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.

The Turing Test of Prose

Posted on by J.M. Cullen

I built my career writing software. I built bridges between business objectives and the systems and operations that support them. I’ve written elegant, maintainable code, and I’ve written trash. You see, I allow myself to fail, sometimes spectacularly, and I’ve learned to do it right.

One thing stands out from the millions of lines of code I’ve reviewed and maintained: you can tell when someone cared. From the names they used that were well thought out, that clarified rather than obscured, to design patterns that guided you forward instead of fighting you at every turn. You can see it in the edge cases they handled before they became catastrophes, tests that proved the intent wasn’t accidental, that someone had imagined the failure and chosen not to look away.

And you could tell just as clearly when they hadn’t. Logic that worked, but only along the happy path. Patches layered over assumptions nobody had documented. Entire systems that functioned, technically, while resisting understanding at every level. Care left artifacts. So did its absence.

Prose is no different.

Readers won’t tell you they’re noticing structure. They won’t say: the sentence rhythm shifted here and I felt it, the delay before that revelation was exactly right, something was withheld and now I’m leaning in. Often, they don’t analyze. They experience.
It doesn’t matter what genre the prose is written for. We consume stories to feel hope, to imagine ourselves stronger, more capable, and braver than what we see in the mirror.

The author’s voice isn’t decoration, it’s selection, and commitment. It’s what connects readers to us, to our characters, and ultimately to themselves. For our part, as composers of prose, choices are the difference between capturing imaginations and reading weather reports. What gets noticed. What gets ignored. What is stated directly and what is allowed to remain implied, to drift, to land later or never, to become the reader’s discovery rather than the writer’s explanation. A strong voice narrows the world. It says: this and not that. This angle, this light, this moment, rather than the ten moments surrounding it.

I am amazed by what Artificial Intelligence can do. New capabilities come to light every day, every hour. Truly, the latest accomplishments are stunning. And yet.

Generated texts tend to broaden. Machines want to include everything, explain, smooth, and complete it. The generated text is coherent. It is readable. It is, in the way of all things, optimized for general approval, anonymous. No one is standing behind those words because standing behind words requires having chosen them over other words you could have chosen, meaning it, and being willing to be wrong about that choice.

AI tends toward even distribution. Clarity early. Resolution quickly. Confusion is avoided where possible. But clarity too early is a kind of loss. Meaning depends on timing, and without timing, prose flattens into information, which is a different thing entirely from experience.

Great writing is not just what is said. Writers who care think in sequence: what does the reader know now, what happens if I delay this, what gains weight if it arrives later rather than sooner. Structure creates tension the way a held breath does. The release matters because the holding came first.

At the sentence level, the difference is unmistakable. Writers who care break rhythm when it matters. They choose specificity over safety, the word that is exactly right over the word that will do. They let a sentence end sooner than expected and let the silence after it carry weight.

What is left out matters as much as what is included. More, sometimes. Omission creates participation. It creates interpretation. It signals trust. It says: I believe you can hold this gap without needing me to fill it. Generated prose fills gaps because, from a statistical perspective, gaps look incomplete. But those gaps are where meaning lives. When everything is said, nothing is discovered. The reader becomes a passenger instead of a collaborator, and something essential drains out of the experience.

The deeper risk of AI-generated text isn’t about artificiality. It’s scaled indifference. Writing produced without anyone standing behind the choices. Over time, that becomes the baseline, and we are worse for it in ways that are difficult to name and easy to feel.

The presence of a tool does not remove responsibility. It clarifies it. Because now the distinction is unavoidable. The tool produces possibilities. The author chooses what is worth keeping. That choice is where care lives.

Readers notice the difference. Not consciously. But they feel the accumulation of choices made on their behalf, choices that didn’t have to be made, decisions that cost something, and they feel the absence of those choices too, the flatness that settles in when prose has been produced rather than written.

Writers don’t pass the Turing test of prose by hiding their tools. They pass it the same way good engineers do: by leaving behind evidence that they cared enough to make decisions that didn’t have to be made, and then lived with them.

The code will tell you they cared. So will the prose.