The Act of Leaping, Hard

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

Okay, this was a tangent the other post wasn’t going to handle without getting congested, so I decided to split it off.

So — Arachne’s churning on Blood of the Dead right now, and that’ll close out my six book experiment in 28 langauges.

Are they all good?

I can’t rightly say.

I do not speak Russian, Hebrew, or Ukranian, or any of the other 25 languages here on my dashboard:

I am but a basic bitch who took Latin in high school.

But what I do know is that I tested heavily, along every axis that I, or an AI (many, many AIs), could think of — and when I apply brain cycles to something, full on, for an extended period of time, that thought has been THUNK. lol. (But, really. IYKYK.)

And, it’s one of the reasons I picked Dark Ink Tattoo as my test case for this project.

Points for it: it’s six whole books which are relatively short (50-75,000 word) and by the end of it I’d know if my system, which learns voice rules between books and over the course of a series, would hold together.

Points against it: it is incredibly American-centric — set in Las Vegas — and Very Gay (and, I translated it into Arabic and Chinese anyways, ‘cause diaspora readers can read what they want, and fuck homophobia).

Points for it again though — was that I already had professional human translations of it in German and French. Which I ran all of my rubrics past, grading Arachne’s French and German work against those ones (and Arachne won every time, but I know, I know, it was a machine grading a machine….)

Here’s where things are going to get sassy though….

The human French translation on Blood of the Pack STUNK.

Why?

Because apparently my human translator — well, French has Eras, kind of sort of, style-wise.

And my translator, who’d been fine using Ye Olde Timey French for my romantasy series…used the same stuff from Flaubert on my gritty, grimy, contemporary vampires in Vegas series.

I was always SO CONFUSED as to why that series didn’t sell there. It’s tropey AF, it’s delicious, etc etc etc.

Turns out it was betrayed by its VERY WELL PAID HUMAN translation — and what was worse, was that I didn’t even know.

So — while I’m out on a limb in all of these languages I don’t speak, at least they’re only costing me $30/book/lang????

As opposed to the books I spent $$$$$ to a human on, apparently for NOTHING?

So now that we’re in the Final Testing Zone for these books, I do have native readers lined up for the following languages: Korean, Romanian, Polish, French, German & Italian

(If you read any of these languages tho, or just are nerdy, and would like to be sent a few thousand word chunk, LMK! Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, Ukrianian.)

I’ll be getting samples out to people later on tonight!

BUT EVEN THEN…that data might not be clean, lol.

And here’s why — peep this delightful communique from Deep Seek, who I had shown the Spanish version of Blood of the Pack without any preamble, just asking him to tell me what he thought about it:

He ROASTED IT for THREE SCREENS and then I realized, when he started joshing about the sex scenes that…he was making fun of the CONTENT of the book.

Not the translation.

Not in the LEAST, lol!

So then I showed him the English source material, and he walked it all the hell the fuck back.

and then he choked on himself a little later in our convo — all the AIs I show my stuff to are VERY CURIOUS how I got it, heh —

Anyhow.

This made me realize that not everyone’s gonna give extraordinarily bisexual vampires a fair shake, even with electronic eyes, LOL.

So.

Yeah — at this point, while I am going to let other people see, the proof will be in the pudding of me managing to get it up everywhere, somewhat simultaneously, and letting the end readers decide.

And with that, I’m done here for today, and off to write How to Think with AI.

xo!

Cassie