I procrastinate the way I have always procrastinated: instead of writing the book, I build tools that help me write the book. It started with my first book, about the BEAM, where the build system reached production quality years before the prose did. The novel got a continuity engine before it got an ending. I would like to call this a method. Some weeks it is a method. Other weeks it is a very thorough way of not writing.
This time the tools were AI, which turns an old habit into a controversy.
Not using AI in writing today is like refusing the typewriter, and later the word processor, when they arrived. The refusals are on the record. In 1875 Mark Twain asked a correspondent to keep his machine quiet: "please do not even divulge the fact that I own a machine", he wrote, and he later joked that the thing had been degrading his character. When Conan Doyle needed a telltale sign of fraud in 1891, typed letters were sinister enough: "he always felt that the machine had come between us". Emily Post was still ruling "never typewrite a social note" in 1922, and by 1959 the charge had found its lasting form, Truman Capote on Kerouac: "it isn't writing at all, it's typing".
A century after the typewriter, the same trial reran against the word processor. Gore Vidal ruled in 1984 that "the word processor is erasing literature". The poet Louis Simpson warned in the New York Times Book Review that the machine "enables you to think you are writing when you are not". Wendell Berry promised to reconsider "when somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante's". The stigma ran deep enough that students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop penciled fake corrections onto clean printouts so their manuscripts would look handmade. The argument filled entire books: a philosopher's case against the word processor in 1987, and a Harvard literary history of the whole fight three decades later.
Every tool that made clean pages easier to produce has been accused of cheapening the work. The pages got cleaner anyway. The New York Herald was requiring typewritten competition manuscripts by 1892, and by 1911 the standard advice to authors was that all manuscripts should be typewritten. When researchers pooled thirty-two controlled studies of word-processed writing, the accused machine turned out to produce longer and slightly better pages.
Today the trial is running a third time. Many publishers and agents will not touch AI-generated books, and some ban AI assistance outright. The concealment is back as well: writers now strip em dashes and other rumored tells from their prose so it will not read as machine-made, the Iowa pencil trick run in reverse. I understand half of the refusal. The training of these models on copyrighted work is a real and unresolved wrong, and authors are right to be angry about it. The other half is quality: a lot of AI writing is simply not good. I know, because I have deleted it. An early draft of my novel's opening went through a model in 2025, and over the following year I cut every phrase it had chosen, one commit at a time, until the page was mine again.
The debate misses a distinction. There is AI as the writer, and there is AI as the staff.
A publishing house's offer to an author is the team: a developmental editor, a copy editor, a fact checker, a continuity reader, a typesetter, a proofreader. Nobody calls a book less authored because a fact checker verified its dates, a proofreader caught its spelling, or a typesetter fixed its widows.
I self-publish, so no team came with the deal. I built one.
My continuity department is a program that reads the manuscript in story order and keeps a log of who knows what, when: five thousand four hundred entries. It caught a character citing an event nine hours before it happens.
My fact-check desk audited every clock in the book against sunrise tables
and ferry schedules, and struck the word DeFi from a conference scene:
in September 2018 the term was one month old and had not yet escaped the
Telegram chat where it was coined, and my scene had it printed in a
session title. It is also why the malware in chapter 23 harvests signing keys from
~/.gnupg and never touches ~/.ssh: git could not sign commits with
SSH keys until 2021.
A simulated first reader estimates, scene by scene, what a reader feels. It flagged that my opening chapter had flattened into monotone, and a human reader then confirmed it by asking whether the book was translated from Swedish.
A typesetting pass renders every page to an image and inspects it for widows, orphans and broken lines, the job a print shop once staffed.
The judgment stays human, three times over. Alpha and beta readers took the early drafts, poor souls. I hired a professional story editor and a professional copy editor, the way any publisher would, and their passes changed the book. Above them, every finding from every tool lands on my desk as a proposal. Some die there, and most of what survives is tweaked before it reaches the page. The staff produces findings. The author produces verdicts.
The refusal also has a third half, which no house prints, and which I understand just as well: the staff is the product. What AI actually threatens is the publisher's cost structure, the floors of editors and checkers and typesetters that justify the deal. When an author can build some of that staff at home, a publishing house comes down to marketing and the quality gate. Both are real. Neither is a reason to forbid the author a staff of their own.
This is also why I self-publish, and why I say all of it in public. The policy does not produce abstinence. It produces silence: writers using the tools and not saying so. I would rather show you the factory than pretend the book was carved by hand.
My automated staff is slowly turning into a thing with a name. Skald is the production line I wish someone had sold me: the continuity ledger, the fact-check desk, the simulated first reader, the typesetting eye, behind one desk that keeps the author in charge of every verdict. The pieces have been accumulating since that first BEAM book. Whether anyone else wants such a thing, I do not know yet. I wanted it, and two books exist, after just fourteen years. That is two data points.
The novel is The Chain, out 9 September under the pen name Frank Able. The first chapter is free at readthechain.com, and the Kindle edition is on Amazon for pre-order. Everything I have claimed here stands or falls on those pages, which is how it should be.
Judge the pages, not the tooling.