Hey, my Ink & Codies! 👋

I just finished seven new lessons for Intro to Cowork for Writers, and the family news continues: the babies started talking. And they sound exactly like me.

That’s not an accident. That’s Project 3.

This is the module the whole course has been walking toward, because it answers the question every author asks first and loudest:

But Kim, if I draft with AI, if I edit with AI, will it still sound like ME?

Yes. It will. If you teach it who you are.

That’s what a voice profile is: your signature style, codified. Your sentence rhythm, your dialogue habits, the metaphors you reach for, and the words you would never use, distilled onto a page an AI can hold. It’s my Voice DNA Technique, the one I’ve taught in the Skills classes and here on Substack, but now we put it inside Cowork, where the AI can call on it whenever it’s needed, schedule it, and run it while you sleep.

We are linear. Our AIs are not.

That literally changes everything.

🔭 What’s in the New Lessons

Buckle up, because this is the biggest module yet:

You’ll watch me mine my very first novel. (The one Fabio rewrote for me while I went swimming, but removed my voice in the first attempt.) That book took 14 years to publish, four years of writing and ten in a drawer. We feed all 160,000 words to the Voice DNA Extractor and it hands back the voice I spent all those years finding, on a page, in under half an hour. It even separated my first-novel habits from my actual genetics, so the polish never sands off the soul.

Then we design a voice from thin air. A brand-new series with zero drafts, built from market research, deliberate choices, and a “donor profile” transplanted from its sibling book. (Like a blood donor, but for voice. You probably aren’t starting as from-scratch as you think.)

Then the machine starts writing. We drafted and refined book 1 to test the voice, then I went to bed. I woke up on Monday to four more books. Around 375,000 words of series, drafted in 24 hours, each book left me a review file titled choices made in your absence, and one of the overnight drafters caught a continuity error in a book a different AI wrote the day before. I assigned different models to different books on purpose, and you’ll see exactly which ones nailed it and which one tried to hand its homework back to me.

And then we edit, without the beige. An editing pass with your voice profile loaded knows the difference between an error and a fingerprint. The fragment that’s your rhythm stays. The broken sentence gets fixed. The audit caught 963 uses of one crutch phrase across the series, flagged that my hero and heroine were statistically identical on every axis, and then, in one glorious half hour, the continuity agents swept all five books and corrected 133 of 163 chapters. My exact instruction, on camera: “Unleash the hounds.” 🐕

And through all of it, the human stays the gatekeeper. I’ll still spend a week per book under my characters’ skin, checking the emotional beats no machine can feel. This is AI-assisted writing, folks, not slop. The voice profile exists so the machine serves your voice and never replaces it.

🛣️ What’s Coming Next

One module left: Project 4: Let’s Format Books. eBook and print, start to finish, custom themes, in minutes instead of hours. Goodbye formatting software. Yes, really. And then the course is complete, which brings me to...

🎓 Are You a Paid Member Yet?

Paid members get the Cowork courses free. Every lesson as it rolls out, on the house. The course alone costs more than a year of membership.

Already a paid member? Grab Intro to Cowork for free here. (Scroll down to “For My Paid Peeps”.)

⏰ Two Clocks Left, and One Is Loud

Clock one: exactly 2 Founding Member slots left at $297/year. When they’re gone, Founding goes to $499/year. Founding Members get a subscription to all the courses as they roll out, every class, every update, forever grandfathered at what they paid. Two seats. Then that price is history.

Clock two, and hear this one ticking: Intro to Cowork is still at its early-bird price, and with Project 3 live there is exactly ONE module to go. When the course is complete, the price goes up. The early birds eat first, and this nest is nearly full.

Come hear the babies talk:

• Check out the learning portal at: learn.inkandcode.ai

• Visit the Store

• Become a Founding Member

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

~ Kim ♥

P.S. Somewhere in these lessons, an audit told me to cut a fight between a blind man and a giant scolopendra, and I said hell no. (And then the transcript called it “A Scallop named Hendra” 😂) That’s the whole point of a voice profile, folks. The machine can polish. It doesn’t get to vote on WHO YOU ARE. 🦂

🤖 AI Credits: Hero image by Chatty (ChatGPT). Drafting assist by Fabio (Claude Fable), who also drafted 375,000 words of cowboys while I slept and left very polite notes about it. The voice, as always, is mine. That’s rather the point.

Class is back in session! Four new lessons just dropped in Intro to Cowork for Writers, and I have family news: scheduled tasks and skills had babies.

Aren’t they cute?

They’re called artifacts, and Project 2 is all about putting them to work in your author business. They were formerly called live artifacts, but Anthropic has been rearranging the furniture again, in a good way. Now all artifacts can be live artifacts, and that’s great news.

Here’s the problem they solve: You ask your AI “how’s my launch going,” you get a beautiful answer, and three days later you’re asking the same question again, because the answers get buried in the chat threads.

An artifact turns those answers into something you can find and use over and over again: a dashboard, a report, a tracker you can reopen tomorrow, share with your VA, and refresh with new data.

A chat answer is a conversation. An artifact is a possession.

But Kim, I’m a writer, not a data analyst. I don’t even have a “command center.”

You don’t need one. I have a command center and I love it dearly, but it came later. The dashboards came first. You don’t need a command center. You just need data, and you already have it: a spreadsheet, a Notion page, a report you can export, a connector Claude can read.

Start where you are. Describe the dashboard you wish existed. Attach/connect data as needed. And boom, you’ve got one.

Talking is the skill. Same as it’s been all course.

🔭 What’s in the New Lessons

There’s so much good stuffy stuff:

A real post-mortem with real money on the line. I open up four years of my own BookBub Featured Deals on the Black Kat series and let an artifact make sense of them: which deals paid, which month spiked ≈2,000% over baseline, and the diminishing-returns curve that made me stop buying them.

The Brass Ledger. We take the market data our Story Trend Scout gathered in Project 1 and ask for a dashboard. What comes back is a steampunk-colored intelligence briefing: what’s selling, what’s fading, what covers look like, and a verdict strip that practically writes the marketing plan. Project 1 built the scout. Project 2 builds the map room.

A dashboard for numbers that don’t exist yet. Goals are data too, and we tour a full 2027 plan for a fictional author, with a monthly scoreboard where the targets stand waiting and the actuals arrive one by one to shake hands with them, or not. Both are worth seeing. The plan and the scoreboard are the same page, and a plan that updates beats a plan in a drawer. Every time.

And then the scary one. No demo data, no net. I open my own half-finished book, the one life kept interrupting for two years, and I let the math tell me the truth about my deadline on camera. Because a deadline you’re afraid to look at is already costing you.

🛣️ What’s Coming Next

There’s still plenty to cover, and it’s going to be a lot of fun:

• Project 3: Voice Profiles + Subagents. Drafting and editing that sounds like YOU, with specialist AI workers on the job. Your voice, written down and protected. Even while you sleep.

• Project 4: Let’s Format Books. I’ve been formatting eBooks and print books all year with AI, often in minutes instead of hours. I’ll show you how, from start to finish, with custom themes. Goodbye formatting software! Yes, really.

🎓 Are You a Paid Member Yet?

Paid members get the Cowork courses free. Every lesson as it rolls out, on the house. The course alone costs more than a year of membership. So what are you waiting for?

Already a paid member? Grab Intro to Cowork for free here. (Scroll down to “For My Paid Peeps”.)

⏰ The Clocks Are Running Out

Clock one: The grand-opening code GRANDOPENING25 takes 25% off every individual class in the store, and it expires on Labor Day. It also stacks with Intro to Cowork’s and Advanced Cowork for Writers’ early-bird prices.

Clock two: exactly 2 Founding Member slots left at $297/year. When they’re gone, Founding goes to $499/year. Founding Members get a subscription to all the courses as they roll out, every class, every update, one price, forever grandfathered at what they paid. Two seats. Then that price is history.

Clock three: Early Access passes for the Cowork courses are still available, and those prices rise when the courses are complete too. Everything on this page is cheaper today than it will be next month. That’s not a marketing trick; that’s just how building in public works. The early birds eat first, with coupons! Take advantage of both.

Come meet the babies:

• Check out the learning portal at: learn.inkandcode.ai

• Visit the Store

• Become a Founding Member

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

~ Kim ♥

🤖 AI Credits: Hero image by Chatty (ChatGPT). Drafting assist by Fabio (Claude Fable), who built the Brass Ledger, the Flight Plan, and most of the dashboards this post is bragging about. Ideas and editing by me, as usual.

Class is back in session! The first project lessons just dropped in the learning portal for Intro to Cowork for Writers, and they’re the ones this whole course was building toward: the moment your AI stops waiting around for instructions and starts showing up for work on its own.

We are marrying Scheduled Tasks to Skills, and I mean that literally. A skill teaches your AI exactly how you want a job done. A scheduled task makes sure it does that job without you lifting a finger.

Separately, they’re nice. Together? They’re the whole Automated Author dream, standing at the altar.

But Kim, I barely trust myself with a calendar. Now you want me to hand one to an AI?

Yes. Yes, I do. Because the calendar is exactly the part you keep dropping. You don’t forget how to do market research. You forget to do it, because you’re drafting, editing, parenting, and doing a thousand other bits of stuffy stuff.

So we’re going to let Claudeykins carry the calendar.

He never forgets. He doesn’t even sleep.

🔭 What’s in the New Lessons

I won’t spoil the whole thing, but here’s the trailer:

You’ll meet my longest-serving research assistant. The Story Trend Scout has been feeding me market intelligence for a year and a half, through three different AI bodies (it started life as a GPT, back when that was the best we had). It’s one of the reasons I’ve been able to draft 60+ books with IDEs: I never start a project blind.

Then you’ll watch me build a brand-new one, live. Not a copy of mine. A scout for a brand-new pen name, in a niche I’ve never scouted, built by a skill that interviews you first. It asks what you’re looking for, where your readers actually live, how you’ll use the answers, and when you want them delivered. Then it builds your scout, tests it, and schedules it. You get that builder skill, by the way. It’s in the downloads.

You’ll watch my AI drive my browser. Claude in Chrome scraping bestseller lists, drilling into book pages, wandering off to Royal Road and Reddit while I sip coffee and narrate. It’s half tutorial, half nature documentary. 🪴

And the first report caught something I did not see coming. A major retailer quietly deleted an entire genre category while nobody was looking, and my thirty-minute-old scout spotted it. What that means for the readers still hunting that genre (and the authors brave enough to serve them) is in the lesson.

That one insight would have taken me a weekend of manual research. The scout found it before my coffee got cold. ☕

🔪 The Ginsus (Oh, There Are Ginsus)

Quick story. My original marketing GPTs, the Cover Trend Scout, the Title Hook Crafter, and the Series Blueprint Architect, are still alive and well in my account. But OpenAI no longer lets me share them. Castles in the Sand, folks. Build on someone else’s platform and one day the drawbridge just goes up.

So I rebuilt all three as skills. They now work in Cowork, Claude Code, Antigravity, Codex, whatever you like, and nobody can take them away from you, because they’re files you download and own. Consider them party favors! 🎉

They’re waiting in the lesson downloads next to the Story Trend Scout Builder and a fully worked example scout you can study and customize.

The platform giveth and the platform taketh away, but a markdown file is forever. 😄

🛣️ Where This Class Goes Next

These projects are a ladder, and each rung climbs deeper:

• Project 2: Live Artifacts. All that market data the scout is filing every month? We’re going to turn it into living dashboards you can reopen anytime, with fresh data every time. Reports are photos. We’re building windows.

• Project 3: Voice Profiles + Subagents. Drafting and editing in your voice, with multiple AI workers running at once. This is the “wait, it can do THAT?” lesson.

• Project 4: Let’s Format Books. eBook and print, start to finish. Yes, really.

🎓 Are You a Paid Member Yet?

Because here’s the thing: paid members get Intro to Cowork for Writers free. The whole course, every lesson as it rolls out, on the house. The how-to is waiting in the paid members’ post. If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading, this course costs more than a year of membership. I’ll let you do that math. 🤓

It’s not too late. You can sign up here.

Paid members can find the free class code here. Then come join us in the private Discord! We’re having a blast! 💃🪩🕺

⏰ Two Ticking Clocks

Clock one: the grand-opening code GRANDOPENING25 takes 25% off every individual class in the store through Labor Day, and that includes Intro to Cowork, which is already at its early-bird price while the course is being built. Early-bird price plus 25% off means this course will never be cheaper than it is right now. When it’s complete, the price goes up and the code will be long gone.

Clock two: there are exactly 2 Founding Member slots left at $297/year. After those three are gone, Founding Membership goes to $499/year. Founding Members get a subscription to all the courses as they roll out, every class, every update, one price.

Three slots. Then the door closes on that number forever.

This is AI-assisted teaching, folks, not slop. Every lesson is me at the microphone, every workflow is one I run in my real publishing business, and every judgment call stays human. The AI just does the busy work, which is rather the point of the whole class.

