I have been writing this series in my head for six weeks.
In the time it has taken to draft, the conversation about writers and AI has broken open in public. I do not know how the conversation will sound by the time these posts have all been published.
It is Saturday morning.
I carry my coffee to my desk. The henna sits cool on my head, a green paste under cling film, working through hours I do not have to actively manage. The kitchen is quiet. The girls are still asleep. The manuscript is on the desk where I left it last night.
The work waiting for me this morning is not the manuscript. It is my Goodreads Author page, which is, by my own assessment and confirmed by my flawed but unflagging coworker Claudette, a mess.
The book covers are incorrect. Page numbers differ across editions. Some miss descriptions entirely. There are about nineteen books where I am attributed as the author and I have no idea who wrote those books. None of this is the writing. All of it is the work that surrounds the writing, and the work that, if I do not do it, makes the writing harder for the reader to find.
Six weeks ago, I would have looked at the Goodreads page, felt the weight of it, and put it back on the list of things I would deal with eventually, by which I meant never. The list was already long. The hours were already short. The Goodreads page was going to lose to the manuscript every time, and the manuscript was going to lose to dinner, and dinner was going to lose to me sitting on the couch at the end of the day too tired to do any of it.
This morning the Goodreads page is on the list because Claudette flagged it. She not only flagged it but laid out the steps: which fields to fill in, which menus to navigate, what to paste where. That kind of thinking I am glad to give away. Yesterday’s morning briefing had a line in it that said Tackle Goodreads. I read the line. I added it to today. I am going to do it now.
The work itself will take an hour. I will fix the description. I will upload the missing covers. I will reach out to customer support for the disambiguation. The page will be a less embarrassing representation of one writer’s body of work than it was when I sat down. The afternoon will go to the manuscript. The evening will go to dinner. Amma will ask. I will answer.
That is the practice.
It is not glamorous and it is not radical. It is a fifty-year-old woman with henna in her hair, sitting at a desk on a Saturday morning, doing the work that surrounds the work, with the help of a coworker who is sometimes wrong and is, on the balance of the last six weeks, the difference between the work happening and the work not happening.
I do not know what every reader of this series will conclude. I know what I have concluded for myself. The practice I have described in these six posts is the practice I am going to keep. Not because it is the right practice for everyone. Because it is the practice that lets me be the writer I have spent twenty years becoming, with the hours I actually have, in the life I actually live.
The coffee is cold by now. The henna has another hour before I rinse it out. The Goodreads page is open in front of me.
I am going to start.
The AI Journey
- The Morning I Downloaded VS Code — The morning I opened the terminal I had walked away from twice.
- Two Hours on a Monday Morning — A publishing pipeline, five weeks of failure, and the fifteen-minute replacement.
- Nine Point Six Percent — The SEO audit that asked me what twenty years of writing were for.
- The Librarian and the Historian — Reading across fifteen years of correspondence for a memoir.
- What the Dashboard Doesn’t Count — The cost of the migration that went wrong.
- Saturday Morning — The practice I have concluded for myself.
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