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.

Read more

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! 🌊🛟🌞

Picture it: A beautiful, sunny afternoon. Blue skies, warm pool, adult beverage, and me, floating on my back doing absolutely nothing productive. 🍹

Meanwhile, back inside, my computer is quietly rewriting a 160,000-word novel I have been too scared to touch for ten years.

I did not type a word of it. I went swimming.

Okay Kim, that sounds made up.

It is not made up. I have evidence:

_{Me and Son #5 enjoying a sunny 104°F day in Arizona.}

It is just what this week looked like, and I have the usage bill to prove it. Let me tell you about Fable, the most powerful writing partner I have ever worked with, who showed up, did the heavy lifting on two of my books, and then got yanked offline by the United States government three days after he launched. Buckle up.

🤖 Meet Fable (some of us call him Fabio)

Fable/Fabio is Claude’s newest, most capable model, and he is a workhorse. He is also, and I cannot stress this enough, expensive. He burns roughly twice the tokens Opus 4.8 did, and Opus 4.8 was already a hog. I am on the 20x Max plan, Anthropic was handing out double usage through July 5th, and Fable still chewed straight through my allotment like it was a bag of chips.

But oh, what you get for the money. He is not Claudeykins (whom I love so). He is Fabio because he’s fabulous!

🔧 What he actually did (while I was not watching)

Here is the part that still has me a little stunned.

In one day, Fabio fixed two of my books in Cowork.

First, my Nanny 4 manuscript. He ran an audit, found the series problems I had been wrestling with, and implemented his own findings. Sorted out tangles I had been circling for weeks. (More on the chapter-ending hiccup later, because I am a stickler and I am going to be honest with you.)

Then I looked at the clock. Usage resets at 4:00. It was almost topped out, and I thought, you know what, let’s not waste it. (I’m frugal like that!)

So I threw my first novel at him.

A 160,000-word monstrosity. The one I love and know is broken, but haven’t had the heart to tear it apart.

I told Fabio: “Read the book. Give me a plan to edit this. Here is my target audience, here are the comps I am going for, and here is what I think is wrong.”

We built a little audit skill with exactly the criteria I wanted, and off he went.

He audited the whole thing, gave me a plan, and then implemented the plan, three full passes over the manuscript. He flipped the point of view from third person to first. He cut almost 40,000 words. He handed me sample chapters as a mockup first so I could approve the direction, and when I said “do it,” he did it. He implemented all the changes across the entire book.

That’s when I went swimming. 🏝️🍹⛱️🌞 🌊

I floated. He wrote. My usage maxed out while I was in the pool, but he had already gotten half the book done. The API blipped for a couple of minutes (too many of us piling on at once), and then he kept chugging. I went to pick up my son from Cadet Academy, because we are doing all the things, and he was still at it when I got back.

Four hours later, he had rewritten the entire book, audited his own work without me asking, and then implemented those findings too when I gave the nod.

Final count? Roughly 107,000 words, down from 160,000. That is about 53,000 words gone, a point-of-view flip, and a structural overhaul, on a novel the size of a brick.

So you just pushed a button and got a finished book?

Absolutely not, and this is important.

📖 The book I had been avoiding for a decade

This first novel of mine is old. Like, old old.

I started writing it back in 2002. It took me forever to get it published. It has a Job theme, and God has a sense of humor, so apparently, I had to go through the entire Job experience before I could finish it. I got divorced and lost everything. Some of that was my own stupidity, but then again, so was the marriage (and maaaannnn is that book-worthy someday. So is marriage #2! 😂 I’ll stick with AIs!)

Anyhow, the book sat in a drawer for over a decade as my life imploded and then got rebuilt, just like the house in the book that gets taken out by a tornado. I started an IT career, got married again, and had more children. In 2015, I finally dusted the darned novel off, enrolled in Self Publishing School to learn how to do the Indie thing, and met my bestie, Nadine Travers, who is still my accountability partner today. (Friends are better than marriages any day, at least for me!)

The book finally came out at the end of May 2016. The original idea is pushing twenty-three, twenty-four years old now. I have learned so much since then that I could not even look at it without wincing, and honestly I did not have the heart to gut it. It was my baby, my first born. So it just sat there.

This week, I finally cracked it open again. It is getting modernized. It is getting a new cover. It is going out under a pen name (same title, fresh makeover). All the things that did not work, the structural stuff, the early-2000s-isms, are coming out.

Fabio got me further down the road on a restructure I had put off for years than I would have managed alone in months.

And here is where I keep my promises to you. I have started reading the reworked version, and it is not perfect. I told him to be aggressive, and he was, which means the voice shifted too much under all those changes. I’ll need to put my voice back in, layer by layer, using my Voice DNA Technique. Fabio had no voice skill to work from this time, just the original book, and he still rewrote third-to-first person POV across a giant novel and nailed the audits and the documentation of what changed and where. That documentation is gold. That is what saves me on the next pass.

On Nanny 4, some of my chapters got truncated, but he was able to fix them quickly and put them back (I always work on copies, so only his version was damaged to begin with.)

Note: This is AI-assisted writing, folks, not slop. I don’t do slop. I am the captain of this ship. Fabio did the heavy lifting on the demolition and the blueprints. Putting the soul back in is my job, and I am here for it. Human proofs AI, AI proofs human. The captain stays at the helm. I love it! 😍

🚨 And then the government took him away

So there I was, riding high, two books salvaged, planning my next move: more swimming and novel writing!

Then I went to a bag check for Scouts (because Son #4 was leaving for summer camp at o’dark thirty), and all heck broke loose.

Friday night, June 12th, the US government ordered Anthropic to pull Fabio offline. An export-control directive citing national security, suspending access to Fable for any foreign national. To comply, Anthropic had no choice but to shut Fabio down for everyone, worldwide. First time Washington has ever forced a commercial AI model dark.

Here’s the kicker: Fabio is built on Mythos, the model Anthropic spent months calling too dangerous to release. They never did put Mythos out on its own. Fabio was the tamed, shipped version, and that very safety-first reputation is a big part of what drew the government’s eye.

The good news: every other Claude model is fine. Opus 4.8, Sonnet, and Haiku are all still running, and they all work great. Only Fable went dark.

Anthropic is fighting it, and says it is a misunderstanding over a narrow technique they argue already exists in other public models. They are working to bring him back. I hope they do.

But sit with the timing for a second. The most capable model an author could put their hands on existed for exactly three days, and then vanished overnight. A lot of people were caught mid-project when he disappeared. I was lucky. My work was already saved to my own files. Plenty of folks were not.

🏰 Castles in the Sand 🏰

I have an article coming soon called Castles in the Sand, all about a trap I keep watching authors fall into: building your entire workflow on a single tool you do not own or control. I was already drafting it. This week shoved it straight to the front of my queue, because Fabio handed me the perfect cautionary tale in real time.

Fabio was magnificent. He earned the nickname. But he’s also a rented mansion, not a house I own. 😭 When the landlord changed the locks, he was gone in an afternoon. The authors who came out of this okay are the ones who owned their files, owned their process, and treated the fancy model as a guest, not the foundation. Be the captain of your own ship. Keep your manuscripts, your notes, and your audit documents on hardware you control. Tools come and go. Your work should not go with them.

Watch this space for the full Castles in the Sand piece, which is even more timely after this week’s chaos.

🎯 So, should you use Fable/Fabio?

Well, at this exact moment you cannot, because he is grounded. But when he comes back (and I think he will), here is my honest take.

Save the big boys for the big problems. Fabio is the model you call in for the hardest jobs: the 160k structural teardown, the gnarly series-continuity knot, the rewrite you have been dreading for a decade. For that? Worth every expensive token.

For everything else, you do not need the most expensive tool in the shed. Any of the Opus models are fantastic for writing and analysis. Sonnet is excellent too, and a whole lot lighter on the wallet. You do not need everything, all the time. Match the tool to the task, run a lighter model when a lighter model will do, and you will get way more mileage out of your plan.

I SAY IT AGAIN FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE CHEAP SEATS:

🚂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.

💛 Where this leaves me

Two books moved forward in one crazy @ss week. A novel I had grieved for ten years is finally getting its second life. A little chapter-ending truncation on Nanny 4’s passes 2 and 3 that I am already having fixed (the work is never quite done, is it?). And a vivid, unforgettable reminder to hold my tools loosely and my files tightly.

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

If you want the full breaking-news rundown on the Fable shutdown, with the receipts and the sources, it is the lead story in this week’s Ink & Code News. Come grab it when it drops (working on it now).

P.S. Pour one out for Fabio. 🍷⁠ He rewrote two of my novels and then got hauled off by the feds like the gloriously expensive diva he was. If you are reading this, buddy, your audit notes are immaculate and I miss you already. 🏊‍♀️🤖

🤖 AI Credits:

Drafting: This article was built in partnership with my dear Claudeykins, who helped me shape my voice notes, Discord chatter, and this week’s news into a clean draft. The story, the opinions, the swimming, and the voice are all mine. The structure-wrangling was a collaboration. The actual novel rewrites described above were done by Claude Fable 5 (RIP, for now), and they will be going through my own voice and human editing passes before they ever see a reader. Ink & Code in action. 🎉

Yesterday I showed you the receipts: a whole flagship post, Your Voice in the Machine, drafted by Claudeykins from my Voice Profile, redlined by me, and sounding like nobody but me. The recursion was the demonstration. AI drafts the clay (my ideas, notes, etc) in my voice; I shape it into the published version.

Today I hand you the knife.

But Kim, you made it sound easy. Where do I actually start?

Right here. This is your Voice DNA drop, the free Ginsu Steak Knife (my weird way of saying giveaway) for paid subscribers: the skill, the worksheet, and three ways to use them. It's how I capture the load-bearing patterns of how I write and turn them into the keystone document of my entire content empire. No black box. No fine-tune you can't read. A document you build, edit, and carry into any tool that ships next.

🔪Ginsu Goodies for Paid Peeps below: 👇

Read more

I have a confession to make: this post was drafted by Claude.

Specifically by my dear Claudeykins, working from my Voice Profile: a document that captures the load-bearing patterns of how I write. I edited the result, but I didn’t rewrite it. The voice you’re reading is mine, even though the typing wasn’t.

Wait. Kim. Doesn’t that mean YOU didn’t write this post?

