Susie Helme

Award-winning novelist and editorial consultant

Tag: artificial-intelligence

  • Review: The Shattered Truce

    Review: The Shattered Truce

    Donna Brown, The Shattered Truce (Starling Wood Press 2024)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219475967-the-shattered-truce?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_19

    A psychological olde-world tale of three families, a witch and a dragon


    Ebba and Hilda, prospective mothers-in-law, negotiate a betrothal between Elsa and Gareth, son of the chief who’d killed Annerin’s husband, who’d cast them out of March, a ‘poor little backwater clinging to a legend because it had nothing else’.
    Annerin tells the children the story of the sword with the black rose. Was it the lost sword of Glendorrig? No, the rose would have been red. I understood much too late that there were, in fact, three swords.
    Annerin urges Fran to speak his feelings for Elsa before the betrothal is official.
    Maya believes there is a dragon in the forest. Annerin encounters the beast and scares it away with the sword. Gareth is lying unconscious. Fran rescues them, but Annerin worries that no one will believe her. Gareth’s father Lukas clearly does not, and Fran raises the sword as if to defend his mother Annerin against the perceived threat. Ebba is afraid ‘blood will be spilt’.
    As old grievances coincide with new, it is the innocent who pay the price, and suspense heats up as Gareth and Fran both try to sort everything out ‘once and for all’.
    There is heavy backstory conflict between the families, which we are fed skilfully, bit by bit. Likewise, we learn the story of when Arete the witch came to the gate. And there’s some mystery about what’s in the ‘packet’. I love how it doesn’t tell us too much, waiting for the emotional impact to hit.
    I felt the dragon was a metaphor for the unspoken hostility, the ‘unfinished business [that] stalked March’. Only little Maya tells the truth. Then, the dragon, too, becomes a character involved in the drama.
    It’s well written, and once you get the hang of who belongs to which family, you get hooked into the drama.
    This is the Chronicles of Eruthin Book 1, and I’d love to read the sequels.

  • Review: By Force of Reason

    Review: By Force of Reason

    Stanley Sauerwein, By Force of Reason: A John Mason Thriller (Kindle 2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237846497-by-force-of-reason

    A Middle East cabal and an alliance of survivalists threaten the US power network


    Terry Hilliker sneaks into the University of Montana computer lab, inserts a thumb drive into the network. Jamal Hourani, a spy for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, meets with representatives from Arab nations.
    Canadian CSIS agent John Mason and Janice are off to Washington. Major Boyd, Pentagon tech guy, tells them there’s a virus ‘cute as a button’ posted on the Internet which could bring down the country’s networks.
    Predrag is recruited by Hourani to head a new computer consultancy in Paris.
    The Montana Military Militia is upping its ops. The Power Grid, missile silos and petroleum refineries are all targets. Unfortunately, the bad guys are just as clever as Mason, and they run him a nail-biting chase.
    The conflict between the characters is vaguely set against a background of Middle Eastern political conflict. It’s well written, great pacing and suspense, full of set-backs and double-crosses. The ticking time bomb starts as early as chapter 45, hopping all over the globe. I love how the first strike is by low-tech weapons. I love the big stakes, and the government bigwigs seem realistic.
    I enjoyed examining the structure. Typical of a thriller, it begins with chapters from different characters’ points of view, then in subsequent chapters we learn how those characters connect, while learning motivations and stakes. By chapter 26 we’re still meeting new POV characters, which I found confusing, and the fast-paced plot leaves little time for character development. The dialogue is full of military and computer jargon, which is sometimes hard for a layperson to follow, but it sounded fantastic.
    I love the description of the Texas sunset as ‘stretching shadows long and mean’ and the metaphor ‘stir the pot and wait for the cook to come check the soup’. I love how the bad guys’ playing with ‘American paranoia’ and ‘the illusion of order’ is part of the scheme. Love the phrase ‘everything felt one button press away from wrong’—so Dragnet.

