Process
How I Work
The Idea
New stages of human evolution are hiding in plain sight — evolutionary biology rather than mythology.
What AI Drafts
A competent scene.
What It Actually Takes
Hundreds of passes over every chapter, a series architecture defined across four books before a line of prose existed, and a decision about what Vess Mourne calls herself that took three weeks to get right.
These books are being written with the assistance of AI. Openly, and documented here.
The series architecture — four books, each a distinct stage of becoming — was built before a single chapter was drafted. The characters arrived with specific biological costs, not powers. The world existed before the prose began.
That is the work. The AI did not create it.
What AI contributed was two things. First, drafts: first-pass scenes and the momentum to iterate fast enough that the story could be tested against itself in real time. Second, and more valuable, the ability to hold the entire four-book architecture in working memory at once — to ask what a change in chapter three does to chapter twelve before either is written. That is the scaffolding novelists with long careers spend years building by hand.
The drafts are the cheap part. Every line of them is rewritten, usually many times, and what survives each pass is decided by one question: does this feel like a sixteen-year-old girl managing the unmanageable, or a machine trying to sound like one? The machine can produce twenty plausible details for a moment. Choosing the one that is alive is still mine.
In Practice
For anyone who wants more than a statement of principle, the Build Log documents the process as it happened. In short:
- Architecture first. Character bibles, world mechanics, a four-book arc, beat sheets, an epigraph progression — dozens of documents before any manuscript.
- AI drafts, I rewrite. The first full draft was structurally complete and emotionally hollow. Every chapter since has gone through the same loop: the AI generates or analyses, I read, I rewrite in the voice I hear, I send it back.
- Measured, not felt. Dialogue percentage, repetition counts, physical-to-abstract detail ratios, and a watch list of the constructions AI prose defaults to — tracked per chapter, with targets.
- A simulated editorial panel. Several distinct editorial perspectives read each chapter and return diagnoses, not prescriptions. I decide what to fix and write the fix.
- A feedback loop. The physical details and observational habits from the chapters where my voice is strongest are extracted and fed back as reference material, so each new AI draft starts from a narrower, more character-specific field. The gap between draft and voice narrows with every cycle. It does not close.
The longer accounts — what revising a chapter actually looks like, how the perception layer was built, and why I think the industry is arguing about the wrong thing — are in the Build Log.
What that means for the books is yours to decide. The architecture is mine. The world is mine. The decision about what to call Vess — the name she earns, not the one she was given — took longer than writing any single chapter.
The story came from somewhere human.
The words found their shape with a machine.
What you feel when you read it is the question this series was always asking.