Reflections After the Fire: On AI, Authorship, and “Grammar for the Dead”

I didn’t expect this post to get much reaction at all, let alone light up the way it did. But that’s part of what I’ve come to accept about working in public—you never know which match is going to catch.

So here’s what I’ve been sitting with since I posted the preview of Grammar for the Dead—the concept, the process, and especially the backlash around my use of AI.

Let’s be clear: I didn’t write every line of this book myself. But I also didn’t let AI write it for me. What I did was build something iterative. I let the AI go wild sometimes, especially in early drafts. I prompted it with ideas I’ve collected over years. I asked it to stretch logic, form, syntax. Sometimes it showed me unexpected new paths. Other times, I deleted whole sections and rewrote them entirely.

I’ve gone through every line, over and over, refining, reshaping, replacing. This book has been through countless hours of revision and iteration. It’s not finished—but it is mine. And it’s becoming more mine every time I work on it. I’ve never once pasted an output and called it done. I’ve used the machine to push and provoke and sometimes just to feel like I’m not alone while writing. It’s been a flawed but strangely steady partner—one that doesn’t ghost me, one that’s always available, one that reflects without judgment (even when it probably should).

So why use AI if I can write without it?

Because I crave feedback. I struggle with anxiety, and after a heart attack and mental break, I found myself paralyzed by silence. The AI gave me a strange, immediate kind of dialogue. It was too congratulatory sometimes, sure. It pushed toward premature polish. But even that taught me what not to do. I like to think of my process as feeding concepts into a never-ending Choose Your Own Adventure engine—those books I adored as a kid—and seeing what patterns and routes emerge. It’s not perfect. But it keeps me creating.

One of the most interesting moments in the reaction thread was the debate over the phrase “Past is participle”—a line spoken at a pivotal moment in the book. I love it. It came to me during a recursive loop scene and I didn’t entirely understand it at first. I still don’t know if it’s “correct” in a grammatical sense. That’s part of the tension. I’m following up with an old teacher of mine to dig into it, because the AI and I both agreed the phrase made sense… which says everything about this book, really. It feels right to us. But I’m taking it to my writing group because I need to know if anyone else gets it. Even if just a few.

I’ve been working on multiple projects at once—The Cancer Diet, Think Stoopid, Firepit, Black Wind, and more. Each one has its own voice, tone, process. The Cancer Diet was as close to pure “me” as I could manage. Grammar for the Dead is me trying to be… more. To stretch what story can do. To see what happens when language becomes haunted.

It centers, at first, on Edgar Allan Poe and Aleister Crowley. But then it fractures. The mirror speaks. The grammar cracks. Ghosts argue in syntax. The narrator begins to suspect the story is writing him—and maybe it already did.

I understand the distrust. I’ve been burned by bad AI books, too. I don’t want to be part of that sludge. I’m not saying what I’ve made here is perfect or polished or even publishable in its current state. I’m saying I’m working on it—and I’m working openly. Because I believe in transparency. And because sometimes it’s better to invite people into the mess than to pretend you’ve got it all figured out.

And if anyone goes back and reads my earlier post about the number of projects I’m working on, they’ll see I’m not trying to build just one kind of thing. I’m experimenting—chasing inspiration wherever it hits. Some days it’s a memoir. Other days it’s a recursive horror-poem in the shape of a novel.

A lot of what I write may never see the light of day. That’s okay. I’d rather be honest about my process—warts, rewrites, AI experiments and all—than pretend there’s only one right way to make something meaningful.

I’ll keep doing this until I die.
Not because it always works. But because it’s how I stay alive.