If you read fantasy for the magic, the world-building, and the occasional moment of dark humor—I write that. One urban fantasy series, one epic fantasy series, both set in the Fractured Arcana universe, with more coming. My newsletter takes you deeper into the worlds, the characters, and what's next.
I use AI in my writing. There, I said it.
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Yesterday I needed to remember exactly how a character destroyed a dragon artifact three books ago. I didn't dig through my own novels to find it—I asked an AI I built to search them for me. It's called the Grimoire: a mini-AI system I put together with Pinecone that I can ask questions about my own books—hair color in a different epoch, a side character I want to bring back, a detail I'd otherwise lose momentum digging for. It keeps me writing instead of hunting. That's the quiet way AI has worked into my writing life—and honestly, into almost everything else too. If you're not already using AI directly, you're probably using it indirectly: search engines are switching over, cars use it, and whatever's recommending your next read has used it for years. Yet the lines have been drawn hard for writers—"Made by a human" stamps are showing up on books, as if human creativity and AI have to occupy opposite sides of a fence. I don't see it that way. My day job is chip design—these days, that means designing AI chips, so I use AI to build AI. I have a nearly unlimited budget for it at work, and I write code 10–100x faster than I did 40 years ago. Am I worried I'm working myself out of a job? No—not because I doubt AI will eliminate some of what I do, but because I'm curious what I'll do next. Every problem AI solves for me uncovers another problem I can chase. Outside of work, I've built a dashboard that watches my whole writing business—Amazon, FB/IG, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, my email list, income and expenses, and what kind of posts actually land. Profitability-wise, building the dashboard was probably a questionable use of my time. But I like building things. I've also built that Eigenthrope blockchain game with AI bots that try to solve it, and a crypto dashboard with bots trading on Kraken (paper money, for now). That's probably the biggest change AI has made for me: it turns "some day" into "why not now?" This week, that showed up twice for other people too. At a pub, a buddy admired a sales site and wished he could build something like it. So, on his phone, I connected Claude to his Shopify and WordPress, pointed it at the site he liked, and had it drafting a similar page before we finished our drinks. Small unlocks, but real ones. For writing, I think my own line is pretty straightforward: AI can help me with the machinery around the story. I still want to write the story. Maybe your line is somewhere else. I'm actually curious: Do you use AI? And if you do, where have you drawn your own line? Hit reply and tell me. I'm especially interested in the answers from writers and artists, because I suspect there's a much wider range of opinions than social media makes it seem. One last thing—and a first for this newsletter. I’ve never run a sponsor before, but given the topic today, this one seemed too on-the-nose not to try. All books by Steven J. Morris Previous Newsletters
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Steven J Morris
If you read fantasy for the magic, the world-building, and the occasional moment of dark humor—I write that. One urban fantasy series, one epic fantasy series, both set in the Fractured Arcana universe, with more coming. My newsletter takes you deeper into the worlds, the characters, and what's next.
In this one: an old friend from way back, 20k words of progress, and a new reel from Thaumatropic Fractures. Last newsletter I asked for some accountability help. A few people reached out. One was someone I think of as an old friend from high school. But I've got to tell a little story about him. Way back before high school, in 5th grade, I transferred into a new school roughly mid-year. In one of my classes, the teacher insisted I do a placement test. But the placement test was this set of...
Hey Reader, Quick fun bit before today's update: the polls from my last email are in. I'd asked how many of you had actually read the three portal fantasy books that made me want to write the genre: Mordant's Need: 14.3% have read it The Darwath Trilogy: 0% have read it War of the Flowers: 14.3% have read it Almost nobody has read them, which tracks. They're buried treasure. If any of them ended up on your list because of that email, I'd love to hear how it goes. Okay, the actual update. I...
Hey Reader, I was ~sixteen when I first read Mordant's Need by Stephen R. Donaldson. A woman gets pulled through a magic mirror into a medieval kingdom that desperately needs a hero—except she isn't one. No power, no destiny, no idea what she's walked into. What Donaldson does with her arc stuck with me, particularly the moment she finally understands the game being played around her, finds her place on the board, and chooses to step into it. I try to replicate that in my storytelling. That...