Revised schedule, due to server issues earlier in the day. This book review was supposed to have gone live at 10 a.m. but, since youall had plenty to read already, you may not mind its appearing now.
Title: Revised Rodeo Star
Author: Emily Spring
Date: 2023
Quote: "My savior was none other than Daniel, the rodeo's star bull rider."
"Revised" is also what this book manuscript should have been a few more times before it was published. It's told in that completely artless, yet verbose, style that screams "The computer did this all by itself." A real writer would never trust a computer to do anything all by itself. What ChatGPT spits up at us are writing prompts. It is up to the writer to go in and remove every trace of ChatGPT's mash-up of words plagiarized, probably, from the sites Google refuses to display in search results.
Since it was done by ChatGPT, there's nothing believable about the novel. Romance readers know that a romance is by definition an unlikely story. The word "romance" originally referred to speculative or fantasy adventure plots more than it did to the couple who live happily ever after at the end, and there was an intermediate stage where it often referred to stories where the couple met, felt that they were "in love," and then were separated never to meet again in this life. Still, there's a touch of reality in a properly written romance. The plot may involve someone's being the long-lost monarch of a place that never existed, but it's supposed to include hints of the writer's real experience, at least in the relationship advice. That's why romance writers linger over every detail of the nonverbal communication between the couple's exquisite bodies when the couple quarrel and make up. That's the real element. Romance writers are not always women, as they're almost required to pretend to be these days, but at some pint in their lives they all have had intimate relationships and they're supposed to be telling us how they resolved quarrels within those relationships.
That's what ChatGPT can't do. So in this alleged romance Daniel and Amanda don't quarrel and make up; they're troubled by an anonymous letter making vague accusations about Daniel's past, and they resolve their feelings by flitting off to live on El Rancho Perfecto where we never see either of them doing a lick of work. It's one cliche after another without a human conversation.
Writers who crank out Book Funnel books in this way may be satisfying the algorithm based on what's worked for people who had written a lot of manuscripts before they started publishing online. They may be cranking along at the furious pace the system tells them is most effective. But they're cheating their readers, they're cheating Book Funnel, and worst of all they're cheating themselves if they ever want to sell books they have actually written.
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