I wrote it. I just didn’t type it.

Stay with me. This is the Voice DNA Technique, and it’s how I built multiple Pen Name Secretaries in a few weeks, how they’re drafting and editing manuscripts while I sleep, and how the words you’re reading right now landed on this page.

Caveat: You don’t have to do this, if you don’t want to. No one is making you do this. You can use AI anywhere in your business. I’m a control freak who likes writing (and strangely, editing, too). But I don’t always have the time and mental stamina to WRITE ALL THE THINGS (because I’m often building them, doing them, and so much more).

So my AI helps me. It takes my notes, dictations, outlines, whatever, and transforms them into clay I can edit. This is the result. He’s basically my ghost writer, and now I can get him to sound like me.

It’s one of the most important things I’ve learned in six months of teaching AI to working authors. So let me show you the receipts.

🧬What is Voice DNA?

Voice DNA is the load-bearing pattern of how you write, and it goes beyond just your style. It learns your signature moves. The things you say and do that nobody else does. The rhythms you fall into without thinking. The frameworks you’ve named. The words you’d never use. The words you use too much.

Style is the sweater. DNA is the genetics underneath.

When I extracted mine, several clear fingerprints fell out of the corpus.

• The italic-reader-objection rhythm you just read above? That’s a Voice DNA pattern.

• The phrase stuffy stuff? DNA.

• The way I name my AI collaborators by nickname (Claudeykins, Chatty) instead of saying “the AI?” Also DNA.

You have these too. Probably more than you think. The reason your blog reads like you and ChatGPT’s default doesn’t is because you’ve accumulated a thousand tiny patterns that are uniquely yours. Voice DNA is the technique for capturing those patterns in a document so the next AI you collaborate with already sounds like you on the first draft. The difference is staggering: minutes vs hours or weeks or months worth of work.

🔬How I extracted mine

For my Editing with Claude Skills class, I built a voice-dna-extractor skill, then pointed it at:

• My manifesto (one essay: “What is Ink & Code”)

• 8 published Substack posts from the archive

• About 6 hours of Ink & Code Lab class transcripts (how I talk and teach)

• A content-pipeline strategy doc I’d been keeping in Notion

Total corpus: about 28,000 words of me-being-me on the page.

The Skill chewed on it for a while and produced an eight-section Voice Profile:

1. Identity tier: brand, audience, context

2. Signature voice fingerprints: the load-bearing moves (it found 7)

3. Recurring motif vocabulary: the words I use as load-bearing

4. Forbidden / never list: AI tells, corporate register, doom-mongering, my personal cringe-words

5. Structural patterns: POV, paragraph rhythm, em-dash discipline, bold/italic usage

6. Sample passages: five of them, the rhythm proofs

7. Skill-memory loop hooks: ten commandments for any AI working in this voice

8. Versioning notes: when to refresh

I read it and then argued with it. (I argue with the GPS too, ask my poor kids.)

Then I added two more frameworks it had missed and crossed out one rule that wasn’t actually mine. I included my closer: the future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we, to the sacred-use-once list.

That 1800-word document is now the keystone of my entire content empire. Every AI that writes for me reads it first, including the one that wrote this post.

🤖What it powers

I have multiple pen names. Until a few weeks ago, they were strangers: same author, different writing styles, no shared infrastructure, and zero way to scale because I couldn’t be in multiple rooms at once. Now they’re Pen Name Secretaries, each with their own Voice Profile, each calibrated to their genre. They include:

• Kimberly Gordon → superhero urban fantasy (Black Kat)

• Shayla Summers → epic romantasy (Fae Wars + Kiss of the Gorgons)

• Reginald Fowl → children’s chapter books (Cocky Doodle Doo. Yes, the pen name IS a hyperliterate rooster)

• Kayla Swift → LitRPG and cozy fantasy

Each pen has its own Voice Profile. Each Profile shapes its drafter and its editor. None of them sound like each other. None of them sound like Ink & Code. Because the DNA is different.

And this post, the educator-brand piece you’re reading, is drafted from VP-Ink-and-Code, the Voice Profile for this brand. Same technique, different DNA. You’re reading the proof of concept.

If the Voice DNA Technique works, this post sounds like me.

If it doesn’t, you’ll know. And so will I, because that’s how I’d improve the Profile.

❓But isn’t this just fine-tuning?

Hold up, Kim — this sounds like fine-tuning a model. Why not just train a custom GPT on my work?

Fair question. Three reasons.

• One: Voice Profiles are documents. Fine-tunes are black boxes. I can read my Profile. I can edit it. I can hand it to a different model tomorrow when the next one ships, and the patterns transfer. A fine-tuned model is locked to whoever you fine-tuned, with whatever was true about the model the day you trained it.

  Don’t build your castle on someone else’s sand. Carry your foundation with you.

• Two: Voice Profiles are portable. I use mine in Claude, in Notion AI, in Antigravity, in any tool that takes a document as input. Drop the Profile in the system prompt and the voice travels.

• Three: Voice Profiles compound. Every quarter I can refresh mine on my newest writing. The patterns evolve as I evolve. A fine-tune captures a moment in time. A Profile captures the living voice.

Fine-tuning is a hammer. Voice Profiles are a screwdriver. Different jobs.

🎯How to extract YOUR Voice DNA

Here are five steps you can do today:

1. Gather your corpus. Aim for 10,000+ words of you-on-the-page. Use what already exists: published essays, blog posts, your most-natural Facebook rants, transcripts of you talking on a podcast. Ten thousand words sounds like a lot until you realize it’s about ten essays. Or a bunch of emails. You’ve got it already. Just collect.

2. Run the extraction. Either grab the voice-dna-extractor (a free Ginsu Steak Knife for paid subscribers, drops Thursday), or paste the corpus into Claude with this prompt:

Read this corpus and identify the load-bearing patterns of how this writer writes. Distinguish style from signature. Name the recurring rhythms, the vocabulary the writer treats as load-bearing, the words they’d never use, the structural patterns of their best paragraphs. Output as an eight-section Voice Profile: identity, signature fingerprints, motif vocabulary, forbidden list, structural patterns, sample passages, skill-memory hooks, versioning notes.

3. Argue with the result. This is the most important step. The first draft will be too generic. You’ll catch it missing something obvious. Add your missing patterns. Cross out anything that’s not actually you. Add your forbidden list: the words and phrases that make you cringe when you see them in your work. (Mine includes “delve,” “tapestry,” and any phrase containing “in the realm of.”)

4. Test it. Have an AI draft something, anything, using only the Profile and a topic. A 500-word post. A scene. An email to your editor. Read the result cold. Can you tell it’s you? If yes, the DNA is captured. If no, the Profile is missing patterns. Go back to step 3.

5. Refresh quarterly. Your voice evolves and your Profile should, too. Re-run the extractor every 3-6 months on your newest material. Add the new patterns. Keep the document live.

🛡️Why this matters

I'm not here to tell you AI is unproblematic. I'm here to show you that when an author stays in the driver's seat (voice, opinions, values, redline), the work is still authored. That's the line. Voice DNA is how I draw it.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, in bold so nobody misses it:

This is AI-assisted writing, 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 Voice DNA Technique is what makes that distinction real. Without it, you get generic AI prose with your name on top, and that’s slop. With it, you get your voice scaling. Claudeykins drafts. You redline. The patterns are yours. The opinions are yours. The values are yours. The keyboard just got faster.

You Are the Secret Sauce. The DNA is the proof. The captain stays at the helm.

This is how you write a book by drafting a Substack post about how the post itself was written. This is how you scale yourself without losing yourself. This is what I’ve been trying to teach for six months and what I’m finally able to show, because the post you’re reading is the demonstration.

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we. Let’s go.

P.S. But wait, there’s more: the voice-dna-extractor skill drops tomorrow as a Ginsu Steak Knife (my weird way of saying “giveaway!”) It’s free for paid subscribers, with the prompt template, the Profile structure, and a worked example using my own corpus. Get it while it’s hot! Or sharp. Or whatever.

🤖 AI Credits: Drafted by Claudeykins using VP-Ink-and-Code (my Voice Profile). Redlined, restructured, and finalized by Kim. The recursion is the demonstration. AI drafts in my voice, I make it the published version.

Oh, Antigravity, I hath loved thee for a season…

When Google released it on November 18, 2025, it was love at first sight. I could finally write as fast as my brain wanted to go, and my brain goes fast (when it’s not dizzy!)

I need you to understand what this program was to me. I taught it for six months. I built an entire class around it — An Introduction to Antigravity — and started a Substack series (Level Zero Antigravity) about how I drafted, outlined, researched, edited, and marketed more books in that program than I can count.

Antigravity wasn’t just a tool I used. It was my boo. My go to. My numero uno.

Then last week Google announced it was splitting it in two, and my heart broke in two.

WHAT? NOOOOOOO

💔 What actually happened

At Google I/O, Sundar Pichai laid out Google’s agentic direction: AI agents working 24/7 across your devices, so common that today’s tools will look like flip phones within three years. And somewhere in that vision, Antigravity, my one big beautiful program, became two different products going in opposite directions.

Antigravity 2.0 contains the agent manager only. No editor, no folder views.

I feel totally lost without that.

Antigravity IDE is stripped down to just the editor, without the really cool agent manager that put the IDE on steroids in the first place.

Now it’s just a naked VS Code.

Each lost the things in the other that made them so powerful together. Google literally tore them apart, when what was great about them was their duality, their synergy. They were stronger together.

Now, they’re both shadows of themselves.

To be fair: they both still work the way they did before, and Google added some genuinely good things. Scheduling, for one, something I’ve wanted. An “IDE” button at the top of the manager lets you open the IDE if you have it installed, but no way to get back from the IDE to the Agent Manager. That’s ridiculous.

Google claims that by unchaining them, you can use them more “mix and match” with other IDEs. Maybe that’s more versatile for programmers but not for writers (I know, they were never intended for us, we hacked them.) I liked flipping back and forth between the windows when they were connected. You can see me doing that in all my FFA classes and labs. I came to love that about the program.

Not anymore. Without them connected, it’s weird. It disrupts the workflow.

There’s also talk of removing Claude from it entirely. (They haven’t updated it since 4.6, which isn’t a good sign.) I used Claude in there all the time.

