Fabio (Fable) Is Back, and He's Helping Me Finish the Damn Book

Remember The Big Ugly? That's getting done.

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.

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🤖 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.

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📖 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.

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🔧 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!

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🏰 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.)

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💛 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. 💛

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🤖 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. 🎉

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