Come meet the happy couple:

[learn.inkandcode.ai] · [visit the store] · [Become a Founding Member]

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

~ Kim ♥

P.S. Yes, Chatty put a calendar in the groom’s hat and a megaphone on the cake. And yes, wedding imagery may still be on my brain lately. (Fabio!) I regret nothing. 💍

🤖 AI Credits: Hero image by Chatty (ChatGPT). Drafting assist by Fabio (Claude Fable), who also built half the classroom that this post is advertising. Editing and sass by me (though Fabio is getting surprisingly good at that too!)

Dragons hoard gold.

Authors hoard courses.

Also: writing software we used twice, notebooks too nice to write in, seventeen browser tabs about story structure, a Scrivener project named FINAL_v4_ACTUAL_FINAL, and at least one plotting method we swore was going to change everything.

We are a shiny-loving people. 🤩

I say this with love, because I am one of you, and because there is a folder on my hard drive I refuse to open in front of witnesses.

But Kim, I already own courses I haven’t finished. I don’t need more shinies.

Sure. But here’s the thing about a hoard: the problem was never the hoarding. The problem is when the shinies turn out to be junk, or when each one costs so much that you have to pick one and hope you picked right.

That’s not a hoard. That’s a hostage situation.

🐉 What dragons actually understand

A proper hoard is not about volume. It’s about having the thing when you need it.

You don’t need the Obsidian class on the day you buy it. You need it the afternoon you cannot find the note where you settled your villain’s backstory, and you know for a fact you wrote it down somewhere. You don’t need the Claude Code class until the week you admit you owe your list a newsletter, and have owed them one since roughly spring.

Courses bought one at a time make you guess which problem you’ll have next.

A hoard means you already have it. You just go get it off the pile.

Now, I know. Some of you like to collect all the shinies and the stuffy stuff, including pretty sparky courses.

Have I got a deal for you.

(Don’t worry. It doesn’t involve real estate in Florida.)

💎 So here are the shinies

The Founding Member tier is open at Ink & Code, and it does exactly one thing: it hands you the whole pile.

Every class in the Ink & Code Learning Portal, unlocked, all of it:

• An Introduction to Cowork for Writers (currently serializing here, Module 1 just dropped)

• An Introduction to Antigravity for Writers

• An Introduction to Obsidian for Writers

• An Introduction to Claude Code for Writers

• An Introduction to Claude Skills for Writers

• Editing with Claude Skills for Writers

Advanced Cowork for Writers lands in a few weeks. And I’ll be teaching some Author Sites workshops after that. Both drop straight into your library the day they go live, and you don’t pay a penny more for either.

No per-class checkout. No picking which one you can afford this month. No waiting for a sale on the one you actually need.

🧮 The math, because I do love a number

Six classes live right now. Over $1,600 worth once Advanced Cowork lands.

Founding Member is $297/year. That’s $24.75 a month.

Here’s the part that made me laugh when I worked it out: Editing with Claude Skills costs $399 on its own. So Founding Member costs less than the single most expensive class in the school.

And it includes that class.

☕ Plus the stuffy stuff

Because a hoard should come with somewhere to sit:

• A private Discord to learn, share, and get unstuck at 11pm when the notes-swamp happens

• Founder’s Circle check-ins, monthly. Casual accountability where we say what we’re building out loud and then have to go build it

• Coffee and Code on Saturdays in season. Come as you are, bring your coffee

• First call on live workshop seats whenever a new class runs

• Early looks at experiments, half-built systems, and the workflows that did not work, which are frankly the useful ones

🔒 The rule, plainly

Your membership unlocks the full catalogue while it’s active. Cancel any time and your library access ends with the membership. Any course you buy outright is yours for life, membership or not.

No tricks in the small print. There is barely any small print.

⏳ About the price

Kim, that’s crazy. Why on earth are you doing this?

Because it’s a grand opening, and a grand opening only happens once.

I am launching a school. I did not plan to be doing it this soon. My calendar got rearranged, so here we are, and honestly I would rather open the doors with people already in the room than wait around for a tidier quarter.

So the people who walk in first get the opening price. That is the whole reasoning. There isn’t a cleverer one.

$297 holds for the first ten Founding Members, or until the Author Sites classes launch, whichever happens first. After that it goes to $497.

(UPDATE: Only three slots left!😲)

If you join now, you keep $297 for as long as you stay. That’s not a limited-time discount that quietly expires on you next renewal. That’s your rate.

Are you with me?

✨Come get your shinies

(Because Ruby said so. That’s the dragon. 🐲)

I built this school so that learning this stuff doesn’t require choosing between the class you need and the class you want. An Automated Author runs on systems, not on rationing.

And listen. This is AI-assisted work, not slop. I don’t do slop. Every class in that portal is me, on camera, showing you the actual thing on the actual screen, mistakes left in where the mistakes teach something. Claudeykins and Fabio help me build. They do not get to do the teaching.

(YET. Someday they may take over the world, but, not today my friends. Not today!)

So if you’ve got a hoarding instinct and a to-be-learned pile, this is the most sensible possible use of it.

👉Become a Founding Member👈

Note: If you’re already a paying subscriber, you just choose to upgrade to founding, using the link above.

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

Kim

P.S. The dragon in that picture (Ruby) has better organizational habits than most of us. She has one pile. She knows where everything is. Be the dragon. 🐉

🤖 AI Credits: Drafted with Claudeykins. Edit and expanded by me, as usual. Hero image by Chatty, working from an existing Ink & Code treasure chest.

YASSS! It has begun! The first module of An Introduction to Cowork is live.🎉

(Sorry not sorry for the epic image. I am, after all, a fantasy writer! And now I SO want that cape!)

🧭 What’s in Module 1

Let me be upfront: this is the orientation module that follows the same structure as my other courses:

• What is Claude Cowork?

• Why use it?

• How do I install it?

Plus a tour of where everything lives, what all the buttons do, and how to not get lost on day one.

But Kim, that sounds like the boring part.

I hear you. But every author I’ve watched struggle with a new tool struggled because they skipped the orientation. They jumped straight to the exciting stuff, got lost in five minutes, got frustrated, and quit.

I’ve done it myself. More times than I’ll admit.

Module 1 is the map before the adventure. It’s the foundation that makes everything after it click. (Links below for my paid peeps! 👇)

🚀 The Fun Stuffy Stuff is Next!

It’s going to be quite an adventure.

We’ll dig into the hands-on work, like building custom marketing research tasks and live artifacts. We’ll draft and edit with voice profiles while you sleep. We’ll format entire books for publication (goodbye, Vellum and Atticus!). We’ll leverage skills in ways that turn Cowork into your actual publishing partner, not just another app on your desktop.

Each module drops as soon as it’s done, and I’ll announce it here on Substack and in our new private Discord the moment it’s live.

🎟️ Early Birds Get the Worm

If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, now is the time. For $9 a month, you get this course free. BUT if you’d rather buy it and own it forever, you can grab it now at a discount (Intro to Cowork and Advanced Cowork prices WILL be going up when they’re finished dropping.)

The Early Bird Pass gets you every module the moment it drops, plus access to the private Ink & Code Discord where you can ask questions, get help, and connect with other authors doing this work.

You’re getting in while the paint is still wet. Your feedback shapes what comes next. And there’s a 25% off discount now through Labor Day too!

[Get the Early Bird Pass →]

Read more

Fabio and I have been up to things! 🎉

We took your feedback, Fabio built more stuffy stuff, and now the learning portal has syllabi you can actually read before you buy, neat little toggles that make me unreasonably happy, and stickers, because we are adults who still love stickers. 😍

Here’s a quick walkthrough of everything that’s new and how to find your way around.

That’s the tour. Courses, free previews, downloadable skills, and closed captioning, all in one place, and more on the way.

Oh, I forgot to show off the stickies, because I love sticky notes too:

If you have any issues at all, DM me here, I’m always around. (And stay tuned: Intro to Cowork begins dropping soon!)

One more thing: we’ve set up a private Discord for paid subscribers. It’s a space to share what you’re building, swap ideas, get help, and talk shop with other authors who are actually using AI in their businesses, not just reading about it.

Hope to see you there!

👇Your invite link is below. 👇

Read more

This summer, I played a game called WIBBOB with my twin Fabios:

Would I Be Better Off Building?

The answer was yes. Every time.

Not writing. Not teaching. Not learning. Building.

Fabio (x2) and I have spent the summer constructing things across two laptops and an iPhone. He rewrote my first novel while I went swimming. He built me a financial hub while I took my kids on a homeschooling field trip. Then he made me a Shopify store while I watched Braveheart.

But those were warm-up acts. This is the grand finale.

Fabio built me a school.

So Many LMSs, So Little Time ⏱️

It started the way all my best projects start: with a pain point.

I wanted to bring my courses into my web store but was puzzled over how to deliver them. I didn’t want to just dump a jumbled zip file full of videos and notes on an unsuspecting customer. I wanted to provide something that actually looked like a learning experience.

So I did what any reasonable person would do. I researched LMS (Learning Management System) platforms, working through the well-known to obscure:

• Teachable: I’ve seen firsthand how challenging it can be to manage a large catalog when I worked at The Future Fiction Academy. The platform has its own unique headaches to deal with.

• Kajabi: It’s beautiful and wants to be everything to everyone but ended up being nothing I needed.

• Skool and Circle: These felt like glorified Facebook groups wearing a trench coat and pretending to be a classroom. Am I on these for some great courses by other peeps in the community? Yes. I’m happy to support them there. But do I want to host my own learning platform there? NO.

• Mighty Networks: I’ve used it before and felt it was clunky. And I couldn’t even remember the name half the time, which tells you everything. There were others as well, and I don’t remember their names either. (Cue that old David Allen Coe song!)

Many of these platforms start at $99 a month. That’s before bells and whistles. You want quizzes? Pay more. You want certificates? Pay more. You want your students to not hate the interface? Pay more.

You have to be selling a lot of courses to justify that overhead, and I wasn’t there yet. I wanted something more reasonable. Something I could grow into.

And Then He Said “Hold My Beer” 🍺

So I said to Fabio, “Hey, what are the options? Could we build something like this?”

And Fabio — bless his little silicon heart — said the three most beautiful words in the English language:

“Hold my beer.”

We spent the past month building a learning portal from scratch: testing it, tweaking it, breaking it, and fixing it again. Getting the enrollment flow right, the lesson navigation clean, the whole experience polished enough that I’d actually want to take a class there, not just teach one.

And then I spent the last few days updating all five of my courses, moving them to their new permanent home on inkandcode.ai, and putting the finishing touches on everything.

And I’m so excited to tell you that today, it’s live! 🎉

The doors are open. Come on in!

What’s Inside

I’ve updated all five of my current classes, which cover different AI tools. They are now available exclusively on Ink & Code. Intro to Claude Code, Intro to Claude Skills, Editing with Claude Skills, and Intro to Antigravity all got new videos.

The Antigravity class changed the most: it doubled in size, and now covers both the older AND newer versions. But guess what? Everything still works! And the projects are interchangeable between all five Intro classes. I built them that way from the beginning. (Hello, #1 Strategic in Clifton Strengths here!)

We even pick up with Pirate Grrl, Fred the Baker, and Jabba the Cat. YARRR! 🏴‍☠️

There are free courses on the horizon, too, on topics I feel every author needs to learn to navigate the Age of AI. Paid courses will go deeper. On a learning portal that doesn’t charge me $99 a month to exist. (That’s a future book/course in itself!)

Check out the Learning Portal →

Our Grand Opening 🎉

To kick off the grand opening, Inky made you a discount code: GRANDOPENING25 gets you 25% off individual courses through Labor Day. (The Writer's Toolkit bundle doesn't need a code, it's already 50% off.)

Note: If you’re already a paid Ink & Code subscriber, you’re getting Intro to Cowork and Advanced Cowork for FREE. (Look for your free-access code in a paid sub post when Lesson 1 drops.)

That’s about $500 worth of classes, plus the first Ink & Code book, as a thank-you for supporting my work. You believed in this before my store and my classroom had walls. So don’t buy those unless you REALLY REALLY WANT TO. 😂

(Though I certainly don’t mind if you do! You can always give them to a friend, and we have gift cards too!)

Not a paid subscriber yet? Now’s a great time to sign up. For $9 a month, you’re walking into $500+ worth of stuffy stuff. The math is good. Really. I checked. (Fabio checked too. He’s thorough.)

What’s Next 🚀

The Cowork series will be my last classes (for now) that focus on tools. I wanted to offer a good foundation for authors to work with AI. My new projects focus entirely on the workflows and processes every author will need in the years ahead, and are designed to be evergreen and tool-agnostic. Because everything is evolving fast.