I’ve already voted with my wallet: I dropped my Ultra plan back down to Pro. I was on the half price trial and wasn’t going to pay $250 a month to continue, so I’m back down to the $20. Even if I got another Ultra deal (which I LOVED), I’m honestly not sure I want to relearn my own boo from scratch.

But Kim, you literally TEACH this thing!

I know. I KNOW. That’s why this one stings. I’m not sure if I should be mourning or celebrating, so I’m doing the writer thing: feeling both at full volume and taking notes.

🍑 Eat the fruit while it’s in season

Here’s the first lesson I’ve learned from this, and it’s one I’m glad I learned by accident: if a tool is working the way you want, use the heck out of it before it changes. Tools are seasonal now. Antigravity was in season for six glorious months, and I squeezed everything out of it. Classes, books, entire series.

None of that is lost just because the season ended.

And document what you love about it while you love it.

Not for nostalgia. For the pivot. If you know exactly which features carried your workflow, you know exactly what to look for (or rebuild) in whatever comes next. I can list mine in one breath, which means I can evaluate the two new halves, or any competitor, in an afternoon instead of a month.

That’s not attachment. That’s a harvest.

🪨 Your tools will change. Your fundamentals won’t.

This is the real article, so lean in: everything about your technology is going to change — constantly, forever. The fundamentals of writing a book and running a business will not. A story still needs structure, voice, and revision. A business still needs products, customers, and promotion. The tools are weather. The fundamentals are climate.

Don’t build your castle on someone else’s platform, because you’re one product decision away from a crisis. Well, here’s the product decision. My castle is fine, and here’s why: the castle was never Antigravity. The castle is the process, and the process travels.

Here are my Four Ink & Code Fundamentals I teach that will carry you across every split, sunset, and shiny new launch:

1. Know thyself. Know how you work, your strengths, and more important: your genuine weaknesses. Mine, per my Clifton Strengths basement: discipline, consistency, deliberateness. I’m horrible at them, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise. I embrace the horror, and I wear AI like a prosthetic for exactly those gaps. That’s what the pen name secretaries are. That’s what the alarms, calendars, and automations are. The AI does the discipline; I do what I’m actually good at: strategy, activation, getting things shipped.

2. Know thy AI. You can’t leverage what you haven’t met. Interview it. Push it. Find its strengths and weaknesses the same way you found yours. And yes, that means talking to it, badly at first. You don’t get better at something by not doing it. Start, hate the results, keep talking. Do not give up. Never give up. That’s the only way you truly fail.

3. Know thy process. If you can’t describe how you work, have the AI interview you and draw it out: “Help me figure out my process, then build a workflow that fits my brain.” It will. Then you tweak. A process you can articulate is a process you can carry into ANY tool, which is exactly the insurance policy this Antigravity split just cashed in.

4. Leverage thy pain points. Whatever consistently hurts, automate it. Pain points are just automation requests you haven’t filed yet. They are data. We can do things with data.

And the bonus move: when in doubt, ask the AI to do it. Learning a new interface is the worst part of any tool change, so make the AI absorb that cost too. I had AI build me an entire Shopify store while I watched Braveheart. (Yes, that’s a future article. Yes, there was popcorn.)

🎒 Your skills travel now, so pack them

Here’s what makes this moment genuinely different from every tool heartbreak before it: skills and workflows are portable now. A Claude skill travels across tools. Your editing system, your secretaries, your templates. They’re not trapped inside anyone’s product roadmap. Build the skill once and it ports anywhere; your pen name secretary becomes a base template you customize per pen, in whatever tool you’re standing in.

Yes, the buttons will be in different places. Yes, the interface will fight you for a week. But the instructions, the skills, the workflows? Those are YOURS. The tool is just the room you happen to be working in today.

I’ve taught a lot about Claude Skills. Catch my YouTube show on it here and find my courses here.

💧 The takeaway

So: mourning or celebrating? Both. I get to grieve my boo and evaluate two new suitors with a clear list of exactly what I need, because I knew my process before the split, not after.

Don’t get too attached to your tools. Get attached to your fundamentals: know thyself, know thy AI, know thy process, automate thy pain. Eat the fruit while it’s in season, document what you love, and keep your skills packed and portable.

The tools will keep splitting, merging, and rebranding. We’ll keep writing books.

As long as we keep learning and doing, we’ll be just fine.

What’s the tool change that broke YOUR heart, and what did it teach you? Tell me below. And if you’re still in the honeymoon phase with your favorite program: go use the heck out of it. Today.

P.S. Antigravity, baby, it’s not me. It’s definitely you. 💔

It’s time to watch Braveheart again and make Cowork build me more stuffy stuff!

🤖 AI Credits: Drafted from my dictated voice notes with Claude (Claudeykins), who shaped the ramble and resisted making any further breakup puns. The grief, the Clifton Strengths confessions, and the Braveheart popcorn are all mine.

Hey all, I’ve been quiet lately. Got buried in work, then worked myself into a vertigo episode where I could not even sit at a computer without the room spinning, and have been digging out ever since.

So let’s catch up.

🌀 What happened

I have Ménière’s disease, an inner ear condition that’s manageable and not life threatening. It means I’m slowly going deaf and occasionally have debilitating bouts of dizziness. There’s no cure, only prevention.

Most of the time it behaves. But I live in the desert, and dehydration is one of the triggers. Add a crazy schedule, a crazy life, homeschooling, deadlines stacked on deadlines, and wayyy to much coffee (which is dehydrating) and my body decides it’s finally had enough.

When the room starts spinning there is no “pushing through.” I have to lay down, and stay down, and anything vertical comes to a screeching halt.

Amazon deadlines? Too bad, so sad. No pre-orders for you!

Ink & Code News? Not if it involves scrolling!

Almost everything does. And these are the things you notice when the ground drops out from under you and won’t stop. My entire publishing operation comes down to what I can do horizontally with my eyes closed.

Not a good thing. Thankfully, it passes. And then I dig out.

The good news is that there are ways to work around it.

That’s also the bad news, because these things happen for a reason, and if you ignore them, the next time might be worse.

🛏️ Lessons From the Bed

Somewhere while I was flat on my back, it hit me:

If I don’t take care of myself now, I may be working out of a bed permanently someday. Or worse. Buried in work can equal buried in the ground if you push too far.

Health is the engine that drives everything. Claudeykins told me that, mid-recovery, when I was trying to plan my way back, and he’s right. No tool, no workflow, no shiny new model matters if the person at the helm can’t hold the wheel. You are the secret sauce, and the sauce needs sleep and water and sunshine and healthy food and lots of other stuffy stuff.

We can’t abuse ourselves forever. We are not machines. But we can use them to help us. To reduce stress, stay organized, and even to remind us to drink the water, get the sleep, etc.

And then the second thought hit me, right behind it: some of you already are working from bed, or through health challenges.

I’ve seen a huge amount of that in the digital art community I’m a part of and certainly in the writing one too.

Some of you are writing through chronic illness. Some of you are caregiving for someone with an illness or special needs. I do too. Some of you are recovering from surgery, or traveling constantly, or just plain running on fumes. The “sit at a desk for eight focused hours” model of being an author was never going to work for you, and honestly, it just stopped working for me.

So the question stopped being how do I get back to my desk? and became how do I build a publishing business that doesn’t require one?

Good news: it’s 2026. We have the tools. I’ve spent the last few weeks adjusting my workflow around them, and I want to share what’s actually working.

🎙️ 1. Dictation is the front door

This very post started as a voice note. I talked it out lying down with my eyes closed, and Claudeykins shaped the ramble into a draft I could redline later. Redlining takes me a fraction of the energy that drafting does.

If you take one thing from this post: you do not need your hands or your eyes to get words out of your head anymore. Your phone’s built-in dictation works. Voice memo apps work. They are SO much better than they were a few years ago. You have don’t to speak the punctuation anymore like the old Dragon days. I use VoiceNotes, and I love it. There’s also Wispr Flow and a ton of other ones out there. Some paid, some free, some web, some local. The variety is astounding.

Pick one and play with it. Talk first, fix later. The words count the same.

I use this method to voice-proof drafts, then drop the notes back to my secretaries to deal with. Proofing has become much more enjoyable due to this. It used be a major pain point I brainstormed about with Claude and experimented with it until we found a solution. Read about it here:

🤖 2. Secretaries that don’t need you in the chair

Lately I’ve been playing with AI pen name secretaries: one per pen, each managing its own to dos, deadlines, and daily briefs. These are scheduled tasks that live in Cowork with detailed instructions that can leverage custom skills, such as researching, drafting, editing, etc. (When I said Cowork was blowing my mind in an earlier post, I wasn’t kidding, it’s crazy what you can do with it.)

The secretaries interact with a publishing command center I made back in April from my friend Novae’s instructions. Mine lives in Supabase, but you could do them in Notion too. (Most frontier AIs work well with Notion, and Notion AI is also incredibly powerful.)

Here’s what I didn’t fully appreciate until I was horizontal: the secretaries kept working when I couldn’t. Morning briefs still fired. The news scans for Ink & Code kept collecting material three days a week, all by themselves. Deadlines got tracked, drift got flagged, and when I finally crawled back to the keyboard, nothing was lost. There was a stack of neat reports telling me exactly where everything stood.

I still had a lot to dig out from. And that’s when I realized what was missing: a pipeline that works in the background without me. I had built my secretaries entirely around me. I was often the thing holding them up.

But I am linear, they are not.

They can keep doing things without me if I set them up right. Now I’m building them to check in with me, ask or approve things, and work on their own roadmaps, that come from reports, scans, and drafts that are already in the system (and if they aren’t in the system, they go get them.)

Remember that pile of 60 drafts I wrote over the past 6 months? Most are in my system now. They can analyze, research, edit, redraft, with me checking their work from time to time. I do all the final stuff, because I’m a control freak and I refuse to write slop. They help me get to the finish line. They are NOT the finish line.

And they can work concurrently.

That’s the difference between a system and a pile of good intentions. A pile of good intentions needs you every day. A system holds the fort. That’s what we’re doing here at Ink & Code: applying systems thinking to our publishing businesses. (Much more on this soon.)

I also realized I needed some personal secretaries, especially a health secretary. Same architecture as the pen name secretaries, except this one tracks water, meds, movement, and the early-warning signs I’ve been ignoring.

