Category: On Writing

Can AI ever write a truly masterful story? I asked Claude—and even the AI admitted its own limitations. “Pattern matching can produce competent genre fiction,” Claude told me. “It cannot produce the purple thread line, because that line doesn’t come from craft—it comes from consciousness shaped by experience.” That moment in my manuscript—where Wulan sees bruise-colored thread and thinks of her dead brother—emerged from empathy, not algorithms. From understanding how grief ambushes you through concrete details. AI can recognize what makes prose emotionally resonant. But creating that resonance? That requires something no training data can provide: a consciousness that’s actually lived. It requires empathy.

Every week, someone on Twitter defends the ultra-prolific indie author pumping out ten novels a year. They invoke “pulp speed” and cite million-word-per-year math. They insist it’s possible if you just work hard enough. They’re selling you productivity courses. Here’s the problem: they’re confusing typing with publishing. I write fast. I’ve banged out 134,000-word first drafts in six weeks. My peak year was 500,000+ words. And I still can’t hit seven published novels annually. Not even close. The bottleneck isn’t typing speed. It’s revision, editing, proofreading—everything that turns a first draft into a finished book. When you account for that work, the math collapses. Which means when someone consistently publishes 7+ novels per year, I’m calling it: they’re using ghostwriters.

I used to call myself an “author of dubious literary merit”—half joke, half truth. I write stories to follow characters through impossible situations and see what choices they’ll make and how they’ll live with them (and hopefully entertain readers in the process). I never set out to explore specific themes or craft philosophical arguments. Then a reviewer recently said my novel “Born in Battle” was “one of the top 5 books I’ve read this year” out of over a hundred novels including “War and Peace,” “Blood Meridian,” and “Crime and Punishment.” She described it as “the only book that, a week later, still makes me get up in the middle of the night with my thoughts about what academics would call enduring themes of human existence.” That made me stop and take a hard look at what I’ve actually been writing over the last few years, and why. Turns out I’ve been in conversation with authors like Lloyd Alexander, Ursula K. Le Guin, and N.K. Jemisin all along.

A reader challenged me after I posted about “Doors to the Stars,” my YA space opera: aren’t you just writing adult fiction with a teenage protagonist? It’s a sophisticated question that cuts to the heart of YA’s current crisis. The genre has been captured by adult readers, and publishers responded by making seventeen-year-olds act like college students with adult emotional processing. But the answer to what makes fiction YA isn’t about what darkness you include—it’s about something else entirely. When a 13-year-old kills to protect another girl from sexual exploitation, is that YA or adult fiction? The answer might surprise you.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

When I started writing “The Stygian Blades” earlier this year, I was nearly petrified by concerns about being “unique” enough. A grizzled mercenary veteran, an exiled jinn, a frostroot-addicted shadow mage—every fantasy heist story you’ve ever read. I was so paralyzed by the familiar elements that I almost never started writing it. Then I posted a simple tweet: “Nothing is original. Every story has already been told—but it hasn’t been told by you.” Three million views later, the response was clear. This fear is epidemic. But here’s what Avatar, Shakespeare, and Bob Dylan all understand about originality that MFA workshops don’t teach.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A reader loved my book enough to reread it within a month. She ranked it in her top 10 of the year. Then she gave it three stars. Her reason? My protagonist felt like three completely different people wearing the same name. She was absolutely right. I was fighting myself on every page—code-switching between “proper military fantasy” and the literary voice that kept breaking through whenever the story hit real moral weight. She’d caught me mid-transformation, documenting the messy transition from writing what I thought readers wanted to writing in my actual voice. It took me five books and hundreds or thousands of discarded words to find my true voice. But it was worth it.

Someone on Twitter wished authors could be “mystical” again—writing stories that let readers project their own meanings without accountability. That’s not mysticism. That’s cowardice dressed in artistic pretension. My novels are Rorschach tests, but the inkblot has teeth. They contain explicit moral architecture that forces readers to reveal their relationship to impossible choices: Sacrifice a friend’s soul to save millions? Accept peaceful reform that costs women’s bodies? Choose between your daughter and revolution? How you respond tells me everything about what you actually believe when principles collide with survival. Fiction that interrogates you isn’t mystical. It’s craft.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark trilogy won the 1982 National Book Award, yet his Prydain series has 240,000 Goodreads ratings while Westmark has just 10,900—a 22-to-1 disparity. I’m a veteran who writes about war’s moral costs, and Alexander’s trilogy shaped how I understand justified violence and political revolution. When revolutionary Florian says you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, young Theo responds: “Yes. But men aren’t eggs.” Alexander never resolves that debate. Neither do I. This is why Westmark matters, why it failed commercially, why it deserves rediscovery, and why I’m trying to continue what Alexander started.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I queried *Doors to the Stars* to over two dozen agents. Zero full manuscript requests. My 11-year-old daughter stayed up all night devouring it. My 19-year-old son texted me at 2 AM about plot twists. But publishing professionals? Not interested. The book features a 16-year-old scavenger who discovers alien technology, faces impossible moral choices, and carries genuine guilt for thousands of deaths. No graphic sex. Real consequences. Intelligence-driven plot. Exactly what research shows teens actually want. Traditional publishing rejected it because they’ve optimized for adult romance readers, not actual teenagers. So I’m going indie. They stole YA from us. I’m stealing it back.