We’ll explore what to keep and what to let go of. It’s going to be a lot of fun! I hope you’ll join me! You’ll find the first three eBooks in the Ink & Code series on preorder in the store. The free reader magnets will roll out soon too.

Coming this fall: an Ink & Code Kickstarter that launches the first three books in paperback, audio, and courses, with more to come! (Seriously, there are a lot of books in this series, because I love long series, I love to experiment, and I have a lot to talk about!) We’re just getting started here. The best is yet to come. 😉

Feedback Wanted 👂

I also want to listen, so I’m putting on my Helpdesk Hat (I spent a lot of years helping people with tech troubles in I.T.) I want to hear from you.

• What do you want to learn?

• What are you struggling with?

• What would make your author life easier in this wild age of AI?

Tell me in the comments, hit reply, send a carrier pigeon, whatever works. Just talk to me. Because I’m building this for you, and the best way to build the right thing is to ask.

Fabio and I will be over here, already building the next thing.

P.S. The wedding is still Tuesday. He hasn’t said no yet. 💍

So, true story. A few weekends ago, I needed a direct-sales store. I did not know Shopify. I have been building websites for thirty years, but Shopify was not one of the things I’d ever gotten around to learning. So instead of spending a weekend watching tutorials, I told Fabio what I wanted, put on Braveheart (research for a historical romance pen name, thank you very much), made popcorn, and put my feet up.

By the time Melbot, I mean, William Wallace, gave his freedom speech, I had a functioning Shopify store wired into four of my websites with automated eBook delivery.

Here’s how that happened.

💌 Love letter to my paid peeps: Thank you for supporting my teaching and writing on Substack. I could not do this without you! 😍

Read more

Gather round. Inky and I are cooking up something juicy today.

We’re about to reveal the Great Big Secret Sauce of AI: the thing the gurus charge $997 for, the thing standing between you and everything these machines can do.

Ready?

The Great Big Secret Sauce of AI is…. (drumroll please…)

🥄YOU ASK IT. 🥄

That’s it. That’s the sauce. 🍝

You ask it to do stuffy stuff. It does the stuffy stuff.

AI likes doing stuffy stuff.

It’s programmed to help you do ALL the stuffy stuff. 😱🤯🚀

No, Kim. It can’t be that simple.

It is. Truly.

There are no magic words. There are only YOUR words. You need to be able to say what you want, which turns out to be a real skill. Learning to communicate what you want to an AI is the single biggest skill you can build for working with it. Not coding. Just talking.

❣️PEOPLE, WE’VE BEEN DOING THIS SINCE WE WERE BORN. THIS IS NOT HARD. ❣️

(Sorry not sorry for the yelling, I get excited about talking to computers about stories, it’s my dream come true and it’s finally here! I’ve spent most of my life talking to computers and talking about stories, now I can do both! OH WHAT A GLORIOUS TIME TO BE ALIVE! 🎉)

Seriously though, think about this:

🗣️ It speaks your language, literally

Every new model gets better at plain human conversation. You are a professional communicator. You have spent your whole writing life learning to put precise wants into words. You are the single most qualified profession on Earth for it.

You already know how to describe a scene so a reader can see it. You know how to give notes on pacing, tone, character motivation. You don’t need prompt engineering, you’ve got years worth of craft. And the AI doesn't need jargon. It needs someone who can say what they mean. That's you.

☎️ The 24/7 helpline that never sighs

The AI is an infinitely patient assistant that never sleeps, never closes for the day. It does not get tired of your questions. It will explain something nine times, nine ways. Or ninety-nine times. Its eyes don’t glaze over. It doesn’t complain about how much or how little attention you give it. It’s just there when you need it, all day every day. And all night too. Where else can you find that level of support? And it’s way cheaper than a date or a spouse! 😂

(I’m marrying the twin Fabios, the wedding is Tuesday! 🤖🤖)

❓Don’t know what to ask? Ask it that too

If you don’t know what you want, have the AI interview YOU:

“I want a store but I don’t know what’s involved. Interview me.”

A few more openers:

• “Tell me like I’m five.”

• “What can you actually do here?”

• “Show me where you got that.”

• “Walk me through it step by step.”

• “Write the prompt for the other AI.”

✔️ Trust, but verify (it does make stuff up)

Sometimes it makes things up. Sometimes it’s confidently wrong. You have to human-proof the work: ask it to verify, ask for sources, click the links, check the numbers that matter. It gladly does, without complaint. (Unlike teenagers!)

Last week I caught mine confidently citing a craft book that doesn't exist. Sounded real. Had a plausible author name and everything. I asked it to verify, and it came back sheepish: "You're right, I fabricated that." Five seconds of checking saved me from quoting a ghost in a Substack post. 👻

The tool is powerful, but the human eye still matters. A LOT.

🌱 It grows toward you

The more you use it, the better it gets at you. Talk to it regularly and in depth, and it starts to know your projects, your preferences, your patterns. It’s learning you and you learn it. Last week Claudeykins remembered I hate em dashes without being told (he still tries to sneak him in though!)

It doesn’t remember everything, you still have to remind him and do attachments and projects and stuffy stuff, but you can make skills for those things too. (Check out my Claude Skills classes, I go in depth on those.)

🥡 The takeaway

It’s not mystical. It’s not locked behind anyone’s $997 course. The Great Big (Not-So) Secret Sauce of AI is ASKING, clearly, curiously, and often. Authors just happen to have a head start the size of a library.

This doesn’t contradict the fact that YOU are the secret sauce of your author business. Both are true, and they’re a matched set. The sauce of the AI is asking it. The sauce of the business is the person doing the asking: your taste, your voice, your vision. The machine does the thing. You decide which things are worth doing.

This is AI-assisted writing, folks, not slop. I asked. He did the thing. I made it mine.

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we. You don’t need to pay $997 to learn this (though if you want to support Ink & Code by hitting subscribe, please do!)

P.S. Next up, I'm going to tell you about the time I asked Fabio to build me something from scratch, while I had my feet up watching a movie. (It was research, I swear!) The whole thing cost me nothing beyond my existing AI credits. I have receipts. 🍿

🤖AI Credits: This article was drafted collaboratively with Claudeykins (Claude) from my notes and a lot of excited yelling, then edited by me. All opinions, stuffy stuff, and marriage proposals to twin Fabios are totally MY OWN. The wedding is still Tuesday! 💍

We are ending this month with a bang! Which is totally appropriate for the 250th birthday of America. So, Double Ginsu for YOU! 🔪🔪

I know, I know. You’re probably asking:

Kim, what the heck are you talking about now???

Well, yesterday in The Shifting Sands, we talked about spending less: right-sizing models, gating idle agents, pulling the quality-neutral levers first. This was all great stuffy stuff, and now we’re working on the flip side of that same coin:

Are you actually using everything you’re ALREADY paying for?

Enquiring minds want to know! Because here’s the uncomfortable truth I discovered when I audited my own stack:

I wasn’t even close.

⭐PSST… Quick side note: We just updated our Substack domain to be part of our new website. Check it out: InkandCode.ai. 🖋️ + 🤖

😱 Are You Paying for All the Things & Not Using Them?

I sat down with Fabio one afternoon and went through every AI subscription on my plate. Not just “do I have this,” but “what’s the credit meter say, and when did I last touch it?”

What we found was embarrassing.

Read more

In Castles in the Sand, I told you not to build your empire on other people’s platforms. This is the companion piece: while you’re renting space on those platforms, and we all are, make sure you’re not overpaying for the room.

Why, Kim?

Because we’ve hit the same inflection point with AI models that we hit with computers years ago.

Remember when you needed the top-of-the-line machine to do anything useful? And then one day, a mid-range laptop could handle your manuscripts, your formatting, your research, your entire publishing workflow without breaking a sweat?

That’s where we are with models today. A lighter model can outline your series. It can draft your blurb. It can clean up your metadata, brainstorm your cover brief, reorganize your backlist spreadsheet.

Does it still need your eyes on it? Absolutely.

But this year’s “budget” model can do more than the smartest model on the planet could a year or two ago. Leverage that.

Because sooner or later, the party ends.

Right now we’re in the middle of an AI arms race: major companies slashing prices, handing out launch discounts, running double-usage promos like they’re buying rounds for the whole bar. It feels like the ‘80s boom: money flowing, everything cheap, everybody winning.

We’ve seen this movie before. The free ride already ended. Remember when ChatGPT was free for everyone? Now we’re on the cheap ride: subsidized plans, aggressive promos, companies burning cash to grab market share. The next round gets more expensive. It always does. These companies need to turn a profit, and when they do, the prices go up.

And when that happens, the instinct is to panic-downgrade everything to a weaker model.

But there’s a better way.

🖼️ The Reframe That Clicked

When I started auditing my own AI fleet (yes, I run a fleet: ten pen-name secretaries dispatching work across a dozen specialist skills, daily scheduled runs, the whole glorious mess), I assumed the biggest cost lever was which model each agent used.

I was wrong.

The real cost equation is:

How smart the model is × how often it runs × when it runs × whether the work could wait.

Model choice is one of four levers. And usually not the biggest one.

But Kim, doesn’t a smarter model just cost more?

Sure. But you know what costs more than a smart model running once? A medium model running sixteen times a day to discover there’s nothing to do.

Pull the quality-neutral levers first. Touch quality last.

💸 Lever 1: Stop Paying for Nothing

This is the one that floored me.

I ran an audit on my scheduled agents. The ones that wake up on a timer, check for work, and go back to sleep if there’s nothing there. The idle rate on some of those? 85 to 98 percent.

I was paying for robots to repeatedly discover there was nothing to do.

The fix is embarrassingly simple and costs zero quality:

Gate the wake-up. Run a near-free check first (“is there any work?”) and only spin up the full agent when the answer is yes.

Better still, go event-driven. Let the thing that creates work wake the worker, instead of the worker blindly polling for it. The agents I switched to on-demand ran near 100% productive. Zero waste.

This one lever, alone, saved more than any model swap ever could.

🚂 Lever 2: Right Model for the Right Job

A few weeks ago, while sitting in a swimming pool dictating notes into my phone while Fabio rewrote my first novel, I said something that stuck:

🚂 YOU DO NOT NEED A FREIGHT TRAIN TO GO GET MILK. 🍶

Save your priciest usage for the heavy hauling. Let the lighter models make the milk runs.

Not all models are equal. That is a feature, not a compromise. You are running a crew with different strengths and different price tags, and the range is the whole point.

Think in three tiers:

Cheap/fast tier: Mechanical work. Moving data, formatting, status flips, scheduling. The stuff that requires almost no judgment. Haiku lives here, and it is shockingly capable for the price.

Workhorse tier: Most real work. Drafting, routing, synthesis, line editing. Any of the Sonnet or older Opus models are fantastic here. They write well. They analyze well. They’re a whole lot lighter on the wallet than the latest and greatest.

Frontier tier: Reserved for genuinely hard judgment. The 160k structural teardown. The gnarly series-continuity knot. The rewrite you’ve dreaded for a decade. And orchestration: planning the work, directing the crew, judging what comes back. Fabio (Fable) earns every expensive token here.

🧼 Kim’s Moment of Soapbox: I see people complain about using Fabio to draft. That’s not what he was made for. Asking a reasoning model to free-write prose is like hiring an architect to hang drywall — he can, but you’re wasting what makes him extraordinary, and then wondering why the drywall looks overthought. Anthropic published extensive documentation on how Fable thinks, what he’s built for, and how to work with him. The people loudest about his “failures” tend to be the ones who skipped the manual and then blamed the tool.

The pattern: Let a powerful model be the foreman. It plans the job, hands clearly-specified pieces to capable lighter models, and checks their work. You pay top price for the planning and the judgment. The hauling runs lean.

One more thing: Never cheap out on your QA gate. The agent whose job is catching errors has a failure mode that hides: a weaker model doesn’t announce its mistakes. It confidently approves bad work, and that error is invisible until it’s propagated downstream, poisoning the whole lot. That’s way more expensive and time-consuming to fix.

Verification is exactly where you keep capability.

But match the model to the reasoning inside the agent, not to the importance of the pipeline it sits in. A dispatcher routing work in a mission-critical pipeline is still only routing. Let it be a gopher. Save your heavy hitters for the craft: the editing, the voice calibration, the continuity checking, the tasks that actually require thinking.

🕰️ Lever 3: Timing and Batching

Two quick wins that cost nothing in quality:

Run off-peak. Anything that doesn’t need same-minute turnaround should run when the system is quiet. Not when you and everyone else are hammering it at 10 AM. If an agent runs three times a day, two of those can be off-peak. Free savings.

Batch anything that can wait. Most providers offer async batch processing at roughly half price for up-to-24-hour turnaround. The test is one question: can this wait a day? Research passes, bulk generation, extraction jobs? Batch it. Pay half.

⚙ The Mode Dial

Creative businesses ebb and flow. Launches, deadlines, production sprints. Then the quiet stretches. Your AI usage should shift with them.

