I write for a living, so maybe it comes from dozens of bosses, editors, writing advice, writers’ circles, teachers, and even just identifying as a woman and a firstborn daughter = “everything you do must be perfect”.

From the beginning, my whole purpose for starting Substack was about two things:

1. Write things that make me flinch a little when I publish them. Which is another way of saying: write from the vulnerable place of my heart. Or, put another way… embrace the cringe.

2. Publish things I don’t feel are “perfect” yet.

When you hear artists talk about their latest work, there’s this overarching talk of pride.

“I’m really proud of this album/movie/book/painting…”

I just assumed that something had to be perfect for me to be proud of it. But yesterday, in the temple of my own creative self, I realized something that felt revelatory: pride and perfection have nothing to do with each other.

Like, at all.

Something can be unfinished, flawed, still becoming, and I can be proud of it now. To prove it (mostly to myself), I’ll list some personal things I’m proud of below.

• I’m proud of my first novel. It might not go anywhere, which kind of breaks my heart if I'm honest. But it’s finished. And I’ve allowed myself to move on and write other novels.

• I’m proud of the time away from work to heal burnout. Am I fully healed? No. Is my body still throwing tantrums? Yes. Am I taking a real financial hit? You bet! But damn, I feel so much better than I did.

• I’m proud my cat is still alive. He’s 16 and has kidney disease and a list of medications that could rival an elderly Victorian duke, but he’s doing pretty well for an old guy. I’ve kept him alive. More than that, I’ve kept him comfortable and loved.

• I’m proud of the children’s books I made. Are they literary masterpieces? lol. But somewhere there are kids falling asleep to them, or wondering what cats dream about because I made those books exist.

• I’m proud that I’ve made a living as a writer for more than a decade. It has burned me out. I’ve worked for people I loved and people I absolutely did not. I’ve written things I’m proud of and things I barely remember. But I did the thing I wanted to do when I was young. I became a writer.

• I’m proud that I’m still trying to figure out how to be one.

Subscribe now

• I’m proud that I started dancing again. I’m not a dancer. Or maybe I am. I don’t know. That might be part of the point.

• I’m proud that I learned how to DJ (more on this later).

• I’m proud of the things I’ve stopped doing. (Wearing uncomfy bras, eating things my body doesn’t like, stuffing my anger down, etc.)

• I’m proud of the work I’ve turned down. Google, Apple, Shopify, Vogue. Ofc they all popped up when I was sick. My body said no, so I said no. And I cried about saying no, trust me. But also, how cool that I even got those offers? My younger self was like, “we made it.”

Leave a comment

• I’m proud of the days I’ve done almost nothing.

• I’m proud that I’m (slowly) becoming a person who can make something without immediately asking whether it is good enough to deserve to exist.

This Substack isn’t perfect. Some of the things I publish will be half-formed. Some might embarrass me later. Some might be wrong. Some might be beautiful.

I think I can be proud of them anyway.

Actually, I know I can be proud of them anyway.

I’ll end with a sister exchange from last week. She responded to my last Substack because she wanted to make Matthew McConaughey’s weird tuna salad.

her

are we making Matthew McConaughey tuna salad

me

We absolutely can and should

lol are u getting my Substack?

her

yea obv

my cringe sister is a writer i have to support

So there you have it. I’m a writer.

A cringe one, obviously.

And a proud one too.

Share

I will say: the UX/UI is genuinely good. Clean, easy, and it hides your follower count and everyone else’s, which means it doesn’t matter, which means everyone’s just being a person. Thank fuck. Enter my screenshots of the app. Below are people voting on their favorite recommendations, but the weirder they are, the better:

It feels like reading a magazine in 1998 in a way. Kind of like flipping past a “10 things I’m loving this month” sidebar, except the things are bonkers, or straight up life-changing and helpful. I’ve also spent more money on this app with basically no one on it than I have in years, maybe ever (I never succumbed to the Insta and TikTok infomercial ads). So why now? Because I want an obscure cardamom-cashew-almond-coconut butter from Portland that no one on the East Coast knows about yet (delicious btw). And that combo just sounded rlly good.

