BOOK REVIEW: How I Met My Monster - Written by Amanda Noll & Illustrated by Howard McWilliam

Review: ★★★★☆

Summary

One night, when Ethan reaches under his bed for a toy truck, he finds this note instead:

"Monsters! Meet here for final test!"

Ethan is sure his parents are trying to trick him into staying in bed ... until he sees a bunch of colorful eyes blinking back at him.

How does stomach rumbling and snorting help one monster become Ethan's best bedtime friend? Find out in this silly-spooky prequel to the award-winning I Need My Monster.

How I Met My Monster is an irresistible monster-under-the-bed story for monster-loving kids. The perfect balance of shivers and giggles will keep you under your covers, and you'll soon be sleeping soundly.

My Review

I was checking in books people had returned to the library when I came across this book. The cover art had caught my eye. I absolutely loved the illustration style, and the colorful way "monster" is written made it impossible not to open the book and see what it was about.

Ethan is a little boy who can't fall asleep after his parents tuck him into bed. He gets up and begins to secretly play with his toys when he finds a strange note under his bed. It turns out that monsters are real, and their sole purpose is to live under children's beds and ensure a child stays in bed until they fall asleep. They're actually quite nice.

Ethan meets several monsters who are all in training to become his monster, but he isn't scared of any of them. A whole range of silly things happen as they try to find the best monster for Ethan, and finally, they settle on a monster who is friendly and just scary enough to keep Ethan in bed at night.

Art: ★★★★★

Honestly, it was the cover art that made me open this book. I know we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but I absolutely did, and this time it was worth it. The illustrations are vibrant and fun, Ethan is an adorable little boy, and the monsters are also pretty cute. I loved how colorful it was for a story set at night.

Plot: ★★★★☆

The plot was just way too cute. Nice monsters under the bed who actually help children by scaring them? Yes. Absolutely, yes.

Characters: ★★★★☆

Ethan is a brave little boy! If I found out monsters were living under my bed, even super cute ones, I don't think I'd be as fearless as he is in this book! I think his reaction to the monsters would help any little kids reading the book or listening to their parents read this book know that the monsters aren't really there to be feared, they're there to help!

Setting: ★★★★☆

The story is set in Ethan's bedroom and his house, which could have been pretty boring, but the art style made it colorful and exciting.

Recommended For

Anyone! I'm 28, and even I enjoyed reading this cute story. However, I would mainly recommend it for ages 5+.

Triggers

If you have children who would be scared of the thought of cute, helpful monsters under their bed, this probably isn't for them.

IWSG Day – Using AI In The Creative Process

Once again, it's IWSG day!

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!

Let's jump into this month's question:

What are your thoughts on using AI, such as GPChat, Raptor, and others with your writing? Would you use it for research, storybible, or creating outlines/beats?

Honestly, I have very complicated feelings about AI. Yes, I have used it, and I think most of us have at least tried it out to some degree at this point. However, I try to use it very sparingly and only in tasks that are too big to manage on my own.

What I Use It For

Cartography

I drew a map on my iPad using Procreate to get an idea of what I want my science-fantasy world to look like. I've shared it on my blog before, but I'll share it again now.

I'm not sure if you can tell from this low-resolution picture, but on the map, I've marked areas for forests, rivers, and mountains. I hand-drew this map, and I'm pretty proud of it. However, it just didn't feel like my map was coming to life like this. So … I plugged it into ChatGPT and asked it to make a realistic version of the map, as if it were a satellite image.

And this is what it gave me.

At first, I was extremely impressed.

However, as an artist, I have quite an eye for detail, and the longer I looked at the map it spit out for me, the more I was annoyed that it hadn't followed the exact coastlines, and it had changed some of the river systems. It had destroyed one of my peninsulas and made some of the lakes far bigger than they had been in my original drawing, or erased them completely.

Every time I asked ChatGPT to fix it, it would partially correct the issue, but then it would generate increasingly more distorted images, which ultimately proved disappointing and exhausting. Don't get me wrong, this is pretty cool for some concept art, but if I’m going to include a map in my novel, it’s going to be done by a professional artist, not an AI. What can I say, artists really do it better and have an eye for detail, too.

