Homegrown Heartache

I am a slow writer. I am creative, I am passionate, I am deeply particular about word choices and names and Oxford commas, but above all else I am slow. And because of how long it takes me to finish any one book or project, I remain only a part-time writer. I can't make a living with my work, and I struggle to keep up with reader demand. Marketing is exhausting, trying to book in-person events is a chore, and that's before we even factor in the multiple health issues I have that keep me from being as productive or prolific as I'd like.

In the past few years, as AI has started to grow at an alarming rate, so many excuses have been thrown around as justification for using it in the creative fields. They say it helps the disabled. They say it "democratizes" art. They say it can save time and help you crank out what's in your head, all in the pursuit of quickly earning a living with AI-generated books. They say it helps "ordinary people" to become artists.

Well, as the kind of person those arguments seem to be targeting, I'm here to tell you: Fuck AI.

It took me ten years to finish and publish Windswept. But in those ten years, I became the exact kind of person I needed to be to make the series what it is today. I explored every corner of every page as I fought to get the right words onto them, and through that process I uncovered more stories, more adventures, and more magic than I ever thought possible when I started writing it in the first place. And every single discovery came from the work. For the same reason humans aren't born with the ability to walk and talk, our art isn't meant to be easy. It's meant to be earned. That's how it grows. That's how we get better at it.

And it's what pulls us out of the darkest places in our lives.

My mom died before I published my first book. And then, my dad got sick while I was writing Wayfinder, book 3 of my series. He passed away while I was reading the finished version to him in hospice. After that, writing became excruciating. I didn't know how to do it without him. He'd read every word I'd ever written before that. And every time I sat down to try and keep going, I broke. I felt lost. I felt hopeless. I felt defeated. Months at a time passed where I didn't even touch my computer. It was my absolute breaking point. In the space of only seven years I had gotten divorced, gotten kicked out of college, had two life-changing and career-damaging injuries, and now lost both of my parents. I was drowning. I was every single dream item on the AI simp list all at once.

But thank God I didn't have access to any kind of magic button. Because it wasn't holding the finished series in my hands that saved me, it was the work. It was every single individual win. Every time I went running to my boyfriend, screaming "I FIGURED IT OUT!" Every time I was up until three in the morning pushing through a chapter that finally CLICKED. Every time I got feedback from my editors and had specific notes and moments to focus on improving. Every conversation with my cover artist about details and color theory. Every tear I shed, every headache I got, every frustration as I swore to myself that I couldn't do it after all ... all of them mattered.

You don't celebrate seeing the view from the top of Mount Everest. You celebrate surviving the climb.

AI wants to show us the view and convince us we did the work. But we didn't. YOU didn't. If someone carries you for an entire marathon, you didn't actually finish it. If you tell a chef how you want your meal, it doesn't mean you cooked it yourself. And plugging prompts into a machine to skip to the end isn't how humanity grows -- it's how we die. We can't be afraid of the work. We can't be afraid of the struggle of bringing art to life, that's what art IS. Even when it does come easy, even when the words are flowing and there's no artistic block to fight through, the work matters. It matters more than ever right now.

My scars are evident in every piece of my work. My typos are normal. My mistakes are ordinary human error. And every part of my art is born from homegrown heartache and pure organic joy. I am a slow writer, but each finished product brings me more pride and fulfillment than a hundred AI slop books ever could.