A Note on Process

Now that the story is told, a short and honest word on how it was made, and some thanks.

Thank you to Patrick Rothfuss, whose two books made me want to follow this road at all, and to you, for walking it with me.

This novel was drafted and revised with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, working under my direction across many passes. I set the course: the story, the canon it had to honor, and what each pass had to fix. Claude wrote and rewrote the prose to that direction. The editorial reading was done by Galleys, the AI editorial framework I built alongside this project. Galleys doesn’t write prose. It reads the way a demanding editor reads, flagging structural weaknesses, pacing problems, and the prose habits an eye stops seeing after the hundredth pass. The direction was mine, and so are the mistakes that remain.

For writers: if you want that kind of reading for your own manuscript, Galleys is at galleys.ai.

Thank you for staying to the end of the road.