Bonus

Making of

I would like to share with you the creation process of this work, which was long and tedious.

Characters

About 3 years before the publication of Feybound, I created the character sheets for two characters: Arken and another character who does not appear in this novel. I wrote a few random scenes, and the result was quite nice.

A few months later, I discovered the site Hero Forge - Custom Miniatures. I spent my evenings there for two weeks. Cecil, Elara, and Arken were born.

After that, I dug out my pile of D&D books and spent a month of spare time creating the characters. I spent quite a lot of time on it.

Drafts

Once my characters were created, I wrote a few drafts which I had read by some people around me. Based on the feedback, I was quite motivated. None of the scenes from my drafts ended up in the final version, but it allowed me to better define the personalities and relationships of the protagonists.

Plans

With these elements, I listed the chapters and wrote a summary of the content. This work was mainly a thought process. This is where my thoughts deviated during the execution of daily tasks for several months.

I noted everything as my ideas developed and then put everything aside for about a year.

ChatGPT

I then discovered ChatGPT, a technology that really interested me. When ChatGPT 4.0 was released, I wondered if this artificial intelligence would be able to help me finish my novel. Well, it turns out it could. I used it extensively for the rest of the creation process.

Plans: The Return

I created a custom GPT instance for the novel writing and fed it everything I had done: images, drafts, character sheets, plans, etc.

We then created the plans for each part of each chapter, and then we described the content of each part. It was mainly a research and continuous discussion work.

After a few days, the plans were quite advanced.

Writing

The longest part…

First Narration

I used ChatGPT to write the entire text in English. I proceeded in three ways: For environment descriptions, I textually explained what to describe. For action scenes, I used voice dictation and narrated the events as I would for a role-playing game session. For dialogues, I wrote everything myself.

First Revision

At this stage, there were many issues: The paragraphs were not in order. There were conclusions to the narration everywhere. The paragraphs were not narratively linked. The narration was not necessarily in the right order. Character names were missing. There were all sorts of logical and chronological errors. And more.

I revised everything myself and rewrote a lot of text.

Translation

Next, I asked GPT to translate everything from English to French. The automated translation took some time, and the revision even more. It was a massacre… I had to reread and correct everything.

Then, I ran the texts through GPT to identify the errors we had made and rewrote everything a second time. I spent an incredible amount of time on it.

And it’s not over! Then, I had to retranslate everything from French to English. I had modified my texts in French so much that I couldn’t reuse the originals. Another four steps: translation, corrections, modifications, and re-checks. I also had to replace all my dialogues with the originals because I had finely worked on them in the English version. It was very long.

Website

Following all this, I had to create the website you are looking at. Fortunately, it’s my specialty, but I spent two weeks getting up at 4:30 a.m. and going to bed at 11 p.m., including weekends.

Media

Throughout this work, I had asked GPT to create images of certain characters and scenes. Given the result, I decided to add more.

Creating such complex images with GPT is a bit like the lottery. You have to detail all the elements, and then hope the result is there. Sometimes it works right away, other times it takes 10 to 20 attempts, and other times it’s just impossible.

Revisions

Following all this, I conducted a complete revision of all the content, including notes, character sheets, images, and the website, making over two hundred modifications. It was intense and painstaking work.

Voice narration

And finally, I created the audio narration using REPLICA Studios. It was a very lengthy process, requiring that I copy/paste and tweak every single text snippet into the generator and compile that into audio episodes. Chapters that contained multiple characters and dialogues were very lengthy to produce. On average, each episode took about 2 hours to produce.

Conclusion

The experience of creation has been incredible and highly enjoyable. I am really happy with the result, and obviously, if you are reading these lines, you are too.