As a copywriter, my brain keeps trying to name what's happening here. It feels less like influencer marketing with clout and more like distributed word-of-mouth. Because people don't want more content. They want taste. Trusted taste. Maybe that's what comes after the attention economy burns out its last influencer.

Share

It’s also very funny that Lena Dunham is just... there. Posting her favorite beach reads for goths, RealReal finds (sorry, the realest real), plus her collection of “writerly rings” seen below, and various substances she rubs on her body.

See More Rec League

Recs I’m Obsessed With:

• Eating sticky summer fruit in the shower (genius).

  

• Coriander and cumin tea for bloating.

  Share

Things I’ve Learned

• Psyduck is a migraine sufferer. (No further context given or needed.)

• Pizza insurance: eat exactly one slice of pizza before going to an event where you’re unsure of the food situation. If there’s food, you haven’t ruined your appetite. If there’s no food, you’re not starving. Pizza insurance. I think about this constantly now.

• A deep NetGalley hack: everyone knows Libby, but apparently, NetGalley is publishing’s open secret. Sign up with a profile listing where you post reviews (hi, maybe you just post book reviews on Rec League), and you can request early manuscripts of books that haven’t even come out yet.

• Advice for if you’re up at 3 AM and can’t sleep: send good vibes to new moms because they’re probably up and suffering too.

• Butter-stuffed dates are a VERY good thing.

• This Trust Me Edit below about bringing your lover to the DMV as a test.

  

• Beguine mysticism. (I bought two books on it after seeing this video in a Rec post)

• Matthew McConaughey’s tuna salad recipe (wasabi paste, jalapeño chips, apple, tuna, corn, peas…) I tried. It’s really good and really weird.

  

The weirdness and helpfulness of the internet have finally returned. I feel digitally aligned again, even if I'm still chasing that feeling offline, and my desire for digital wayfinding has resurfaced.

Anyway. I love it there. Join me?

Subscribe now

But the highlight of the whole trip was the grocery store.

A perfectly normal, fluorescent-lit, absolutely unremarkable grocery store, where my dad and I went to buy water. That was it. That was the thing. One hour, alone together, for the first time the entire trip.

We drove across the street in the giant black SUV he rented that seats nine people, which felt absurd for a water run but also very Las Vegas, very him. And as the cool glass doors parted open, I just… asked.

“Dad, where do you think your fear comes from? Like… are there specific memories from childhood you can point to?”

I braced myself. I had a whole strategy prepared for extracting information from a man of his generation, which mostly involved patience and misdirection, as if I were some kind of emotional archaeologist. Instead, he answered immediately.

“When I was little, my younger brother was born with hemophilia. I had to watch him scream in pain just from a bruise, all night, every night, for years. My mom spent all her time trying to soothe him. There was just so much pain. I remember your grandfather going into the village, knocking on doors at 2 a.m., asking for blood. I would sleep next to my brother’s bed, trying to make him feel less alone. And because it took everyone’s attention to keep him alive… I didn’t really have my mom anymore.”

I was standing in the chip aisle of a Las Vegas grocery store, holding absolutely nothing, when my dad handed me everything.

Quick context. My dad grew up on a ranch in Mexico with no electricity. He rode a donkey to school. His father dug a well for water. Honestly, parts of his childhood sound less “Baby Boomer” and more “19th-century regional folklore.”

The reason they came to the United States at all was to get better medical care for their little brother. And the reason I had even asked him this question was because a Reiki/Kundalini practitioner I’d been working with told me something that honestly rearranged my brain a little:

Some of my fears might not actually be mine.

Not metaphorically, like literally.

The theory was basically that fear can become inherited. Passed through generations like some kind of emotional relay race nobody consented to joining. That my nervous system may have copied my father’s survival patterns before I was even born.

Share

If I could understand his fears, maybe I could finally understand my own.

