Learned Geek Blog

It's hour 6 of debugging. The bug is fixed. This is not the time to write something entertaining—but it is the perfect time to write something useful.

Everyone's hunting for em dashes. Meanwhile, the real tell is the cadence. You'll FEEL it. Here's when I care about AI voice — and when I don't.

There's a moment in every project where the thing you've been building becomes real. In software, it's the first production deploy.

ChatGPT will not write your novel for you. After months of trying, here's what AI actually does well for fiction—and where it fails catastrophically.

Tonight I'm joining Novel90's Spring 2026 cohort. 90 days to turn a messy first draft into something publishable. Here's why I'm doing it publicly.

Completing a novel, submitting to Novel90, and honoring the patient hound who inspired a character that watches across 500 years.

What NaNoWriMo taught me about process: write fast to discover, revise slow to refine, and be ruthless about your patterns.

What 400+ Celtic deities taught me about moral complexity: forces that are neither good nor evil, but necessary and dangerous at once.

A worldbuilding breakthrough: what if Irish stone circles weren't just settings, but a neural network across the land?

The brutal revision where I cut every explanation of my supernatural forces—and learned to trust my readers.

How I stopped writing chatty demons and learned to ground the supernatural in universal human experience.

Every novel has an origin story. Mine started with a superhero game avatar, transformed when my dog died, and became literary dark fantasy.