Part 7 – The Revision Process: Modulation

This is Part 7 of a series by B.A. Bellec on using AI to edit his novel Cobalt Lungs. Start with the [Series Introduction].

 Modulation: B.A. Bellec on the tightly ruled, line-level AI edit that sharpens a draft, and why running it too early backfires.

Two weeks have passed. You took a research vacation to the actual place your story takes place. I actually did this, I went to Vancouver right in the middle of my editing process when I was moving to my next draft. My Vancouver trip was always scheduled, so I just had to sync it up with a beta reader a few weeks ahead of time. Once you are home, you spend a week incorporating your own notes into the story, bringing the setting to life. Then you grab those beta reader notes. Just like before with the alpha reader, you solve all the low-hanging fruit in the master file right away and then archive the tough spots into the brainstorming document. Use GPT to help with the brainstorming on those tough spots.

Because this was your second draft, you are probably in good shape, and it shouldn’t take long to get through the notes. If you do it in a week, you’re on track. If it takes you longer and you are struggling with spots. Consider another beta reader. There isn’t a right answer. I have had projects go through 10 readers, and I have had projects go through a couple of readers. It just depends on where you are getting stuck and your feel for the project.

Once you get to a clean copy of V2, I did something called modulation. What is modulation? Line-level machine editing, but with a highly controlled set of rules.

Do not do this too early. It is a dangerous exercise that you must first define well.

Here is how I did it.

My biggest problem is not ideas, plot, or character. It is repetitive habits, bad spelling, and bad grammar. I sometimes will write in the wrong tense and/or POV.  Mostly, it is because I am brainstorming late at night and just trying to get an idea out, then I realize, oh, I used the present tense and first person when this scene in my manuscript is actually past tense and third person. Amateur mistake because I had some manic thought I tried to dump into my phone.

Modulation is how I clean those moments up. The beta reader(s) probably already found most of them, but this is the surefire way to get the rest. I would not do this until near the end, as doing it too early is like changing scenes after doing a copy edit. You risk undoing the copy edit by interjecting bad writing. Be careful not to modulate or copy-edit too early.

My story has three clear parts, and each part has different rules. The first time I did this exercise, I realized GPT doesn’t see the shift in the narrative voice like I want it. So I wrote three different sets of rules and then explained to GPT which rules were active. Each rules document was a few pages long. Some of the most important rules:

• Define your tense
• Define your perspective
• Define the narrator traits (for my Maddy character, I wanted longer sentences and more artistic words)
• Define a change threshold. For me, it was 5%. ChatGPT was only allowed to modulate 5% of the chapter. Thus, the core of the story is preserved
• I had a list of overused words and strict instructions to replace 50% of those words, and I gave them a list of replacement words for each
• I use italics to show song lyrics or internal thoughts. I had a rule to ignore all italics
• Ignore all headers
• We set a white space rule. This might be unique to me, but I write very staccato. Lots of short sentences and paragraphs. One of the byproducts is that the print edition has a ton of blank space on the page. I wanted to publish as a pocketbook under 450 pages, but it was at 500 pages. Whenever possible. I wanted to combine multiple short sentences and paragraphs into the paragraph before or after to reduce white space with the goal of a 10% page count reduction.

That is a solid summary. Some of the rules carried over to the next POV; others had to be tweaked and expanded. If you start modulating and something unexpected changes, address it with a rule and upload the new rules.

How I actually modulated. I tried to do multiple chapters, and it didn’t work well. I think I know why. When I set that 5% threshold, it basically keeps making changes until it has hit the 5%, then stops. If you upload two chapters, and the first chapter had a ton of changes. Nothing happens in the second chapter. I did occasionally end up going above 5% when I noticed that not much had changed after the first five pages of a chapter. Once I moved to one chapter at a time, I was getting the result I expected almost every time.

How I did this was I would copy the chapter from my master manuscript over to a blank Word doc. I would then upload that Word doc to GPT as well as the rules that applied, and ask it to modulate based on the rules document.

When the output is done, do not put it back into your master file. Instead, save it to another blank Word doc. Word has a feature called compare. You can use the compare feature to highlight the differences between the two files. I only review the changes between the upload and the output. In other words, I am only looking at the 5% GPT changed. If I disagreed with a change. I would fix it manually and create a new rule to address why it couldn’t do what it did. Once I had edited the output, I pasted it back into the master file. You are really only looking at 5% of your manuscript, so you can do this entire exercise in two to three days.

