of Chapter 1, most of that it just plain old-fashioned human editing.  Upon rereading, I noticed that there were some bad sentences, and I revised them slightly.

Nevertheless, I did steal a couple of sentences from the Gemini Storybook version, and my philosophy is that if you're going to have AI assist with your writing at all, even a couple sentences, you should disclose it.  So I'm adding a tag here for "contains AI additions".  

I'll continue doing this with the other chapters. (If for no other reason then that this process gives me a good excuse to review my earlier chapters as I prepare to get back into the habit of daily writing.)  But I guess at this point I won't expect Gemini Storybook to provide me with any massive revisions.]