Languages

Because I let my world-building get out of control at times, I love developing languages. But I develop so many that it can get confusing, and sometimes it's difficult to remember everything I come up with. Recently, I've been creating language rules and words, and inputting them into ChatGPT, then later using ChatGPT as a dictionary and a translator for my own languages.

When I am drafting and need to write a prayer or hymn in one of the languages I've created, I don't have to individually look up each word and manually put them in the correct syntax. As cool as that would be, I honestly don't have the brain power for it.

So, I go to the chat where I was developing a language, and ask it how I would say this or that in the language I made, and it'll spit it back out to me using the grammar rules and syntax I designed. If I haven’t made up a word for something yet, ChatGPT will tell me, “You don’t have a word for this.” And at that point, I’ll make up a new word.

I do double-check ChatGPT’s translation ability, because off and on, it will mess up. But it’s a nice guideline for me.

Math

The world I'm building often feels like a fantasy world, until I zoom out to the bigger picture and remember that this is a fantasy-like story set in a science fiction universe. At the end of the day, I'm more of a science fiction writer than a fantasy writer, because science is just so fucking cool.

As a science fiction writer, I like to try to be as scientifically accurate as possible when creating my stories, and even when I bend the laws of nature to create magic systems and societies on other planets, I still try to keep those laws in mind. Of course, there is a degree of accuracy that's simply impossible due to how I want the narrative to play out. Still, I try my best.

I often use ChatGPT to help me with math that's just too convoluted for my simple brain.

Example: 

The world I'm building is called Jakaad, and yes, it is a whole world. Jakaad is a planet that orbits a K-type main-sequence star (orange, instead of a G-type main-sequence star, which is yellow, like our sun). This means the star has a longer lifespan than our sun. Jakaad is a rocky planet with a liquid iron core, similar to Earth's, but it is slightly larger than Earth (1.37 times Earth's mass and 1.6 times Earth's circumference). One day on Jakaad is 0.95 Earth days, and one year on Jakaad is 1.17 Earth years. 

So.

If humans are living on Jakaad who age at the same speed as humans on Earth, how old would a human have to be on Jakaad to be about 12 years old/starting puberty on Earth?

I've done this math on my own, but I have absolutely used ChatGPT to check my math. And sometimes I’m wrong.

Again, ChatGPT is also wrong sometimes, so I always double-check its answers and make sure the math makes sense.

Cute Blog Pics

Open source images often don't make the cut when it comes to pictures decorating my blog posts. I don't have the time to draw relevant images, and I also don't have the money to pay an artist to do them. I definitely see this more as decoration than art, and for this, I use the Image Playground app on my Mac.

Using AI In Moderation

I will never use AI to come near my actual writing. I don't want it to help me plot my stories, and I don't want it to modify my writing. I have a few personal reasons for this. 

First, I genuinely enjoy writing. It is a pure act of creation; it is pouring my soul into my fingertips and transforming it into a format that could outlive me. If AI is doing it for me, it not only defeats the purpose, but I cannot claim that my soul is in it. Either there is no "soul" behind AI writing, or if there is, it isn't a human one. 

Second, AI isn't actually that good at being creative. It can only spit out what you put into it and what it knows from the internet. And if you've ever spent an hour on the internet, it's easy to see that it's filled with misinformation and disinformation. So … be cautious. 

Third, I'm already so reliant on technology. I don't want my brain to be reliant on AI. I don't want AI doing my thinking and creating for me. 

Fourth, and most importantly, even though I'm a hypocrite about this, we should not be using AI for art. We should be using AI to perform repetitive tasks that drain our creativity, and reserve the creative tasks for humans. I want AI to be integrated into robots so that they can do my dishes, cook, and clean for me, allowing me to spend my time being creative. 

However, AI won't be developed to do the things we want it to do; it will be further developed to do the things we are already using it for. And if we continue to use AI to do our creative work for us, that's what it will continue to be trained to do. 

AI is a valuable tool, but I believe it is one we must use wisely. 

Do you guys use AI for anything? Do you use it in your creative process? 

Don't forget to visit all the other amazing bloggers posting for the IWSG today!