That was the theory anyway. And suddenly… a lot of things started making sense.

My dad has severe anxiety around illness, blood, chronic disease, and physical suffering. Which, when you grow up watching your little brother slowly die from a bruise, tracks.

But then there was the harder thing. The thing that took me a few days and one very long shower to even look at directly.

Most of the love and attention I received from him growing up came when I was sick or hurt. He’d transform. Soften. Show up completely. And I started wondering something that I genuinely cannot say out loud without feeling like I need to immediately clarify that I’ve been in therapy and I understand how this sounds:

Did my body know that somehow?

Because I’ve had migraines since I was six years old. Six. And I’ve spent two decades trying to figure out why, elimination diets, neurologists, and one extremely confident acupuncturist who blamed my liver. But standing in that grocery store, holding a case of water, I thought: what if my body wasn’t broken? What if it was just trying to get his attention in the only language his nervous system fully understood?

Not his native tongue of Spanish. A more universal one.

Pain.

The kind that made my dad stop, turn around, and actually see me. Actually, take care of me.

The next fear hit even harder.

“When I was little, there were people trying to kill our family and take the ranch.”

I’m sorry. WHAT.

“Yeah. Bandits. I used to hide under my bed while all the adults talked about it. It was a real threat for a while.”

Oh.

Oh.

So THAT’S where it comes from. The thing I had spent years trying to locate, like some kind of psychological missing persons case. Why I hated being home alone at night. Why every unfamiliar sound made my nervous system light up like — well, like a casino floor, as it turns out, which is where I was processing this information in real time. Why I had mentally rehearsed escape routes in houses I’d lived in for years. Years. I once mapped the exits of an apartment I’d rented for four months.

I have no remembered trauma around any of this. No incident. No night that explains it. Just a body that has been on low-grade high alert for my entire adult life, apparently because armed men threatened to kill my father’s family and steal their home when he was a small child, which he mentioned the way you’d mention a weird neighbor.

Suddenly my fear didn’t feel irrational anymore. It felt inherited. By this point, we had migrated deeper into the water aisle, my dad methodically placing giant cases of Smartwater into the cart one by one while recounting decades of unprocessed terror. There was something so specifically unhinged about the combination — the Smartwater, the fluorescent lights, the trauma, that at one point I genuinely wondered if the bottles were absorbing it. Smartwater is just regular water that went to therapy. Maybe it could handle it.

Then came fear number three.

When my dad was older, he worked on an oil rig. Sometimes the workers would hide from the boss so he wouldn’t catch them resting. I will have a lot to say about this when I get to my work trauma, which is its own Substack, its own memoir, possibly its own diagnostic category.

One day, he crawled into one of the rig’s giant metal legs to hide. And accidentally fell asleep. He woke up disoriented in total darkness, convinced he was trapped.

He said he had nightmares about it for years. Which explained a lot. It was unsettling how neatly our fears overlapped.

His fear of illness became my health anxiety. His fear of intruders became my inability to fully relax alone at night. His fear of entrapment became my claustrophobia. Even the way we catastrophize feels genetically coordinated.

We talked about heavier things after that. Things I won’t share here.

But somehow, just knowing it’s from him, knowing I didn’t generate it, I just inherited it, makes me feel freer of it. Like I can hand it back. Just to stop carrying it as mine.

The next day, my best friend and I rented a car and drove into the desert while it rained almost the entire time, which felt correct. Meteorologically appropriate.

Share

We stopped somewhere among the red rocks, and I got out of the car while she stayed inside, watching me through the windshield with the particular expression she reserves for my more unhinged moments, not concern exactly, more like fond documentation. I stood there, soaking wet, staring up at the sky like an emotionally exhausted desert cryptid who had maybe done too much inner child work.

And then — I swear to God — the sun came out.

A double rainbow appeared over the rocks.