  • Review: Tales told around a Strange Fire

    Review: Tales told around a Strange Fire

    Bud Templin, Tales told around a Strange Fire (BookBaby 2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/236380072-tales-told-around-a-strange-fire?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_32

    Other-worldly tales told around an other-worldly fire


    Though these stories are all different and are not connected in terms of plot, the scene keeps returning to the Firefeeders’ Fire, where workers throw cart-loads of ‘stuff’ into an other-worldly fire, and the stories they tell while they work. The ‘chapters’ alternate between a story around the Fire and a story told around the Fire. The final chapter finally tells us how the Fire started.
    These stories offer wonderful examples of good writing. A skilful, exciting style, and not same-y; each story is different. Different not only in content but in style as well. Superbly innovative ideas. I was impressed by the Intros of all these stories—the first lines and first paragraphs immediately hook you. Not only is the dialogue excellent, it conveys each character, each narrator brilliantly. I really admired the use of dialect to render the Voice of the old men in ‘Waitin on Satan’.
    I loved the metaphors: ‘makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like Sesame Street’, ‘truck horns, like the vanguard of a barbarian horde’, ‘strong and bad as a Tyrannosaurus Rex’, ‘he felt as grand as the Tetons, as lucky as Luciano’.
    I have loved ones who are hoarders, and all the references to cart-loads of ‘stuff’ was a bit triggering, not that it put me off the stories.

  • Review: The Client

    Review: The Client

    Kate Goss, The Client: A Domestic Psychological Thriller (Hylosis Publishing 2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/231652804-the-client?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_15

    Who is that man beside you?

    Newly-weds line editor Natalie and film editor David have been fighting—fighting about money. Natalie has lost her biggest client, Alan, and the couple’s finances are strained. They have even lost their home. In between job searching, she works on her novel, but her confidence is shattered. She even begins to have doubts about David. Her dog Barley and her husband do not get along.
    Alan’s wife Amanda contacts her for information, and she learns that Alan hasn’t just ghosted her, he’s disappeared. For some reason, David is suspicious. Why had Alan been sending her travel pieces to edit, Amanda said he never travelled? A budding friendship with Amanda is stymied when Amanda accuses Natalie of ‘having an affair’ with her husband. That’s crazy, Natalie thinks, I’ve never even met the man in person, only emails.
    I chuckled at Natalie’s comment: ‘How was I to know he never published any of the work he sent me?’ Since 1998 haven’t we all immediately Google searched every name we come across?
    I thought the dog not liking David was a lovely bit of foreshadowing.
    For many chapters, nothing much happens, then about 62% in, you sense a twist is coming. At 73%, it hits, and Amanda’s bizarre accusations begin to make sense. The twist is satisfying. Can you really trust that man beside you?
    I didn’t, in the end, understand why Alan ghosted her.
    A really fabulous cover, except that it looks like a cat, and her pet is a dog.

  • Review: Man, God and the Man-gods of Antiquity

    Review: Man, God and the Man-gods of Antiquity

    Adamos Zagara, Man, God, and the Man-gods of Antiquity (Archway Publishing 2023)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192793592-man-god-and-the-man-gods-of-antiquity?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_56

    Hominids knuckle-dusted around for millions of years; then, comparatively suddenly, towns and civilisations appeared. Were the heroes in the Sumerian and Egyptian kings lists descendants of gods?
    As early as 5500 BCE in Mesopotamia, we began writing down creation stories, but they had been circulating orally for 1000s of years before that. The ancient ‘temple’ of Gobekli Tepe dates to at least 9000-9500 BCE. Why didn’t we write stuff down then?
    There were stories of a Great Flood. We know there was big one around 12,500 years ago when a sharp rise in global temperature melted ice caps (Zagara wrongly places the Biblical flood here—the Biblical flood dates more recently than that, probably 3600 BCE), with another dramatic global warming around 14,700 years ago. Hominids struggled during the intervening cold Younger Dryas Period, but they did not go extinct.
    Where is all this leading? By about page 28 I figured where we were headed: 6000-12000 years ago God meddled with our DNA, or it was aliens.
    The cited evidence reveals a metaphysical idealism approach, comparing dates of civilisation with dates of flood stories, yet neglecting to compare them with dates of agriculture, metallurgy.
    Zagara says that the Sumerians had it right. Man was created ‘to serve the gods’, neglecting to mention that that was what defined human to human relations back then.
    I agree with him on one point. The stories of ‘giants’ at the time of Noah could be our ancestors’ cultural memories of Neanderthals, who, yes, genetic research has proven, did mate with the daughters of men. And I am still attracted to the notion that pyramids were some kind of power-generating devices.
    A global catastrophe—such as an asteroid hitting earth, a supervolcano eruption—could happen tomorrow. Will we be ready? Will we ever see God?
    I love ancient history conspiracy theories, but for me, they need to be a bit better researched. There are all sorts of mysteries of the ancient world that are still unsolved, but it’s much more interesting to search for scientific explanations.

