Welcome and what to expect.
If you’ve ended up here, there’s a good chance you’re wrestling with a problem that most writing advice skims past: how to maintain creative control while working at a level of complexity that would otherwise become paralysing.
Maybe you’re planning a multi-book series, and the continuity alone feels like it could crush you. Maybe you’re trying to sustain a distinctive narrative voice across hundreds of thousands of words without it flattening into something generic. Maybe you’re curious about AI as a tool, but wary that it might strip away everything that makes your writing yours.
This isn’t a site about writing faster, “optimising” creativity, or outsourcing craft.
It’s about precision tools for ambitious writers who refuse to compromise on quality. Or, to put it more honestly: writers who’ve already given up on sleep, functional social calendars, and having bookshelves that don’t sag ominously in the middle, and have decided that quality is the one hill left worth defending. Possibly to the death. The caffeine intake suggests this may not be metaphorical.
What I’m interested in exploring here
This space exists because certain problems only show up once you move past single-book thinking, and most writing advice stops exactly where those problems begin.
The topics tend to cluster around:
Voice and perspective integrity
How first-person narrators quietly drift toward omniscience. How you end up unconsciously channelling your influences instead of synthesising them. Why your prose suddenly sounds like Douglas Adams wrote it after a very long day, and whether that’s homage or just theft with extra steps.
Mystery and information management
When to answer a reader’s question vs when to complicate it. How to track what each character knows against what the reader suspects. How to resist the overwhelming urge to reveal everything in Chapter 2 just because you’re so bloody pleased with your own cleverness.
Systematic quality control
How to audit for invisible repetition before your beta readers get quietly bored. What’s worth tracking in a continuity document vs what you can safely reconstruct on demand. At what point your continuity tracker becomes longer than your actual manuscript, and whether you should be concerned about that. (Spoiler: probably.)
Creative–technical balance
When systematisation helps vs when it starts strangling spontaneity. How to preserve human imperfection in prose without it reading as careless. How to explain to normal people that yes, you did just spend four hours building a spreadsheet to track metaphor frequency across eighteen chapters, and no, you genuinely don’t see the irony.
AI shows up in some of this work because it’s useful for certain kinds of problems - the tedious, structural, pattern-matching ones. In other areas, it’s entirely absent. The constant is that judgment, authorship, and creative responsibility stay human.
A note on AI collaboration
I want to be clear about something up front:
AI is not writing my fiction. I am.
What it can do - when handled carefully and kept on a very short leash - is take on tasks that would otherwise consume time I’d rather spend on voice, character, and emotional truth. Things like:
Scanning for close-proximity repetition (turns out I use “precisely” precisely too often)
Flagging POV violations before they metastasise into structural nightmares
Cross-checking continuity details across hundreds of thousands of words (Yes, Enkidu’s sword had a name in Chapter 3. No, it shouldn’t have a different name in Chapter 11. Yes, I did that anyway. We fixed it.)
Think of it less as a ghostwriter and more as an extremely literal research assistant who never gets tired, never judges your poor life choices, and occasionally needs reminding that “make this better” is not, technically, actionable feedback.
Used badly, AI flattens prose into algorithmic beige and erodes your judgment. Used well, it works a bit like a structural editor who’s fast, cheap, and operates under constraints you define - not some generic set of “best practices” scraped from the internet’s collective mediocrity.
If that makes you uncomfortable, fair enough. If you’re curious what careful, constrained collaboration actually looks like - with all the failures, course-corrections, and places where it absolutely doesn’t work - this might be useful.
How this space works
This isn’t a feed, a diary, or a productivity system pretending to be profound.
Some posts are focused essays on a single craft problem. Others are messier - exploratory notes, half-formed frameworks, post-mortems on techniques that sounded brilliant at 2 AM and turned out to be structurally incoherent by morning. When AI is relevant, I’ll be explicit about what it’s doing and what it categorically isn’t. When it’s not relevant, I won’t drag it in by force just to stay on-brand.
Subscribe if you want. Bookmark the page and check back when a topic sounds useful. Either works.
Long-form fiction is hard. Managing complexity without losing your voice is harder. AI collaboration that doesn’t flatten everything into corporate-speak mediocrity is harder still.
There’s very little value in pretending otherwise.
This is one attempt to document what actually helps - and what absolutely doesn’t.