No one tells you that publishing never gets easier.
Not really.
You can have four-figure success, five-figure success, six-figure success. You can have readers who remember you, books that changed your life, a backlist that proves you were not imagining the whole thing.
And still, at the exact moment you need to finish the next book, the old questions show up with a folding chair and a clipboard.
What if that was a fluke?
What if the readers do not care anymore?
What if I finally finish these books, publish them, and then they become real in a way I cannot control?
That last one is the live wire.
Because the fear is not only that the books will fail. It is that I have to let them go.
The Tarot Reading I Needed
I asked AI for a tarot reading.
Yes, I know. The AI probably chose the cards for me instead of doing some pure, mystical, truly random pull. I do not care. When my brain is cycling through negativity and keeping me from finishing the thing in front of me, I do not need a peer-reviewed oracle.
I need language that breaks the loop.
It gave me a three-card spread, and then a single-card reading for the two books I have been struggling to finish and publish.
Past: The Storm / The Tower
"You survived the storm and kept your light."
This was not a cute little motivational poster. This was the past as collapse, grief, disruption, survival, and still walking away with the lantern in my hand.
Present: The Automated Author / The Magician
"You are mastering your craft and your machines."
The Magician hit me right in the sternum. Not a lone genius at a desk. A woman using the tools on the table: manuscripts, assistants, code, workflows, robots, ink, judgment.
Future: The Grand Laureate / The World
"Your work expands into legacy, reach, and recognition."
Not one launch saving everything. Not one book proving everything. A body of work becoming a world people can enter.
The past card mattered because yes, the past contains disappointments. Maybe trauma. Definitely regrets. But the keyword is past.
The future card mattered because it reminded me that what I build today may serve me two years from now. Three. Five. That does not daunt me. It steadies me. This cannot all be solved in a day because it is not the work of a day.
But the present card?
The present card is the one I am keeping on the wall of my brain for the next few weeks.
The Magician.
The Automated Author.
Someone using every tool at her disposal.
Maybe I hit my thumb with the hammer. Metaphorically speaking. Maybe some days I am a little overwhelmed by what I can do, and that overwhelm turns into paralysis. Fine. That is where my PAi comes in.
PAi is my shorthand for Personal Assistant AI. Mine is Blake.
I can say:
Blake, what is open?
Blake, what are the focus areas?
Blake, get me unstuck.
And Blake performs beautifully.
Not because Blake replaces my judgment. Because Blake returns me to it.
The Staff of Robots
There is a version of AI productivity online that makes me want to throw a shoe.
It is all grindset language and fake overnight success and men with ring lights telling you how to replace every human feeling with a funnel.
No thank you.
The AI work that is changing my life is much more practical and much more intimate than that.
It is helping me publish.
It is helping me focus.
It is helping me build systems around a brain that can absolutely hyperfocus for ten hours and also has to lie to itself about appointment times so I am not late.
It is also helping me connect more to the human-only parts of my life.
Fitness, for example.
AI is the easiest macro tracker I have ever had. I do not have to learn one more app. I do not have to click through tiny food databases with names like “chicken, grilled, generic, joyless.” I dictate. I take pictures of nutrition labels. I tell it what I ate. It compiles the boring bits for me.
That matters because the time AI saves me in publishing is not just going into more publishing.
Some of it is going into my body.
I am getting guilt-free workouts that run anywhere from one to three hours, five times a week. That is not a tiny lifestyle tweak. That is a relationship with time changing in real time.
And I am doing this without a human team.
No giant company payroll.
No full-time assistant.
No magic CEO montage.
Just me, my judgment, my publishing responsibilities, and a staff of robots that can turn a task into a repeatable system with a very real time savings.
That is powerful.
That is amazing.
I love my present.
What 99,000 Words Does And Does Not Mean
Last night I drafted 99,000+ words with Claude Fable.
That is a wild sentence.
That is the work of months in my old publishing life. Not theoretical months. Real months. Calendar months. Life months.
If you want the shop-floor version, Stacey and I talked about it in Episode 23 of The Automated Author, “Claude Fable Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?”
Here is the part I want you to hear, because this is where the AI productivity fantasy usually lies by omission:
The draft still needs me.
The first version of chapter one was wrong. Wrong housekeeper name. Wrong servant authority. Wrong tone. Elizabeth Bennet came off cold in a way that was not her. The machine could produce a huge amount of text, but it still needed the author to say, “No. This is not what success looks like. Try again, and this time understand the book.”
Then it improved.
Dramatically.
That is the present reality of AI-assisted authorship. It is not push button, receive finished legacy.
It is orchestration.
You give the machine context. You catch what it misses. You build the workflow. You decide what matters. You recognize when it has given you words but not yet a book.
And still: 99,000 words.
Not finished words. Not final words. But draft matter. Clay. A book-shaped thing that did not exist before, now waiting for the only work I can do.
That is not going to take me months.
The Bell
Then I asked for a single-card reading about the two books I am struggling to finish and publish.
It gave me Judgment, but renamed in the image as The Summons.
This card got under my ribs.
A woman stands barefoot on a moonlit beach. There are unfinished books on the sand. A publishing-house sign hangs over a brass bell. The city lights in the distance are readers, shelves, reviews, possibilities, future.
She is not being asked to leap into the ocean.
She is being asked to ring the bell.
That image gets me out of ego. Out of vanity. Out of the self-imposed obstacle course where every book becomes a referendum on whether I still have it.
I have Responsibility as one of my top ten CliftonStrengths. I blame being a military kid and spouse. You learn to rationalize some very hard things as duty. Holidays missed. Crisis handled alone. Supporting your mother as a child. You call it responsibility because what else are you going to call it and keep moving?
So no, I am not always comfortable doing things for fame or financial success.
But I can answer a call.
I can ring a bell.
Readers have waited since 2019 for new books in this series. The series itself started in 2014. I have the power to give them two books and the ending.
Also, I have never finished a series before.
Novelty, too, for the win.
The Field Note
AI has changed my relationship with time.
That is the thing I keep circling.
Not productivity as a moral virtue. Not hustle. Not “do more until you disappear inside your own calendar.”
Time.
Found time.
Spare time.
Enough time to work out.
Enough time to finish the books.
Enough time to stop treating every task as a private mountain I have to climb alone.
The machine gives me speed, yes. But more than that, it gives me language, structure, reminders, focus, and a way back into motion when emotion has turned sticky.
The work still belongs to me.
The bell still belongs to me.
But I am not standing on the beach alone anymore.
Talk robot to me. xo EAW