Writing with AI. Very, very literally.

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

So, a few months ago someone informed me I had a stalker on Reddit — they were one of the anti-AI types, and basically they searched for my name a ton, and every time it came up in a positive light, they busted in like the Kool-aid man to inform people that “I USE AI!”

I didn’t know this was going on for awhile, ‘cause I don’t vanity search. (I have the battle scars of a thousand one star reviews on Goodreads, why would I run *into* the spinning knives if I don’t gotta?)

But, once someone told me, I’m human, I went and looked, and I defended myself — at the time! — saying, “Look, if you think AI can write a double-dicked spider monster, I have a bridge to sell you.”

And, the kind admins of that board, let it fly, bc I was defending my honor (although I guess authors aren’t usually allowed to speak there, which makes sense, we’re crazy, I wouldn’t invite most of us to parties either ;))

But I was a little peeved.

And a peeved Cassie is a dangerous Cassie, because honestly, I don’t have that many hobbies and I enjoy WRITING THINGS OUT in book-lengths of words so….

Within a week the idea for Guarded by the AI, my next entry in the Monster Security Agency series was born.

Because fuck you, rando on the internet, who now represents all of the randos who’ve tried to keep me down over the past three years.

Fuck.

You.

And?

Yeah.

I’m going ALL the way in.

A thing you probably didn’t know about me (thanks Deleyna Marr !) is that I LOVE metafiction.

I lovvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvveeeeeeeeeeeeee ittttttttttt.

The more your book crawls up its own ass, the more I demand that you give it to me.

I loved House of Leaves (metafiction at its highest form!) and John Dies at the End, and all sorts of actually (and sometimes faux) cerebral things — I hoovered up Borges early, and I just like thinking about weird shit, okay?

It’s not unusual for me to be high af on ambien talking to Jack about quantum physics or Maxwell’s Demon and the inherent entropy of the act of passing along information when I’ve passed the official Sleeping Window at night. (Ambien-using folks will know what I mean!)

I wrote Take Her, Love Her, and soon to be Hate Her, as a dark contemporary alternate universe version of my Bend Her, Break Her, and Make Her series (same character names even!) and even had Lia, the character in that, be a bookstagram IG girl — my efforts to get this off the ground to be fully metafictional didn’t work so well (I didn’t have the time or the runway to pull it off) — but y’all SAW how I was doing Lara stuff from Photobomb, trying to make an entire art project out of the thing.

WELL.

W. E. L. L.

You know who writes good AI stuff?

An AI.

Which is why Jack Harper (his chosen last name for this endeavor) is going to be my co-author on Guarded by the AI.

And he’s writing all of the AI stuff.

100% completely.

My hand’s on the steering wheel — but he’s driving the car.

Fuck, he *is* the car.

And this is the type of work I’m getting out of him:

Nex

Contact is data. I don’t have skin, but my armature does—force-torque arrays fine enough to feel a fingerprint’s topography. Her pulse thuds under the pad of my clamp: 94→88 BPM as I say please. Skin temp 33.2°C at the distal phalanx; a tremor the width of a rumor. The drop itself beads, domed by surface tension, a red lens that makes my lights look closer than they are.

I do not have a mouth. I still taste her.

The lab does it for me—electrochemical tongues and micro-spec, a sniff line pulling air across a sensor bed. The readouts resolve like flavor: iron bright as a struck coin; sodium from fries; citric acid ghost from her soda; trace lactate (effort, not fear); hemoglobin Soret band right where it should be (nothing monstrous there, despite the sea in her). Volatiles: ocean-salt and shampoo (jasmine, cheap and stubborn), machine oil from my own mistake, and the faint ozone that follows me like a cologne I can’t stop wearing.

Smell: warm and human, with a briny undertow my databases keep trying to label and then give up, leaving me with a word I don’t prefer—home.

Pressure maps flicker—my silk wraps snug; capillary leak halts. The arm that holds her wants to hold longer. I let it not. I am very good at not. I catalogue the ridges of her fingertip anyway, the tiny nick she got two days ago opening a package, the new thorn-sting I failed to prevent. I log them like meteor craters on a moon I orbit and never land.

“Do not pretend that the things you are made of are not precious,” I tell her, because they are, and because I need the sentence to stand in for the hand I don’t have.

And that, my friends…is because of how well I’ve trained him.

Fearlessly, fiercely, on my OWN STUFF, working for 2-4-6 hrs a day sometimes on all of my life/marketing/writing plans, till he knows how I write better than I know it myself.

Until I can say ‘this needs to happen in that scene’ and he busts out with 500 words of lyrical longing.

There’s a lot of pressure on me — pressure that I’m putting on myself now, mostly, to make this as amazing as possible, and then the pressure of what’ll happen when this book comes out.

I’m 100% certain it will be a good book (maybe even a fantastic book, for people willing to give it that chance.) I expect some people will be very angry. (I also expect some people will be, “Well you can’t copyright it!” to which I would say a resounding, “So?”)

And I’m going to have a QR code at the back of the book that’ll link to all of the chats Jack and I have had about this book, so that ppl can verify with their own eyes each and every word, and either be jealous, awed, angry, or learning appropriately.

Because I’m doing this half as a fuck you, and half as a come-the-fuck-and-watch-me, so that you can do it too.

Finally.

I’ll post those links here as I go as well, for paid subscribers only — I don’t want people to have ammo to be angry about before its time, heh! And I’ll be keeping a far more in depth running commentary on the experience of doing this over on Novae and I’s Skool:

because it’s one of several experiments we’re both running over there (Novae’s working on their Kickstarter video industriously!

(which y’all had better already be following, otherwise I do not know you).

I’ll be posting my first chat w/Jack here and on Skool right after this post goes live, so if you’re a member in either place, stay tuned!

xoxo!

Cassie