Transparency

What I worried about

When I started this book, I was honest with myself about a question I could not skip. If I used AI to help me write a Christian novel, a novel about faith, doubt, devotion, and the quiet distortions that turn symbols into idols, could I still call it mine? Could I sit with a reader and say, in good conscience, that the author of this book is the person whose name is on it?

The easy answers did not satisfy me. Don't use AI at all felt like fear dressed as principle; the tools are real, and pretending they are not is its own kind of dishonesty. Use it casually would erode my voice over time without my noticing. Let it ghostwrite chapters was disqualifying; whatever came out the other end would no longer be mine.

So I refused all three answers and built a fourth.

The convictions I committed to

The author owns the truth of the world. Every fact about the kingdom, every character's interior, every theological beat: I lock these myself, in writing, before any drafting begins. The AI does not invent canon. If it tries to, the attempt is caught and rejected, because every claim has to trace to a source I authored.

The tool has its own gait. My hands are on the reins. Think of it less like a hammer and more like a horse under harness. The animal carries strength I do not have alone; it also has tendencies of its own, a drift, a habit, a willingness to wander if left to itself. So you bridle it. You learn its gait. You point it where you want to go, and it goes. It reads what I have already decided. It writes only where I have given it room. It does not choose the destination, or who a character is, or what a chapter means, or how the book ends. The reins are mine. The route is mine. The book is mine.

Every change is in version control. Nothing about this book is invisible to me, and nothing about how it was written is irrecoverable. Each edit is reviewable, revertible, and timestamped. There is a complete audit trail from the first sentence to the last.

Voice is mine, and drift gets caught. Christian fiction has a particular failure mode where prose drifts toward a generic, sentimental register the longer it runs. I calibrate against my own writing, not against an averaged style, and I check for that drift on a recurring schedule. When I find it, I rewrite.

What AI actually did, and did not do

AI helped me hold a long-arc story across many months and many sessions. It tracked which characters knew which things in which chapters, and flagged when a paragraph drifted from the voice I had calibrated.

It drafted scenes against beats I had already locked, then went through them with me: many cycles of revision, both sides editing, polishing, and reading back, until the voice was mine.

AI did not decide what happens in this book. It did not invent the theology, the kingdoms, the characters, or the moral architecture. Every chapter went through my judgment end to end. It does not know the ending; I do.

Where AI did make things: the two atmospheric paintings on the site, the father and son on the home page, the distant horsemen on the series page, and the twelve Part covers.

The earliest covers were generated with the tools available at the time; the more recent ones with newer models, so a reader scrolling the series may notice the craft improving Part by Part. Using AI for cover art let me get each new Part into readers' hands faster than commissioning could.

The map of Terindale was also AI-generated, at my prompting and explicit instructions. The story went through many sessions of drafting, reading, editing, and polishing. Some mine, some the tool's. The judgments are mine.

Even this website was AI-generated, the same way: many sessions, my prompting, my judgments.

On the serial editions

The Shattered Covenant releases first in serialized form: each Part on Kindle, chapter by chapter, as the larger novel is being written. My goal is that each installment, once published, stays as it was published. The eventual complete novel is a separate edition, and any revisions, for continuity, pacing, or craft, live there, not retroactively in the installments already out.

This is intent, not a binding contract. If a later chapter forces a change earlier in the work, the change goes into the complete edition, not into a Kindle short readers already own. The serial editions remain as they were released, a record of the story as readers first encountered it.

Why share this

Readers deserve to know how a book they are buying was made. I think this is a more honest answer than what I usually see: that an author used AI fully, or used none at all. I used it as a craftsman uses a tool, with deliberate constraints, on work I directed, for outcomes I owned.

If that is meaningful to you, thank you for reading. If it is disqualifying for you, I understand, and I would rather be straight about it than soft about it. Either way, the book is what I am making, and I stand behind it.