I Am Haunted

Posted on by J.M. Cullen

My breath comes heavy with the foul stench of regret. Each inhale pulls rot deep into my chest, where it settles as a burn that won’t ease. My throat tightens around an ache I cannot swallow, cannot release. Behind my eyes, salt gathers, tears that refuse to fall, trapped like the words I wish I could take back.

There’s a hollowness inside me, the knowledge that I did this. Not circumstance, me, my thoughtlessness in that moment before I spoke. Helplessness consumes me. The words are gone. They live in you now. I can’t retrieve them, can’t soften them, can’t undo the pain you feel.

Now, we both carry the weight of those words. It’s the shared darkness that burns inside me.

The fair was alive with laughter. You were the prisoner of the moment, celebrated for your charm, paraded through the crowd in jest. I was doing what I always do, heckling the magistrates, playing the crowd, keeping the performance sharp. It was all part of the dance.

My words were aimed at the jailers, not you. I was in the moment, in my role, riding the energy. I didn’t see you as the target. I saw only the Lizardman, his hands wrapped around the chains, leading you past my booth.

Words don’t care about intent. They flew from my mouth, meant for one person, and landed on you. And in that moment of performance, when everything was supposed to be light and silly, I became the thing I wasn’t trying to be.

You may pardon me, and I hope you do. Not for what it spares me, but what it frees in you. When I imagine your forgiveness, I don’t see my absolution. I feel your release—the moment the burn in your chest sputters, flickers, and dies, melted away by the bright light of heaven. Grief healed the way rain falls after the long heatwave, washing away the dust, clearing the air, restoring life to the downtrodden. I hope that you walk back into every room the darkness held. I hope for laughter with no echo underneath, joy at its full weight again, owing nothing to sorrow.

You wore chains that day, and they came off with the costume. Mine I fastened myself, and no hand but mine can work the lock. Even the bright light of heaven waits for me outside a door barred from within. The burn in my own chest will not sputter and die with yours. It waits on a harder mercy, from the one man least inclined to grant it. It waits for the day I forgive myself.

I hope I can do that.

AI in the Workspace

Posted on by J.M. Cullen

When the US Copyright Office affirmed that human creativity is the deciding factor in copyrightability, it did not hand writers a blanket permission. It identified a threshold and left each of us to determine whether we stood above it. The concept of de minimis, a contribution so incidental that it does not materially affect authorship or the character of the work, typically covers things like grammar assistance, research support, brainstorming, outlining, marketing copy, and chronology. Human creativity remains the central and deciding factor. That ruling gave many writers a measure of relief, but relief is not a standard. I needed a more solid framework for using AI in my processes. What follows is not a comprehensive map of every tool I use. It is my attempt to articulate how my use of AI fits within that standard and why I believe it does.

Character Beats are those discrete emotional, cognitive, and volitional shifts through which a character, and, therefore, the reader, experiences a scene and moves from one dramatic state to another. AI offered material, but I exercised authorship through selection, rejection, transformation, and final expression of every moment the characters experience.

Theme and Meaning are the conceptual and interpretive dimensions of a narrative; the recurring abstract concerns the story develops, and the significance those concerns take on through the work’s structure, style, and dramatic action. Themes are not inserted. They emerge from the choices made at every other level of the work. AI can identify thematic territory, name concerns other works in a genre have explored, or reflect back what a scene might be saying. What it cannot do is know what each story is about in the way my life experiences shape my voice, through the pressure of every structural decision already made, through a sense of what the work is moving toward and what it must finally mean.

Voice is the identifiable verbal presence through which a narrative is articulated. It emerges from patterned linguistic and stylistic choices and gives the impression of a particular consciousness, attitude, or sensibility governing the discourse. AI did not generate voice here, because voice cannot be generated. It can only be recognized by a writer who has spent enough time with their own instincts to know when something rings true and when it doesn’t. I know what my prose sounds like at the sentence level, at the paragraph level, in dialogue, in interiority, in description. When something came back from the model that didn’t carry that sound, I knew immediately, and I wrote until it did. The governing consciousness in this narrative is not a pattern.

Character and Plot Arcs describe the interrelation between external narrative events, ordered and connected so that actions generate consequences, tensions accumulate, and the story’s dramatic pressure produces change, resistance, recognition, or self-revelation in its characters over time. Arc unfolds across hundreds of pages and thousands of decisions, each one made in relationship to everything that came before it. No element of fiction is more dependent on authorial intention than arc, because arc is argument. It is the writer’s claim about what experience does to people, what they can survive, what breaks them, and what, if anything, redeems them. I decided which pressures to apply, when to relent, and when to push until something in a character finally gave way or finally held. The shape of every arc came from that sustained, accumulated judgment.

Prose Generation is where every other element of craft either succeeds or fails. A character beat that lives only in an outline is not yet fiction. A theme that hasn’t found its sentences doesn’t exist on the page. Voice, arc, meaning: none of it becomes a story until someone writes it. I considered what AI returned, questioned it, challenged it, and measured it against the story burning inside me. AI returned material I could think with. I questioned it, pushed against it, and held it up against what I knew the story required. Sometimes it illuminated something. Sometimes it confirmed what I already suspected. But consideration is not composition. When the time came to put sentences on the page, I wrote them. The diction, rhythm, emphasis, subtext, and pacing. The imagery, the dialogue, the way a scene opens, and the way it closes. The point-of-view filtering that determines what a reader knows and when they know it. Every choice at that level was mine, made in the act of writing, and answerable to nothing but the story.

AI generates prose. They’re built to do it that way. I considered what it gave me. And then I wrote.