I know how that sounds. I know. But it happened, and I was there, and my best friend saw it too, and sometimes the universe just does that. Sometimes it gives you the double rainbow. Sometimes after you cry in a Las Vegas grocery store with your father about bandits and oil rigs and the specific shape of inherited terror, you get to stand in the desert in the rain and watch the sky do something completely unnecessary and beautiful.

Subscribe now

But that serotonin-soaked stretch left me more open than usual. More porous. I started getting little downloads, snippets of clarity from thin air, the occasional answer to a question I hadn’t asked out loud but wondered about.

So two weeks ago, once my mind was quiet enough, I asked the universe or god or my guides (whoever responds, idk) why I’m still having digestive issues after two years of doing everything right. Clean diet. Supplements. Acupuncture. Reiki. Gastroenterologists. Testing. The whole tedious routine.

What else is there?

The answer came back simple:

It’s not just what you eat. It’s what you consume with your eyes. Your ears. Your sensing body.

Sounds biblical. But it felt true enough.

Because I’ve been burned out for three years, and to self-soothe, I’ve definitely been mainlining social media, K-dramas, and whatever show is trending that week. I love storytelling. So does my brain. And meaning making. And being in advertising meant I had a professional alibi for it: I needed to know the trends, understand them like that demographic would, like that gen would.

So I gave myself a week. Instagram for thirty seconds a day, just enough to answer messages. TikTok was deleted entirely. No TV or movies. No disturbing fantasy audiobooks or sci-fi novels (I love sci-fi, y’all, this hurt). What was left was books, boredom, long walks, cooking, writing my romantasy novel, and rambling conversations with friends and family.

Day two, my thumb kept opening Instagram on autopilot, twice an hour, like a tic. Day three, I was tired. Day four, I was really tired and had to take a nap at 1 PM. I also felt kinda sick. By day five, I was lying on the couch thinking a quick twenty-minute nap would set me up for the rest of the afternoon, when I had a small idea and grabbed my phone to research it. Twenty minutes later, I was wired. No nap in sight.

And that’s when I saw it.

I was using my own curiosity, my own phone, as an upper. Every time I’d felt tired in the last however-many years, I’d reached for a screen and gotten a hit that felt like rest but wasn’t. I don’t drink caffeine. I didn’t realize I’d been drinking it through my eyes.

What surprised me most was how physical it was. Not emotional, not even really mental at first. My body wanted to be tired. It wanted to lie down without me jacking my nervous system back up with research tabs, Reels, and Zoom calls. The tiredness I kept “fixing” was just my actual baseline trying to show up. I hadn’t met it in years.

And — this is the part I still can’t believe — my gut started improving. Last week. After two years of clean eating, and all the things not moving the needle, a week of not watching things did. Whatever voice came through in meditation was right. My eyes were eating, and my stomach knew.

The one thing I let myself watch was Crows Are White on Sunday night, a documentary about a strict sect of monks in Japan. Beautifully shot, a gorgeous soundtrack, and the documentarian's own story bleeds through in ways that scream: men will do anything but go to therapy. I loved it. It's also about monks who walk a marathon every single night for seven years, no missed days, no stopping once you've committed. If they break it, the sect requires them to end their own lives. I picked my nails the entire time. Something I hadn't done all week.

Share

It’s been seven days now. I’ve given myself some grace and checked Instagram three times today, and the strangest thing is I don’t really want to be there. It feels like a Snickers bar I used to crave and now find a little chemical. I don’t know yet where the balance lives; that’s the next phase. For now, I’m still not watching anything at night. My husband is reading me The Republic of Pirates as I fall asleep, and there’s more giggling in our bed than there’s been in a while

.

I didn’t realize I needed to know how tired my body actually was.

Subscribe now

But here I am. Somewhere between palms and ashes, death and resurrection, following the thread of my own emotions and finding that it keeps looping back to him. Keeps orbiting one central thing: abandonment. Work, in my dad’s case. Always, work took him away from me. Still does. Most of our phone calls end with “Hey, I’ve got to take this call.” Unless something dramatic happened to my health or my siblings’ health. That’s when I’d get all of him.

