Hi all,

After a few weeks off on holiday, I am back with regular newsletters and lots of news to share!

First off, there are two new Blog posts I invite you to check out:

• Read How to Write Dialogue in a Story to learn how to write good and useful dialogue and balance showing versus telling.
• ​Hard vs Soft Magic Systems explores magic systems with plenty of examples and a deep dive into Sanderson's Laws of Magic.

Secondly, during the holiday, I had some time to complete Chapter 2 of A Wizard's Hunt, which will shortly go live on the website!

Lastly, I am working on a new section for the website called Tools, which will host free writing tools to help you write your stories.

The first entry in Tools will be an AI-based Fantasy character name generator, leveraging the cutting-edge Claude Opus algorithm.

After exploring different options, including Claude's own Sonnet and Haiku models, alongside GPT-4, I found Claude Opus to generate the best and most unique names.

The tool is expected to go live in late April / early May. For those interested, I will publish an accompanying Blog article where I'll dive into how I built the tool, down to the technical specifications and architecture. Stay tuned for more updates!

In the meantime, here is a teaser of what the tool will look like, and some example names I generated for Dwarf characters:

📖 Novels

A Wizard's Hunt 🏹

Progress: 22%

With the completion of Chapter 2, which will shortly be available on the website, the novella has reached 22% completion.

🗞️ Blog

Hard vs Soft Magic Systems: An Exploration of Sanderson's Laws of Magic

Learn the difference between Hard and Soft magic systems and Sanderson's Laws of magic.

How to Write Dialogue in a Story

Learn how to write dialogue in a story.

🎓 What I've Learned This Week

AI is expensive to run, and not particularly environmentally friendly.

I've learned this while building the new Fantasy name generator tool that will be released on the website later this month.

In building the tool, I have learned how AI tools are created and how they operate. I found out they are:

• Expensive to train, using large amounts of electricity and expensive computer hardware
• Difficult to train, as data must be sourced (whether ethically or not)
• Large (hence the first L in LLM — Large Language Model)

I have taken steps to ensure AI-based tools on my website are used responsibly and have as minimal environmental impact as possible.

Whether we're aware or not, AI tools will become central to how society operates. Understanding that they come with a significant cost, for both our pockets and the environment, is important when looking into the future.

Costs for operating AI models are expected to improve in the following years. However, for the time being, as we all experiment with ChatGPT and the like, we must remind ourselves that AI tools must be used responsibly, as they can be:

• Powerful
• Dangerous
• Environmentally unfriendly