If you notice it is not following your rules. Ask it to clarify why it made a specific choice. Sometimes, too many rules will overwhelm it, and you can prioritize certain rules to be core rules that take precedent.

There was a failure state during my modulation. I had not uploaded the rules in a few chapters, and after about 5 chapters of modulation, I compared the output, and there were huge changes. Hundreds of words. A character that wasn’t supposed to be there yet was being introduced before his first scene. I hit the stop button. Deleted the files. Started again. ChatGPT had lost the modulation rules. The short-term memory fell away; instead of the chapter being modulated by my rules, if modulated based on vibes. I caught it right away thanks to my compare function in Word, and since I had the rules in a separate file, I could upload the rules and the chapter again. The second attempt worked perfectly, and I learned I had to keep reuploading the rules every few chapters, otherwise I risked drift.

Once you have the entire manuscript passed. Give it to another reader. That reader is essentially a proofreader. If they give you lots of notes. Consider extending your project and doing another round of edits, modulation, and beta reading. If they don’t give you many notes. Do one final pass yourself and set your release date. You are ready to think about marketing!

I do a very strange thing while I am at this stage of the project. I like to call it finding my voice and tone. I already showed and hinted at some songs. There are more. Lots more. I have an entire album that goes with Cobalt Lungs. As I get near the end of the editing process and approach my final pass, I write more and more songs. Some are from the character’s POV, and I use those to really feel the characters in specific moments. You have to think about the word choice. The speed and rhythm. Efficiency and clarity. Tone. All these are similar to editing a book.  Then I do this other thing, I write “editing” songs. Me as the author, about my editing process and feelings. All of it is really a calibration exercise.

Why do I make those songs? It’s just naturally how I go about tuning my mind to run through my stories.  “Novel Bryan” is ruthless. Every word is guilty until proven innocent. My novel. It is almost sacred to me. To get a single word changed, I will fight. Hard. To deal with the emotional battle I am going through in my mind, I write songs as a form of therapy, as a break from the editing.

A single sentence can trigger: a structural discussion, a character discussion, a thematic discussion, a pacing discussion, or a white-space discussion. I spent literal weeks arguing over: paragraph breaks, “not” constructions, Ethan’s vocabulary, Maddy’s sentence length, modulation thresholds, and whether a callback was too obvious. Sometimes the final change was to delete or change one word.

That’s not normal editing. That’s craftsmanship. Borderline OCD. It’s also why adding the final 10K words to the novel took months, and why my process is so refined. Every change had downstream effects, and I documented everything along the way. I wrote songs to deal with the anguish.

If a novel sentence was 80% right, it haunted me. If it was 95% right, I might let it go if I deemed the scene not critical. The thing I fight for is execution. Once an idea graduates into something that represents me, once it leaves the brainstorming document and the outline phase, the standards go through the roof, and the battle begins. It is a heck of a fight, but it is also immensely rewarding as you begin to approach the finish line.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

B.A. Bellec is an award-winning Canadian novelist, songwriter, and music video producer whose work blends cinematic storytelling, emotional atmosphere, and deeply human science fiction. Drawing from an education in film and a multidisciplinary creative process that merges music, prose, and visual symbolism, his stories explore themes of survival, memory, grief, identity, and the search for meaning inside collapsing systems.

Known for emotionally immersive worlds, recurring symbolic imagery, and a style that balances intimate character work with large-scale thematic ambition, Bellec creates stories that feel less like traditional narratives and more like lived emotional experiences. His current project, Cobalt Lungs, expands beyond the page into a companion concept album, combining literary fiction, atmospheric worldbuilding, and music into a unified creative universe.

COBALT LUNGS

Station Eleven meets The Road with the psychological containment and systems tension of Silo.

A deadly airborne spore has transformed the world into a collapsing maze of quarantines, sealed cities, and desperate survivors struggling to adapt. In the ruins of Vancouver, musician Maddy fights to hold onto her humanity inside an overcrowded refugee shelter while scientist Ethan isolates himself nearby, deep underground in a self-sustaining silo where routine has replaced emotion. As society fractures and survival becomes increasingly brutal, the two are pulled toward each other in ways neither of them fully understands. Atmospheric, intimate, and emotionally charged, Cobalt Lungs is a post-apocalyptic story about isolation, survival, and the dangerous hope that can still burn at the end of the world.

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