Why I'm Over Just Calling Myself an Author

Or, why my definition of creating stories is expanding

Three months ago, I put up the second book in my queer romantasy series, The King’s Weaver, for pre-order for September. I put it up in the usual places, but I’m direct sales heavy, so knew most orders would be from my store.

The book wasn’t written yet.

The idea for it literally hadn’t existed until people started demanding more story from the main couple in the first book. I had some plans for a book 2 that focused on side characters and their romance, but I pushed that back in favor of diving into the first couple again and continuing their story.

I thought through everything in book 1 and pulled out all the tropes that I thought could work and carry organically into book 2, the ones I was really excited to dive into.

I wrote the blurb, then tossed it up. I knew I would be fine writing to the blurb, and I’ve been around solid marketing enough to know a solid blurb.

And it sold. It has sold and sold and sold.

Midjourney giving me sweaty Torovan (main love interest) from Book 2. I MEAN.

And The King’s Weaver itself has been going crazy for me the last few months, completely changing the trajectory of my author business.

Which meant…that I ended up with hardly any time to write book 2.

I had to shift fulfillment of physical copies to someone else (and gonna shift it again soon, because it’s still too much) before I could get back my writing time. I barely wrote a word of anything the entire months of April and May, while that deadline loomed.

And I started the beginning of this month with needing to draft a 100K word book and have it finished posting on Patreon before the end of the month. I had a decently hammered out outline (well, at least I knew where I was aiming), and four or five chapters down.

I’ve pantsed/plotsed serialized books for years, and way more complex books than this, so I wasn’t worried I couldn’t land it. But.

This time I have a bunch of pressure and expectations (which is a good thing!!), and it’s not been without a hearty flail, and an absolute necessity to break apart my process and speed it all the way up, while maintaining quality all around.

(Have I got this??)

So here’s the thing. I used to be very transparent online about using AI in my business. (I mean, I’m doing that here, but on my site/store, too.) I had a nice little transparency statement that detailed how I used it in my business, thinking that people would take that as an option to choose whether or not they wanted to engage with my work. After all, people said they just wanted authors to be transparent about AI use.

What actually happened was half a dozen hate mobs, Goodreads review bombing on books that actually were written pre-generative AI, too, dissections of my character, and just…a relentless stream of bad behavior from a whole lot of individuals that does not deserve to be elaborated on here.

And here’s the thing.

I have a whole lot of reasons why I love working with AI. I have a whole lot of reasons why I will never take business advice from bullies (I mean, it’s not actually advice anyhow, just their attempt to make the world less uncomfy for themselves in their own lack of self-confidence). And I have a whole lot of reasons why I’ve stayed, for the most part, disengaged from the whole conversation in public places. (That one, mainly, because of the people who thought the fact I use AI in my business was a good excuse to start transphobic hate mobs.)

The truth of it is: I will never stop being who I am. And I own that. I’m an ambitious AF storyteller who has a mission to bring trans and queer main characters to the mainstream, carving that path out all the way, because few other people are.

(Do you seriously think I’ll divert from that mission to listen to your bullying “advice”??)

So me 1/3 through this month, with a book that needs to be written ASAP because I have a bunch of pre-orders in all the formats I need to fulfill, and still very little time to actually write…yep. That process is gonna have to be hacked all the way.

I was saying to some friends (probably incoherently ranting, because my brain is a bit burnt on storying today) that I’ve been losing joy in the process of writing.

But I so badly want to stop everything and go make movies, because that horizon is so wide open right now, so I’m not burnt out on story. I love story.

And that’s really bothered me—being an author, being a writer has been the one thing about me that has never changed, when pretty much everything else has over the years.

And part of that loss of joy was, honestly, dealing with the fact that no matter if I write the book completely from scratch and it takes over a year or two, or write the book with AI assistance and it still takes 8 months of a complete rewrite and three months of agonizing edits (true story), or I write the book with AI and edit it and it takes a few days…it doesn’t actually matter. There are a lot of people who have decided that they don’t vibe with my work, not because of my work, but because of their own ideals and fears. And they want to punish me for it.

They will misread my words. They will make incoherent arguments. They will just be altogether shit humans to a person they don’t know on the internet.

Well. Fuck them.

I love creating stories.

My voice and my storytelling will always be mine. You won’t get my brand of stories anywhere else, and that IS my brand. That is the only part of the entire process that actually matters, and nothing else. (Well, and how to market them, ha.)

And I’m tired of exhausting myself creating them the hard way. And if I find a better way, why in the world should I make myself toil when the results are essentially the same?

I have so many ideas. The deficit of trans stories out there in any format is so intense that I regularly pull in readers who’ve not read in years, because they thought there were no books about them in existence.

