I Went Swimming While Fable Rewrote My First Novel

And then the government took him away!

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.

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🤖 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!

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🔧 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.

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📖 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! 😍

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🚨 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.

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🏰 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.

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🎯 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.

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💛 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. 🏊‍♀️🤖

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🤖 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. 🎉

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