Tag Archives: fiction writing

A simple way to refute any allegation of AI use? Paper trail, baby

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Not so long ago, as publishing companies were feeding manuscripts into AI programs to determine if AI was used to write the manuscripts – not surprisingly, in some cases, the AI came up with a “positive for AI” diagnosis, strangely enough often in the case of first-time POC authors – the discourse among writers was how to prepare to defend yourself in case of AI allegations.

“Save your drafts,” the simple response came. Each of the four or five or 10 times you wrote a new draft, each one was proof that it was your hand that crafted the writing.

But what if you don’t draft?

Maybe it’s because of my “this must be written now” practice of writing for newspapers, I don’t draft, at least in the sense of rewriting a stem to stern version of a work several times.

NOTE ADDED AFTER POSTING: I do go over and over everything I write, usually by rereading what I’ve written previously to put myself in the frame of mind to write anew. Does this count as drafting? Dunno.

I do have my outline for my first (and most recently published) novel SEVEN ANGELS, as seen above, dated from June 2019, saved in the SEVEN ANGELS folder on my MacBook Pro.

But is there a more certain, beyond subterfuge, way of proving that a book was written in increments, day by day, for months?

I didn’t realize at the time that I was building proof that I’d written SEVEN ANGELS – really, all my books and even many short stories and nonfiction articles – as I wrote it.

It’s long been my practice to email to myself the latest version of any book as I write another chapter or, on a less productive day, another set of paragraphs. Hell, even new sentences.

In my email, I’ve got the latest version of whatever I’m writing, every day, as I’ve written it.

There’s some added assuredness that could provide a time frame for my writing: social media.

Again, coming from the newspaper business, I’ve always been pretty transparent with my writing. So on Twitter, going as far back as 2009, and more recently Bluesky, I’ll often note on social media what I’ve working on. It’s an incremental timeline, not quite as explicit as the daily email to myself, but pretty close.

Not to mention notes to myself in physical notebooks, which I’ve been using since even before I began writing novels in 2019.

So if the thought of creating a “paper trail” of drafts is intimidating to any writer, I’d suggest emailing yourself your latest version. It’s a good indication that you’ve been working on a project.

It has the added bonus of backing up your work in case your computer decides to jump off a cliff.

You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.

Countdown’s almost over: SEVEN ANGELS publishes tomorrow, June 1

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Okay, I should just acknowledge that when you’ve published a book, the promotional push for it is never over.

But it feels like we’ve reached something of a milestone as my new crime novel SEVEN ANGELS is published tomorrow, June 1, 2026, by Constellate Publishing, a publishing imprint of Constellate Creatives, a company founded by my longtime friend Jill Blocker and for which I do some editing and other work.

By way of noting that promoting a book is never ending, I’ll say that I’ll be darkening your doorstep plenty even after the book is published.

A few quick words on how I got here:

I wrote a few crime novels back in the early 2000s that weren’t completely baked and I didn’t pursue publishing them. A few years later, sometime before 2010, I outlined a book called SEVEN ANGELS, a crime story about a fictionalized version of the little town in Tennessee where my parents grew up.

(I was still about 14 years from being a Tennessee resident myself, but I’d been down here plenty of times, visiting family.)

After I outlined SEVEN ANGELS, I set it aside. I didn’t write a book-length project again until my first true crime book, co-authored with Douglas Walker, was published in 2016. Three more true crime books followed. It turns out that writing and co-writing and editing those books was essential for me in figuring out how to write a book-length manuscript. I’m a plotter and outliner, and turning out an outline – one paragraph per chapter, outline length in total 15 or 16 pages or more – is a step I can’t imagine skipping.

In 2019, I took a buyout from my newspaper job and finally felt I had time and focus to write novels. In a few years, I’d written SEVEN ANGELS, GHOST SHOW and THAT OCTOBER. The latter was the first to be published (self-published) in 2025.