I didn’t realize until a few weeks ago that my body had learned this.

The Pattern

When I told my dad about my adenomyosis and endometriosis diagnosis, at first it felt like love. He dove in, researching, sending me everything he could find. Article after article after article. But by day three, something in me started to tighten. His panic became my panic. And underneath, my inner child smiled because she knew:

To be fair, the man has earned his fear. He grew up on a ranch in Mexico without electricity or decent medical care. He lost siblings, had a brother with a scary mental illness, and watched his own mother lose her mind. HIV claimed two family members later in his life. Scary things happened to everyone he loved, and no one had the resources to stop it. So he learned that bodies betray you — and honestly, there’s truth to that. He just never taught me the other part: that bodies are also amazing. Instead, research became his tool against fear. I get it. I really do. Because I do it now, too.

So yeah, his fear became my nervous system’s native language. And I’ve been speaking it fluently my whole life without realizing it wasn’t mine.

I asked him to stop sending articles about ozone therapy and methylene blue. He didn’t. And I felt something I didn’t expect… disrespect, and something older. Abandonment. A word I always thought was too dramatic for my situation. But my body doesn’t care about nuance.

The Fire Circle

On Palm Sunday, I sat around a fire with six women to say goodbye to a friend’s father, who died a year ago. Half of my friend group doesn’t have fathers who are alive anymore. But we still carry the wounds. One by one, we talked about our fathers using their full names — different stories, different men, totally different dynamics. Some had really painful relationships with their dads. Some had sweet, loving relationships. But at some point, it landed in the circle, almost all at once: he wasn’t fully there. Emotionally, there was a gap. No explanation needed. We all recognized it immediately. Dad was always at work. Dad fell asleep when there were big feelings. Dad didn’t know how to raise a girl. Dad distanced himself when I turned 16. Dad sent money instead of coming. Dad badmouthed Mom.

Just a few popular ones. (There were also many good things we said about our dads, but that’s for another time.)

One woman in the circle is Catholic, and she brought up a part of the Easter story I had never really metabolized in my Christian upbringing. There’s a moment on the cross where Jesus says, “Why have you forsaken me, God?” Which is really: Dad, I need you. Where are you? Can you help me? I don’t want to die! Knowing there will be no saving. No help is coming. Just you, hung out by life, without much support.

And if even Jesus felt abandoned by his own father — the most spiritually connected man in Christian canon, then maybe this feeling isn’t a sign that something went wrong. Maybe it’s a rite of passage. Maybe everyone who has ever loved someone and needed them and not gotten it has stood exactly here. Which is somehow both devastating and the least alone I’ve ever felt.

Passover is this week too, which feels right on time for this work. That story has always been about crying out to a father who seems absent and finding that the liberation was happening anyway, just slower and stranger than anyone expected.

Going to the Source

I promise this next part gets extremely woo woo. I’m not even a little bit sorry.

After sitting with all of this, I realized my body had gotten so wired to crisis-as-love that I’d go into a low-grade panic whenever my dad texted me, and he was texting me like 20x a day at this point. Like my nervous system would sound the alarm: something really bad must be happening. Someone might be dying.

So I went to his manager.

He appeared mostly as my dad, but not quite. In my mind’s eye his heads were multiplied — placed inside a glass hexagon, rotating, each one clicking into place before shifting to the next, sometimes blurring mid-turn. Like his spirit was tuned to every frequency at once. So wide open to everything that he misses what’s right in front of him. It sounds creepy. In that liminal space it was just true. He really can see things others can’t. He just pays for that gift with attention deficit in his human body.

I told Spirit-Dad everything. How I wanted more time with my actual dad. How much he’d hurt me by not being there, by always choosing work. I told him I didn’t want to carry this sadness around anymore, this abandonment, this anxiety that loops in my body because of his fear around illness. And I told him I didn’t know how to fix it.