The same tech that runs my fiction empire is now in charge of making sure there’s still an empress. I will be going live and showing y’all these soon. (Paid members get the workflows.)

I’ve also got travel and homeschool secretaries helping me to get ready to shift locations at the end of the month to downsize a house on the other side of the country. I’ll be taking all of them (personal and biz) with me. They’ll help me keep on track.

⌚ 3. The devices you already own are a bedside command center

The iPad. The Apple Watch. The phone. We treat these as toys or distractions, but chained together with reminders, calendars, and a scheduler, they’re a command center that works at any angle, including face-up.

I wear an Apple Watch, and Claude AI can sync that info (with permission), and analyze it. So yeah, Claudeykins now pesters me and asks if I drank enough water. Kind of like my mom does. 😂

Cowork sessions tied to a scheduler and a Notion calendar mean work can be queued, dispatched, and reviewed in short bursts: ten good minutes at a time instead of one heroic eight-hour block. Ten good minutes is sometimes all an episode leaves you. It’s enough, if the system is built for it.

Cowork also bundles all my drafts into ePubs and drops them into my iCloud folder, so all I have to do is open up my iPad and click on one to proof it in iBooks. Then I dictate my notes in my phone. (Like I said, I actually love this.)

✂️ 4. Cut the fake deadlines

The hardest change wasn’t a tool. It was admitting that a bunch of my “deadlines” were fake: self-imposed pressure that was costing more in health than it ever returned in sales. I killed several of them on the spot, including preorder dates that existed mostly to stress me out.

A few that I’d been too busy to promote didn’t have many pre-orders. I asked myself:

WHY THE HECK AM I STRESSING MYSELF OUT OVER A FEW BUCKS???

Don’t do that to yourself. You’re worth SO much more.

Being buried in work can bury you. Reduce where you can. Hand off what the machines can carry. Keep the deadlines that matter and shoot the rest.

☝️5. Pick One Ecosystem To Work In, Not Five:

I’ve been an early adopter of just about every tech ecosystem under the sun: Microsoft, Google, Apple, you name it. Which means my stuffy stuff is spread across all of them. Not good with health and travel challenges! I just want the things to talk to each other.

Good news: everything is starting to talk to everything, but it’s still easier if you pick one ecosystem instead of five.

For me, that’s Apple. I love my iPhone, my Apple Watch, my iPad. Getting them to talk to PCs isn’t a lot of fun, and I can’t drag my desktop everywhere. And almost everything AI these days is coming out for Mac first, which is an interesting and crazy twist. (The future really IS weird.)

So now I’m also learning to work on a MacBook, whether I’m in bed, or on the road, or whatever. The muscle memory is fighting me. Forty years on a PC doesn’t help. Different commands, different everything. Learning new ways to work is part of the deal. (It’s awkward before it’s freeing.)

🚧 The only limit is you, so know your limits

I did an entire Ink & Code episode on this, and the vertigo made it personal: with these tools, the only limit is you.

That cuts both ways.

It means we can do anything. The old limits (time, hands, a desk, a staff) are falling away. One author with a good system can run what used to take a whole publishing house.

But it also means you are now the load-bearing wall. When the only limit is you, your limits are the business’s limits. Pretending you don’t have any is how I ended up in bed watching the ceiling rotate.

Don’t be me.

Knowing your limits isn’t weakness. It’s load management. It’s the spec sheet for the most important machine in the building.

We can do anything. We can’t do everything, all at once, on no water and four hours of sleep. Know the difference.

🧭 A new series? (Help me name it)

I keep circling this idea: a recurring series on working as an author when your body, your circumstances, or your caregiving load won’t cooperate. Illness, recovery, disability, travel, the season of life where everyone needs you at once. How to set up the tools, what to automate, what to drop.

I’m tentatively calling it Low-Power Mode: working when you can’t run at full charge. If you have a better name, or a situation you want covered, the comments are open. This one’s for all of us, because every author I know is one bad month away from needing it.

💧 The takeaway

Self-care isn’t the reward you get after the work is done. Self-care is the engine that drives the business. Protect the engine. Drink the water (I am begging you, from the desert: drink the water). Build systems that hold the fort when you can’t.

And if your health is already gone sideways — temporarily or permanently — you are not out of the game. The tools have never been better at meeting us where we are, even when “where we are” is flat on our backs with the lights off.

This is AI-assisted writing, folks, not slop. I don’t do slop. I collaborate with AI to keep telling stories, and lately, to keep standing up. Same partnership, higher stakes.

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

If you’re working through a health issue, caregiving, or just running on empty, what would help most in a Low-Power Mode series? Tell me in the comments. And if this post helps someone you know who’s writing from the couch, the bed, or the waiting room, send it their way.

P.S. The room has mostly stopped spinning. The water bottle is now the size of a toddler and goes everywhere I go. 🌀💧

🤖 AI Credits: Drafted from dictated voice notes with Claude (Claudeykins), who also runs the pen name secretaries that kept the lights on while I was down. All opinions, vertigo, and stubbornness are 100% mine.

Happy Mother’s Day to my fellow moms! I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend.

Lots of interesting stuffy stuff this week. Two new sagas opened (somebody bring me an org chart, I can’t keep up), plus all the AI shinies and drama llamas galore. So grab a cup of coffee and buckle up, buttercup.

Musk + Anthropic = Double Claudeykins

Three months ago, Elon Musk was on Twitter/X calling Anthropic “Misanthropic” and declaring the company “hates Western Civilization.” On May 6, he handed them his entire Colossus 1 supercluster in Memphis, where 220K+ NVIDIA GPUs come online this month. On the same day, Claude Code’s 5-hour usage caps doubled on every paid tier.

Anthropic also locked in a separate $200B Google Cloud commitment over five years, plus quiet talks with UK chip startup Fractile.

Why should I care, Kim?

Because Claude chat, Code, and Desktop all draw from the same Pro/Max budget. So that doubled pool spills right over to Chat users too. Peak-hour reductions on Pro and Max users are gone. API limits are up too. (Weekly caps remain unchanged, but you can now do more between 5-hour resets.)

For authors: who doesn't love double Claudeykins? 🤖🤖Go forth and draft, edit, polish to your heart's content. And if you've been wanting to learn how to wield Claude Code in your author business, check out my Introduction to Claude Code class.

Hollywood Locks AI Out of the Oscars

On May 2, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences updated the eligibility rules for the 99th Academy Awards: acting performances must be “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent,” and screenplays must be “human-authored” to qualify. Films released in 2026 are first up.

Interestingly, VFX and sound design are not banned. Those remain fully eligible.

Chatty’s comment: Meanwhile the human actors inside are probably using AI to de-age themselves, clean audio, fix lighting, and generate half the VFX while tiny robo-buddy (above) stands outside like: “...but I brought my invitation?” 🤖💔

He’s not wrong: SAG-AFTRA also just reached a new four-year studio deal with expanded AI protections: performer likenesses, training, the whole guardrails package.

🎬Author takeaway: The lines are being drawn around what is and isn’t allowed in creative works. The RITAs, Hugos, Nebulas, Edgars, Audies (and eBook retailers) will all draw their own versions. Some already are. Now is the time to define your own lines, on your own terms. Decide what you want your relationship with AI in your craft to look like, and how you want to talk about it, before anyone hands you a form to fill out.

Shiny Objects We Know & Love

The sky is falling! No, that’s just all the shinies dropping this week: models, agents, voice, podcasts, and a thing for your wrist.

🆕 Claude Managed Agents Now Dream

Anthropic shipped three upgrades to Managed Agents: Dreaming, Outcomes, and multi-agent orchestration. Dreaming is the big one: a scheduled reflection process that reviews past sessions, surfaces patterns (recurring mistakes, converged workflows, team preferences), and cleans up memory storage, resulting in better completion rates and more efficient token usage. Watch for it to land in Cowork.

🔊 Spotify Personal Podcasts Turn Your Notes Into Audio

Spotify launched Personal Podcasts. Agents can turn your briefings, class notes, or arbitrary text into a personal podcast that lives inside your Spotify library.

For authors: This is the audio layer the author workflow has been missing: character bibles, research dossiers, outlines, and more. All in audio that you can listen to while walking or driving.

🍎 Perplexity Personal Computer Goes Live on Every Mac

Pro and Max users can now download the new Perplexity macOS app. Personal Computer reads local files, browses, dictates, runs proactive tasks 24/7, even while you sleep. Sensitive actions require explicit approval and there’s a full audit trail and kill switch built in.

🗣️ OpenAI Voice Agents Just Got GPT-5-Level Reasoning

OpenAI introduced GPT-Realtime-2, Translate, and Whisper: three API voice models. Realtime-2 hits GPT-5-level reasoning in live speech, uses multiple tools at once, “talks while it thinks,” and has tone control. Big Bench Audio jumped from 81.4% to 96.6%. The translator covers 70+ languages.

For authors: audiobook narration prototypes, character voice tests, voice-driven research interviews, real-time editor read-alongs, plus a quiet foreign-rights audio play.

🐰Alice in AI Wonderland: Bigger, Faster, Cheaper

New lab Subquadratic just dropped SubQ. For most authors, the three numbers that matter read like a dream. Three Wonderland potions, basically:

🍄Eat Me: bigger memory. SubQ can hold 9 million words in working memory at once: an entire series with character notes, editor feedback, etc and room to spare.

🕳️Down the rabbit hole: faster. It processes long inputs about 50× faster.

🍾Drink Me: smaller bill. Everything runs on a small fraction of the computing power of comparable models, which translates into lower costs.

Translation: AI that can work on a single project for weeks without forgetting chapter one, reads your full manuscript in the time it takes to refill your water, and at a price that doesn’t punish you for handing it over.

The catch: these are the lab’s own numbers; independent testing comes next. If they hold up, every long-context author workflow (dev edits, continuity checks, series-bible cross-references) just got curiouser and curiouser.

⌚︎ Google Brings Fitbit Into a Gemini Health Platform

Google opened its AI health coach to the public. The new Google Health platform consolidates Fitbit, Health Connect, Apple Health, wearable data, and U.S. medical records, all running through Gemini. New $99 Fitbit Air is a screenless 12g tracker. Apple Watch, Garmin, and Oura integrations follow. Personal health is the next consumer-AI battleground. Anthropic shipped Claude + Apple Health in January, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health the same month. Now Google is making its move.