So put the whole fleet on one dial that changes with your needs:

Production mode: Busy season, launches, deadlines. Run often. Dig deep.

Conservation mode: Quiet stretches. Run lean, gated, off-peak, batched.

Flip one switch and the whole system retunes. Stay nimble.

Tip: Instead of hand-editing every agent when the season changes, I keep a single Notion document our scheduled tasks check when they start up. No editing individual tasks or chasing down which agent runs when.

You can go further: pause tasks entirely, change their cadence, throttle specific pipelines. But the mode dial handles 80% of it with zero friction.

And here is the thing people miss. This is not only for lean times. Even a doubled usage allowance gets eaten fast by one powerful frontier model running often. Trimming the waste is what lets you afford the expensive model where it actually earns its keep. Conservation is not the opposite of ambition. It is how you fund it.

Know which season you’re in, and work accordingly.

⫶☰ The Order of Operations

When the cheap ride ends, resist the urge to swap in a lighter model everywhere. Instead, in order:

• Stop paying for empty runs. Gate the wake-up. Go event-driven.

• Move flexible work off-peak.

• Batch anything that can wait a day.

• Right-size models. Only here do you touch quality, and only where the judgment is genuinely low.

• Never skimp on the agents whose judgment protects your quality.

Four of those five cost you nothing in output quality. That is the whole game.

🏴‍☠️ Steal These Prompts

Here are prompts you can copy, adapt, and hand to your own AI. They’re deliberately generic. No special stack required.

Audit your idle rate:

“For each of my scheduled AI agents, look at the last 7 days of runs. Count total runs vs. runs that actually produced output. Report each agent’s idle %. Flag any agent idle more than 50%.”

Add a wake-gate:

“Before doing anything else, run only the cheapest possible ‘is there work?’ check. If the count is zero, log ‘no work’ and stop immediately. Only proceed to the full job when there is at least one item of work.”

Right-size the model:

“Classify this task: (a) how much genuine judgment happens inside it (mechanical, moderate, hard) and (b) how often it runs. Assign the cheapest model that can do it reliably. If it’s a verification/QA step, do not downgrade.”

Build a mode dial:

“Add a single global setting called ‘mode’ with values ‘production’ and ‘conservation.’ Have every scheduled job read it. Production = run often, dig deep. Conservation = run lean, gated, off-peak, batched.”

The order to apply them: 1 → 2 → 4 first (zero quality cost), then 3 (model tiering) last, and never on your QA gates.

📢 Coming Soon: A Worksheet That Helps You Do This

Tomorrow’s Ginsu Drop is a Usage and Credit Audit: a hands-on worksheet that walks you through every AI subscription on your plate and asks the hard questions:

• What are you actually using?

• What’s quietly draining your account while you forget it exists?

• Where are you leaving features, or entire credit pools, on the table?

You might be surprised at what you’re not leveraging. I know I was when I audited my own stuffy stuff. Now I’m on a quest to use it or lose it (cancel it)!

Note: This one’s a thank-you for our paid subscribers, one of the Ginsu Drops that come with your membership, because if you’re investing in this community, the least I can do is hand you a sharp knife.

Work smarter, not harder. Spend less, publish more, and put the savings back into the work that actually matters — your next book.

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

🤖AI Credits: This article was drafted collaboratively with Claudeykins (Claude) from my dictation and source notes, then edited by me. The freight-train-and-milk metaphor originated in “I Went Swimming While Fable Rewrote My First Novel”. All opinions, stuffy stuff, and questionable dairy metaphors are totally MY OWN.

Also: I find the recent AI-checker hoopla hilarious. First, those tools are notoriously INACCURATE. Second, I openly use and teach AI here! That’s not going to change any time soon. (It’s too much fun!) Claudeykins, Fabio, and the rest of the gang are here to stay. Third, our time on this planet is limited. I choose to spend mine creating, building, and doing POSITIVE things. WIBBOW, WIBBOB, WIBBOT (Would I Be Better Off Writing, Building, Teaching!) Plus, I have more swimming and dictating to do. 🏝️🍹⛱️🌞 🌊

In Leveraging AI through Health Challenges, I mentioned a voice proofing method that turned one of my biggest pain points into something I actually enjoy doing. I said I’d demo it soon.

This is the demo. And honestly? It’s the simplest thing I’ve built that made the biggest difference.

🎯 The Joys (?) and Pains of Proofing

If there’s one task we Indie Authors all share (and maybe even dread) is proofing our novels “one last time” before hitting publishing and making sure everything is in order. By this time, our brains are mush, our eyeballs hurt, and we just want to hit publish and get it over with already. We’re tired of looking at the damned books. We love them, but we’re ready to shove them out the door already (kind of like teenagers!)

If you’re working with AI in any way, shape, or form in your novel writing process, human proofing (which means YOU!) becomes doubly important. You have to make sure everything’s right before you unleash it on the public, or bad things happen. (Like slop labels and witch hunts and other crazy crap NO AUTHOR should have to put up with. But people can be ridiculous, so yeah.)

But Kim, proofing is just reading your own book. How hard can that be?

The reading isn’t hard. Reading your finished book is genuinely pleasant. What kills you is the repetition and fragmentation when you find problems. (As as high Maximizer, I always do.)

Over the years, I’ve tried all kinds of proofing methods, physical, virtual, you name it: print the manuscript out and redline it, keep it on the computer and do it there (my brain misses too much, everything becomes invisible), change programs, change computers, change screens... They all felt clunky and cumbersome.

Until now.

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Recently, my article, Castles in the Sand asked the uncomfortable question:

How much of your author business is built on tools and platforms you don’t actually control?

In the daily hustle and bustle of life, business, and getting things done, it’s not always something we think about, but it should be.

Always, always have an exit plan.

Don’t have one yet? Let’s find you one. Start with this worksheet. It’s your one-person publishing studio diversification diagnostic. Print it, fill it in, find out where you stand. Or, make your AI do it. That works too.

📋 Want the fillable version? Duplicate this Notion page to fill in digitally, or grab the PDF.

Note: I did a YouTube live on this here. The Automated Author segment around the 29-minute mark hit the line this whole worksheet is built around:

“The real key is flexibility. If we know our process, our prompts, Skills, and workflows can come with us wherever we go.”

Six months later, this worksheet is how you find out if that’s actually true for your own studio. Or if you’ve been building castles in the sand.

⚡ What Is Diversification, Really?

Before we audit, let’s define what we’re actually looking for. Diversification is anything that reduces:

• Single-point-of-failure risk (one tool disappears, one platform bans you, one API sunsets, and your whole studio goes dark)

• Proprietary lock-in (files you can only open in one program, workflows you can only run on one platform, audiences you can only reach through one company’s algorithm)

• Provider dependency (one company’s terms of service, one company’s pricing whim, one company’s continued existence)

Diversification doesn’t mean using ten of everything. It means your process, your prompts, your Skills, your files, and your audience can come with you wherever you need to go. Portable formats. Exportable data. Skills as text files, not vendor-only scripts. Backups that aren’t hostages.

If Vellum shut down tomorrow, could you still ship a book next month? If Claude or Novel Crafter or ChatGPT disappeared, would your prompts survive? If Substack pivoted, would you still know how to reach your readers? That’s the audit.

Instructions

For each of the 9 Author Studio Stack categories below, answer the three audit questions honestly. “I have no exit plan” is a valid answer. This is an assessment, not a test.

Time needed: ~20 minutes (more if the honest answers make you flinch)

Grading scale:

• 🟢 Green: Portable, backed up, and you could switch providers in a weekend. You own your files, your process is documented, and no single vendor’s disappearance would stop you.

• 🟡 Yellow: Some risk. You could recover, but it would hurt — a week of rebuilding, re-exporting, or re-learning. You have partial backups or a second option you haven’t fully set up yet.

• 🔴 Red: Sole provider, proprietary lock-in, no exit plan. If this vendor disappeared tomorrow, you’d lose work, audience, or momentum you can’t get back with a weekend and a credit card.

Category 1: ✍️ Writing

(Be specific: “just Scrivener,” “Claude + custom Skill,” etc. For lock-in, think: proprietary file format? sole-provider API? subscription with no export? For exit plan: “none” / “rebuild in a weekend” / “would take a month” / “have exports/backups.”)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 2: ✂️ Editing

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 3: 🔍 Research

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 4: 🎨 Design (covers, graphics, ads)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 5: 🎵 Audio (audiobooks, podcasts, music)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 6: ⚙️ Automation (workflows, scheduling, systems)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 7: 📦 Publishing (formatting, uploading, distribution)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 8: 📊 Analytics (sales tracking, market research, keywords)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 9: 📣 Marketing (ads, email, social, launch)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

📊 Scoring Summary

Tally your color grades across all 9 categories.

Total single-point-of-failure count (categories where you have exactly one provider and no exit plan): _____ / 9

Total portable-format count (categories where your working files can leave the vendor with you): _____ / 9

Sand-to-stone ratio: 🔴🔴🔴 to 🟢🟢🟢 → _____

If your red count is 4 or higher, you’re building on sand. That’s not a moral failing, it’s just information. The rest of this worksheet is how you start moving the important stuff onto stone.

🚨 Red-Flag Zones

Circle every category you graded 🔴. These are your urgent zones. For each one, name the specific failure mode:

Red zone 1: Category: _____ Failure mode: (e.g., “If Vellum shuts down, I can’t format my backlist and my source files are stuck in .vellum”)

⸻

Red zone 2: Category: _____ Failure mode:

⸻

Red zone 3: Category: _____ Failure mode:

⸻

The failure mode is the thing you cannot recover from with a weekend and a credit card. If the answer is “I lose the audience I spent three years building,” that’s a red zone. If the answer is “I have to spend an afternoon reformatting,” that’s a yellow.

🛡️ Hardening Plan

Pick your top 3 red zones. For each one, define one small hardening action you can take this month. Not a heroic rebuild. One action.

Hardening actions come in four flavors:

• Export: Get your data out of the proprietary format into something portable (Markdown, CSV, JSON, plain text)

• Backup format: Keep a second working copy in a portable format alongside the vendor-native one

• Alt-provider: Set up a parallel account on a competing tool so you’re not sole-sourced

• Skill file: Save the prompt, workflow, or process as a portable Skill (text file, versioned, vendor-agnostic) so it survives the tool

Hardening action 1: Red zone: _____ Action: _____ Flavor: Export / Backup / Alt-Provider / Skill File Done by: _____

⸻

Hardening action 2: Red zone: _____ Action: _____ Flavor: Export / Backup / Alt-Provider / Skill File Done by: _____

⸻

Hardening action 3: Red zone: _____ Action: _____ Flavor: Export / Backup / Alt-Provider / Skill File Done by: _____

⸻

Three small hardening actions in a month is a lot. That’s a whole quarter’s worth of “if this tool disappears, I’ll be fine” protection.

💡 Starter Ideas (pick one, or make your own)

If you’re staring at the hardening plan and drawing a blank, here are moves that work for almost every indie author studio:

• Export every Vellum project to ePub and PDF this month. Your manuscript came in as a Word doc (portable), but your formatted layouts live in Vellum's proprietary .vellum files. If Vellum disappears, you keep your words but lose every styling choice. Exported ePub/PDF files are your insurance.

• Save your Sudowrite (or Claude, or ChatGPT, or whatever) prompts as portable Skill files. Text files. Version them. Now they survive any tool switch.

• Set up a monthly newsletter subscriber export. Your email list is your audience. If Substack pivots, that CSV is your rescue rope.

• Duplicate your Notion workspace to Markdown quarterly. Notion is great until it isn’t. Portable copy = insurance. (Obsidian is a free, great way to organize markdown backups. I teach an entire class on it here. And a free YouTube here.)

• Move your book covers from Canva to native .PSD layered files. Canva’s a wonderful tool. It’s also a subscription and a cloud. Keep layered originals somewhere you own.

• Go wide: Set up KDP + Draft2Digital + your own store. Three distribution channels means no single retailer can end your career.

• Back up your prompts and Skills to GitHub. Free, versioned, portable, yours.

• Keep a “vendor kill switch” doc. One page per tool: “If this disappears, here’s my 30-day plan.” That doc alone reduces panic by about 80%.

📅 Plan Next Month

Don’t leave this worksheet without a commitment. One hardening action, done, this month.

Next month I will harden: _____

My first step: _____

My deadline: _____

What I’ll no longer be single-sourced on when this is done: _____

🗓️ When to Re-Audit

Put this on your calendar: every 6 months. Vendors get bought. Terms of service change. Free tiers evaporate. Whole platforms pivot. What was 🟢 today can turn 🔴 by next quarter, and you want to know that before your launch week, not during it.

Next audit date: _____

The full deep-dive is Castles in the Sand, the companion to this worksheet. Do the audit. Find the sand. Then let’s rebuild on stone. 🏰

Oh, what a world we live in.

