Personal Story With A Soundtrack

Dear Reader, it´s been a while since I wrote you a personal story with a soundtrack. The fact that I am back means there are milestones to talk about.

This world is a crazy place.
Fifteen years ago I started a novel.
Fifteen years later I will start part II.

Did it get published?

Nope.
Of Course Not.
What Did I Think?
Did I Think It Was Easy?
That I Was God's Gift To The Readers?

I published it myself, as a telenovel blog. That allowed me to overtime clean it up...a bit.

That was needed, to be honest. What a mess.

Yes, my work was a mess

I was always told that I wrote nice stuff.
Teachers at every age were a fan, even when I studied.
Hence, I thought I could do it.
I had written some short stories so why not write a book?

Write A Book

When I ended up in the South of Spain with only a part-time job I spent at least an hour a day writing. And in a year it was done.

I had an idea of how I wanted it to read, mixing classic with modern, and ending up with what I thought was my style.

I was looking for a certain sound, a certain flow.
What I did not look at was in what tense I was writing. Which caused a large part of the story to end up in the past tense, but mixed with the present without any logic.

The storyline was quite okay, but looking back it was a horrible read. I dived in and went down the rabbit hole with little experience writing longer stories and even less experience reviewing my work.

I Lost It All

The computer on which the story was written crashed. It was a very old one, but I lost every word I typed. My first novel, gone!

That was just to add some drama to this story because I did have a printed version.

Thanks to what was modern technology back then you can make a picture of a page and then convert that picture into a Word doc. I had to do that for all 267 pages.

I did the work, converted them all, and then turned those pages into blog posts, which I would post on a Dutch website as this was all written in Dutch.
I cleaned up the story a bit, but I did not rewrite it in the present tense.

All That Effort In A Story That Nobody Reads

The whole move from paper to digital including headers, artwork, and intros took me a lot of time.

Rewriting in the present tense was just too much work I wanted to have it stored online first. Maybe one day.....

That whole from paper to zeros and ones took me about a year and ended up being 202 chapters, or steps on an endless journey as I called them back then.

Constructive Criticism

I had some frequent readers, like ten maybe. And I got some useful feedback. Nobody mentioned me making a mess of the present and past tense btw.

The storyline was received pretty positively, and the format as well. I might have put in too much thinking and philosophy but that was key for me, at least back then.

But I failed to receive useful criticism, something I always missed back in my school days as well. People loved it, but did not tell me how to improve.

When I finished publishing my book in blog posts I had a much more international life. This caused me to have many, well some, non-Dutch friends asking me if they could read my story. I promised them that I would do a translation ...one day. A day that never came.

Never say Never, but it already took me almost 10 years to publish my book online in Dutch.

Five Years

It happened but it took another 5 years to finish the translation.

That translation I started about 46 weeks ago, and unfortunately it was not as easy as dumping it in Google Translate.

Well, that was rather fortunate to be honest, because where the freckle would my creativity go? Nothing wrong with using Tools & AI but at the core of this cyborg of a story should be my crazy creativity.

Even though Google got a lot better over time, it does not magically capture all the intentions...it does capture all the errors and translates them...into errors.

Paint A Story By Numbers

It was a great start, instead of having to reread, translate, and retype every single word it gives you a bit of a paint-by-numbers set-up.

It´s as if the blueprint is handed to you by Google Translate, and then you can go and be creative by mixing the colors.

That coloring is badly needed, some expressions are fun to keep but so many things just don´t cut it. The good thing is that every chapter gets reviewed.

Change Is Eminent

The Dutch chapters were shorter as I was posting five days a week.
When I created the English version I wanted three posts a week and approx. 1000 words per chapter. That meant a lot of changes to keep the page-turners and even worse.... I had to get rid of many intros.

Those little intros at the start of every chapter were something many readers mentioned as a positive, so killing those darlings was a sad exercise but less is more. The best were kept, and some actually might have gotten better.

Thank God For AI

For the Dutch version I used a different picture for each chapter, I got them from Pixabay so it took a lot of work to find one that matched the storyline.

I thought AI would solve that problem and allow me to create the perfect art for each step of the way.

Boy, was I wrong.

It seems that prompting Free AI tools to get the image you want is still quite a challenge and I spend many frustrating hours getting pictures that would come close to what I had in mind....

What I did not like about the Dutch version was that there was no constant, except for the title due to the ever-changing picture. For the translation, I made a standard cover picture and then created a fitting piece of AI art to illustrate each chapter.

Still, that was not enough, I wanted a full multi-media experience, pictures, and audio. Every step needs a song to accompany it.

Sometimes you know exactly what song other times, I searched hard to find a fitting tune.

And boy did I find many awesome tunes. I will focus on those in tomorrow's Part II of this personal story.

Now, where was I?

Text, translation, art, music, almost perfect...
Almost, because I had still that past tense mess.
And one the one trillion seven million and eight-day god created Chat GPT!

Chat please rewrite in the present tense....and there was light! Or at least Chat did what I asked.

Except for that one chapter in which blood was pumping from veins after decapitated heads were rolling over and already red carpet.
I hate the politically correct behavior of these free AI tools.

It´s as if we are living in the puritanical era once again.

But in the end.......I did it.
I wrote my novel.
I Published it online.
I wrote the translation.
And now I am done, I can die a happy baby....

No, You Can Not

But more about the WHYWHY of why I can not tomorrow. I have been already eating away at your valuable time Dear Reader.

Hope you enjoyed the show and that this leaves you hanging in such a way you're dying to come back!

Personal Story With A Soundtrack - When One Book Closes.... - Part 2
Thank goodness you made it till the end Pees, Love and I am out of here!

You just read the latest chapter in my Personal Story With A Soundtrack series.

Some earlier Personal Stories:

ALL ART by MyI & AI

Personal Story With A Soundtrack - When One Book Closes.... - Part 1