Writing with AI · Story craft
Unhinge Your AI
How to push AI brainstorming from slightly odd to completely unhinged, then choose ideas that keep your genre’s promise to readers.
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Signals, stories and the promises between them.
Essays on genre, commercial fiction, story craft and the choices that begin before the first sentence.
Gothic Curiosities · Literary history
Why Are We Still Falling for the Byronic Hero?
Byron’s affairs, poetry and scandals helped create a Gothic hero who still gives writers trouble, especially when AI wants to make him likable.
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Writing with AI
I Write with AI, and I Am Still Responsible for Every Bloody Sentence.
How I use AI in drafting and revision, and why I remain responsible for every sentence I publish.
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Voice and revision
Ghostwriting Taught Me to Hear What a Voice Actually Does.
What ghostwriting teaches me to listen for when an AI revision changes the narrator as well as the prose.
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Gothic Curiosities · Story craft
Can You Hide a Plot Twist in Dinner?
A Victorian dinner experiment involving November strawberries, invalid meals and one supposedly dead wife.
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Market signal · Gothic romance
Why the Gothic Romance Trend Is Having a Moment
Danger, desire, secrecy and old gothic structures have become newly legible to a mass romance audience.
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Cover analysis · Gothic romance
Reading Gothic Romance Covers: Five Books, Five Promises
What five current covers tell readers, and what those signals mean for your own book packaging.
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