brainstorming | Stephanie Flint

“The Singing Coil” was not on my to-write list.

In fact, the idea for the world of Singing Coil sprung into my mind one night as I’d been dwelling on the genre conventions of romantasy and cozy fantasy.

I’d recently read and enjoyed Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz, and for some reason my head went, “What if we mashed up Legends & Lattes (which I happen to love) with Babylon 5… or even Deep Space 9? What if we focused on the characters who aren’t out saving the world, but are just trying to live their lives on the space station while everything else is happening around them?”

And because it was super late at night and I couldn’t pester my creative writing partner, and because I’d been studying what Claude AI could do, I dropped into the chat and started a brainstorming session.

(Note: when it comes to CliftonStrengths, Ideation is among my top five. And I’ve recently realized that brainstorming new story ideas, even using an AI to bounce them off of like a talkative rubber duckie, apparently equals lots of energy pennies for me).

“Okay, bear with me Claude… but I had a story idea that I want to brainstorm with you and consider for market viability.

I was thinking about cozy fantasy and science fantasy romance, and then I had an idea for a cozy science fantasy story…

Think something like a baker or trinket trader or salvage seller sets up shop on a space station and is trying to get their shop up and running while navigating alien culture differences and supply chain issues and building an unexpected found family… all while the “usual” space opera happenings are going on around them. Red alerts…. meteor storms… random weird time travel episode…

Think Legends and Lattes meets Deep Space 9 or Babylon 5. Maybe with a dash of Lower Decks.

What do you think? Think anyone (besides me) would want to read that?

For better or worse, Claude is an overenthusiastic cheerleader, and this conversation starter shifted into me tossing in world and character ideas, and reining in Claude because I wanted to be the one to make most of the suggestions for the different alien races and worlds.

Ultimately, by the end of all the brainstorming I had formed a rough idea of a six part novella series centering around Harte and Eica navigating their grumpy/sunshine friendship while dimensional wonkiness was happening aboard an ancient space station with secrets of its own.

But I still needed to focus on writing the third Huntress book, so I shelved the cozy sci-fi idea.

For all of two days.

I’d been on a major kick of reading everything I could on entrepreneurship, innovation, and generative AI. In one of those books I found an interesting prompt where you specify the amount of time and money you have during a given week to devote to a small side business, along with your interests or skills, and then you ask your favorite AI to suggest potential business ideas based on those constraints.

Very long story short, I ended up with the concept of micro fiction prompts.

This time I had been testing ChatGPT, and once again I had to curb its enthusiasm. It generated neat ideas, but its idea of how fast micro fiction could scale as a side income seemed… very optimistic… for what I know about the market.

(Important: If you choose to use generative AI, please keep in mind that it is not a professional. It’s generating responses based on probability and what data it trained on, in addition to weighted leaning intended to make you happy... meaning it often tells you what it ‘thinks’ you want to hear.)

And because I was curious as to how well the micro fiction idea would work, I grabbed my series guide I’d had Claude compile for me for the cozy sci-fi idea, tossed in the micro fiction guide ChatGPT made for me, and asked Claude to give me ten story seed ideas.

The ideas surprised me. I was interested in them, and more than a little jealous that I hadn’t come up with these ideas myself.

But, I admit, I sometimes have a hard time finding those emotional connection points that resonate on a personal level. That part usually takes me a while, and go figure, the AI pinpointed it easier than I usually can. (Downside is the lack of satisfaction of the ah-ha! moment of finally figuring out which moment touches the heart strings).

One of those micro seed ideas was for “The Singing Coil.”

This was Claude’s suggestion based on the prompts and information I’d provided:

5. The Singing Coil

While repairing a food synthesizer, Harte discovers it’s been producing an ultra-low frequency hum that perfectly matches a Vyraenar lullaby. They track down why—and find an elderly Vyraenar engineer who installed it decades ago, homesick.

POV: Harte
Setting: Station mess hall/communal dining area

I asked Claude to further develop that story seed using the micro fiction seed template. (As a note… I did not succeed in making “The Singing Coil” a piece of micro fiction. I was lucky to keep it under 5,000 words).

Claude gave me a heart-tugging outline that I legitimately wanted to write. (I’d share the full response here, but it does have spoilers for the story. Let me know if you are interested in seeing it in a later so you can make comparisons to the final story).

Then I wrote the story based on that outline.

Now, I did make a few changes. I added several details that weren’t in the outline. I was very insistent that I write the lullaby, though I did use its suggested title, “Stars Remember Home” as the inspiration.

Because here’s the thing. While I have been super fascinated by generative AI and what it can do, I also know it has some major downsides and concerns (lack of transparency surrounding environmental impact, as well as copyright issues, being among the main ones I’ve been watching).

And while I have writer friends who are AI-positive, I also have friends who are very much AI-negative and want nothing to do with AI.

So, because I did use generative AI heavily for brainstorming and to give me the basic plot for “The Singing Coil,” I wanted to keep the rest of it as human as possible.

I did all the drafting and revisions myself.

I wrote the lullaby and came up with its melody myself.

And I hit the oh-so-fun wall of realizing cozy fantasy/sci-fi stories tend to have illustrated covers, and since I didn’t want to use AI to generate a cover (I tend to avoid image generation as much as possible since that’s one of the more energy-demanding tasks and its copyright practices can be… really questionable, if I’m being generous), and since I didn’t have the funds to properly pay an illustrator to make the cover I had in mind…

That left me to illustrate the cover.

Oof.

I think creating the cover took me as long as writing the story.

Usually I either use stock photography and do photomanipulation, or use Daz Studio to render a base image that I can then polish, but neither would have given me the desired effect.

So I broke out the pencils and fine-line pens, scanned the resulting foreground and background line art, then brought them into Photoshop CS6 to clean and color digitally.

(You know how long it’s been since I’ve done digital coloring? It’s been a while. A really long while).

But I’m reasonably happy with the final result and I can always change the cover later.

So there you have it.

I never planned to write “The Singing Coil.”

It was a spur of the moment, “Huh, I wonder what would happen if…” idea that I used to incentivize myself to keep revising Huntress #3. (As a daily practice, I wouldn’t allow myself to write anything on “The Singing Coil” until I finished revising at least one chapter of revisions for Huntress #3. It was effective).

But I hope you enjoy the story as much as I enjoyed writing it, creating a new lullaby, and then getting that lullaby stuck in my head.

“Home among the stars, let the stars remember me…”

💫

Pre-Order “The Singing Coil” today and get it as soon as it goes live on February 17th!

Sometimes a broken machine sounds like home…