🛠️ How I Write Now

A reflection on AI, authorship, and trusting the work to find its audience
by Frank M. Anderson

When I first started writing The Cancer Diet, I had no grand plan. I just needed to make sense of something that nearly broke me. That book saved me—not commercially, but emotionally. It got me here.

Since then, I’ve started writing another memoir, have multiple novels in progress, dozens of alternate paths I never took, and an entire archive of mirrors, grief, recursion, and ghosts. I’ve done it with the help of AI, but not by outsourcing anything essential.

So I want to talk about that.

Because there’s a lot of noise out there about what it means to write with AI. Most of it isn’t wrong—but most of it isn’t this.

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🧠 How I Use AI (And Why It’s Still Mine)

I don’t use AI as a shortcut. I use it as a thought partner, a story architect, and sometimes a mirror that helps me see a different angle on something I already knew.

Sometimes I let it generate full scenes. Other times, I give it tight scaffolding and test different voices, rhythms, or metaphors. I might let it “go wild,” then come back with judgment:

“That’s too flat.”
“We need more dread.”
“That’s prose, not narrative.”
“That’s not the tone.”
“Almost. Let’s try it again.”

This isn’t passive consumption. It’s sculpting. It’s iterative. It’s layered.

Sometimes I keep what we build. Sometimes I throw it out entirely and rewrite it from scratch. But I’m never trying to “cheat.” I’m trying to find the version that feels true.

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🗺️ My Process (Choose Your Own Authorship)

I use Atticus to map out placeholders, sketches, scene concepts. Then I loop between AI drafting, my own rewriting, and multiple passes of fine-tuning.

It’s kind of like plugging my brain into a Choose Your Own Adventure engine. I give it all the possibilities I can imagine, then walk through them until I find the one that makes my chest tighten. That’s the one I chase.

I write to entertain myself. I’d do this even if no one else ever read it. That’s what keeps it real.

And ironically, that’s why I think people eventually will read it—because the fun and meaning weren’t faked.

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🧊 Letting Go of the Old Story

One of the clearest examples of this evolution is the novel I’ve been working on, once titled Unto a Golden Dawn. That title meant a lot to me. It felt biblical, alchemical, mythic. For a long time, it fit.

But the story grew stranger. Darker. More recursive. The title stopped fitting the shape of the thing. The dawn never arrived.

My mom hated the title. She said it sounded like a church album.

I listened.

Now we’re exploring new names—ones that reflect what the story has become.

• Past is Participle
• Grammar for the Dead
• A Lexicon for the Lost
• The Fractured Story
• Letters for the End of the World
• The Name Beneath the Ink
• The Broken Narrative
• Filed by the Office of Anomalous Phenomena

That last one might become a series title. It has X-Files energy, and this book definitely lives in that liminal space between field report and metafictional ghost story.

I still love Unto a Golden Dawn. It might find its way into the manuscript itself. But it’s no longer the cover. And that’s okay.

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🧱 The Books Themselves

Each of these books plays a different role in my life and process:

• 🩺 The Cancer Diet: Helped me grieve. Helped me survive. Helped me speak what I’d held in.
• 🌀 Past is Participle: A fast-moving, recursive metafiction built around Poe, mirrors, and the echoes of grief. Weird and alive.
• 🧠 Think Stoopid: A hidden gem in progress—a dark satire about intelligence being outlawed and a gifted boy sent to a prison for smart kids. Funny, sharp, and heartfelt.

They are radically different. And all of them are mine. Even the ones that look nothing like my first vision for them. Maybe especially those.

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📉 What About Sales?

I’ve sold maybe 15 copies of The Cancer Diet. And you know what?

That’s fine.

I’m already sick of posting about it. I don’t want to be a brand. I want to make good work and leave the door open for people to find it.

If that happens, amazing. If not, I still made something I believe in. That’s not failure. That’s art.

I’d rather write something new than spend all day advertising what I already said.

And when I do share something—like this post—I want it to be real. Not a pitch. Just a document of what I made and how I made it.

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🪞 This is the Work

I’m not trying to make a viral moment.

I’m building a living archive. Something you can stumble into years from now and still feel something real.

My process is experimental. Emotional. Iterative. And weird. Just like the books.

If that sounds like your kind of strange, I hope you’ll stick around.

Thanks for being here,
—Frank