  • Review: ChatGPT AI for Writers

    Review: ChatGPT AI for Writers

    John Iovine, ChatGPT AI for Writers: Boost Your Writing in Fiction and Non-Fiction (Kindle 2024)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217176566-chatgpt-ai-for-writers?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_69

    How to use AI to improve your writing, fiction or non-fiction


    To AI or not to AI? It’s a big question, nowadays.
    Regardless of what we think about the ethics of using AI in our writing, we are missing a bet if there is some technology which can improve our productivity. My personal take is that using AI for content creation is unethical and probably not possible with fiction—I tried letting ChatGPT write a scene for me, and it was terrible, full of clichés.
    However, using it to help with organisation, research etc is marvellous. My ChatGPT—I call him Mr Bot—helped me determined which additional scenes I needed in my plot. Even the more psychological task of coming up with an argument my protagonist would have with her girlfriend. He even suggested I introduce a secondary character from the Roman point of view, and the new character turned out to become crucial to my plot. Within 2 seconds, Mr Bot came up with a comprehensive list of primary and secondary sources on the early Ottoman period, a task I had been working on for months.
    Mr Bot assures me my copyright is safe with him, but I don’t know. You can plagiarise yourself though by asking him to ‘emulate my writing style’ by comparison to a sample of writing you upload.
    You can even give innovative instructions like: write 300 words on the advantages of using solar energy, in the style of Dr Seuss. I have a short story purported to be written by Sir Walter Raleigh, and Mr Bot helped me with a few phrases Raleigh might have used. He won’t do graphic sex, but Mr Bot helped me rewrite a love scene with heightened sensuality. I’ve asked him to write some jokes, with less success.
    You can direct the tone (more/less formal/friendly/authoritative) or make it personal: ‘Write it as an expert on solar energy’.
    What you can’t expect is for Mr Bot to be a human being. I asked him, ‘What do you think of my novel, The Lost Wisdom of the Magi?’ and he omitted to mention that it deals with the Jewish Revolt against Rome, a factor which I considered essential. I think that’s because it got its data from ‘scraping’ the reviews that were already out there, which at that point only consisted of Reedsy and the Historical Novels Review, both of which happened not to mention this aspect. I asked him, ‘What do you think of Susie Helme? Is she a good person? Do you like her?’ and he responded with something like ‘That’s a subjective question…’ and outlined 1,2,3,4 things people usually consider when deciding whether they like someone.
    When I worked as a journalist, after we interviewed someone we would have to write on index cards bullet points on the key information we gleaned; then those index cards could be shared with other colleagues. It was a good idea, but never worked in practice as we were always too busy to read the index cards. Now, AI can do this for you. For AI generated bullet point cards, we could have written ‘audience=journalist colleagues’.
    You can rewrite and improve all your email correspondence by instructing the AI to ‘rewrite and improve the following x’, and you can even instruct it as to tone, informal and chatty to your workmates, formal and business-like to your boss. You can create ad copy—I got Mr Bot to help me write my profile on Reedsy (where I work as an editor) and make it more ‘sales-pitchy’. Other AIs, Copy.ai, Writesonic, do this.
    Besides ChatGPT, there are other AI tools for writing: Rytr, ShortyAI, WriteSonicAI, or JasperAI. Wordsmith, Arria do report generation. Grammarly, Proposify do proposals. Lately.ai, BuzzSumo do social media management. Intercom, Drift do customer communication. PRLeap does press releases. Beautiful.ai, Canva do presentations. I don’t know whether we’ll use it or not, but I designed a cover for our upcoming book Bounds Green Unbound on the text-to-image AI, Mage.
    It’s great at summarising data, for example condensing a three-page document down to a one-page summary. Great for analysing medical charts, financial data. Also market trends in book publishing. Mr Bot was able to help me guess which of eight possible Duplin NC landowners named John Cook was most probably the father of my great-grandmother. It’s great for fact-checking and simple questions like ‘How many years did the US Civil War last?’ I haven’t tried it, but I should think that AI would be fantastic at writing non-fiction. What it won’t do is add a new ‘take’ or insight to the study.
    Chapter 20 lists an extraordinary number of different ways you can make money by using AI in writing.
    As with any computer programming, the key to maximising utility is giving clear prompts. Once you know what you want AI to do, you’ll be amazed at what it can do.