Why a pseudonym?
The Randall stories are being published with the listed writer as “Randall Fox,” even though I have preserved my name in the copyright for each publication. Also, randallfox.info goes to ronoakes.com, my writer’s site. This pseudonym is not one I am using to conceal my identity. This could lead to the question of why I chose to release these stories using a pseudonym.
There are a few reasons why I made this choice. First, the first two stories, Flight of the Heretics and The Prey’s Rebellion, made extensive use of generative AI. The stories in both are my original story. However, much of the dialog and surrounding description were rewritten using a large memory model generative AI.
At the time I started writing Flight of the Heretics, I was writing for myself, for entertainment and exercise, and I was utilizing the Sudowrite program to get suggestions. Since I had no intention at that time to share the results. But, when I finished the story, I realized that I had something that I could share. I went through the process of making some edits and refinements before uploading it to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing as a minimal-cost novella, but tracking down the original text was not something I had the wherewithal to do. Wrong or right, I was feeling unsure of myself, so I continued to lean on the crutch of Sudowrite for the second story, The Prey’s Rebellion. I stopped this with the third story, The Wolf and the Parliament, in part because I was no longer able to access Sudowrite. This and all subsequent stories have been written with only minimal tool support—specifically, the use of Grammarly to find incorrect words and other grammatical errors and sometimes fix voicing and word-order issues, and the use of Google Translate to allow me to have dialog in languages other than English.
Another reason I chose not to publish these stories under my name was that, unlike the upcoming The Phoenix Knives, these stories have not been professionally edited. I have relied only on the tools above, along with AutoCrit, to find and locate issues. Since these are less professional than my Northland story and its intended sequels, I wanted to create some distance.
It is for these two reasons that I have used Randall Fox, chosen for my narrator character, as the pseudonym for these stories.
