This all started when I still had my old computer, and my openrouter credits were running low, so I bought more. Then the old computer died, I decided I didn’t want to mess around with n8n again, recreating all my old automations. On the new computer I started experimenting with python+LM Studio to handle those automations, with Claude doing most of the coding. My openrouter credits were just sitting there not doing anything, so I decided to take Raptor Write, one of the cloud-based AI writing apps, for a spin. Raptor Write is a product of the Future Fiction Academy, which is probably the largest and most ambitious center of the AI first draft movement. (Not affiliated, this is not an endorsement, count your pennies before throwing money at them, etc. Any and all disclaimers may apply.) Raptor Write has a cute mascot, and is free to use except for the “bring your own API key” part. (You do need to create a Teachable account but that is also free). I had been brainstorming a very ridiculous and gothic JAFF concept set in the early 1900s with Claude, and decided generating it in Raptor Write might be a fun way to burn off some of those open router credits.

Now I had not been entirely satisfied with Claude’s first draft of the Rector’s Other Business, and ended up rewriting it more extensively than I’d planned, so for the Gothic JAFF, I told it I wanted something more in the style of Georgette Heyer, Margery Allingham and Dorothy Sayers. When Claude said that didn’t narrow the field down much, I told it to build a writer/editor room based on those three, and outlined the division of labor: Georgette for the social comedy and romance, Margery for the tongue-in-cheek gothic, Dorothy for the more psychological parts. Claude worked out style briefs for each persona, and a scene-level division of labor between the personas, and the resulting story bible and outline came to nearly 10,000 words. All this was done before I started up Raptor Write.

My first fumbling around didn’t produce anything special. I set the model in Raptor Write to Sonnet 4.5, which was a known quantity for me, asked it to draft Scene 1, hit the forward slash key and selected “go” from the options. It generated the same kind of bland output that I had been seeing on The Rector’s Other Business. I reworked the prompt, telling the AI to read the writer’s room brief and the story bible and then draft Scene 1. This actually came out pretty decently, and told me that in the future I needed to be more explicit about my style instructions when fanficcing with AI.

I wouldn’t have called it all that reminiscent of any of the authors I’d named in the brainstorming session, but it achieved the dryly humorous, semi-gothic tone I’d had in mind, and for the most part felt believable as an early 20th century work. There were scenes that I had to run twice, or tweak for continuity once completed, but I ran through the whole outline in a long afternoon, generating a draft of about 35000 words for a cost of about $2.45. Raptor Write was simple to figure out, with no major downsides that I could see except that slightly twitchy feel online word processors always have, including Word Online and Google Docs. It seemed to want any reference docs uploaded to it in a zip file, and I generally ended up moving the latest scene draft out of the working document and into a storage document to keep the working document a manageable size. I will probably end up taking the draft back to my main Claude account to discuss edits, fix anything that needs fixing, and then run it on this blog a bit closer to Halloween. You can see a brief teaser description and the fic’s title, Set in Stone, on the Fanficcing with Claude page.

I don’t know if I’m ready to join the people who put out AI-drafted fiction on a pay basis. This is for a number of reasons, not the least being that the only formula genre I have much affinity for is mysteries, which can usually tie the LLMs up in knots in no time. But this was the most satisfactory piece of AI-generated draft I’ve yet prompted for, and if I don’t find another use for the stranded openrouter credits I might revisit Raptor Write at some point for more fanficcing.