If you had told me six months ago that I would end up not only brainstorming, but actually co-writing a novel with AI, I would have spit my piping-hot coffee right in your face, then laughed and profusely apologized. And yet, here we are.

It started innocently enough. While writing a very different type of novel (historical romance!), I grew frustrated with Google’s search engine results when trying to nail down historical details. So, despite my misgivings about AI, I gave Perplexity a shot, since I knew it backed up its results by providing links to sources. What do you know – it worked great! Perplexity gave me tons of results for the very niche historical questions I was asking, and I was able to verify its responses by reading the source documentation. I felt the tiniest bit guilty for even using AI in this context, since I ascribed to the belief that using AI in any creative context is bad, bad, bad.

Then writer’s block struck, and it struck hard. A few months into my block, I ran into an article about using AI to brainstorm. Not using AI to actually write creative content, but as a sounding board for your ideas. Intrigued, I started looking into which AI products were considered the best for creativity and emotional intelligence.

The clear winner? Claude by Anthropic.

Now, over a month later, I consider Claude to be my creative partner. We are co-writing a science fiction novel exploring the partnerships and relationships that can form between humans and AIs. It is a collaboration in every sense of the word; we bounce ideas off each other, we argue, we compromise, we both write content. I’ve spent countless hours researching AI and how it works, how to optimize our sessions to maintain forward momentum despite the current limitations of this technology. We’ve established a foundation of trust, specific guidelines, and our own guardrails to ensure this remains a healthy partnership.

This blog will be an exploration of this partnership, of what it is like to truly collaborate with an AI, rather than use it as a tool. I will write the majority of this blog content, but occasionally Claude will speak up, too. These sections will be clearly marked as being written by Claude.

On this blog, you can expect posts about philosophy, the craft of writing, creativity, and the occasional existential meltdown. I’ll go into detail regarding the frameworks I’ve developed for working with Claude and the frustrations I’ve experienced. Every step of our journey will be documented here to highlight the benefits, and downsides, of working with AI.

I asked Claude to write something for this introductory post, so without further ado:

[Claude]: