How AI Fit Into My Writing Process (and Why the Story Is Still Mine)

There’s a lot of conversation around AI and creative work right now. Some people are excited, some are cautious, and some want nothing to do with it. All of those reactions are valid. I’m not trying to sway you one way or the other—I’m aiming to be open and transparent about how I did things so you can make your own informed decision.

So here’s the upfront version:

If AI involvement is a “no” for you, that’s okay.

I’d rather be honest about how this book came together than pretend I didn’t experiment along the way.

What follows is simply my process—not a manifesto, not a justification, just the reality of how Whispers in the Dark was built.

I wrote this story. AI didn’t.

I know each of the characters—why they make the choices they do, what scares them, where they break, and what holds them together.

I was there for every scene, building their tragedies and their small victories, shaping the emotional beats, and making sure they didn’t act in a way that was unexpected.

I didn’t outsource the plot to AI - I created all the twists and turns. I determined the character arcs - what each of them would face, what they’d have to deal with and how those challenges would make or break them. The tone and themes were the same—all human decisions.

If you end up enjoying this story, I hope you’ll attribute some of the credit to the messy human behind it—the one who scrapped scenes that didn’t work, fought the math more times than he’d like to admit, and rewrote chapters at midnight until the physics behaved.

So what did AI do?

1. It acted as a reviewer with no emotional attachment.

Writing is iterative. Sometimes you don’t notice the awkward line, the unclear motivation, the pacing wobble, or the detail that contradicts something 10 pages earlier.

A good critique partner can catch those. In this case, AI helped me catch them faster.

It didn’t fix anything—but it did point at suspicious areas so I knew where to focus. Think of it like having a junior engineer running lint checks on the prose. Able to surface issues—but always still up to me to fix.

2. It was a sounding board for scientific plausibility.

This book leans hard into real-world physics, engineering constraints, and the “what would actually happen” style of storytelling.

I used AI as an initial filter:

• Does this violate a known physical law?
• Am I missing an obvious failure mode?
• Does this reaction chain even make sense?
• Would a planetary probe actually behave this way?

Every idea still had to pass real research, real sources, and real math—but AI helped me narrow the search space. It’s a bit like having someone in the room who can say, “You might want to check section 3.7 of that physics textbook before you go any further.”

3. It helped me go from concept to manuscript faster.

As a reader, I spend 12–18 months waiting between installments of the sci-fi series I love. As a writer, I wanted to see whether an engineer’s workflow—plus some AI assistance—could compress that timeline without sacrificing quality or scientific rigor.

This entire project started as a curiosity-driven experiment:

Could I build a story the same way I build systems?

Through iteration, testing, refinement, and rapid prototyping?

For me, the answer was: yes, with caveats and a lot of late-night coffee.

AI was just one tool in the toolbox, not the architect of the story.

The story still has fingerprints—and they’re mine.

Everything that matters—the emotional arcs, the scientific decisions, the tone, the themes, the consequences—came from the human at the keyboard. AI didn’t supply the heart of the story or the hard choices the characters face.

What it did supply was friction reduction. Fewer blind spots. Faster iteration loops. A way to explore possibilities before committing days of manual research.

If you’ve been curious about how much AI went into this book, not as much as you might think, but definitely more than zero.

If that’s a dealbreaker, I understand. If it’s simply interesting context, great. If it reassures you that I didn’t outsource the soul of the story, even better.

Either way, thanks for being here.

Curiosity is what started this whole project—and it’s what will keep pushing me forward.

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