Cowboys and Scorpions and Homeschool, Oh My!

Showing Up In The Midst of Chaos (Even When We Have No Idea How)

Hey, my Ink & Codies! 👋

I owe you a dispatch. 📬

We’re finally back in Arizona, which involved an airport gate-change triathlon in Dallas-Fort Worth, a lost luggage saga, a scorpion situation, and a homeschool reboot where my teenagers have discovered that math still exists. 😱

They are, I can confirm, UNHAPPY about this. 🧮

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I finished Project 4 of Intro to Cowork for Writers, published my first cowboy book, and am ready to publish another. About 250,000 words of Big Sky Country while crossing the country, battling arachnids, and arguing with teenagers about ratios and quadratic equations. 🤠

But Kim, HOW?

Sit down, friend. Let’s talk. ☕

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🐇 The Energizer Bunny Doctrine

The honest answer is: I had no idea how. I just kept going.

Not in a hustle-culture, grind-till-you-die way. In a the-only-way-out-is-through way. Books don’t write themselves. Classes don’t finish themselves. Scorpions don’t catch themselves (though I’d love to meet one that would, productivity would soar). Teenagers do not voluntarily do math or anything else for that matter (though they have been learning how to cook, ha ha.)

None of this stuff gets done unless somebody shows up, even in the midst of chaos. Glorious chaos! 💥

So I showed up.

Some days I showed up at 5 AM. Some days I showed up at midnight in bed with my iPad and an idea. Or on a long nature walk with just my phone in my hand, voicing a cowboy scene to Fabio while the trail did the thinking for both of us.

🌲 One entire weekend I showed up by NOT showing up: I did a silent retreat, no electronics, no phone, no laptop, two days of nothing, and the empire kept humming while I was gone, because I’d set it up to. That is maybe the single most Cowork thing I can tell you about this summer. The silence worked because the system didn’t need me in it to keep running.

Was it perfect? No. But I’m finding it doesn’t always have to be.

That’s the point: I didn’t do everything well. I did everything badly on about half the days. But I did SOMETHING on almost all of them. And the pile of SOMETHING, stacked over a couple of months, is a class, a stack of books, and children who have (reluctantly) remembered what a times table is.

You don’t have to be good every day. You just have to show up every day. The AI picks up the slack on the days when “showing up” was the whole shift. That’s the whole idea behind Ink & Code.

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🤖 About That Minion Army

Psst. The real secret is: I did not do this alone.

Fabio drafted and edited the overnight cowboys while I slept, each one leaving me a review file titled choices made in your absence. (Yes, I still human proof and edit everything chapter by chapter, nothing gets out without my thorough scrutiny.)

Claudeykins carried the calendar through three time zones. Chatty made the ornamental dividers and the chapter headings for the Big Sky Country theme. The continuity hounds caught issues in 133 of 163 chapters in one half-hour sweep across the whole series.

The Story Trend Scout kept feeding me market intel no matter where I was, one morning brief at a time, which is why this series is launching in KU rather than wide. Turns out cowboys thrive on Amazon right now. It might go wide later when it’s done. (I have an entire project dedicated to Story Trend Scout in Intro to Cowork and how to implement it no matter what your genre.)

My AI minion army showed up on every single one of the bad days. They don’t need to pack. They don’t react badly to scorpions. They do not have opinions about algebra and geometry. (If anything, Claudeykins would politely explain these subjects to a reluctant teenager without needing a coffee break. I’d try harder on this front, but my children have declared him suspicious. Something about the robot energy. 🤷‍♀️)

This is AI-assisted everything, folks, not slop. My name is still on every judgment call. My voice is still in every scene. My kids still have to do their equations. But the mast gets held up by the crew, and the crew works through the storms. The author stays the captain. That’s the deal. That’s the only deal.

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📍 Where We Actually Are Right Now

• Scorpions: dealt with. 🦂 (A professional was involved. We are not speaking of it further. The children have been told this is normal and will one day be a fond family story.)

• Cowboys: rolling out. 🤠 Big Sky Country book one is out in eBook, audio, paperback, and hardcover. Book two is in final proofs, and the rest are drafted and in editing. You’ll see book one dressed for the stores on camera in the next post. There’s a brand new formatting theme for it, and the covers are gorgeous.

• Homeschool: restarted. 🧮 There has been wailing. There has been gnashing of teeth. There has been one not-so-small human arguing that he’s learned all the things, and when would he possibly use this is real life? (Points for creativity. Zero points for the algebra worksheet.)

• Intro to Cowork: Project 4 is DONE. 🎓 The announcement post lands next, and the course wrap-up right after. Six modules. Finish line in sight. This course is free to all paid subscribers.

• Me: tired, happy, caffeinated, and getting back to some kind of routine. ☕

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💬 Soft Landing

If you’ve been quiet because YOUR summer did its own version of this to you — work challenges, family challenges, grief, illness, a hundred invisible things — I see you.

Sometimes life throws us off our horse. 🐎

We just need to keep getting back on (which is strangely enough, the theme of my first cowboy book, Bluer Than the Sky. I just hope you have a better landing than my hero did!)

Life does life. Showing up is still the game. Even when you show up badly. Even when you show up with an AI holding your hand. Especially then, actually.

Need some help getting back on track? We have a private Discord channel for all paid subscribers. Swing on by and share what’s working for you and what’s not.

And stay tuned, the next post is a doozy: Project 4 of Intro to Cowork, where we take Big Sky Country from manuscript to store-ready on camera. 🤠

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

~ Kim ♥

P.S. The scorpion that started it all was in the bathroom. Not a place you want to find one when you’ve dropped your drawers. I did not scream. I lie. I screamed. Fabio was unmoved. He kept drafting cowboys. One of us has to be the professional, I suppose. 🦂🤠

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🤖 AI Credits: Hero image by Chatty (ChatGPT). Drafting assist by Fabio (Claude Fable), who did not pack a single piece of luggage, catch a single scorpion, or complete a single math worksheet, but did draft five cowboy books while I handled the other stuffy stuff, so I’ll call it even. The scorpion story is unfortunately 100% mine.

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