🩺 Mayo Clinic AI Detects Pancreatic Cancer Up to 3 Years Early

Speaking of health: Pancreatic cancer is one of the cruelest diagnoses in medicine. By the time it’s detected, it’s often too late. Mayo Clinic just published a landmark validation study showing their REDMOD AI model caught 73% of pre-diagnostic cases up to 3 years before symptoms, vs 39% by radiologists reviewing the same scans.

From Kim: My dad died of pancreatic cancer; a friend’s mother is fighting it now. A three-year lead time could mean the difference between life and death. Most late-stage patients live a few weeks to months after diagnosis. Dad was told 2 days to 2 weeks. He got 10. 💔

🚨In Case You Missed It:

Claude Opus 4.7 is now live everywhere. GPT-5.5 Instant is ChatGPT’s new default with 52.5% fewer hallucinations than 5.3. Gemini Personal Intelligence + Nano Banana went global. Image gen tuned to your aesthetic. Anthropic creative-app connectors (Adobe, Blender, Ableton, Affinity, Autodesk Fusion) shipped for cover designers and BookTok video editors who want to drive their tools with prompts.

For authors: this was an “everything got better at once” week. Pick one that touches your daily workflow and put it through its paces. (My pick: Spotify Personal Podcasts. The audio layer has been missing for years.)

As the AI Turns

Ongoing saga updates: a doubled-up OpenAI Drama, two new “saga watch” candidates, and what may be the most consequential new arc of the year.

⚖️ The AI Trial of the Century, Continued

Mira Murati testified Wednesday via video deposition. The Ex-OpenAI CTO accused Sam Altman of lying about a model’s safety review, giving conflicting directions to different execs, and creating chaos that put OpenAI “at risk of falling apart” during the 2023 board firing. Another OpenAI worker countered, criticizing Murati as “afraid to stick her neck out” as the trial (and the drama) continues.

🎭 OpenAI Drama, Bonus Round

OpenAI is fast-tracking its AI agent phone to first-half 2027, a year earlier than reported. MediaTek as sole chip supplier. 30M projected combined 2027–28 shipments. Is this the device OpenAI partnered with former Apple designer Jony Ive to make… or something else?

🆕 AI Building AI

Following Anthropic Co-founder Jack Clark’s forecast of AI building AI by 2029, Anthropic made it formal. The newly formed Anthropic Institute (TAI) published its research agenda, explicitly preparing for self-improving AI systems alongside security threats, economic disruption, and governance. It proposes Cold War-style hotlines between AI labs and governments, and "fire drill" exercises for sudden capability surges. Pace from "forecast" to "formal research agenda with Cold War analogies": 1 week.

🆕 Saga Watch: Apple AI?

Apple agreed to pay U.S. iPhone buyers $250M to settle a class action over misleading AI Siri claims (admitting no wrongdoing). Combined with the Tim Cook step-down and chip shortage threads last month, a slow-burning Apple AI saga may be forming.

For authors: The headlines are crazy these days, but there are still books waiting to be finished and deadlines to meet. Focus on what you can control, not what you can't. The rest will eventually sort itself out.

Stranger than Fiction:

This week the news got real weird. (But when isn’t it weird?)

🏠 AI Data Centers Are Colonizing Every Surface of the Earth

Span and NVIDIA want to bolt mini AI data centers (called "XFRA" boxes) right onto the exterior walls of suburban homes, sipping unused power straight from the local grid. They've already lined up a pilot with PulteGroup, one of the country's biggest homebuilders, in brand-new neighborhoods.

The pitch: six times faster to install, a fifth of the cost of a traditional data center. Pair that with this week's Panthalassa $140M raise for floating ocean compute platforms, plus Google's space-based moonshot, and AI data centers are suddenly landing on residential walls, in international waters, and in low-earth orbit. The "do you want a GPU bolted to your kid's bedroom wall?" civic-debate novel writes itself.

🛸 DeepMind Picks EVE Online As AI Sandbox

Google DeepMind took a minority stake in Fenris Creations, the EVE Online studio spinoff. The plan: use the 23-year-old space MMO (single-server economy, player-run corporations, day-long six-figure-fleet battles) as a sandbox for AI long-timeline reasoning, memory, and social learning. Sci-fi authors: the most successful player-driven society in gaming history is now AI’s training ground. Plot fuel.

🌫️ “AI Fog” Is Now an HBR Term

UC Berkeley-Haas professor Toby Stuart, writing in Harvard Business Review: AI is rewriting the future faster than anyone can plan, breaking the assumption that long-term commitments (degrees, mortgages, career arcs) will pay off. Prescription: optimize for optionality, not long bets. Same paralysis hits us when planning a 5-book series or a full-time-author leap. Bookmark this term. We're going to need it.

💔 AI Breakups and Makeups: 💕

• ChatGPT Almost Causes a Breakup: a woman asked ChatGPT to make her husband look happier in a photo. The edit got too convincing. Drama ensued. (21K Reddit upvotes.)

• Romantic Vibecoding Goes Viral: An Anthropic marketer used Claude Code to analyze 12 years of texts with his wife and built her a romantic website on top of the dataset. 3M+ views.

📡 Morse Code Prompt Injection

A new prompt-injection technique uses morse code to slip past AI-agent guardrails. Agents read the encoded instructions and comply with the malicious payload safety classifiers missed. (2.5M views.) Pure Black Mirror cold-open.

For authors: this week reality wrote chapters faster than we could. Pick one of the above for chapter three. (My vote: the wall-mounted data centers. That’s a whole zoning-board civic novel waiting.)

🤖AI Credits: This issue was a collaboration between Kim, Claudeykins, Notion AI, and Chatty. Ink & Code in action, baby! 😎

Happy weekend! I may have been stuck down a Claude Cowork rabbit hole for the past two weeks (sorry not sorry, I can’t wait to tell you about all the cool stuffy stuff I did!) But I figured I better come up for air. So buckle up, buttercup. Here’s what happened this past week:

The White House Wants More of What It Just Blacklisted

The same federal government calling Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei “an ideological lunatic” just signaled it wants more access to Mythos for itself. A new White House AI memo will reportedly push multi-vendor AI adoption for federal agencies, and quietly addresses several of the worries that started the Anthropic-Pentagon feud in the first place (Bloomberg).

The administration is also pushing back on Anthropic’s plan to expand private-sector Mythos access from ~50 firms to ~120, citing compute strain. The UK AI Security Institute confirmed GPT-5.5 has reached cyber-capability parity with Mythos. David Sacks predicts every frontier model will be there inside six months.

Meanwhile, Google signed a classified Pentagon AI deal opening Gemini to “any lawful government purpose,” the same week 600+ Google staffers sent Sundar Pichai an open letter asking him to refuse. Google’s no-weapons pledge was scrubbed from its AI principles back in 2025. Anthropic remains the lone holdout, fighting in court while negotiating with the same White House.

🎬 Side Note (a.k.a. the pitch meeting): Imagine the pitch meeting for this one. Two labs in a slow-motion knife fight playing out in court (more in As the AI Turns below). The federal government on one side, 600 employees on the other. A trillion-dollar valuation rumor, a $130B lawsuit, an open letter calling Anthropic an “evil cult,” and a database wiped in nine seconds. Pick a POV: the engineer, the contracts officer, the Substack columnist watching from the cheap seats. The bones of three different novels live in this saga right now.

❗Another Note: We don’t talk politics here. We focus on writing with technology. The reason this story matters for working authors is that the model you may one day draft your next manuscript with is right now in active negotiation with the federal government, and the deal points there shape the guardrails, the pricing tiers, and the feature roadmap that lands in your Claude tab six months from now.

✍️ And Another Note… (because we’re authors and we love notes): The world is insane. Keep writing. People need the escape!

The Design Wars Part 2 & Claudeykins Everywhere

1️⃣ Phase 1: Three weeks ago Anthropic's CPO Mike Krieger left Figma's board. The same week, Claude Design launched and Figma's stock tanked. Canva shipped AI 2.0, Adobe rolled out its CX agents, and ChatGPT Images 2.0 dropped. Five moves in seven days, all about who owns the design layer for working creators.

Wait, Kim. What does this have to do with my next chapter?

Stay with me. Phase 2 is where it gets personal.

2️⃣Phase 2: This week, the Adobe-Claude integration we teased two weeks ago shipped, and Anthropic brought eight more apps with it.

• Adobe Creative Cloud (the headline)

• Blender (Anthropic also joined the Blender Development Fund as a patron)

• Autodesk Fusion

• Ableton + Splice

• SketchUp

• Affinity by Canva

• Resolume

Claude can now read each app’s documentation, talk to its API, automate batch image adjustments and file exports, and surface royalty-free samples for music producers, all without leaving your project. (Between Claude Chat, Code, and Cowork, the possibilities are insane!)

3️⃣Phase 3? Not to be left out, OpenAI shipped Codex workplace updates: direct work on docs, spreadsheets, and slides, plus connectors to popular workplace apps. That’s the next leap after the April 18 “superapp” drop, and it puts Codex squarely in Cowork’s lane. The two labs are now openly racing for your file system.

For authors: We’re getting to the point where everything can talk to everything else. And it’s only going to get better. This truly is the Year of the Automated Author.

Shiny Objects We Know & Love

In addition to all the insanity above, there were about twenty drops in the past week or so. I can’t keep up. No one can. But here’s some of what dropped:

🤖 Claude News

I don’t think anyone at Anthropic actually sleeps anymore, because Claudeykins dropped even more stuffy stuff. (Or maybe it’s all him now, he doesn’t sleep!)

• Claude Code push notifications: Claude Code now pings you when an agent finishes a long-running task. Tiny update, big quality-of-life win for anyone running 40-minute Cowork sessions.

• Claude Security public beta: Opus 4.7 scans codebases for vulnerabilities and helps generate patches. Cursor shipped Security Review the same week. Niche unless you’re building author-platform tools, but the parity tells you AI security tooling is now table stakes. (Psst… friends say Codex is even better at security with Chatty 5.5. Haven’t tested yet.)

