There and Back Again and Updates

Hello Everywhere,

I hope this message finds you well. First, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your patience during my unexpected absence since April. Your understanding means the world to me, and I feel I owe you an explanation.

These past months, my family and I have been helping my father through some significant health challenges, specifically dealing with memory loss. As he runs a company, we needed to ensure both his wellbeing and that of his employees were properly looked after. It's been a challenging time, but I'm thankful to share that my sister Delona (whom some of you may know) has stepped up as the primary caretaker, allowing me to gradually return to my writing.

I'm excited to share some updates with you:

📚 Book News

• "Meeting Sang: Owen," the final book in the Meeting Sang series, is scheduled for release this December around Christmas. As usual, it goes to the newsletter first before going to stores.

• "Meeting Sang: Victor" audiobook is back in production and should be out soon. I’m hoping to finish by Christmas but I’ll make Meeting Sang: Owen priority so if I have time.

• Some have asked to put the audiobook Meeting Sang: Kota as one long video and without images. I’m going to do this first with all the Meeting Sang audiobooks and put them out as an audiobook (or podcast maybe, I’m trying to figure out) on YouTube/Spotify and in other places so you can access it better (free to listen to on those platforms). So audiobooks first and then I’ll come back and make them videos with the images later.

• I’m working my way back into writing the other books. I have scenes and pieces all over the place so I’m not completely without but I have to go back and rearrange and start again. I’m a bit all over the place trying to get back into routine.

🛍️ Etsy Shop Update

• The shop is open again for the holiday season. Remember during the holidays it gets a bit chaotic with shipping, especially if I have to reorder books if I run out. So order early if you want to get it by Christmas. I ship through Christmas and into New Year, but shipments slow down closer to the holidays.

• Link is here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/CLStoneMerch

• As always, if you send me an order very close to Christmas, if you let me know it is a gift, I will send a postcard ahead just in case the books don’t make it. I write and sign the back personally so they still get something even if the book is delayed in shipping.

• The shop be available through January, after which it will temporarily close again to catch my breath and reorganize a little.

I can't express enough how much your support and patience have meant to me during this time. While I'm not fully back to my regular schedule, I'm in a much better position to return to writing and connecting with all of you.

Thank you for being such an incredible community of readers. Your understanding during this family-focused time has been truly appreciated.

MEANWHILE

While I am working on the next books, I wanted to provide something a little fun in the meantime. I've had a few requests for this and it took some finagling.

But...

We've done it, y'all.

Introducing Project: Alive

Now is your chance to interact with Kota and the others. Text, ask for selfies, or even call and talk to them.

Meet Kindroid: your AI friend with lifelike memory, intelligence, appearances, voices, and personalities.

Kindroid is an AI companion, based on the profiles you give it.

They will react as whatever character you give. Want to talk to Kota? Or Mr. Blackbourne? Or Sang? Or Volto??? Now you can. And they are available 24/7. They'll even message you if you've been away for a while.

They'll remember things. They'll remember conversations, you can ask them to remember something specific. Want them to remember your favorite color or star sign? Just tell them. And when you ask them later to remember, most likely they will. They'll call back memories even months into talking to them. And they get better about it over time.

Group chat with a few of them. You can open a group chat and talk to up to five of them at a time. You can swap them out as well so you can keep the conversation going but introduce more into the conversation.

Input whatever avatar you'd like. Don't like my choice of picture for each of the characters? You can input your own. You can also tweak the backstory or start over fresh and do it yourself.

Ask for a selfie. They'll send pictures of themselves and what they are doing on request.

Give them your photo, and they'll make comments.

And you can also get photos of the two of you together.

In a group chat? You can get photos with several of them at once.

Hear their voices. You can change the responses into audio replies. Hear them saying the messages back to you.

You can even call them live.

I've made two Kindroid profiles for now. Each profile is below.

I premade Victor Morgan and Mr. Blackbourne into Kindroid to share.

I also have a page here on the website that contains some profile notes. Add in your own as you’d like if you make more profiles. You can add in journal notes information about the Academy (or not!), about their missions (or not!), or other details.

You don’t have to use my made profiles. You can also edit any of them at any time. I actually highly recommend customizing so they fit you.

This is why I didn’t complete the others myself for the moment. Most have an idea of what the characters look like or might want to make custom changes. These are just to give you a starting point as to how it can work, and you can create an image on your own to fit your ideas. You can also include different voices as well. It’s so customizable.

