I’m going to say some things that might cost me followers, and maybe even book sales. But the truth matters more to me than either of those things.
Let me start from the beginning.
I went to elementary school in the 80s, back when subtle learning disabilities weren’t something schools focused on. I have dyslexia, ADD, and astigmatism. All of that is manageable now — but as a kid, I was smart enough to learn how to get by while barely reading at all. Dyslexia made reading difficult. ADD made it hard to focus. And the astigmatism wasn’t even caught until I went to get my eyes checked myself, in college. Reading just wasn’t encouraged in my family. Being an athlete was.
But I was always a storyteller. When we had writing assignments in school, I had great ideas — I just couldn’t spell enough words to get them across, and it dumbed my stories down every time. I turned out to be a decent artist, so I started telling stories through art instead. Then in high school and college, I discovered graphic design, and realized a computer could help my art get better than my hands alone ever could.
In the early 2000s, I reconnected with a high school friend who happened to be an English teacher. She’s my wife now. She’s the one who got me reading. At first, she bought me books — but I never actually read them. Eventually she got over her own stigma about audiobooks and realized that was the way in for me. We started reading books together, especially ones that were coming out as movies, and that’s where I fell in love with story for the first time in my life.
My wife is an avid reader. We have over a thousand books in our house — genuinely overwhelming. As our 19th anniversary passed, I started thinking about our 20th, and I wanted to give her something no one else could: I wanted to write her a book.
I’d already been using AI the same way I’d once used a computer to sharpen my graphic design — as a tool to enhance what I was already doing, not replace it. So I started using it to help enhance my stories. I want to be clear: I didn’t want to make AI slop. I didn’t type one prompt and print out a novel. I spent a full year outlining, editing, and rewriting, nonstop, before that story became what it is.
That book was for her — a fictional story about the years between our high school friendship and reconnecting again in our late twenties. It’s full of inside jokes and things only the two of us would find funny. But writing it lit something in me I hadn’t felt before, and by the time it was done, I had two more stories in me. That first book became a trilogy.
When the trilogy was finished, I wanted to keep writing. So I took the things I love — our life, and history — and combined them. I wanted the next story to feel real, and it does, because so much of it is drawn from things that have actually happened to us.
Here’s the part that might cost me some readers: AI helped me write it. Every single word on the page was chosen, approved, or rewritten by me — nothing went into that book without passing through my own judgment first. But for someone like me, who has struggled with reading, writing, and spelling for my entire life, AI is a tool I needed. It’s the same reason a computer helped my art. It’s the same reason audiobooks got me reading in the first place.
I hope that doesn’t cost me readers. But I’d rather tell you the truth than let you find out some other way.