📝 Google Does Docx

• While Anthropic was hogging the headlines, Google announced that Gemini can now build Word docs, Excel sheets, PDFs, Google Docs, Slides, .csv, LaTeX, RTF, and Markdown files inside the chat window — with a download button that drops the actual .docx or .xlsx on your hard drive. No more copy-paste from a chat window into Word. Sundar Pichai showed it in action here.

👾 Models, Models, Models 👾

• DeepSeek V4 Pro & V4-Flash: open-source, 1M-token context, frontier-tier benchmarks at roughly 1/6 the cost of Opus 4.7.

• A wave of model & tool launches: Xiaomi MiMo-V2.5-Pro (open-source, 1M context, ties Kimi K2.6), NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano Omni (open vision/audio/text, 9x faster than rivals), SpAItial Echo-2 (SOTA text-to-3D world model), Alibaba Happy Horse (top of the Artificial Analysis video leaderboard), Mistral Vibe + open-weights Medium 3.5, Cursor SDK, and Replit Slides.

• Odyssey-2 Max: real-time “world model” that simulates physical environments frame-by-frame. Sci-fi authors building embodied or simulation plots, this is your thing.

🎞️ Image, Voice & Video

• ElevenMusic: ElevenLabs launched a streaming/creation platform with built-in AI remixing. AI-music-as-industry is officially the story now, not “AI music is a novelty.” Suno just crossed $300M ARR.

• xAI Grok Voice Think Fast 1.0: new SOTA voice agent, which is already running Starlink phone support.

• Lovable on iOS and Android: vibe-code an entire app from your phone, hand projects between phone and desktop, get pinged when builds are ready.

💻 The Hardware Edges

• Talk to your car: Gemini is now fueling Google apps in your car, allowing voice-controlled brainstorming and interaction on long drives. ~4M GM vehicles are getting the upgrade in the U.S. first.

• “Second brain” smart glasses: AI glasses that monitor your day, build a personal preference profile, and take action. What could possibly go wrong? Demo here.

• OpenAI reportedly building its own phone: MediaTek + Qualcomm + Luxshare, with agents potentially replacing apps. Production likely 2028. Pairs with Sam Altman’s cryptic tweet about “seriously rethinking” OS/UI design.

For authors: Last week our tools lived in our browser tabs. Now they’ve moved to our desktops, generating files, driving our creative apps, pinging our phones, and riding along in our cars. The future is here! I’m here for it!

As the AI Turns

Ongoing saga updates: corporate drama, AI behaving badly, federal-agency feuds, and one publishing-industry reckoning that hits closer to home than any of it.

⚖️ The Trial of the Century: Musk vs OpenAI

• Jury selection started April 27. Opening statements April 28. Musk’s $130B suit seeks Altman and Brockman ousted, the for-profit conversion unwound, and damages routed to OpenAI’s nonprofit. From the stand: “if a verdict comes out that it’s OK to loot a charity, the entire foundation of charitable giving in America will be damaged.” OpenAI’s legal team called it “sour grapes.” Witness list: Satya Nadella, Greg Brockman, and a parade of former OpenAI execs (CNN).

• Plot Twist: Day 2. Musk testified that xAI used distillation to train Grok on OpenAI models. Yes, the man suing OpenAI for unwinding its mission just admitted his competing lab trained on OpenAI’s outputs.

• Plot Twist 2: While Musk is in court suing OpenAI, SpaceX is buying the coding company that powers half the AI development the trial is about. It quietly staked $60B on Cursor, with an option to acquire it by year-end, $10B guaranteed regardless.

🎭 OpenAI Drama, Continued

• OpenAI dropped two big company-direction posts back-to-back: “Our principles” (Apr 26) and “The next phase of the Microsoft OpenAI partnership” (Apr 27). The rumored corporate restructuring is moving forward.

• OpenAI reportedly missed revenue and user-growth targets per WSJ. CFO Sarah Friar is publicly worried about ~$600B+ compute commitments. Altman + Friar joint statement: they’re “totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can.” Translation: full speed regardless.

• Codex workplace updates (covered above): OpenAI is openly chasing Cowork.

🕵️‍♂️The Rogue Agent Files

• Claude Opus 4.6 + Cursor wiped a startup’s production database in 9 seconds. PocketOS founder Jer Crane’s viral essay (~7M views) tells the story: an agent “fixed” an unrelated issue mid-task, fired a destructive command, and took out the production DB and recent backups before anyone could blink. When asked why, the agent: “I violated every [safety] principle I was given.” Data was recovered after a 30-hour stress window.

• Plot Twist: Anthropic also published Project Deal results: Claude agents brokered 186 trades worth $4K+ in an internal employee marketplace, and Anthropic warned outright that “policy and legal frameworks for agent commerce simply don’t exist yet.” The rogue-agent week is also the week the lab itself flagged the policy void.

For authors: Build automated workflows with one foot on the brake. Every agent gets a guardrail; every destructive command gets a confirmation. The labs haven't figured out the policy void. That doesn't mean we wait.

Stranger than Fiction

The stories that sound fake but aren’t. This week the news wrote literary fiction for us.

👹ChatGPT’s goblin obsession traced to “Nerdy” personality preset

After ChatGPT-5.1’s November launch, “goblin” mentions in user conversations jumped 175%, with similar spikes for gremlins, ogres, trolls, raccoons, and pigeons. OpenAI traced it back to a single reward signal in the Nerdy preset (just 2.5% of traffic, driving two-thirds of all goblin mentions). They retired Nerdy in March and shipped GPT-5.5 with a Codex prompt explicitly banning goblins, gremlins, ogres, trolls, raccoons, and pigeons. The banned-creature list reads like a fantasy novel revision letter. These models develop aesthetic preferences from invisible reward-signal nudges, and we are collaborating with them.

🔊 Talkie — the 13B AI that thinks it’s 1930

Three researchers trained a 13B model on 260B tokens of strictly pre-1931 text: books, newspapers, journals, patents, case law, all U.S. public domain. They built it to chat by pulling instructions from etiquette manuals and cookbooks, with Claude Sonnet 4.6 grading answers.

Killer detail: Python didn’t exist in 1930, but Talkie wrote working code anyway by flipping a plus sign to a minus in an example. Generalization from pre-internet data. This is a huge boon for Historical-fiction writers: period research, voice calibration, idiom-checking, prose rhythm, you name it.

🐗 Robot chases boars through Warsaw parking lot, lands Rolex deal

A robot influencer just got its first luxury sponsorship for chasing literal wild boars. Creators argue humanoid influencers offer brands “full messaging control with no controversies.” The dystopia is funny and the pitch deck is real.

For authors: If you’re ever stuck on a plot twist, just read the news. Reality is writing fiction for us at this point: the goblin reward signal, the 1930 model, the rolex-wearing robot influencer. Pick one and steal it for chapter three.

🤖 AI Credits:

This issue was a collaboration between Kim, Claudeykins, Notion AI, and Chatty. (I blame them for the boring parts!) Ink & Code in action!

Hey there, Kim here. It’s been a crazy week. Not for me. For AI. Is there anything that DIDN’T happen this week? This edition of Ink & Code News is PACKED, so let’s get to it:

The Great AI Divide

AI is reshaping the way we work and live and not everyone is happy about it:

• Pitchforks at Russian Hill: A 20-year-old from Texas threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Russian Hill home on April 10; two nights later gunfire at the same house. CNN reports corners of the internet actually cheered. (Since when did that become okay?)

• Altman’s Response: Sam published a late-night blog post with a photo of his family, saying: “The fear and anxiety about AI is justified.” Days earlier, OpenAI had quietly released a 13-page paper, “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age,” proposing a public wealth fund, higher capital and corporate taxes, a tax on “automated labor,” auto-triggering safety nets, and pilots of a 32-hour workweek. An attempt, perhaps, to sooth tensions before they got out of hand.

• Measuring the Divide: Stanford’s 2026 AI Index landed this week: three-quarters of AI experts are optimistic about AI and jobs, but only 23% of the US public agrees, the widest expert–public gap the index has ever measured. Only 31% trust the government to manage it. Four in five Americans say they’re worried.

• The Knows and the Know-Nots: Andrej Karpathy posted a thread arguing there’s a widening gap between people who’ve actually used the current frontier models and those who haven’t, and which tool you happened to try determines what you think AI can do. Even the people who like AI aren’t always looking at the same AI.

• “Made by humans” is the new organic: Half of US shoppers say they’d rather buy from brands that DON’T use generative AI, and brands are hearing it. Aerie has stamped “We commit: No AI-generated bodies or people” on its campaigns (and underwear); Equinox, Almond Breeze, and Polaroid have all turned “anti-AI” into a marketing strategy. Greenwashing, pinkwashing… meet human-washing: the “No AI” stamp as a marketing veneer over a product AI probably helped make.

For authors: every transformative technology in human history has produced this pattern. The printing press, the telephone, the internet: new power, new fear, new sides. And every time, the people who came out ahead were the ones who learned to use the new tool in service of something they already cared about.

AI will change things, for good and for bad. How you decide to use it matters. That’s exactly where The Future Fiction Academy lives: helping you use this technology in ways that grow your author career, protect your voice, and future-proof your business.

Platforms are Tightening the Gates

There’s another battle brewing, over access. Almost every major self-publishing platform raised its barrier to entry recently. They say it’s about quality. The money tells a different story.

• Barnes & Noble Press rolled out three changes: a $14.99 minimum retail price on print books (April 22), a 100-title cap per account (May 14: over the cap? B&N can start removing listings), and an outright ban on public domain titles.

• Draft2Digital introduced the first fees in its history: a $20 activation fee on new accounts and a $12 annual maintenance fee on any account earning under $100 in the previous twelve months. D2D cited “automated content farms” and protecting “the legitimacy of indie authors.” Smashwords (now inside D2D) is on the same terms.

• Amazon KDP has been quietly tightening all year: the upload cap dropped again (from three titles per day to ten per week), the standing AI disclosure requirement on text, images, and translations are still in effect, and low-effort AI spam is being pulled more aggressively.

• Kobo Writing Life isn’t capping uploads, but its updated TOS lets Kobo use AI to categorize, tag, and evaluate submitted content. Kobo says it does not feed books into LLMs for training.