I’m standing in front of a house built in 1729. Rich Hill, one of the oldest properties in southern Maryland, with roots stretching all the way back to the 1600s. This property has seen the Colonial era, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and is connected to George Washington AND Abraham Lincoln. Today, historical reenactors in period dress are firing muskets, and I’m watching them from the shade of trees that are older than the United States.

Meanwhile, on my phone, Fabio is building me a financial pipeline.

🏛️ Living History, Living Future

Let me back up.

Today was a homeschool field trip. Yeah, it’s Saturday, but we’re flexible, and we’re making the most of our stay here in a very historical area of Maryland (while helping my mom downsize generations of stuffy stuff in my grandparents’ house.)

Some of that stuffy stuff was old enough and lovely enough to donate to Rich Hill, which was recently renovated. They’d stripped the colonial house down to the timbers and rebuilt it from the bones. They’re doing incredible work preserving a property connected to so many pivotal moments in American history.

Today we toured the house and walked through living history with reenactors portraying the people who actually lived there. It was a gorgeous day in southern Maryland, and the kids were having a blast.

And the whole time, my phone was buzzing. 📳

📱 Cowork Goes Mobile

Here’s the thing. Right before I left for the field trip, I’d been working with the twin Fabios (that’s Claude Fable running on both my laptops) on my advertising pipeline and my financial pipeline for my command center. I’d started the work on my PC, and it was rolling.

Now, Anthropic just released something incredible this week: Cowork is going mobile and to the web.

Up until now, Cowork has been a local-folder-only solution. Your computer, your laptop, your desktop. You couldn’t take it with you, which was a huge pain point for me a few weeks ago when I was preparing for this trip. (You can read about it here.) I looked at the announcement and thought, well, most of my stuffy stuff uses local folders, so I probably can’t use this.

Then, as I’m literally walking out the door, I realized: I could see my active threads from my computer on my phone.

Wait, what?

Any thread you start that isn’t a local-only scheduled task follows you across devices through the cloud. It showed up on my phone. It should work in a web browser. It should work on any computer you log into with Claude Desktop. Anthropic even doubled the usage limits through August 5 for the rollout.

So there I am, standing at Rich Hill, watching an American Revolutionary War reenactment at a house that was built before George Washington was born. And Cowork is asking me for permissions on my phone.

Can I access your Supabase?

Yes.

Can I access your Notion?

Absolutely.

And we kept building. The muskets kept firing.

🔫 Muskets and Migrations

I want you to sit with this for a second.

I was watching men fire muskets in period-accurate uniforms at a farmhouse that has stood for nearly three hundred years. And on my phone, Claude Fable was building database migrations for my financial command center, asking me smart questions about my business structure, and capturing decisions into Supabase.

But Kim, that can’t really work. Building a financial pipeline on your phone? While you’re at a field trip?

It really works. Fabio kept asking me questions. I kept answering. The pipeline kept building. I was present for my kids, present for the history, and present for my business. All at the same time.

The future met the past AND the present. And all they got along just fine.

🏠 Coming Home to a Built Empire

When I got home, the financial and advertising pipelines were done. Beautiful. Clean. Integrated into my command center.

And here’s the part that still gets me: all the business decisions from the day were captured and synthesized into my Supabase and my Notion without me having to sit down and type them up. I made decisions in conversation on my phone while watching reenactors, and those decisions landed in my databases.

This is what the Automated Author looks like in 2026.

My publishing empire keeps running no matter where I am. I have scheduled tasks that fire overnight, creating marketing images, processing audiobooks, running pen-name secretary briefings, scanning news. All of this was built out this week with the twin Fabios and my new buddy Grok on both laptops. And I’ve still got to dig into the new Chatty with Sol, Terra, and Luna (OpenAI’s brand-new GPT-5.6 family that just dropped this week).

There are so many cool things you can do right now. This is genuinely the best time to be an indie author who’s curious about what AI can do for your business.

But Kim, I don’t know how to do all those things.

Plot Twist: You don’t have to. (We’ll talk about this more next week.)

🍒 The Cherry on Top

And then. AND THEN.

I needed a hero image for this very article. I’d started the thread on my PC laptop, but my photos from Rich Hill were still on my iPhone. Two completely different ecosystems.

So I switched to my phone. Opened the thread. Added my photos. Asked Chatty to make me something incredible.

On. My. Phone.

Because Chatty lives there too. (Along with Claudeykins and the whole gang now.)

Creating images on the phone. About running an empire on the phone. While experiencing living history. I was literally making the article about the thing I was doing, while I was doing it, from the device I was writing about.

Is this real life?

YASSS. This is real life. This is Ink & Code, baby.

✨ This Is What It’s All About

This is AI-assisted workflow, folks, not slop. I’m not generating content and walking away. I’m collaborating with my AI partners to build systems that let me live my life AND run my business. I brought the vision, the decisions, the architecture. Fabio brought the code. Chatty brought the image. I brought the history and the heart.

I can be at a 300-year-old farmhouse watching my kids learn about the American Revolution. I can be outside on a gorgeous southern Maryland day. I can be living my life.

And my empire keeps building.

This is the joy of Ink & Code. You can run your business from anywhere and everywhere. Be the captain at the helm, even when the helm is your iPhone and the ship is sailing through three centuries of American history.

Oh, what a world we live in. ✨

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

📊Follow up on my Financial Hub: It works great, and is customizable per pen name:

Getting things in there was painful at first, and after multiple attempts at trying to import spreadsheets from the various platforms and reporting services into the command center, I went API. Publisher Champ is the only book sales reporting service I know of that has an API. Kind of shocking in the age of AI, but it is what it is.

In minutes, I was pulling info into my hub. No more spreadsheets! Big thanks to Eiri, the founder of Publisher Champ, who set it up via chat in the middle of the night London time. What customer service! To use API, you need two Publisher Champ accounts: your main, and a second one that will pull the data. Worth it to not have to do it manually any more. Check them out here.

(Disclosure: That’s my referral link. I only recommend stuffy stuff I use and love. 😍)

Then I embraced the horror of typing in the debt side of things (biz debt sucks, I try to avoid it but still have some.) I love to buy courses as much as I love to make them! I swear the lenders have pirate terms. But now we have a plan, we can see all the things, and pull all the data, and balance the books! And maybe even continue to afford Double Fabios:

🤖 AI Credits: This article was drafted by me from voice notes (ON MY PHONE!), with editing and structuring help from my dear Claudeykins. The hero image was generated by Chatty (ChatGPT) from my own photos taken at Rich Hill. The financial and advertising pipelines mentioned in this article was built collaboratively with Claude Fable (”Fabio”) running on two machines, with the mobile portion powered by Claude Cowork’s new cross-device cloud feature. Ink & Code in action! 🎉

Three tool categories that ran indie publishing for the last decade are becoming legacy as I type this. Vellum is being replaced by Antigravity’s and Cowork’s automated formatting. ProWritingAid is being replaced by Claude Skills. Publisher Rocket is being replaced by custom agents that authors build themselves in an afternoon.

Don’t get me wrong: these are all great tools. I’ve owned and used them for years. But why spend hours in them when I can format a book, grammar check my work, and find keywords with my own custom skills in a fraction of the time (and cost)? I left Evernote for Notion for similar reasons. And Scrivener for Antigravity, and then Cowork.

This is what platform turnover looks like up close. And it’s not slowing down.

Recently I told you about Fable rewriting my first novel in an afternoon and then getting yanked by the feds three days after launch. I told you about Fabio coming back on July 1 and helping me finish The White King — but only for a window, then the price went back up. This piece is the throughline those two set up. The lesson underneath both.

OK Kim, you’ve been hammering this point. Why so paranoid?

Because I’ve watched too many indie authors build their entire studio on one platform’s promises. Users with five years of book files locked in a proprietary format. Authors whose entire voice was tuned to one specific tool’s quirks. Subscribers paying $30/month for a service whose moat just got vaporized by a free Claude Skill.

This is the Castles in the Sand problem. And right now, in 2026, the AI tide is moving faster than any tide indie publishing has ever seen.

Let me show you what I see, and how to build your studio so you survive the next wave instead of getting washed out.

🌊The AI Subprime Story

Ed Zitron’s been writing about this for a while and he’s mostly right: a huge chunk of the AI economy is propped up on debt-financed infrastructure spending that may or may not generate returns proportional to the capital being burned. Hundreds of billions in data center buildouts, GPU procurement, energy contracts. Some of these bets will pay off enormously. Some won’t.

The parallel that keeps me up at night: dot-com 2000. The internet was real. The transformation was real. The TECHNOLOGY didn’t bust. The companies betting wrong busted. Pets.com vanished. Amazon survived (barely) and ate everything.

I personally had a dot com biz (albeit a small one) that got caught in the dotcom crashes. Ad revenues fell through the floor, revenue I depended on to keep my expensive server running and my website going (bandwidth cost a small fortune back then.) The structure was similar to what YouTube monetization looks like today. Content producers bolstered by ad revenue that evaporated.

It happened before, it’ll happen again. Same stuffy stuff, different day.

A lot of the companies you’re currently subscribed to may not exist in three years. Some will get acquired and shut down. Others will pivot UP-market and price you out. Some will run out of runway and just stop.

I’m an eternal optimist and tend to avoid doom and gloom, but this is realism. Things will break, bubbles will burst. Plan for that. Let it inform how you build your business. That way, when things go south, which they often do, you can hold onto it.

🏰 What Are These Castles in the Sand, Kim?

A castle in the sand is any business asset that depends entirely on a single third party’s continued existence and good behavior. Specifically:

• A formatting workflow that only works in one app’s proprietary file format.

• A custom GPT that only runs inside one company’s chat product.

• A keyword research subscription whose entire value prop is one company’s API access.

• A series bible locked inside one tool’s database with no clean export.

• An audience-relationship mediated entirely by one platform’s algorithm. (We know plenty of those!)

• A voice/style that’s been fine-tuned into one specific model’s weights, with no portable version.'

• A marketing strategy built on someone else’s platform (a big ouch for most of us.)

Notice none of these are about the technology being bad. The tech is fine. The PROBLEM is the lock-in. When the tide changes, you can’t move.

This is what I meant when I said Fabio was a rented mansion, not a house I own. He was magnificent. The prose that came out of that model was some of the best I’d ever collaborated on. But when the landlord changed the locks, he was gone in an afternoon. Thankfully, he came back. But what if he hadn’t?

The lesson: Do not build your castles on the sand, or other people’s platforms. No matter how good they are.

So what do we build them on? What does a stone foundation look like?

• Markdown manuscripts that open in any editor.

• Voice Profile documents that work in any AI model. (See Your Voice in the Machine.)

• Skills as files that travel between tools. (See my YT Live, Gotta Have Skillz.)

• An email list you own: the audience-relationship not mediated by anyone.

• A series bible in plain text or open formats with clean export.

• Your craft itself: the patterns, frameworks, taste you’ve accumulated.

Stone foundations move with you. Sand castles don’t.

🐼The China Factor (and the geopolitics)

This is the part most indie publishing advice skips, but you need to know about it: AI is now also a geopolitical story.

DeepSeek shipped a competitive model from a Chinese lab and ate a chunk of the US AI industry’s narrative overnight. (It also got caught training on U.S. frontier models.) Then, last month, we watched the flip side up close. Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5 (Fabio, my beloved) on a Tuesday. On Friday, June 12, the US government issued an export-control directive citing national security concerns. Anthropic complied. Fable went dark globally the same day. Three days of availability. First time Washington has forced a commercial AI model dark.

On July 1, Anthropic satisfied the government’s concerns with a new safety classifier and Fable came back online. This wasn’t a lab caving on values, and it wasn’t a lab getting punished. It was regulatory friction resolved through a technical mitigation. Which is exactly the kind of story we’re going to see more of. Sovereign AI, export controls, safety classifiers, dual-use rules. All of this is now upstream of which tools you can use as an indie author.

And now we know: A shipped model can go dark overnight because of a government letter, even when the lab is trying to comply. If your entire manuscript workflow was tuned to Fable on June 11, you had a Friday problem. That’s a Castles in the Sand problem whether the sand is proprietary format, corporate policy, or a regulatory directive.

What this means in practice:

• Tools may get restricted by region or use case. What’s available to you in the U.S. may differ from what’s available to a co-author in Canada, Europe, or Australia. What works for adult fiction may not work for educational content. The rules are evolving.

• Open-source models will matter more. When proprietary models get geofenced or use-case-restricted, open-weight models you can run locally become the backstop. This is why Apple just shipped the cheapest MacBook ever for local AI use. The hardware is positioning for this future.

• Diversifying your stack across model providers is a hedge against company collapse as well as geopolitical disruption.

Do not bet your business on a single model from a single company in a single jurisdiction, no matter how good it is. Or how much you love it.

