I write dark urban fantasy set in the Sonoran Desert, and I write it with an AI in the room. Not as a ghostwriter and not as autocomplete. As staff. I hold the room, I set the standard, and I decide what ships.
That arrangement turned out to need infrastructure. Not prompts, not a clever system message, but the actual thing: a canon database the model queries instead of guessing, character records structured so voice is a field rather than a vibe, a standards document that encodes every craft failure anyone ever caught, and quality gates that run before I ever read a draft. Most of what I know about building that came from three decades of doing systems integration for a living. It transfers better than it has any right to.
These essays are the build log. They were written as the room went up, in the order it went up, which means the early ones do not know what the later ones figured out. I have left them that way on purpose. A schema introduced in one entry gets queried three entries later; a failure my wife caught reading over my shoulder became a gate in the standards document the same afternoon. That sequence is the argument.
What this is not
It is not a course, and it is not trying to be beginner-friendly. There is no ladder, no prerequisites, no promised destination where you come out certified in anything. If a piece assumes you know what a foreign key is, it assumes it. Plenty of people are doing the introductory version of this well, and I am not one of them.
It is also not an argument that you should work this way. It is a record of one person working this way, with the reasoning exposed so you can disagree with the reasoning specifically rather than the conclusion generally.
Why this is not on Substack
Position taken July 21, 2026, the day Substack shipped Pangram. It stands until that changes.
This was formerly on Substack. However, with the addition of Pangram to Substack, and the roving masses of Anti-AI zombies, I decided that Substack was no longer the correct place for this. I judged Substack to be unworthy.
Until such time as they exorcise the Pangram demon, I see no reason to post any articles of my own there.
The fiction
The system described here exists to produce a specific thing: Vampires of Tucson, a series about the people the desert keeps. Everything in these essays is load-bearing for that. If you want to see what the room actually outputs, that is over here.
Following along
New entries appear when there is something worth writing down, which is not on a schedule. The RSS feed is the reliable way to know.