I’d gone back to SEVEN ANGELS almost every year since 2019, fleshing it out with new characters and I hopefully made it better.

The blurbs and comments and reviews have been laudatory and I appreciate it.

For a few months now, I’ve been actively compiling ideas for a new novel, including using some elements from an aborted novel from 2025. (I’ve mined those early 2000s books for a number of ideas and characters, and I’ve done the same with GHOST SHOW, so nothing ever entirely goes to waste.)

So here I am with a promise: I’ll be working on the next novel, along with articles and short stories.

And I’ll be promoting it all, so forewarned is forearmed.

It comes and it goes and it comes around again

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My morning began with a rejection but ended up with signing a short story contract, all threaded through writing some totally separate piece of work.

Man, every day is a little game of expectations versus reality for all of us, but that’s especially evident for writers.

The rejection email, as these things go, was from an editor and fiction outlet I haven’t tried before. It was direct and to the point but also gracious, saying a couple of nice things about the story I’d submitted and they’d rejected. Much better than a form rejection – I got one of those just a while back – and even thanked me for my support of them on social media, which will absolutely continue.

This rejection stung, man. It was for a story I wrote for an earlier anthology call for submissions and honestly, I really like this story. It’s not my typical crime-wimey story. It was, dare I say it, hearfelt.

But I’ll submit it again somewhere and I’m sure I’ll submit something else to the humane editor who rejected this particular story this particular morning,

So i got back to work. I’m close, very close, to finishing a 5,000-word short story to sub to an anthology/collection that I really want to be included in. I’ve got a few more words to write.

Then I signed a contract for the anthology you see above, DAYDREAM BELIEVER: CRIME STORIES INSPIRED BY THE MUSIC OF THE MONKEES. The anthology comes out this fall and has some wonderful writers in it and I’m happy that editors Shelley and Larry chose my story to include.

Then I got back to working on that 5,000-worder. And I wrote this.

(I’m thinking about having a snack later, if you need that much insight into my day,)

All of this could be filed under the life in a day of a writer. Or maybe managing expectations. Or dealing with rejections and successes.

To writers and other people: Push on. The only way out is through.

2025 so far, so good … ?

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Don’t be fooled by that headline. 2025 is very much a shit show. I’m talking my writing year so far and that ONLY.

I published my 1984-set high school crime novel THAT OCTOBER in June and the reception so far has been pretty good. I have no complaints about how kind and generous people have been. If you’ve read it, please leave a review on Amazon. But buy it from one of the dozens of sites that sell it, especially bookshop dot org or Ink Drinkers Anonymous, the woman-owned, Black-owned bookstore in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana.

Other than THAT OCTOBER, I’ve been pleased to see a number of short stories published or purchased for upcoming publication, including in a future anthology that I can’t wait to tell you about.

In September, I go to my second Bouchercon, the world convention of mystery and crime writers and readers, and I’ll be on my second Bouchercon panel, with a hugely talented group of authors. This one is at 3 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 3, the first day of Bouchercon. This Bcon is in New Orleans, which I’m pretty sure should be mild and breezy by September, right? Right?

But very nearly overshadowing all this is that I submitted, earlier today, a short story to the crime fiction genre’s preeminent market. Now I don’t have any great hope that the story will be published. There are a hell of a lot of great writers out there submitting stories.

But the submission was a goal of mine for 2025. Not to get a story published in that magazine, I will note. Nope. Just to submit a story to them again.

I subbed once before, a few years ago, and their rejection was so perfectly justified but so devastating that I didn’t submit to them again for several years. Hell, I didn’t submit anywhere for a year.

So aside from publishing THAT OCTOBER, and attending and speaking at another Bcon and winning a place in this cool anthology that’s coming up in just a few weeks, getting up the nerve to submit to the Big Show again was a 2025 goal realized.

It’s all gravy from here,

As Homer Simpson would say, “Mmmm … gravy.”