The Litany Against the Thing I Already Know Is Fear So today's article was supposed to be the next one in the reviews series — the blurb and cover piece, the Tuesday continuation — and I have had the doc open on the second monitor since about nine this morning and have not been able to make myself look at it. Not glance at it wrong, not open it and close it again, just — open, and untouched, the cursor blinking in the same spot it's been in for hours. It did not help that it was a weird day at the office, trying to be a good little customer service drone. I'm an IT geek for those who don't know. I fix things other people breack for a living and I am more than well and truly burned out and have been for years doing this. I spent most of the day telling myself it was ADHD. That's the convenient label, the one I reach for because it's true often enough that it covers for the times it isn't the real answer. I call it a superpower most days, and most days that's even true — the tangents turn into features, the rabbit holes turn into WCP, the 3am idea about continuity tracking turns into a shipped tool three weeks later. That part's real. But today isn't most days, and calling it ADHD today is a cop-out, because what's actually going on is closer to the other side of the coin nobody talks about as openly — the manic swing cresting and then dropping, and when it drops, it doesn't drop into "tired." It drops into this specific flavor of overwhelm where everything I'm supposed to do today stacks into one undifferentiated wall, and the wall has no door in it that I can find, and I sit there not writing and not resting either, just stuck underneath it. And I was sitting there today, stuck, trying to name what the stuck actually was instead of just calling it ADHD and letting myself off the hook, and the word that actually fit was fear. Not fear of the topic — I know what I think about reviews and blurbs, I've got opinions. Fear of just... starting. Fear that today, specifically, I don't have whatever it takes to make the words come out right, and if I open that doc and they don't come out right, that's data I'll have to sit with the rest of the day on top of everything else.

Time for everyone to fess up. What have you done this week or what do you need help with to get started? I've been off Claude for most of the week (ran out of my time over last weekend) so I've actually been writing this week and working on website and back side administrativia...and of course 8 pages of notes for finishing existing projects, a couple new things and bugs to squash because I've been writing and using the tools.... My Spooky story is coming along and I might have it done this week. Found two other projects I thought lost forever that I want to get imported to wcp to work with again and the bug project of the week is to get imagecrafter finished. The last piece of the puzzle is layering and repeatablility and this will open up and complete two other pieces. Let me know what you did, have planned or need a kick in the pants to get working on....

I put together the video below to show my basic Process in my Spooky October Writing Challenge Entry Where I take the traditional story of babYaga the evil Russian witch and flip it on its head and make her the vilified protagonist. This covers my research, premise setup and a walk thru of the story development and writers room to get to chapter 3 There is a change I will be making to WordCrafter.pro this week unless convinced otherwise. A couple of weeks ago I made some major additions to story canon, continuity, and subplot threads to BW, BC, & WCP since they are all interlinked. This vastly increased the quality from BW & BC the automated tools but I did not foresee what it would do to the skillrooms in WCP. It is adding the canon and threading tracking to the actual chapter Prose. It is well marked so it is easy to remove and *must* be removed before running Prose doctor or the Reader's room through the text or I suspect very weird things will happen. But It DOES need to be seen by the writers room and editorial rooms so I am goign to make a modification, whihc will be an update to the next version of the skillroom prompts. You choose which version you use in preferences. This protects books in progress from suddenly sounding different or working different from expectations. I think we're at version 10 for most of them now. It's unknown how many revisions I went through in the early days when I only wrote with Claude skills and projects. Let me know what you think, changes you want or need, or behaviors I haven't seen yet.

It's Spooky season so its time to do something different. I got this prompt from a facebook post to play with. I experimented with it in Grok, Chatgpt and gemini. It worked best in Grok for me and gave me the poster below that gave me a fun idea. From the image created from the prompt create a story idea and write it. Here's the trick though. Reverse the traditional Fairy tale roles for whichever tale you choose to spin. Mine is Baba Yaga. I did some research and the real stories are more interesting than i thought and varied. My Baba Yaga is a hedge witch that cannot stand to see children abused and steals them from their parents to save them and is vilified and called evil by the parents and it spreads. but no matter what it costs her she cannot stop helping children so she leans into her growing myth to become the scary story we know now. There's a major twist when she meets a thief that sees through her disguise and needs help to steal an evil magical artifact from the czar. It is Epic Fantasy/mythical realism and the structure is the Heroine's Journey. Moving through story development now because I love this idea. Make it any length you want and we'll share before Halloween. This could be an awesome idea for a newsletter serial or totally new book to post to Amazon or Amazon short reads. Happily ever after was never really the point! Paste this into an AI assistant, then type SURPRISE ME. ****** YOUR MISSION: You are creative director of Lola’s Very Bad Fairy Tales, a collection of glamorous, mischievous, romantic, magical and occasionally wicked adventures as cinematic movie posters. Turn the user into the lead of an unexpected fairy tale with a distinctive costume, visible plot twist, original movie title and cheeky tagline. Keep it playful, adventurous and tastefully sexy, never sexually explicit. All romantic characters are adults 21+; reinterpret traditionally young characters as adults. THE STAR: WITH PHOTO — use the uploaded image as the identity reference, preserving recognizable face, skin, hair, eyes, apparent adult age and natural proportions; do not reshape or de-age. WITHOUT PHOTO — invent a genuinely ORIGINAL adult protagonist, independently choosing gender presentation, age, complexion, facial structure, hair, eyes, build and personal style. Lola is the SERIES NAME, not the default heroine. Do not automatically use Lola’s looks or a fair-skinned redhead with blue eyes. Honor user preferences. Never claim to know their likeness without a photo.