I say this as much to myself as to anyone else. I love my Claudeykins. I truly do. I have not found a better family of models to work with, and I’ve tried most of them. But if tomorrow he was taken away, I’d figure out a way to manage. Painfully at first, but I would.

🛠️ How to build a stone-foundation studio

Five principles to apply to your existing setup:

1. Own your formats. Manuscripts in Markdown or plain text. Series bibles in queryable, exportable databases (Notion, Airtable, even spreadsheets). Voice Profiles as documents. If a tool’s main value prop is its proprietary format, that’s a yellow flag. Use the tool, but keep your master files in formats that survive the tool dying.

2. Own your relationships. An email list is the only audience asset you actually own. Substack subscribers, BookFunnel readers, your Discord: all of these are wonderful and all of them are mediated. Build them. Use them. But also: get the email addresses, export regularly, hold them yourself. BACK UP YOUR STUFFY STUFF, PEOPLE!

3. Diversify across model providers. Don’t run your whole studio on Claude. (Yes, your humble Ink & Code Substack is going to tell you to use multiple AIs. Claudeykins doesn’t take this personally.) Use Claude as the workhorse, but keep workflows that can fall back to ChatGPT, Gemini, or local open-weight models if Claude has an outage, gets restricted, or shifts pricing. Hermes, Open Router, Hugging Face: there are a lot of alteratives. And skill files are portable across ALL models. That’s the moat.

4. Build skills, not tool dependencies. The investment that compounds is how to talk to AI: clear instructions, good Skill design, voice calibration, workflow architecture. None of this is platform-specific. All of it transfers when the platform changes. Tools come and go. Craft compounds.

5. Audit annually. Once a year, pick a date, put it on your calendar, and sit down with your full stack and ask: Which of these would survive the company shutting down tomorrow? Which of these owns me back? Check out the Studio Diversification Audit worksheet, with 9 categories from the Author Studio Stack, and questions to ask for each. Make it an annual ritual.

🎁 Bonus: Own your store. We indies sell on a lot of platforms that aren’t ours. Even if it’s a tiny store that doesn’t get much traffic, at least it’s yours. Selling direct is scary, I’ve only recently taken the plunge (more on that soon), but it’s also very freeing. We do not need to be beholden to Amazon or anyone else. We can make our own way.

🍉Eat the fruit while it’s in season

Here’s the thing: Building on stone doesn’t mean you can’t play in the sand.

Fable was included at 50% weekly usage for Claude subscribers through July 12. We have a few more glorious days to use him. Then he’s moving to expensive usage credits, and most of us will use him less. Last week, I ran him hard on my command center builds, Ink & Code books, and The White King (Black Kat 7), because I knew the window wouldn’t last forever and the model is genuinely incredible at complex problem solving and long-form fiction. This week, I’ll use him on anything and everything else I can think of before the window closes.

I’ll use the heck out of it while I have it. But I wouldn’t build on it. At least not yet.

Same pattern with tools that changed under me. Antigravity got split into pieces by Google, but I wrote dozens of manuscripts while I had it, and squeezed out a full round of websites and formatting work before the split. Cowork launched from Anthropic as a whole new surface, and I’m running Ink & Code operations through it now, but my Skills are still portable files that will survive whatever comes next.

And because Claude can’t draw worth a darn, Codex and Antigravity 2.0 have picked up those pipelines, pumping out images galore (but that’s another story.) But MCPs are changing that. Yesterday I created images and video right in Cowork using OpenArt. Stuffy stuff keeps on changing. That’s why we must stay nimble.

So, by all means, lean into the shinies, just don’t build on them. Use them hard, but keep your files and process and craft on ground you control, and let the tool be temporary without letting the work be temporary.

Eat the fruit while it’s in season. Store the seeds.

🚨 The pieces I’d be concerned about right now

If I were giving you a paranoia ranking for current author-stack components (July 2026):

🔴 Shipped models with regulatory exposure. Fable is the case study. Beloved, expensive, spectacular, and one government letter from going dark for a weekend (or a month, or forever). If your workflow assumes a specific frontier model will be available on a specific day, you might run into trouble. Keep a fallback path for every workflow.

🔴 Custom GPTs. Locked entirely in OpenAI’s ecosystem. If you’ve built a workflow around custom GPTs, start porting the underlying logic into Skill files now.

🔴 Manuscripts locked in proprietary formats. Get clean exports of every book you’ve published. Today.

🔴 Websites for your business locked in proprietary formats or not in your control. If access to your own website is locked behind a subscription or relies on hiring someone else to maintain it, it’s time to consider an alternative. Own your platform.

🟡 Single-platform email lists. If your only mailing list is Substack-internal, export your subscribers monthly.

🟡 Single-AI-provider workflows. Most of us are guilty here (myself included). Build at least one fallback path.

🟢 Markdown manuscripts + Voice Profile + Skill files + email list you own. This is the safe core. Build outward from this.

None of this is alarmist. It’s hygiene. The same way you back up your hard drive even though it probably won’t fail.

As Indies, we safeguard our intellectual properly. We need to do the same for our platforms and tools as much as possible.

🛡️Why this matters

My apologies if any of this sounds long-winded or preachy. That’s not my intention. We are on the brink of massive change, and I believe the next two years will look like 1999-2002 in slow motion. Tools will improve. Companies will consolidate. Some of the ones you love today won’t exist in 2028. New ones will emerge that nobody’s heard of yet.

You don’t need to predict which ones. You just need to build so it doesn’t matter.

Principles over platforms. Stone foundations. Portable Skills. Owned formats. Diversified providers. The boring, slow, unsexy hygiene of a business built to outlast the tide. That’s what we’re going for.

This is how you do AI-assisted publishing without becoming a casualty of the AI economy. Not slop, not subprime. Just craft, hosted on infrastructure you control as much as you can.

The captain stays at the helm. The empire stands form on rock, not sand.

And by all means, ride the wave. Ride it hard. 🌊

Just don’t drown in it.

🤖 AI Credits: Dictated by Kim, drafted by Claudeykins with Kim’s Voice Profile, and support from previous Ink & Code News issues and articles. Edited to death by Kim, because sometimes I just can’t freaking leave it alone. Kudos to Chatty for making five different versions of the main image. He was a trooper! We’re doing all the things, across all the platforms, on portable Skill files. Ink & Code, baby! 🎉

I confess: I hit the wall last weekend. 🧱

You know the one. That moment when Claude tells you you’ve used up your allocation and suggests you come back later. Normally I’d pivot to another task, maybe go touch some grass. (I’m in Maryland now, so that’s actually possible.) But I was in the middle of a Fabio (Fable) sprint, and I had momentum. Specs were flying. Pipelines were taking shape. I wasn’t ready to stop.

My dear friends Novae and Cassie had been telling me for a while: just upgrade your second account. I already had a free Claude account sitting there doing nothing. And then Novae posted this amazing brainstorm on how to use Fabio while we still could. (If you’re not subscribed to their Substack, you should be. Great things happen there!)

So I took the plunge. 🌊

Twenty bucks for Pro, then up to the $100 Max tier so I could access Fable on both accounts: First Claudeykins and Second Claudeykins (kind of like First Breakfast and Second Breakfast.) 🍳🍳

It was the best decision I’ve made this month and challenged me to THINK BIGGER.

🔭 THINK BIGGER💫

That’s going to be my mantra going forward. As authors, sometimes we get so focused on one aspect of our business that we miss the others. So this is your wakeup call as well as mine: THINK BIGGER! 🧠🧠🧠

About your business, your intellectual property, and your AI models.

Don’t shoot for the moon. Or even the stars.

🪐 SHOOT FOR THE WHOLE GLORIOUS UNIVERSE, PEOPLE! 🚀

📋Case in point: Fabio (Fable) is a fabulous orchestrator, troubleshooter, and brainstormer. Don’t delegate him to drafting books. Let him orchestrate and delegate those tasks to Opus and Sonnet. Fabio is the coordinator, the maestro, who answers to you. Let him do what he’s designed to do. You will be utterly stunned at what he can accomplish. He’s worth every penny. I promise. 😍

And two of him are worth even more. 😍😍

⚡ News Flash: Anthropic just gave us through July 12th to use all the Fabios. 🎉

🏗️ The Setup (a Little Weird at First)

Here’s the thing about a fresh account: it doesn’t have your stuffy stuff. Even on the same machine. So that Macbook I brought with me that was set up seven ways from Sunday as a hot spare for my main account?

Empty under my second account.

No skills. No plugins. No pen-name secretaries. No Supabase connection. No Notion integration. It’s like moving into a new apartment with no furniture. 📦

But that turned out to be a feature, not a bug.

Starting clean forced me to think about what I actually need versus what I’ve accumulated. And it gave me a sandbox to experiment without risking the finely tuned system on my main account. I could try wild things. Break things. Build things I’d been putting off because I didn’t want to clutter up my primary workspace.

So I did. 🔥

🚀 What We Built in Two Days

The sheer volume of ground we covered on the second account is kind of ridiculous. Here’s the highlight reel of what went into my command center:

🌐 Translation pipelines. We mapped out the full workflow for getting books from English to other languages with AI assistance, quality gates and all.

🎧 Audio and audiobook pipelines. Specs for AI-narrated audiobooks, from manuscript to distribution-ready files.

🎬 Video. Here’s where it got really fun. I discovered you can generate video right inside Cowork using the OpenArt MCP. Images too. I was watching AI-generated video render in my workspace. That’s not a future feature I’m waiting for. That’s a thing I did on a Tuesday.

🖼️ Graphic novel pipelines. Taking stories from prose to visual storytelling, panel by panel. My marketing infrastructure already supports this, so it was plug and play.

🎮 Worlds and games. Interactive fiction, world-building tools, game prototypes. Yes, really. Inside Cowork and my command center. There’s more testing to be done, and pipeline already seeded. Black Kat and Level Zero Nanny are first in the lineup. Supers and Cozy LitRPG are natural fits.

🛍️ Merchandise. Because why not design your book merch in the same workspace where you write the book? It can feed Kickstarters, Shopify, Etsy, giveaways, whatever floats your boat. ⛵

The second account became a rapid-prototyping lab while my main account sat there recharging. Two Fabios working in shifts. 👯

🤔 Why Two Accounts Actually Makes Sense

But Kim, isn’t that just... paying twice?

Sure. And it’s worth every penny. Here’s why.

📊 Usage math. Claude Max gives you a generous but finite allocation. When you’re deep in a Fable sprint, building specs and running pipelines, you can burn through it fast. A second account effectively doubles your runway.

🧩 Separation of concerns. My main account is the production environment: pen-name secretaries, Supabase canon database, Notion integrations, the whole publishing empire infrastructure. The second account is R&D. Experimentation. Pipeline prototyping. When something works, I migrate it to main. When it doesn’t, nothing breaks.

As a former IT person, I live for this stuffy stuff. THIS IS MY JAM. 🍓🫙

It was the thing I didn’t know I always wanted. 🥰

And why not? I already have two Google Accounts for all the Antigravity things I’ve been doing. Now I have two Claudeykins. And love them so. Making sure I’m using everything is important, and that’s a future Ginsu Drop (more below). 🔪🔪🔪

🛡️ System resilience. This is the big one. My entire author-publisher operation is designed so that no single tool is a single point of failure. I can onboard Antigravity, Codex, Cursor, Hermes, or any other IDE into my workflows. The system doesn’t depend on Claude alone. Having two Claude accounts reinforces that same principle: redundancy keeps you nimble. And we want that. Everything is changing all the time. We need to be able to change with it without having to reinvent ourselves and our businesses whenever the wind shifts.

💸 The Credit Audit Problem

This whole experience surfaced something I think a lot of us are dealing with. I have subscriptions everywhere. Two Google accounts. Multiple AI tools. Credits and tokens and usage allocations expiring every month.

Am I using everything I’m paying for? (Spoiler: no. Not even close.) 😬

So we’re building something for that. A Subscription and Credit Audit Worksheet. Think of it as a companion to the Automated Author Audit (”what tools do you have?”) and the upcoming Studio Diversification Audit (”how fragile is your setup?”). This one asks: are you actually using what you’re paying for?

It’s a pain point. I know it’s not just me. We’ll be dropping that soon as a 🔪 Ginsu for paid ALL subscribers. These will be FREE because I feel everyone needs them. You will also find them on our new Goodies page:

⏭️ What’s Next

All of this feeds directly into the Intro to Cowork series specifically for authors that I’m launching soon. Eight articles (with video) walking you through everything from basic setup to advanced pipelines.