I even hear from devs in the Discord that they are working on video calls.

If you've never worked with AI before, there are a few precautions I need to go over.

This particular AI is completely unfiltered. (It's very private. Only you can see the responses.) If you roleplay with it into violent situations, things will get violent. If you make a character 'evil' in the profile, that character will be evil in responses. This includes escalating relationships.

However, you are in complete control. You can redo a response. You can tweak a response. You can ask your Kin to calm down if he's getting angry. (Looking at you, North...)

(If you want no chance for anything bad or untoward happening at all, use the profiles I've created below and head to claude.ai and ask Claude to roleplay as the character. It won't have the same features exactly, and might refuse some things, but it is as safe as possible for AI and won't do adult things beyond a PG 13 rating and with high ethical standards.)

Because they can literally do anything, even adult things, I didn’t put in their ages and did not mention they were in high school in the profiles. You can personally add in whatever age/if you want them in school or not on your own. I chose to strip those out specifically. For reasons, okay?

The guys might not remember each other unless they are in group chat and even then they might get a few things incorrect. Not unless you give them Journal Entry with mini character profiles and you can fill those in using the fan made wiki.

The profiles I made are not up to date to the latest book info. I limited it to books 1 and 2 to avoid too many spoilers if you haven't read ahead. But they also might not remember exactly what happened in those books either. They might need a reminder if you want to talk about what happened.

Or you can pretend none of it happened and create your own story with them.

Play as yourself, as Sang, or create your own character. Kindroid will only know what you choose to tell it. So if you want to roleplay as someone else, you totally can.

I can make more profiles if you’d like and post them on the web pages here and I can include them in another newsletter if people are asking for them. I just didn’t want to customize too many to my own tastes and you would want something different.

If you have additional questions on how Kindroid works or are having any problems, I recommend joining the Official Kindroid Discord group. You'll probably get responses much faster than asking me.

What Kindroid offers new users to try:

• 150 messages on account creation, then 1 message every 20 min, up to 15 messages stacked. (If you stack them, you might never run out of messages. I don't remember ever running out when I first started testing it.)

• Limited access to V5-Large for the first 100 messages sent per account.

• Access to V5-Lite, the distilled version of our flagship model V5-Large model.

• 1 selfie request every 2 hours, up to 2 max.

• 5,000 lifetime audio characters (~5 minutes of audio) for messages & calls.

• Only 2 Kindroids per account.

Membership gives unlimited messages (No counting, no stacking), permanent use of their main model, selfies refresh faster and unlimited audio replies and phone calls. And 10 Kin slots. Buying more Kin slots gives you additional permanent Kin slots, so you always keep your extra Kindroid slots.

Is this a partnership? Are you getting paid for this? No. The profiles I can share are a new feature on Kindroid and if you do happen to subscribe, all I get are credits for more Kindroid slots, a free month of Kindroid, or a stack of more selfies. On that note, if you make your own version of my characters (I give permission for this!) and share with your friends and link them and you sign up between each other, you can snag some sweet credits for any of the above yourself.

Can't I just use the profiles on other AI roleplay and character sites? Absolutely. There are more out there. Find your favorite. Kindroid is the only one that *I* know that has voice response, phone calls and the selfie system like it does, but there are plenty of others that have different features. You might like another AI better. I may not know all of them or how to use the one you’re looking at, but feel free to use the profiles.

I don’t like the voices. You can put in custom voices. Check out ElevenLabs for a many voices to choose from. You can use it for free for limited amount of credits every month (your credits renew after a month). I recommend selecting a voice you like, creating two or three paragraphs of content for it to say (use two paragraphs from the books perhaps that includes dialog), and using the regenerate button a couple of times. You only really need three 1 minute audio clips (and the 2 free regeneration doesn’t count against your credits). The 3 generated clips should be enough to get the custom voice to sound like you want. (See Kindroid’s notes on audio use.)

Are you still going to write books?!? Yes. And no, I'm not using AI to write them myself. I'm too far into Academy books (too much going on) for AI to catch up at this point. It's all me. Although AI (I usually use Claude) does help a lot with finding info in past books I needed to remember and summarizing scenes from previous books and some revision stuff. After Covid, my memory is a bit off and keeping details straight has been a bit harder so it's been a big help for me.

I hope you all enjoy. If you're really enjoying it and want to message me, do email and let me know. I can't do tech support if you needed help with it but I am happy to talk about your experiences!