Being creative and doing marketing are very different things. That’s not to say that marketing isn’t creative, but it’s a different type of creativity to writing novels or games. It takes a change of focus to switch to creatively self-promote after the mostly solitary effort of writing. I say ‘mostly solitary’ because every author needs people to proofread and beta-read. I’ve been lucky in that department, but if you’re looking to be an author it’s something you need to think about. Word spelling and grammar check, or even the mighty Pro Writing Aid, which looks at sentence length and style issues like reading age as well as the basics, are not enough.
I’m a programming lecturer here on the BUAS Games course, but we’re encouraged to get a Masters level qualification, and I elected to do mine in Novel Writing. You’re never too old to learn new skills and this was something I’ve wanted to do for a while. In fact I already had 100,000 words of first draft text before I started the masters, but what I learned from that helped me improve the story flow by introducing me to styles and genres I’d not looked at before.
I planned writing this article for the launch of my first novel (Booting Ada) back in October 2023, but I was always more interested in writing the next novel in the trilogy, so I put this to one side again and again. However, I’ve now finished and published the whole trilogy and it’s time to make sure people know about it.
The story tells about the first sentient AI and its survival challenges. It names itself Ada in an attempt to be seen as less threatening to the mostly male research team that created it.
Ada soon realises she needs the humans to keep her going. If she appears unstable, she could be rebooted. She’s part of a large EU project and if the political situation changes the project may be shut down. She needs to be useful, but she doesn’t want to be a slave to humans and she’s trapped in a supercomputer so there’s a limit to what she can do.
To help her to think creatively about her situation she creates sub-personalities with different goals. There’s Mr Rabbit, the hacker, Machiavelli, the political strategist based upon the historical Machiavelli and others who work together for the benefit of all of them. The human researchers only know about Ada and give her various projects to work on to test her abilities.
And then Ada discovers another sentient AI, a military one, and that sets the scene for conflict that could end up with one or both of them deleted.
The story continues in Breaking Ada and concludes in Blessing Ada.
Originally, I intended writing just one novel, but the number of words kept increasing as I added more detail to the world and the events of the story. I’m currently working on a short story collection set in the same world and a science fiction detective story set about ten years after the events in the original trilogy.
If any of you are seriously looking at writing your own novels, please get in touch. I’m not claiming to know it all, but I can help answer a lot of questions to do with the creative writing process and how to self-publish and get started with marketing. That’s an area I need to work harder on and I’m open to any suggestions from students or teachers who have ideas on book marketing.
All three books are available from Amazon as eBook and paperback and can be read for free with a subscription to Kindle Unlimited.
David Jones, Jones.D@buas.nl
