I use AI as a writing collaborator, and I’d rather tell you how I use it now than have you wonder later.

The work that’s mine is the architecture of the book. I built the characters and the world they live in. I built their voices and the moral spine of the story. I decide what each scene is doing and where it ends.

For Book 1 of The Bellhaven Ledger, I keep voice files for each major character. In them I note the cadence and physical tells that make Nora sound like Nora. I keep a prop ledger to track objects across chapters, so the blue mug on page twelve isn’t green on page two hundred. At the end of each chapter I run a prose pass to catch the patterns I drift into when I’m tired.

AI is a partner inside that system. It holds the whole book in memory when I can’t. It catches continuity breaks and procedural errors across hundreds of pages, so a detail I got wrong doesn’t pull a reader out of the story, even a reader who knows Coast Guard signal practice or small-town municipal audits.

Every word of every sentence in this book has been pored over, turned over, and placed on the page by me. I won’t pretend that in the throes of writer’s block I haven’t sought suggestions; AI is one of the options I turn to, and I’ve also run stumbling blocks past close friends who know my heart for this story. As often as not, those suggestions showed me a path my characters wouldn’t take, and that wrongness was what I needed to find the path they would.

I’m writing this because I’d rather tell you about my process than let you guess. My email is on the contact page. If what I described isn’t for you, I respect that. And if you’re reading Book 1 of The Bellhaven Ledger, thank you. The work is mine.

Merritt