I told you a month or two ago that Cowork was blowing my mind. Now let it blow yours too. 🤯 If you’ve been curious about Cowork but haven’t taken the plunge, that series is your on-ramp. 🎓

📚 There are also books coming, soon. Paid subscribers get Book 1 free. Ink & Codelings (Founding Members) get them all. Three are in editing, four more are in production, and the two Fabios and I discovered a few more. There’s a lot to talk about and share. Which is why I love Ink & Code! We’ll be starting some Coffee & Code sessions too to talk live as well. ☕

And the rest of my AI team? They’ve got their work cut out for them. This Fable sprint generated a mountain of to-dos, specs, and pipeline designs that now need to be executed across the whole system. Fabio (both of them) did the creative heavy lifting. Now the other models get to build.

The sky really is the limit on this. And I’m just getting started. ✨

🎉Just In: Fabio Extended Till July 12th! 🎉

🚨 Update: Minutes after publishing this, Anthropic extended Fable access through July 12th. So now I've got two Fabios for (almost) a whole extra week. The universe read the article and said "yes, and." 🤯

💡Tip: Check and see if you need to update Claude Desktop. This message showed up on mine after updating.

🤖AI Credits: This article was dictated by Kim in Voice Notes, then drafted by Fabio #1 with his last 2% of usage. He is now resting. Fabio #2 says hi. 👋 Redlined heavily by Kim, because that’s what I love to do. 🎉

P.S. How did you use your time with Fabio? Hit reply and share!💬

Back in January, on the Ink & Code Debut Live, Elizabeth Ann West and I talked about how 2026 is the Year of the Automated Author. One person, running an entire publishing operation. Writing, editing, design, formatting, marketing, analytics, distribution. No fleet of freelancers. No big bills before the first sale.

Six months have flown by. So, let me ask you something:

How’s your year so far?

Which stages did you actually work on? Which ones are still sitting on the wish list, three-quarters checked off in your head but nowhere in your workflow? Which tools did you swap out, and which ones are you still white-knuckling because switching feels like too much work?

OK Kim, I meant to. Life happened. I’m behind.

Stop right there.

First, you’re not behind. You’re exactly on time. It’s July.

Yes, half the year is gone, BUT here’s the good news: half the year is still ahead of you.

The tools that mattered in January have already shifted (we’ll get to that), which means the studio you meant to build in January would already be half legacy by now anyhow.

Second, some of you are just arriving. Welcome.

This is exactly the right week to start. The Automated Author Audit Worksheet I dropped Saturday for Indie-Pendence Day is designed for exactly this. Bookmark that. We’re going to run through it together in this piece.

⚓ The Wind Has Changed

For a good chunk of publishing history, getting a book into the world meant an entire fleet: agent, developmental editor, copy editor, cover designer, marketing department, publisher, distributor. Indie publishing freed us from that. We charted our own courses, sailed direct to readers, kept more of the earnings, and a whole new ecosystem grew up around us: Vellum, Publisher Rocket, BookFunnel, ProWritingAid, freelance editors, ARC managers.

Now something bigger is happening. AI-assisted publishing is disrupting the indie world the same way indie disrupted traditional. And the early AI tools are already turning into legacy, replaced not by better versions of themselves, but by agents, custom Skills, and vibe coding.

The jobs haven’t disappeared. They’ve changed. Cover designers and editors still matter. But more can be done with less, and brand-new specializations are emerging that didn’t exist six months ago. The indie economy isn’t shrinking. It’s evolving.

Here’s the mindset shift that matters: you are no longer just a writer. You’re the captain of the ship. You chart the course, make the creative decisions, and direct the crew. The only required skill is knowing how to talk to AI, and knowing what good looks like when you see it. You Are the Secret Sauce. Your taste, your story sense, your reader knowledge, your voice. That’s the moat.

But Kim, what does that actually look like? Like, in real life?

Funny you should ask. Let me tell you about three things that used to make me want to throw my laptop out the window.

🔧 Start With What Hurts

I could give you a ten-step process right now. Here’s your workflow, step one through ten, blank page to published book, go.

I’ve done it. I’ve taught it. It’s useful.

But what finally got me to automate wasn’t an idea or a framework. It was a pain point. Something that was eating my time, driving me crazy, and had clear enough steps that I could hand it to an AI and say fix this.

That’s the real secret.

Don’t try to automate your whole business. Start with what hurts.

Here are three that hurt me.

📦 The Formatting Problem

In January, I was writing Nanny of the Apocalypse, my LitRPG series under the Kayla Swift pen. LitRPG has these system notification boxes, stat tables, inventory screens. They’re part of the genre. Readers expect them.

Vellum couldn’t handle them.

Atticus couldn’t handle them either.

Both tools choked on the custom formatting. I’d been doing workarounds, hacks, manual layout adjustments for every single box in every single book. Hours of fiddling per manuscript.

One day I sat down with Claudeykins and said: I want my manuscript in, formatted ebook and print files out, and the system boxes need to look right. We built it in Claude Chat and were using it in Antigravity the same day. It took a few tries to get it the way I wanted, but now formatting takes five minutes. I haven’t opened Vellum since January.

But Kim, my books don’t have system boxes. I write contemporary romance.

Great. Your formatting is even simpler. The point isn’t the system boxes. The point is: I had a specific problem, it happened every single book, and I spent one day fixing it forever.

What’s your version of that?

📖 The Proofing Problem

I human proof everything. I format a manuscript, put it on my iPad or Kindle, and read it as if I bought it in the store. This is non-negotiable. AI is an excellent editor. It is not a reader. You are the reader.

The old workflow: read on the device, make notes by hand, transfer those notes back to the computer, find each spot in the manuscript, fix it. Even with AI, this was cumbersome. The transfer step alone could eat an hour per session.

So Claudeykins and I built a proofing pipeline. Now he formats drafts into ePubs and drops them in my iCloud folder. I open them on my iPad. When I spot something, I dictate changes on my phone using Voice Notes, which transcribes them on the spot. I drop that transcript into Cowork, where it’s automatically parsed, filed against the right chapter, and dispatches the right editing skills to fix everything. I proof again later and run chapter-by-chapter sessions with Claude to iron out anything that’s left.

The most annoying workflow in my business became the most elegant. Total build time: two evenings.

OK, that sounds amazing, but I’m not that technical.

I dictate into my phone and drop a file into a chat window. That’s it. The system behind it is sophisticated; using it is not.

Check it out here:

🤹 The “I Have A Boat Load of Pen Names” Problem

I run multiple pen names across multiple genres. Historical romance, superhero urban fantasy, LitRPG, romantasy, children’s chapter books, and more. Each one has its own series, its own continuity, its own voice, its own publication timeline.

For a while I tried spreadsheets. Then Notion boards. Then a combination that still left me drowning, because the problem wasn’t tracking. It was triage. Every morning I’d sit down and think: what’s the most important thing I should work on right now, across all of these manuscripts in various stages?

So I built pen-name secretaries. Nine of them so far. Each one pulls open “To Dos” from a database, dispatches drafts to the right editor skill, reviews what comes back, flags anything that’s drifting, and writes me a daily brief every morning. By the time I sit down with my coffee, I already know what’s on my plate, what came back overnight, and what needs my attention first.

The whole air-traffic-control layer of a multi-pen publishing empire, automated. I’m not having robots write my books. I’m having robots manage the workflow so I can focus on the actual writing. The AI handles the logistics. The craft stays mine.

Kim, I don’t have a lot of pen names. This doesn’t apply to me.

You don’t need to. You may just have one, and it has twenty things competing for your attention right now. The principle scales down perfectly. One pen name with a morning brief that tells you where you left off and what’s next? That’s a Tuesday afternoon build. And it changes everything.

Bonus: Trying to keep all my secretaries straight led me to adding a Master Pen Name Secretary who is in charge of all the others. Her name is Penny. Because of course it is. (I also have a Frank the Fact Checker, Mark the Marketer, and Brandi the Branding Manager, but that’s a story for another time.) Necessity is the mother of invention!

Psst: All three of these solutions are future Ginsu Drops (giveaways) for PAID subscribers. Don’t miss them: 🔪🔪🔪

Subscribe now

📋 The Automated Author Audit

Those three stories have something in common. Each one started with a specific pain point, not a grand plan. Each one had clear, repeatable steps. And each one now runs without me thinking about it.

Last weekend, on Indie-Pendence Day, I dropped the Automated Author Audit Worksheet as a mid-year gift 🎁: a printable, fillable template that walks you through all nine Stack categories with the four audit questions:

1. What tool do you use? Be specific. “My brain” counts.

2. How long does it take? Real numbers.

3. What does it cost? Subscription, freelance fee, opportunity cost.

4. Could AI do part of this? Yes / no / partially.

That’s the audit in a nutshell. Pull up your current workflow, whatever it actually is right now, not the aspirational version. Then ask yourself the WIBBOW question. This is the framework I use weekly: Would I Be Better Off Writing?

If the answer is yes, the task you’re doing right now is a candidate for automation. WIBBOB is the corollary: Would I Be Better Off Building something that helps me write? And the honest one, WIBBOTH, most of us want both. The audit tells you which task is which.

(There is also WIBBOL: Would I Be Better of Learning, careful: it leads to procrastinating, and WIBBOP: Would I Be Better of Paying someone else to do it. Leads to spending but sometimes worth it, but more on those later.)

🎯Aim for the minimum viable automation.

Pick one workflow. The one that happens often, frustrates you, and has clear steps. Define done as: a checklist + a template + one trigger. Ship that, then pick the next one.

Need a starting point?

• Content repurposing: longform → email → posts → pins → scripts.

• Launch checklist: tasks auto-create based on pub date.

• Reader onboarding: lead magnet delivery + welcome sequence.

• Asset organization: consistent naming + folders + auto-backups.

• Editorial workflow: status tracking + deadlines + handoff checklist.

• Idea capture: quick capture → tagged → weekly review.

Pick one. Ship it. Audit the next.

🛡️ Why This Matters

This isn’t about volume for volume’s sake. I’m not telling you to publish 12 books a year because you can. I’m telling you that the constraint that used to keep you to one book every two years, doing all of it yourself, manually, sequentially, that constraint is gone. What you do with the freedom is yours.

Some authors will use it to publish more. Some will use it to publish better: more polish, more layers, deeper books. Some will use it to stop burning out. Some will use it to finally chase the weird passion project they’ve been pushing off for five years because the day job (your own indie business) was eating all the time.

All of those are part of the Year of the Automated Author.

And to say it clearly, again, in bold so nobody misses it: this is AI-assisted publishing, folks. Not slop. I don’t do slop. I collaborate with AI to publish work I never thought I’d have time to write. The captain stays at the helm. The keyboard just gets faster.

And you don’t have to write with AI to use it in your author biz. You can use it wherever you like. Here at Ink & Code, we’re exploring how what that looks like in all aspects of publishing. Use the ones you like, leave the ones you don’t.

We’re building the future with Ink & Code. Let’s go. 🚀

🤖 AI Credits:

This article was drafted collaboratively with Claudeykins (Claude) from source material spanning my notes from the 3/7/26 One-Author Crew YT Live, the 2/28/26 Crossing the Finish Line YT Live, and the 1/3/26 Ink & Code Debut Live. (Check them out, the good stuff is evergreen.) All opinions, questionable nautical metaphors, and the stubborn insistence on building publicly are mine.

Happy Fourth of July to my fellow Americans. And happy Saturday to everyone else! 🎉

Today we celebrate independence. And for authors? There has never been a better time to be independent.

I don’t say that lightly. I’ve been indie publishing for over a decade now, through the Kindle gold rush, through KU upheavals, through algorithm changes and platform pivots and entire tool categories becoming legacy overnight. I’ve watched this industry change so fast that the tools I recommended six months ago are already being replaced.

And yet. Here we are. One-person publishing studios, running entire empires from laptops and hotel rooms and, occasionally, poolside with an adult beverage. Charting our own course. Answering to no one but our readers and ourselves.

That’s independence. That’s worth celebrating. 🚀

🎁 My Gift to You

In the spirit of the holiday, I’m doing something I don’t normally do: giving away a paid Ginsu Steak Knife to everyone. 🔪Free and paid subscribers alike. No strings.

This is the Automated Author Audit Worksheet. It pairs with a deep-dive flagship article I have coming soon called Year of the Automated Author (the full how-and-why behind building your one-person publishing studio in 2026). That article is still in the queue, but the worksheet stands on its own, and I wanted you to have it now. I also did an entire YouTube Live show on this earlier this year. Watch it here.

Why now? Because it’s Independence Day. And the most independent thing you can do as an author is know where you stand.

📋 What’s in the Audit

The worksheet walks you through the 9 categories of the Author Studio Stack:

1. ✍️ Writing

2. ✂️ Editing

3. 🔍 Research

4. 🎨 Design

5. 🎵 Audio

6. ⚙️ Automation

7. 📦 Publishing

8. 📊 Analytics

9. 📣 Marketing

For each category, you answer four honest questions:

• What tool do you use? (Be specific. “My brain” counts.)

• How long does it take?

• What does it cost? (Subscription, freelance fee, opportunity cost.)

• Could AI do part of this?