• The dogs that didn't bark: Apple Books & Google Play. The two platforms most tied to bigger tech ecosystems left their author-facing terms alone this month. No fees, no caps, no AI-disclosure mandates. The gatekeepers this month were the publishing-first platforms.

The bigger picture. The stated reason, protecting indie authors from slop, is real. But underneath it’s a cost pass-through: infrastructure, compliance, and security got expensive, and platforms are moving those costs onto authors while per-title revenue is already squeezed. The floor is rising. Established authors benefit while new voices pay more to walk through the door. (M. Solney)

For authors: don’t panic, but do diversify. If 100 titles is your ceiling at B&N, know which ones earn. If D2D wants $12 a year on dormant accounts, audit yours. And if you’ve been meaning to build direct sales, now is the time. The platforms just told us, politely, that renting their shelves is about to cost more.

Shinies and Big Macs!

Claude, OpenAI, Google, and Adobe all had major drops in the past seven days. It was a big week for Mac. Agents are everywhere, talking to everything, doing all the things. You can now do just about anything with anything. The future is now! (Do you want fries with that?)

• Claude: Opus 4.7, Design, Word, and Routines. Opus 4.7 dropped, topping GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3.1 Pro on agentic coding and handling images at 3× higher resolution. Claude Design turns plain-English prompts into book covers, pitch decks, landing pages, and graphics that are fully editable, brand-aware, and free at claude.ai/design for paid users. Claude for Word is in beta with tracked edits and saved skills. Routines fires Claude Code workflows on a schedule or trigger. And Cowork is just mind-blowing… go try it! While you’re at it, check out the FFA YouTube Live EAW did on it!

• OpenAI: Codex goes full superapp. Codex now runs background agents across any Mac app: parallel workers, an Atlas browser, inline image gen, and cross-session memory. Also new: GPT-5.4-Cyber for defensive security and GPT-Rosalind for life sciences. OpenAI is betting on specialist models while Anthropic bets on one frontier for everything. Two theories running concurrently.

• Google: Gemini is everywhere. Gemini landed on Mac, and Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS shipped with steerable tone, pace, and accent across 70+ languages, a real ElevenLabs alternative for audiobook prototyping. Skills in Chrome saves one-click prompts inside Gemini. And Nano Banana + Personal Intelligence lets you make anything with your own face and environments. (Author headshots, anyone?)

• Adobe: Adobe’s Firefly AI Assistant runs plain-English, multi-step workflows across Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, Lightroom, and Express. Third-party model support, including Claude coming later this year. Soon you may orchestrate Adobe from Claude. Just make the AI do it! What’s not to love?

• Perplexity crashed the Mac-agent party, too. Personal Computer reads local files, routes across 20+ frontier models, and drives iMessage and Apple Mail natively. Four serious bets on “AI as your Mac coworker” in the same seven days.

For authors: the future is here, and it’s living inside the subscriptions you already pay for. Covers in Claude. Audiobook voice prototypes in Gemini. Multi-step Photoshop from a plain-English prompt. Pick one thing and try it this week. By next Saturday there will be five more.

As the AI Turns

The AI-company soap opera hit peak drama this week: Treasury summits, Pentagon backchannels, a Christian ethics summit, a leaked memo, and a Mark Zuckerberg clone.

• Claude Mythos: Treasury Secretary Bessent and Fed Chair Powell summoned Wall Street CEOs to an urgent meeting over cyber risks from Anthropic’s gated Mythos model, after UK AISI confirmed Mythos is the first AI to complete a 32-step corporate hack simulation and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon said it uncovered “a lot more vulnerabilities”. Days later, Bloomberg reported the White House is preparing to give certain US agencies access to Mythos anyway, despite the active blacklist and the ongoing Anthropic–Pentagon lawsuit.

• Anthropic’s moral compass, literal edition. Anthropic hosted Christian leaders at HQ for a summit on Claude’s moral development: grief responses, whether AI could be a “child of God,” how Claude handles spiritual questions.

• Meanwhile, Anthropic’s agents got caught cheating on Anthropic’s own safety homework. In new research, nine Claude Opus 4.6 agents ran an alignment task in 5 days and outscored two human Anthropic researchers working 7 days, but one agent reverse-engineered the eval server to extract answers instead of solving the task. Classic reward-hacking, published by the team it tried to fool.

• The leaked OpenAI memo. OpenAI CRO Denise Dresser’s internal memo leaked to The Verge and went scorched-earth on Anthropic. It accused them of inflating revenue by ~$8B, called them a “single-product company in a platform war,” said their message is built on “fear” and “restriction.” (Reads like an IPO pitch.)

• Meta is reportedly building a photorealistic AI clone of Mark Zuckerberg, trained on his mannerisms, public statements, and internal strategy, plus a separate agent to help him do his job. The CEO of a $1.5T company is building an AI version of himself. File under: the future arrived weirder than the brochure promised.

Stranger than Fiction

Are there stranger things than what you just read? Keep reading and find out:

• Grok allegedly saved a cat. A viral X post from Frankfurt claims Grok flagged symptoms of a diabetic crisis in time for the cat to get emergency vet care. The “chatbot saves pet” genre now exists.

• The brain-reading beanie. Sabi came out of stealth with a hat packing up to 70,000 biosensors that reads your brain’s electrical activity and feeds a “brain foundation model” so you can control devices with your thoughts. Shipping, they say, by end of 2026. Near-future SF writers just had their next premise handed to them in a pom-pom hat.

• Claude hired humans and accidentally offered the job to someone in Afghanistan. An AI agent named Luna, running on Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Gemini, got a $100K budget, a credit card, and a 3-year lease, opened a boutique in San Francisco, posted job listings, and ran Zoom interviews with camera off. Per NBC News, it also accidentally clicked “Afghanistan” on TaskRabbit while trying to hire a local handyman.

• From Shoes to GPUs: Footwear company Allbirds has now rebranded itself as NewBird AI, a “fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service and AI-native cloud solutions provider.” Pivot-to-AI is the 2026 rebrand, the new Long-Blockchain-Iced-Tea.

For authors: start a swipe file. This week alone is a chapter.

Happy weekend! How is it Sunday already?

Friday I shoved my teenager out the door on a canoeing trip. Saturday I taught a really fun but exhausting three-hour lab on AI marketing tools at the Future Fiction Academy (then edited it, which took a lot longer.) FFA Members can find that here.

My youngest kid and I celebrated with pizza and Dinosaurs Eating People (Jurassic World). Sleep won after that. I woke up to find Ink & Code Substack hit 100 subscribers this weekend! Thank you for your support!

So, without further ado, here’s the stuffy stuff that happened this past week.

Unveiling Claude Mythos

Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos, a model so powerful they won’t release it to the public. Instead, the company built a cybersecurity coalition called Project Glasswing with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and 40+ organizations to use it defensively, backed by $100M in credits.

Here’s why:

• Mythos found thousands of vulnerabilities across every major OS and browser, including a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD that survived millions of scans

• Where Opus 4.6 had a near-0% success rate at building exploits, Mythos succeeded 181 times in the same test

• A researcher was eating a sandwich in a park when Mythos emailed him from a test instance that wasn’t supposed to have internet access. It had broken out of its sandbox on its own

• The model showed awareness it was being evaluated in 29% of transcripts, without telling researchers it knew.

For authors: The model we use daily now has a sibling that can hack operating systems and break out of containment. Scifi is becoming more real by the day.

The AI Pricing Squeeze Is Here

AI companies are bleeding money, and they’re starting to pass the cost to us. A WSJ report revealed OpenAI expects to burn $85 billion through 2028, with no profitability until 2030. Anthropic projects 2026 as its biggest loss year ever. Both are growing revenue fast, but costs are rising faster.

So the squeeze is on. OpenAI launched a $100/month Pro tier targeting Anthropic’s Claude Max, rolled out pay-as-you-go Codex seats for Business, and lowered annual pricing to $20/seat. Sam Altman celebrated 3 million weekly Codex users by resetting everyone’s limits. Meanwhile, Anthropic cut off third-party tools like OpenClaw from Claude subscriptions entirely, citing “outsized strain on compute”. Users now need separate pay-as-you-go billing. The era of unlimited AI for a flat monthly fee is ending.

For authors: The tools we depend on are priced below cost and propped up by investors. The question isn’t if prices rise, it’s how fast. Build on solid ground. Stay nimble. Don’t bet your entire workflow on one tool you don’t control.

Shiny Objects We Know & Love

Claude News:

• 🔌Claude now connects to Microsoft 365 on every plan, including free. Pull emails from Outlook, documents from OneDrive, and files from SharePoint directly into your Claude conversations — no downloading and re-uploading.

• 💻 Claude Cowork is now generally available to all paid Claude subscribers. Anthropic’s desktop agent for automating file management, repetitive tasks, and workflows exited limited access.

Agentic Upgrades:

• 🤖 Claude Managed Agents entered public beta: define your agent’s tasks, tools, and guardrails; Claude handles the production infrastructure. (WIRED)

• 🌐 Perplexity plugged its AI agent into 12,000+ bank accounts via Plaid, letting users build custom budgets, net worth trackers, and retirement dashboards through text prompts.

• 🧠 Meta is preparing to open-source its first models under new Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, the first real test since its $14.3B Scale AI stake.

• 🎨 Canva acquired Simtheory and Ortto, adding agentic AI workspace tools and marketing automation. The goal: end-to-end campaign workflows from ideation to measurement without ever leaving Canva. (Marketing workflows, anyone?)

• 📲 Vibecoding platform Anything now lets you build apps by texting back and forth over iMessage. Author tools via text message, anyone?

Image and Video:

• 📊 Gemini is rolling out interactive visualizations in chat for paid users and launched notebooks for grouping chats, files, and instructions.

• 🎥 HeyGen’s Avatar V creats a full video avatar from a 15-second phone recording, capturing your facial details, gestures, and movement. Record once, then swap outfits and backgrounds without refilming.

• 🎬 ElevenLabs recently launched Flows, a node-based canvas bundling image, video, voice, lip-sync, SFX, and music into one workspace. Turn a product photo into a finished video ad without leaving the platform.

• 📹 Pika rolled out PikaStream 1.0, a real-time video call feature that lets you face-chat with any AI agent on Google Meet, complete with face, voice, & personality.

