Leveraging AI through Health Challenges

Self-Care, Working from Bed, & Lessons from a Spinning Room

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.

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🌀 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.

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🎙️ 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:

🔪Ginsu Drop: Voice Proof Your Novel

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🤖 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.

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⌚ 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.)

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✂️ 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.

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☝️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.)

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🚧 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.

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🧭 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.

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💧 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.

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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. 🌀💧

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🤖 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.

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