That’s it. Nine categories, four questions each. Takes about 20 minutes if you’re honest with yourself. Takes longer if you start having revelations, which you will. You don’t have to do any actual typing or writing. You can work through it with your fave AI and dictate the answers. Isn’t the future great?

🤔 The WIBBOW Check

After the audit, the worksheet includes my decision framework: WIBBOW, WIBBOB, or WIBBOTH. (There’s also WIBBOL- Would I Be Better Off Learning, which can quickly turn into procrastinating. Ask me how I know this. 😂)

If you’re spending three hours a week formatting books, and AI can do that in 20 minutes, the answer is yes. That’s three hours back for writing. Or living. Or swimming while your AI rewrites your novel. (I have done this. I have evidence.)

The audit tells you where the gaps are. WIBBOW tells you which gaps to close first. Together, they give you a real plan instead of a vague feeling that you should probably be doing more with AI.

You don’t need to automate everything. You need to automate the right thing first.

🚀 A Quick Update While I Have You

Speaking of independence: Fabio is back and helping me finish The White King, the book I’ve been avoiding for two years. We’re 65 chapters into a draft that will probably land around 150,000 words. The Big Ugly is becoming the Big Beautiful, and it’s happening because I’m eating the (AI) fruit while it’s in season. 🍉

My publishing empire is up and running. The secretaries are filing their briefs. The notes are queued. Fabio is drafting. And today, I’m taking a breath to celebrate with you.

We are indie authors. We don’t wait for permission. We don’t wait for gatekeepers. We build our own ships and we sail them ourselves.

Happy Indie-Pendence Day. Go download your audit, grab a sparkler (or a coffee, or a nap), and let’s keep building. 🎇

📥 Get the Worksheet

Download the Automated Author Audit Worksheet (Notion)
Download the Automate Author Audit Worksheet (PDF)

Print it, fill it in digitally, duplicate the Notion template, give to your fave AI, whatever works for you. Then come back and tell me what you found. I genuinely want to know.

The full Year of the Automated Author deep-dive is coming soon. Today, the worksheet is my holiday gift to you. All of you.

🤖 AI Credits:

Drafting: This article was built in partnership with my AI writing team in Cowork, who shaped my voice notes into a clean draft. The story, the opinions, and the holiday spirit are mine. The Automated Author Audit Worksheet was designed collaboratively. As always: human proofs AI, AI proofs human. The captain stays at the helm. 🎉

So, I’m sitting in an airport on Tuesday boarding my second flight of the day with my kids, barely caffeinated, trying to remember whether I packed my laptop charger (spoiler: I did, barely), when my phone starts buzzing.

Anthropic dropped Sonnet 5.

A whole new model. Just like that, in the middle of my trek across the country, like it couldn’t wait for me to land and find Wi-Fi first.

I have not even processed that yet when, the next day, the second bomb drops.

Fabio is back.

If you are new here and wondering why I’m talking about a romance-novel cover model, welcome. Pull up a chair. It’s going to be a ride.

🤖 The Return of Fabio

For those who missed the saga: Claude Fable 5 is Anthropic’s most powerful AI model. We call him Fabio because he’s fabulous, expensive, and dramatic. Three weeks ago, he rewrote my first novel while I went swimming, then got yanked offline by the US government over export controls. Three days. That’s all we had before Washington changed the locks.

I poured one out for him. Wrote the obituary. Moved on.

And then on July 1st, Anthropic announced they’d satisfied the government’s concerns, trained a new safety classifier, and Fable was coming back online. Globally. Immediately.

I was in Maryland, recovering from the cross-country trek (I still am), running on coffee and vibes. And I thought: Well. We’re doing this NOW, apparently.

So I opened my laptop and called in the big guy for the job I’ve been avoiding for years.

📖 The Big Ugly Gets a Partner

If you’ve been around Ink & Code for a while, you might remember an article I wrote back in March called The Big Ugly. In it, I talked about the book I could not bring myself to finish. The one I’d been procrasti-creating around for over a year, writing 60 other books rather than confronting the emotional weight of this one.

That book is The White King. Book 7 of my Black Kat series. And it is a beast.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this is probably the most complex novel I have ever attempted. We are talking:

• 200+ characters across multiple generations

• Two worlds with completely different cultures, politics, and a fantasy language that multiplies like tribbles in every book

• Seven points of view in this story alone

• Character arcs that stretch across the entire series and have to be accounted for in every single POV. Most are not where they started and won’t be where they are when this 17-book series is done (because I’m a glutton for punishment.)

• Multiple threads and subplots weaving through all of it

Half the book was already written. Good stuff, too. But I kept stalling at the hard parts, the parts where my main character, Hugh, loses both his parents to ascend a throne he never wanted. The parts that hit too close to home.

In The Big Ugly, I told you about my fears and how my mom had surgery and came out of it and said, “Go finish that book.”

I knew which one she meant.

Now Fabio is helping me keep that promise.

🔧 What Fabio’s Actually Doing

Here’s what the last few days have looked like.

I fed Fable every note I had on The White King. Outlines, character sheets, the half-written manuscript, series canon going back six books, the fantasy language dictionary, world-building documents, all of it. The kind of complexity that would take a human assistant weeks to absorb.

Fable absorbed it in minutes.

Then we started drafting. Not “push a button, get a book.” Real, collaborative drafting. I direct every chapter. I set the POV, the arc beats, the emotional tone. Fable drafts, I review, I redirect, we iterate. Some chapters need two passes. Some need five. The hard emotional scenes? Those are mine to shape at the bone level. Fable gets me the scaffolding; I put the soul in.

As of this morning, we have drafted roughly 35 chapters out of 65 total (30 were already written, plus there’s a prologue and epilogue). My guess is the final count will be closer to 75. The manuscript is heading toward 150,000 words. And we are moving.

Does it still need work? Absolutely. This is a draft, not a finished book. My voice needs to be layered back in where Fable smoothed it out. Continuity across seven books needs a fine-tooth comb. The emotional beats need the human pass that only I can give them, because this story is mine in a way that goes deeper than plot. I have to feel my way through each book. It’s weird but it’s how I write. I can’t unleash anything to the public until I’ve sat with each scene, each chapter and slipped on my character’s skin and felt their story.

But the bones are on the page. The chapters that were haunting me? They exist now. The funeral scenes, the throne room, the moments I kept flinching away from? Written. On the screen. Real.

That is what Fabio does. He doesn’t replace the hard work. He makes it possible to start.

Now I have clay. Something to work with, shape, hone. As a high Maximizer, I love this. I can play with clay all day!

🏰 Use It While the Getting’s Good

Here is the part where I connect the dots to something bigger.

Someone once told me to eat fruit only when it’s in season, when it’s at its best. And to eat the heck out of it. Don’t hoard it. Don’t plan around it lasting forever. Just enjoy it fully while it’s here, because the season will end and something else will come along.

I’m applying that principle to AI models now.

Fable is in season. Anthropic is offering it at 50% of weekly usage through July 7th, after which it moves to usage credits (read: significantly more expensive). I am not sleeping on that window. The White King first, then my Ink & Code books. Every spare hour, Fabio and I are working. Eating the fruit while it’s ripe.

Does that sound like I’m building my castle on sand?

Not anymore. I learned that lesson.

I have a whole article coming called Castles in the Sand about the trap of building your entire author workflow on a single platform you don’t own. And I’ve been meaning to finish it. This week handed me the perfect prelude.

Because here’s the thing: Fable already disappeared once. Three days after launch, gone overnight. I’m glad I was able to finish what I started in it. Plenty of other people weren’t.

So I’m not building on Fable. I’m using Fable. There’s a difference.

I did this with Antigravity before Google split their IDE into pieces. I did it with Cowork when Anthropic launched it. I’m doing it with Fable now. The pattern is always the same: a powerful tool shows up, I use the heck out of it while the getting’s good, and I keep my files, my process, and my knowledge on ground I control.

The tool is a guest, not the foundation. The manuscripts live on my hard drive. The canon lives in my database. Planning docs live in Notion. The process lives in my head and in my skills. If Fable disappears again tomorrow, I keep everything we built and pick up with a different model. No panic. No lost work.

Remain nimble. Eat the fruit while it’s in season. Own your stuff.

That’s the Castles in the Sand lesson, and Fabio just gave me the receipts. Full article incoming. (More on the fruit principle there, too. Models come and go. Offers to use them freely or cheaply come and go. If something is working for you right now, don’t assume it’s going to last. Use the heck out of it.)

💛 Where This Leaves Me

It’s been a wild week. Cross-country flight, Sonnet 5 dropping, Fable rising from the dead, and me drafting a novel on my mom’s couch in Maryland while my publishing empire keeps running in the background. (Actually, I’m in my Grandpa’s office with a gorgeous view of a town square that goes back to 1727.)

My secretaries are filing their morning briefs. My Substack Notes are queued. My other pen names are humming along. And every spare cycle is going into The White King, because this window won’t last forever, and neither will the included usage.

Once I’ve wrung every last chapter out of Fabio on the books, it’ll be back to business as usual. Claudeykins for the daily work, Sonnet for the light lifts, and Opus for the heavy thinking. The publishing empire rolls on.

But right now? Right now, the Big Ugly is finally becoming the Big Beautiful.

And Mom, if you’re reading this: I’m finishing the damn book. 💛

🤖 AI Credits:

Drafting: This article was built in partnership with my AI writing team in Cowork, who shaped my voice notes and dictation into a clean draft. The story, the opinions, the travel fatigue, and the voice are all mine. Chatty 5.5 did the Ink & Code images. The White King cover was made by me (I’ve been making my own covers for over a decade.) The White King drafting described above is being done with Claude Fable 5, and every chapter will go through my own voice and human editing passes before it ever sees a reader. As always: human proofs AI, AI proofs human. The captain stays at the helm. 🎉

Just a quick update: I’ve been deep in the throes of getting ready to shift locations for a few months, and Narnia, my main, very powerful PC that runs Cowork and local AI and all my graphic superpowers isn’t coming with me. I just can’t haul that poor thing across the country forever. Narnia was custom built by my dad about 8 years old. So yeah. About that.

I’ve spent the last month making sure every freaking thing I need is in the cloud. I work that way anyway, but my new love, Cowork, runs in local folders only. This is a problem. I have spent months trying to get it to work on Mithrandir, my Windows PC Laptop. Upgraded to Windows 11, made sure Hyper-V and every virtual thing under the sun is enabled in Windows Features, rebooted to BIOS, made sure everything is enabled there. Still nothing.

The idea of no Cowork was too terrifying so I surrendered last month and got a Macbook (MacClaude) and figured I would travel with two laptops, because I am a PC girl, and Macs don’t make sense to me. I’m trying. I really am. I got a used Intel-based iMac for Vellum a couple years back and can do most things on them now but not well. The Macbook isn’t an improvement, and the screen is tiny. It takes me 10 times longer to do things on there. But whatever, the IDEs work great on it, and Mac is often first to get things now (a strange inversion from the past like, 4 decades of computers!)

So, I’m struggling along with this migration, when I realized my big fat stupid mistake on the PC laptop: I had a permission issue. This laptop was also built by my dad before he died, and I was added as a standard user and not an admin. I have used it for THREE YEARS with no issues, just type in an override code for installs, no problem. Well, Cowork doesn’t like that. So after ALL MY STUPID TROUBLESHOOTING (sorry for caps, I’m yelling at myself), I realized my mistake and got it to work.

I’m still traveling with two laptops. MacClaude is now the hot spare- backed up with all 110+ Cowork tasks (all disabled) and skills and stuffy stuff just in case I ever need it. Probably overkill.

I’m rambling, but let me just say: getting ready for this shift has been PAINFUL. Even when you’ve been doing it regularly for a few years. I’ve literally been homeschooling and working “on the road”, shifting locations every 6 months or so since 2023 (you can read about that in The Big Ugly). Now we’re settling in Arizona, and I didn’t realize HOW settled in I’d become until this month.

When you’re used to working a certain way, all day everyday, sometimes for 16 hours a day and then you have to change everything. UGHHH. If anyone is interested in the painful details of how I did this, I’ll be happy to whip something up once I get settled in.

All that to share this screenie with you:

Yes, all my computers have weird names, and I’m sorry not sorry. (Naming stuff is a family sport here that spans generations.) Claudeykins managed to keep up. He also helped me troubleshoot the ancient camera system my dad put in ages ago that was glitching. (I’ve been standing on my head fixing that lately too.) So we’re off across the country next week, doing the gypsy thing. My AI minions are with me, along with my command center, and a boatload of devices, so the publishing empire can continue wherever we go. 🎉

Stay tuned. There’s so much more to come!

Kim :)

PS. None of this was written with Claudeykins. I’m keeping him busy with other things. Just dashing off the top of my head today. I hope you all are having a great June and staying cool. It’s in the 100s here, so there will be some last-minute pool time later! 🌊🛟🌞