I’m in the same boat! I’ve been playing around with KobaldAI and Oobabooga. It’s coming along slowly, but surely. I haven’t checked in with the projects in a month or too, but even while I was playing with them you could do some interesting things. My main issue was speed. Responses were talking 10-20 seconds to come in, which felt really slow to have a conversation.

Personally, I really want an co-writer software. I can come up with my own ideas with little issue, but I find that a lot of current solutions are either chatbot only, or just an editor. Novel AI was really fun to play with, but got expensive pretty quickly.