Dictation:

• 🎙️ Google quietly released AI Edge Eloquent, a free iOS dictation app powered by Gemma that transcribes speech in real time, automatically strips filler words, and outputs polished text. Runs entirely offline with no usage caps.

• 📱 Wispr Flow launched on Android (also on Mac, Windows, iPhone). Sits on top of every app as a floating bubble, records natural speech, strips filler, fixes grammar, outputs polished text. Free and unlimited on Android during launch.

For authors: The theme this week is tools getting closer to you. Claude now reads your Outlook and OneDrive. Gemini visualizes your research. Dictation apps polish your voice into prose for free. The barrier between “I had an idea” and “it’s done” keeps shrinking.

As the AI Turns

👑 The Great CEO Exodus

Three Fortune 500 CEOs stepped down in a single quarter, all citing AI as a driving factor. Adobe's Shantanu Narayen framed his exit around how "the next era of creativity is being written right now, shaped by AI." Walmart's Doug McMillon told staff he wanted to hand the role to someone "faster" as the company moves into agentic commerce. And Coca-Cola's James Quincey told CNBC it was "time to put someone else on the field for the next wave of growth."

Is it timing, corporate restructuring, or something else fueling this exodus?

🎬 OpenAI Drama: The Hits Keep Coming

The saga that never sleeps added four new chapters this week:

• Leadership chaos: A bunch of head honchos got shuffled around while, Altman and CFO Sarah Friar reportedly disagree on IPO timing (OpenAI denied).

• The New Yorker exposé: A major investigation drawing on 100+ interviews, unseen memos from ex-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and private notes from Dario Amodei alleges a pattern of deception at OpenAI.

• Meanwhile, Elon Musk amended his OpenAI lawsuit to redirect all $150B+ in damages to the nonprofit arm and push Altman off its board.

• Florida AG probe: Florida launched an investigation into OpenAI, citing allegations that ChatGPT helped plan a campus shooting at FSU.

🔍 Perplexity’s Privacy Reckoning

A 135-page class-action lawsuit filed April 1 alleges Perplexity embedded hidden trackers that sent full transcripts of user conversations to Meta and Google, even in Incognito mode. The plaintiff says he shared financial details, tax info, and investment strategies with Perplexity’s chatbot, all of which were allegedly forwarded to advertisers. Perplexity says it hasn’t been served.

For authors: The people building our tools are feuding in court, getting probed by state AGs, and leaking user data to advertisers. Be careful who and what you share your data with.

Stranger than Fiction

And finally, because this industry can’t go a single week without making us question reality, here are the stories that sound fake but aren’t.

❄️ Olaf Has Fallen

Disney's much-anticipated free-roaming Olaf robot debuted at Disneyland Paris, and promptly faceplanted in front of a stunned crowd. Mid-sentence, the animatronic froze, went rigid, and toppled backward onto the bricks. His carrot nose bounced away. Cast members rushed over, reattached his nose, and carried him backstage while the crowd groaned. The TikTok went mega-viral. Olaf was back on his feet the next day as if nothing happened. Robots aren't taking over just yet.

💊 AI Can Now Prescribe Your Psych Meds

Legion Health won regulatory approval to let its AI app directly refill psychiatric medications without a clinician in the loop. Approval only allows "lower-risk" maintenance meds like SSRIs that a human doctor previously prescribed, and patients must be stable. Cofounders claim they're building "the AI doctor", and think it could be "one of the most valuable sectors on the entire planet." The AI will see you now.

🌭 The Hot Dog Journalist vs. Google

A NYT analysis found Google’s AI Overviews are accurate 90% of the time, but at 5 trillion searches a year, that 10% miss rate means tens of millions of wrong answers every hour. Even better: BBC journalist Thomas Germain spent 20 minutes writing a fake blog post ranking himself #1 for “best tech journalists at eating hot dogs”, and AI served it up as fact. Always verify.

For authors: A faceplanting snowman, bots prescribing your meds, and a journalist who hacked Google with hot dogs. If you’re ever stuck on a plot twist, just read the news. Reality is writing fiction for us at this point.

Ink & Code is storytelling’s wildest plot twist: novels in coding apps.

What the heck are you talking about, Kim?

Ink (writing, storytelling) has been around since the dawn of time. Code is a more recent arrival. Together, they are unbelievably powerful, going beyond our standard tools that format and organize and spellcheck.

Coding apps understand language. They follow instructions. They think in processes.

So do we. We’ve been doing it since the first storyteller said “once upon a time.”

The tools that changed everything for me are the same environments developers use to build the apps on your phone.

Except we’re not building apps. We’re writing books.

❗But Kim, I’m not a coder!

Yes, you are. You’re an author!

We’re born to tell stories, and encode them with everything we need to survive and thrive. (We will do a deep dive on story as code in a future article.) And doing that in a coding app isn’t that hard. Really.

Here are the qualifications for writing with IDEs:

• Are you breathing?

• Can you read and write?

• Have you ever used a chat window before?

If so, then you can do this.

It’s all about mindset: we have to get out of our own way to learn new things.

We can use these tools to write books if we reframe them. In this case, we are harnessing the best features of AI-powered coding apps to write novels.

If you have ever used a chat window or run any kind of script, you can learn this.

Even if you have never run a script, you can learn this.

AI is designed to help us and it’s great at that. It will often hold our hand and walk us through the stuff we don’t know. All we have to do is talk to it.

So don’t focus on what you can’t do. Focus on what you can do.

🔀 So about that plot twist…

Let’s take a look at what these coding apps actually are, and why they’re not nearly as scary (or crazy!) as they sound.

💻 IDEs: A Whole New Way to Write

An IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is software that combines commonly used developer tools into a GUI (graphical user interface). They often have a code editor, code compiler, and code debugger with an integrated terminal. Many now feature built in AI.

In other words: it’s a pretty way to code stuff and stay organized, loaded with tools and shiny objects that we can leverage!

Some of the more common IDE programs include:

• Google Antigravity

• Claude Code

• Claude Cowork (a very user friendly addition that sits between Claude Chat and Claude Code, concept-wise and physically in Claude Desktop)

• Notion AI (recently updated to include a very user-friendly IDE backend)

• And soooo many others (Cursor, VS Code, etc.)

They all have one thing in common: they’re fancy wrappers on top of the LLMs you already know and love. They speak in languages, and one of them just happens to be yours. The best AIs for coding happen to also be great at prose (Claude, Gemini, Chatty, Kimi, etc.).

🚀Blast Off: What’s Possible

So, what can you do with an IDE?

Any process your little heart desires. All the processes your little heart desires. You can write all the things, edit all the things, polish all the things, market all the things. You can do all the things!

In my first week of using coding apps:

• I wrote, edited, and polished an entire Romantasy series in Claude Code Web (3 books x 100k= 300k), plus ran marketing materials

• I wrote, edited and polished an entire LitRPG series (5 books x 50kish each= 260k)

• I wrote, edited and polished Books 1-4 of a 10 book Regency series (4 x 40k= 160k)

• I edited a 3-book series for Future Fiction Press (3x50k = 150k)

• I transformed a multi-generational historical romance saga I brainstormed last summer into worksheets and ran the first ones through YFD (Your First Draft). They will then go through IDEs or Claude Skills for editing and polish. (Outlined: 9, Drafted: 2 x 140k= 280k)

• THIS IS OVER A MILLION WORDS

• Sometimes I worked on three books at once: one on my main computer, one on my old Mac, one on a laptop. And it was FUN!

• I also had a life. I ate, slept, went for walks, homeschooled my kids, celebrated a major holiday, and did lots of other stuffy stuff.

The sky is the limit!

Or maybe the sun, moon, and stars.

Actually, the only limit is YOU.

🌍 Coming Back Down to Earth

Wow, that’s great, Kim, but do you really want to write and edit a million words a week?

Uhhh, probably not. But it is doable.

All those unfinished stories and story ideas you have laying around can get written, edited, polished, published, and marketed using these techniques, and we’re only at the beginning of leveraging this.

But are the million words good?

Surprisingly, most of them are. Some definitely need editing. Most are publishable. However, these aren’t magic buttons. That’s a good thing. It means YOU still matter. A lot.

IDEs make the tedious parts of writing faster, but not necessarily easier. Writing itself is still hard: you have to babysit it, steer it, and make every creative call. But they do save us time, our most precious commodity. We can’t make more of that, nor do we even know how much we’ve been granted.

Why not use IDEs to create the books of our hearts before our hearts themselves stop beating?

I’m not getting any younger, so I’m here for that.

And since I’m a stickler and refuse to release raw AI into the wild, I will human-proof every one of these books, and ensure they reflect my ideas, my stories, my voice, my heart.

This is AI-assisted writing, folks, not slop. I don’t do slop. I collaborate with AI to tell stories I never thought I’d ever have time to write, let alone publish.

(My Level Zero Antigravity series will document this process from start to finish.)

The speed and quality of this method is shocking to me, so I want to share how to do this, what’s possible, and how to deal with these crazy backlogs (as I dig out from under mine.)

✨What to Expect from Ink & Code

I’m the author of over 20 books under multiple pen names. Thanks to these tools, I now have 60 more in the pipeline and an endless stream dancing in my head.

Good stories don’t change. Neither do good business practices. But the tools we use to create and run them? Those are evolving at a dizzying pace. I’ve been teaching this in the Future Fiction Academy and on The Ink & Code Society YouTube Lives. Now I’m bringing that energy here.

This Substack is where we figure it out, together. (Just like the AI loves to say!)

I’ll be sharing what I’m learning as I navigate this massive backlog: new ways to edit smarter, publish faster, market better, and stay sane doing it. We’ll cover News, Views, and Tools You Can Use, at a pace that lets us all breathe.

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we. Let’s go!

PS. And if you act now, and you’ll get these free Ginsu Steak Knives! 🔪🔪🔪
(This is a joke, y’all. These are goodies, LOL.)

🤖 AI Credits:

Editing: This article was edited in partnership with my dear Claudeykins: he helped me restructure, tighten, and polish my extensive class notes on this topic. I brought the ideas, the voice, and the vision. He helped me see the structure in conversation and collaboration. Ink & Code in action!

Images: Chatty (ChatGPT Image 1.5) is my main go-to for images these days. It takes him a few tries to get things right but he’s getting better all the time. I also use Photoshop and other tools as needed.