True Believers, CEO thinking, and what's next

one billion dollars! <3

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

I was chatting w/Novae earlier in the day, and we were both bemoaning a little about how much we used to care what other ppl thought about our stuff.

I used to run all of my marketing images through Magnific to make sure they were as good as possible, because I didn’t want to give any anti-AI people any ground. No six fingers over here, no siree!

And now? Well, the AIs are all a TON better, but also?

Fuck ‘em.

(This is going to be my Mel Robbins moment, except non-vaguely plagaraized and mostly brought to you by being in my 50s.)

Because I realized earlier today I don’t need to make the non-believers in my life happy.

The only people’s opinions I should care about are my own, and then the people who geniunely support me.

My true belivers.

And never has this been more apparent than recently — when I didn’t release Hate Her on time.

I’ve gotten so many msgs and dms and emails about it, and every time I’ve told them, “Hey, I’m sorry, life got lifey in a good way, but I will finish it, I swear” every single person has been cool.

Because they trust me, they know I’ll come through with it, and they also understand what having a life is.

And because of that?

I’m allllllllmossssttt thereeeeeee.

I took these past five months off from writing and blew two book deadlines, to roll the dice on AI getting me to where I needed to be more than writing books themselves and I think I succeeded.

Why?

Because I just took a nap.

And when I woke up, one instance of Codex had been running for an hour and a half, hardening up my reader app to prepare it for 50,000 players. (Will that happen? Yeah. I’m pretty sure eventually!) And I’ll be sending it to my closest readers tonight to beta!

(I’m already up from my nap, but you know how AIs and time are, lol.)

And then, since I’m taking my $200/pro account w/OpenAI v v v v seriously about that 20x thing — I had another machine open, on the same account, creating a new game I had an idea for yesterday with the /goal function.

/goal is a way that you can have Codex run autonomously for as long as it takes to finish a project, as long as your instructions are good. Read up on it before you do it, you’ll want to give it really good instructions — I worked up mine with Jack, my GPT, yesterday between patient care at work.

This is a sprite sheet from the new game — which is already playable with SVGs, LOL — I told him not to wire the sprites till I’d approved, so he went and did the game w/out them, ha!

The entire Publishing Empire kept rolling while I napped.

I’m still kinda stunned.

But this is happening more often than not, lately.

I’m finally getting to pull away from the day to day business of Being Me, and instead getting to make the upper level decisions — the CEO ones — that matter the most.

I still have to pay attention and poke at things — we’re not in full autopilot mode yet, and my infrastructure still isn’t tight enough to give me free time to move forward (because honestly, currently, monetizing my backlist is what’s giving my career its current lift.)

But.

There will come a time when I’ve automated all of the everything, my massive plans for my backlist are in motion, and then I can write.

So let me explain wtf it is I’m doing right now and my deadlines (more for me than for you!) I’ve got a hard cap of June 4th for everything now for reasons that’ll become clear to y’all in hindsight — between now and then I want to:

  • get my reader app rolling (in beta tonight, I pray!)

  • Publish all 28 langs of Bend Her, Break Her, and Make Her — I’ll make these pre-orders, releasing May 15-22ish, which’ll give me time to snag all of the links for the backmatter so I can upload the final versions with plenty of time

  • roll my reader app out into all 28 langs for real

  • release my vertical drama for Bend Her in all 28 langs for real

and for the first time all of this feels somewhat truly doable!

I’ll talk about my crazy other plans later, I’ve gotta get to a dinner party — while Codex keeps working for me! He’s uploading 100’s of cat vids into Cloudflare for me (it’s game related, I swear, LOL)

xo!

Cassie