A Note on the Making of This Book

This book would not exist without generative AI — and I want to say so plainly, here, before the first page of the story.

I have carried the idea for this book for many years. But an idea and a finished thing are not the same, and the distance between them is mostly friction: the blank page, the draft that stalls, the chapter you can see but cannot quite get down. Generative AI lowered that friction. It did not give me the book; it gave me a way to keep moving from the idea to the page when, on my own, I would have stopped.

I used it as a working partner throughout. For feedback on drafts and for a reader who was always awake. For edits — tightening, cutting, catching what I’d grown too close to see. For generating images, and for the small, slow work that otherwise sits undone.

What it did not do was decide. Every word, every scene, every choice about what this book is and is not, passed through me. In every iteration I was the person in the final approval loop. The judgment is mine, and so is anything you find wanting in it.

I’m telling you this because the book is, in part, about how new tools change the work of careful people — and it would be strange to write that book while hiding the tools that helped me write it.