How I Work

I am, always and ever, an artist. My mission is to spread queer joy as widely and as far as possible—for people to see themselves in books and shows where they haven't before, and for inclusivity and empathy and self-love and expression to spread.

This page is for readers and fellow creators who want to know how the work actually gets made. My business is creator first and AI assisted. That phrase means something specific, and this page is where I explain what.

My writing process

Writing a book can take me weeks if it's short, or months and hundreds of hours per title. AI assisted or not, that timeline hasn't really changed. The pipeline is roughly: ideation and brainstorming, plotting and character work, drafting, structural editing, final rewrite, and proofreading. My books often go through several drafts before they leave my desk.

I use a lot of tools to write. Some of them are old—notes at 1AM in my iPhone, drafting or editing in Ulysses, comparing edits in Word. Some of them are newer—writing and editing software that I built myself, and AI-assisted brainstorming, scene-expansion tools, and spelling and grammar-checker tools I built to deepen and help with my process.

Some of my books are entirely human written, most written pre-AI: Good King Lyr, Magnificent, Throne of Eleven, Lives on Other Worlds, The Truthspoken Heir, The Shadow Rule, A Bid to Rule, Court of Magickers, The Nameless Storm, The Second Ruler: Part One, The Second Ruler: Part Two, Sky and Dew, and all of my previously published stories from anthologies and magazines. Court of Magickers has one header quote rephrased by AI—but if that soils your soup, my books probably aren't for you.

Some of my newer books are AI-assisted in the writing process. I use AI to enhance my own creativity and lessen the cognitive load of running an author business, not replace my own voice or vision. AI helps me develop and scaffold and zero draft; the book gets rewritten, chapter by chapter, by me. In the human drafting process, I always wrote (and still often do write) a zero draft, never read it again, and then rewrote it completely in the editing process. Now, AI helps me collapse that process by zero drafting off of my scene briefs and notes, summarizing it for me so I can think it through, and then I rewrite it completely--basically, an expansion layer. I treat my rewrite like a true first draft. Only a handful of AI-written lines make it into my final drafts, and if they do, they were chosen by me deliberately, and already primed to be in my voice through the whole process.

My final books are my final books, in my own voice, my own words. (If you don't like my writing, you just don't like my human writing. You can pry my em dashes and sentence fragments from my cold, dead hands, ha.)

Is this AI-assisted or AI-generated? AI-generated books are books that were prompted and published without any human oversight on the final words, or thought into the process.

My books are 100% not that. I believe AI is meant to enhance human creativity, not replace it. That is always what I'm after: how can I use these tools to better write the books I'd write anyway, to enhance and deepen my own ideas and stories, and to reach more people?

Audiobooks

All of my audiobooks currently use AI voices. Some—including The King's Weaver series and The Stars and Green Magics series—use mostly voice clones of voice actors who are paid for their use (via Eleven Labs). I'd love to have human-narrated audiobooks someday. The best way to get there is by supporting my work; narrating my whole catalog with human narrators would cost around $100K and take several years. Accessibility matters to me, with a vision disability and the need to read by audiobooks myself, and I'll use the best AI voices I can in the meantime.

You always have my permission to listen to any of my ebooks through audio accessibility tools, too. Some of my favorites are Eleven Reader and Natural Reader.

Films and shows

I write, direct, produce, and edit my own films and shows under the same creator-first model. AI tools are part of the production pipeline, but these are still human-creative productions made with heavy, hands-on human craft, and hundreds of hours of work. 

The end goal is to build a trans-led studio where I can hire queer and trans actors, artists, and filmmakers to make trans-led movies and shows. Hollywood right now is going backwards on representation. To get there, I've gotta prove the audience—and we might need to change the world a bit in the meantime, too. That's the plan: more people see characters like them and enjoy watching their stories.

The King's Weaver Show is self-hosted—you can watch it on novaecaelum.com via Vimeo.

Why I run it this way

Running a trans-led business in our current world is hard. There are systemic and structural obstacles, like having to dampen some of my advertising and marketing to take out trans keywords, which cis creators do not need to do. I deal with hate often, and trans books often have much less chances of broad acceptance, because trans existence is currently seen as political. This creates challenges many cishet author businesses do not have, and often 2-3x amount of work for the same or less results. So I'm using absolutely every tool and chance available to expand my reach and voice.

Spreading queer joy is immensely important right now, and I'm not willing to back down on it when there's a way to boost the signal. The creator-first, AI-assisted model lets me write more, ship more, support more readers, and build toward my full studio goal without giving up the voice or the values that make the work the work.

I know why I use the tools that I use, and why my business model is built on my own joy, love, and integrity.

Some reading if you want to go deeper

If you want to know more about how I use AI in my business, I run the AI Marketing for Storytellers Substack with weekly articles and calls with author Cassie Alexander. 

I always welcome earnest questions. I will not respond to harassment.