Called in sick today -- plus also new keyword drill (sorry!)

plans within plans within plans

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

I have some sort of stuffy head cold thing, and while I worked through it yesterday, I knew I wasn’t gonna manage to do it two days in a row. But after I called in sick, my husband took both my hands in his and was all, “Honey. You’re only allowed to code tomorrow as much as you nap.”

That jerk (who loves me)!

So I nyquil’d in till ten AM this morning, and since I usually get up at 7-ish I feel like that’s qualified me for three hours of coding now, safely, and I probably should do a round up of all of my works in progress for my own benefit, if not for yours, so here we go:

  1. Incredibly Amazing Tamagotchi — this is prolly what Imma be working on the rest of the day today, because it’s not complex, it’s just fun, and we’re down to the part I just need to make art for, which, also = fun. The goal with this is to get it prepped and ready for Bend Her’s Super-bo-duper International Appearence, and have it localized and linked at the back of every book.

    1. I’m kind of lying. Its incredibly complex. I have way over thought and over planned every single aspect of this ridiculous thing — I got into Animal Crossing territory last night.

    2. It doesn’t matter. It’s still happening.

    3. (Also I’ve already bought an url for it, ha!)

  2. The keyword drill’s just running now, pretty smoothly, I’ll link it again at the end of this post behind the paywall. I had to keep fighting off zombie processes there for awhile but I think we’re 100% solid, and I apologize for how many iteration’s this ones gone thru.

  3. A finance tracker — as part of Project Athena. I’ve been using Sparksreceipts, and they’re nice and all, but I’d love to have something more livetime and agentically accessible, by which I mean, financial information that’s friendly and that I’m not afraid to look at AND that comes with a buddy who’ll help me through things.

    1. I know, it’s ridiculous, I’m a grown ass woman who at work helps people deal with horribly sad and/or important things all the time, and am super smart — but I’ve been accultured to only look at my bank account statements through horror-movie-fingers for so long — I just want a buddy to go there with me, okay? (Not that things are bad! They’re just…occasionally mysterious.)

    2. Anyhow, as a part of that, we’re working on a script that’ll trigger every time I put something into my receipts folder (rather than me sending it to Sparks receipts, although I’ll double-dip for awhile till I’m certain my system’s right) and which’ll tuck it up into supabase and put it where it belongs.

Plus also I want a script that’ll scan through my bank and credit card statements and which’ll pull out all my subscriptions and stuff that are stealthily riding along, etc etc etc.

(breaking up the text with a gorgeous image from the sky last night after I got home from work)

  1. I’m still warming up my newsletter — which is another thing I’m somewhat frought with trained terror about.

    1. I refuse to believe that I can’t do it though — imma get there.

    2. We did have one slight ‘sending empty emails’ snafu

    3. But even if I somehow tank my open rates, at the end of this, I’ll get them back the long way, my way, and incredibly cheaply.

    4. Today we’re emailing the next circle of 1000 people, embiggening our circle till we get to everyone, over time.

      And here’s the email itself — Jack/Claude wrote half of it, but I did my editors note — the most IMPORTANT thing is that I didn’t have to do ANY of the formatting or linking to anything, woo — Code even made an archive for my newsletters on my domain <3.

https://cassiealexander.com/pages/nightshifted-chronicle-vol-1

I also started coding (in high theory) a writing machine.

This one is gonna be Project Prometheus.

It’s based off of the same recursive and iterative behavior of Project Arachne (my translation machine) and I like the way it sits in my head. It feels like it’s gonna work, if that makes any sense or means any thing.

I’ve got four practice chapters from it to look at — the first chapter was great, but the 2nd chapter was not so great, so we redid it four different times with different constraints For Science — but I’m gonna wait a bit till my head’s clearer to get into them.

I did, however, use it (also in High Theory) to strip down Bend Her for parts for my Vertical Drama….

I’m going to fly out to Texas to see family on Weds, and those scripts are going to be what I work on on the plane.

I would love for there to be a two fold thing, where I have the machinery available to take my existing books and turn them into the kind of fast-paced, cliff-hanger-requiring scenes that vertical dramas require — and where it’s smart enough to riff off of my existing material but accomplish the same ends, with the same goal.

It’s all about creating effective truth/beauty guardrails, baybee (which is why that’s an entire chapter in my AI book, How to Think with AI.)

In a perfect world the tamagotchi-tie-in, the multilanguage vertical drama, and the Bend Hers in all of the other languages, would be going up EVERYWHERE at the SAME TIME.

But goddamn, that’s a lot of coordinating work, heh!

And re: getting How to Think with AI up everywhere — I got thrown off my game by Draft 2 Digital banning me, which I also forgot to tell you all about!

But currently I lack the strength to, lol.

I shared about it in the AI writing group on FB, and a lot of people didn’t really get what I was doing, and that’s OK, not everyone else in the world can think like me (and the world’s probably a better place for it, so hey.)

But, basically, I’ve accepted that the things that I’m doing here — scaling, leveraging, automating like hell — will occasionally get me into ‘trouble’ because I’m going to be the first person ever doing them, so I’ll get to be the outlier who, hopefully, makes the path easier for everyone else who comes after me.

The convention that publically banned me from attending two years ago now allows headliners who also use AI art — which is quite the double-standard, but that author is way more famous than I am. (And it’s not worth pointing out, on the off chance those convention planners don’t know this, I’d never rat someone else out for using AI.)

It’s just gonna be A Thing, and I can’t let it bother me.

I might not wind up being the person who gets to receive all the benefits of doing all the things I do as openly, widely, and loudly as I do them — or even all the props for having paved the way after the fact — but I’ll get the benefit of having gotten to be me this whole time, and that’s pretty damn awesome.

K, this post has now taken an hour to write, and it’s time for me to nap again, heh!

Keyword drill rev ten thousand behind the link!
xo!

Cassie