The first pen name was Jackson Giglio. mm erotica with a satirical edge. The most successful name I ever wrote under, which is either funny or instructive depending on how you feel about genre fiction.
I kept going. Different genres, different styles, one question underneath all of them: how far could this go?
What I wanted was a bookstore. Not a brand, not a content operation — a real catalog with the range of St. Marks and the counterculture edge of City Lights and the density of The Strand, all under one roof I actually controlled. My books. My taste. No middlemen deciding what belonged.
Script work paid better. It still does. I have been script doctoring and pitching for close to twenty years and that side of the work is more profitable by a clear margin.
But the books kept charting on Amazon.
Over 100 books. 10 months. Real ISBNs. Actual readers. Not a typo.
The Origin: Pocket Gems
Pre-AI-hype. One of the greatest game companies on the west coast. Up there with Sierra, Electronic arts, Capcom...
Pocket Gems needed romance for mobile game launches. Post-Episode interactive fiction. Players wanted stories. Thousands of them. Fast.
My job: Write romance erotica that made players care.
The tool: Early AI language models. Primitive. Buggy. Hallucinated constantly.
The lesson: AI doesn't replace writing. AI amplifies what you already know how to do.
Early versions stumbled. Repetition. Patterns too obvious. I could see the machine thinking in circles.
Then something shifted. AI started finishing thoughts I hadn't fully formed. Anticipating moves that weren't textbook.
We were training each other. Building shared language.
That was the moment. Not a gradual realization — a clear line. Before and after. I was sitting with an output that had no business being as good as it was, written by something that didn't exist three years earlier, and I understood that everything about creative work was about to change. Not eventually. Now. The writers who saw it early would have an advantage that couldn't be replicated later. The writers who fought it would spend the next decade losing ground and calling it principle.
I became an early defender of AI in rooms where that was genuinely unpopular. This was before the backlash had a name, before the op-eds, before the unions issued statements. People didn't fully understand what was happening yet — but some of them could feel it threatening something, and the instinct was to push back before they could articulate why. I pushed the other direction. Not because I didn't understand the fear. Because I'd seen what the tool could actually do when someone who knew how to write was holding it.
Learned to prompt before "prompt engineering" was a job title. Learned character consistency. Learned pacing. Learned how to guide AI toward what the story needed without losing what made it human.
The romance erotica worked. Players engaged. Pocket Gems had great editors. Great team leaders. They taught me about tech, showed me what collaboration looked like. Inspired me to keep pushing.
Then I went rogue.
The Factory Model
Andy Warhol didn't paint every Campbell's Soup can. He built The Factory. Vision + process + assistants + repetition.
Warhol understood: art multiplies through systems. Repetition reveals new dimensions. The machine becomes part of the vision.
Same here. Writer + AI + systematic process + genre knowledge. Not "AI writes books for me." I built a creative system where AI handles execution while I direct vision, structure, and quality.
The System
Genre research first. Can't systematize what you don't understand.
Romance means meet-cute, tension, black moment, happily ever after. Tried love triangles. Love pentagrams. Love shooting stars. Structure creates freedom. Thriller means hook, escalation, reversal — noir pacing, Brooklyn cop investigating CEO assassination. Erotica means tension building, consent, heat progression — making text create physical response.
Learn the genre rules. Then build systems around them.
Character Archetypes
Genres have patterns. Build templates. Backstory. Motivation. Voice. Flaws. Arc.
AI excels at executing consistent character voice once the template is clear. AI struggles with creating compelling characters from scratch. Solution: you create the character, AI helps them speak consistently.
The Character Naming Problem
Over 100 books. Average 10 to 15 characters per book. Supporting cast. Background characters. That's thousands of names.
Can't use John, Sarah, Mike repeatedly. Readers notice.
The solution: everyone I ever knew ended up in the books.
Friends. Bartending regulars. Comedy Cellar comics. Fashion photographers. Film crew. Pocket Gems teammates. High school. College. Family. Ex-lovers. Random encounters I remembered.
Call it an homage. Everyone I met got immortalized somewhere. Some in erotica. Some in noir. Some in satire. Some characters are composites — three people I knew merged into one fictional person.
The weird part: no one complained. Most didn't recognize themselves. Fiction transforms reality enough that names become new people.
The practical part: authentic names feel more real than generated ones. "Xander Steele" reads like porn star. "Connor from accounts payable" reads like someone you know.
Over a thousand characters across over 100 books. That's the tribute. Your name in my books somewhere.
You're welcome.
The Collaboration
Most people either let AI write everything (garbage) or fight AI constantly (inefficient).
The actual process:
- Outline (me): story structure, plot points, character arcs, themes
- Draft (collaboration): feed outline + character templates, AI generates chapter, I review for consistency
- Heat check (me): does tension build right? Characters behaving true? Pacing correct?
- Polish (me): remove AI tells, add human moments AI can't write, verify emotional beats land
- Publish (system): format, cover, upload, market, repeat
What I rewrote completely: sex scenes. AI was technically accurate but mechanical. No humanity in the heat. Bodies moved like diagrams.
Fixed it by writing those scenes myself. Taught AI through example. Eventually it learned. Sometimes.
The split: I directed every chapter. Sometimes let AI drafts stand to see what happened. Some sections fully me. Some collaborative. Some pure AI just to test boundaries.
Told readers this was new media exploration. Actually cared about their experience.
The Technical Layer
This is the part no one talks about because most people doing it don't want competition and most people writing about it never actually did it.
How the Prompts Actually Worked
A chapter prompt isn't "write chapter three of my romance novel." That gets you generic output that sounds like a million other books.
A working prompt for fiction has four components:
Genre context. Feed it the rules first. Not vague rules — specific ones. "This is a hardboiled noir set in 1970s Brooklyn. Sentences are short. Violence is matter-of-fact. The detective narrates in first person past tense and keeps his feelings off the page." The model needs to know what category it's operating in before it touches your story.
Character sheet. Not a list of traits. A voice sample. The difference between telling AI "Marcus is cynical and dry" and showing it a paragraph Marcus would actually say is the difference between generic and specific. The character sheet I used had: full name, age, one-sentence background, three defining traits, one fatal flaw, and a voice sample of four to six lines in their actual cadence. That voice sample is what made characters hold across chapters.
Scene context. Where we are in the story. What just happened. What this scene needs to accomplish structurally. What the emotional register is. Two or three lines of setup is enough — the model can extrapolate. More than that and it starts following your notes instead of writing the scene.
Specific constraints. POV. Tense. Approximate length. Any hard requirements — "do not resolve the tension in this scene, end on uncertainty." These prevent the model from doing what it always wants to do, which is wrap things up too neatly and too fast.
That's the whole prompt. Four components, assembled fresh for each chapter, fed to a model that already had the genre rules and character voices as context. The output was never final. It was a first draft with my handwriting all over it thirty minutes later.
The Story Bible
Over 100 books means thousands of details to track — and AI has no memory between sessions. Every time you start a new conversation, the model starts blank. The story bible is how you solve that.
Mine was a running document for each book. Character sheets. Chapter summaries — one paragraph per chapter written after I finished each one. Any established facts: what the city block looks like, what year a character's father died, the name of the bar where scene two takes place. Continuity errors destroy reader trust faster than almost anything else. The story bible was the memory I was outsourcing.