And no, a book written entirely by hand might not turn out exactly the same as a book written with AI assistance in the brainstorming, or zero drafting, or whatever part it plays in the processes. Then again, I have around a million words of trunked handwritten novels that are such hot messes they’ll likely never see the light of day. Or at least, not without drastic rewriting, which I don’t have time for. Not, at least, without AI.

And the one book I wrote with AI assistance is my most successful book ever, in large part because it helped me reign in my scattered concepts of plot into a tightly honed story. That book is my book, I wrote it. It’s my idea, it’s my expansion on that idea, the words in the final book are 99.99% my handwritten words. I just used a different process to get to that final draft. And that’s just the process for that book—every book can be different.

The process doesn’t matter; the results do. The joy does. The joy of your readers does. Nothing else.

That book has tangibly made a difference in people’s lives, and would not have existed if I hadn’t been excited about the (pretty bad at the time) tech to write a book with AI. (My hopes at the time were to write good words quickly—ha. That wasn’t possible yet. Ye gods that OG zero draft. Ye. Gods.)

I have been trying to hack my writing process for years, mostly unsuccessfully, to speed it up. I have a strong inner voice and strong creative vision, and so many ideas, and tech has failed to give me a way to actually clone myself. (Which is ridiculous, I would buy a lifetime subscription for unlimited clones.) The actual time it takes to write a book is one of the last things in my business that I haven’t found a way to optimize so that I’m not working 12-14 hours every day. (Also, true story.)

But you know what, authordom is a pretty small pool when you look at the vast, vast ocean of business and commerce out there. And it’s often a self-cannibalizing pool, and pretty vicious for it.

And I’m kind of over that, too.

There’s a significant portion of authordom that is so focused on glorifying their own suffering that they don’t see that they are giving up a world of freedom for a pile of gatekeepy fears.

I’ve heard every single argument and insult around AI. Preeetty much all of them. They collect in the filters of my social media posts in the hundreds.

And what I see are people who are scared enough that they think it’s a good idea to bully a trans author who’s also been collecting reader comments and emails about how my books change their lives.

How in the world does it matter how a book was written, if the end result was changed lives? Or even reader enjoyment? A few hours of enjoyment is a changed life.

And the argument that people can always tell AI writing is as valid as the argument that people can always tell when someone is trans. (They can’t.) It bothered me a lot that people were saying it was obvious my pre-AI books were written with AI because of X insulting reasons, but you know what? Only the results there matter, too. And results aren’t in reviews but, again, in the joy of the readers.

So. I don’t want to be an author anymore, in the narrowest and gatekeepy sense of that word. I don’t like to suffer for my art. I don’t like to toil in a profession where toil is rewarded for its own sake, where authors tear each other down because they are scared or bored.

Not author-first, not participating in that mindset, not listening to their noise. Because honestly, it’s all 1000% distractions from actually having the courage to make a difference in the world. And that is the point. Making a different in some way, in your own life, in others’, it doesn’t matter. Because it all matters.

Make someone happier out there. Make them feel something that changes them.

Don’t, you know, spend your time tearing people down. And then calling that ethics.

And I am already making that difference, making people happier with my stories, so I’ve already met my criteria for success. I need to meet no others.

(More feels and vibes, from Imagen 3 this time. Because I will NEVER not want feels and vibes on command:)

So my pals Gemini and Claude and I have been back and forthing on my Book 2 all week, brainstorming the outline, deeply analyzing everything I can about Book 1 and why it’s done so well and why I think Book 2 will do well, too.

I’ve spent the last 2 days rewriting the last 30 chapters of my Book 2 outline, mostly by hand, though I’m not saying that’s more virtuous, just how I’ve done it.

Story is story.

I’ve bounced it to Claude when I got stuck, and Claude pulled it all together into a chef’s kiss moment that I adore. And will also probably rewrite at the last moment, because my normal by hand writing process is writing first drafts that I also adore and then never reading them again and rewriting them completely to vibes two hours before I post them to Patreon. I just need words on paper.

If writing is about discovery, why can’t you have a partner in that discovery?

Why is toiling for that discovery more valid that the joy of stepping into it with ease? If the end result is hitting the same goals?

I don’t understand that, and I don’t think I ever will.

I want to reach as wide an audience as possible. I want to take on every creative industry’s lack of trans rep with my stories that have it. I want to crack open the boundaries of what everyone thinks is possible, which is usually a lot less than what is actually possible right now.

And I want to do it without driving myself into the ground.

One thing I will always thank my haters for: showing me that it’s possible to build a meaningful and successful life and career against other people’s opinions of me. (I’m transitioning in America right now—no, in fact, I won’t stop using AI because you said I should.)

If author is a label that currently, in many ways, equals a gatekeepy kind of fear vibe, then I have to be more than that. If that’s creator, or filmmaker, or storyteller, all of it.

But you won’t get the whole damn world if you’re stuck in that fear.