As the oldest daughter, I had to sit with that for a minute. Because I usually do all the emotional work in the family. He then spun a giant orb of blue light and placed it over my heart like a bandage.

“This will heal what I broke. Let me deal with George down there. Come see me again in seven days.”

Okay. Wild.

What Happened Next

The next day, my actual dad — a devout Christian man, for context — introduced me to a Reiki master in Las Vegas and offered to pay for my distance therapy. The incessant texting stopped. I raised an eyebrow at all of it, and also just let it be.

Seven days later, I went back to meet with my dad’s higher self again. This time, he placed a pink orb in my heart and said it was for strength. It needed to be there for three days to do its work.

The Reiki healer told me he’d worked with my dad before. Apparently, my dad would fill their entire sessions talking about supplements he was trying, articles he’d found, things he wanted to fix about his own health. Not out of disrespect, he just couldn’t get quiet enough to let anyone in. He wants to be well so badly. He just doesn’t trust his body, or anyone else, to actually get him there. So he researches. He optimizes. He sends articles. It’s the same loop, whether it’s aimed at himself or at me. Something about hearing that from a stranger cracked the door open. Acceptance started to come in.

At the end of those three days, my dad and I talked on the phone for an hour. Just sweet and normal — and for once, I didn’t feel the ick afterward, like

something had been taken from me. Then he invited me to Las Vegas to see the Reiki guy in person. He’ll be working while I’m there. But I have a feeling what’s waiting for me in the desert isn’t really about him at all.

My sister is coming. My friend is coming. I don’t have to do this alone. I don’t have to face my father wound alone. I don’t have to heal my father wound alone.

My Resurrection

I don’t think healing a father wound means resolving your actual father. For me, it’s been quieter and weirder than that. It’s been noticing the link between love and crisis in my own body. Letting myself feel how much I wanted without making him a villain for not knowing how to give it to me. Seeing him clearly enough to understand that his absence wasn’t about me, but it still shaped me.

Here’s the aha: my dad taught me to be afraid of my body. That it will turn against me, torture me, betray me without warning. And I believed him — because every time my body broke down, that’s when love showed up. Crisis meant connection. Pain meant presence. So of course, my nervous system learned to live in a low hum of emergency. Of course, I escalated every weird symptom, every difficult feeling, every one of his anxious texts straight to a ten in my body. That was the only love language we had.

But something has shifted. Slowly, and I’m honestly still in the middle of it. There’s peace where there used to be extreme worry. I’m not matching his panic anymore. I don’t need the crisis to feel the connection. And if that’s what resurrection means, just my own nervous system finally putting down a weapon it’s been carrying since childhood, then fuck yes. I’ll take it.

Not my father’s healing.

Mine.

I’m going to Las Vegas next weekend, to be continued…

TLDR: Publishing is in a full moral panic about AI. Nobody has defined the rules. The detectors don't work. And somehow it's always a woman whose career goes first. Cool system, everyone.

We’ve been here before. Every industry, when it starts to lose control of its old systems, looks for something to blame. Right now, that something is AI and women authors. If you zoom out, the panic feels more like a proxy war for deeper problems the industry hasn’t solved: a business model that no longer reliably discovers or supports new voices, a shrinking appetite for risk (especially with debut authors), a growing reliance on “proven audience” over editorial instinct, a widening gap between how stories are made and how they’re gatekept. AI just happens to be the most convenient villain.

Suspicion is the new standard

When an industry doesn’t know how to talk about something, it defaults to policing it. We’ve quietly entered a moment where anything published after 2023 comes with an asterisk. Was this really written by a human? Was there “help”? How much is too much? The answers aren’t clear, but the consequences are. Writers are quickly learning that even the perception of using new tools can put their careers at risk because the industry doesn’t know how to talk about them. And to make things worse, “this sounds like AI” has become our new shorthand for “I didn’t like the writing,” — which isn’t great for anyone.

The other thing nobody’s saying out loud

Publishing and corporate America have spent the last three years using AI to eliminate writers’ jobs — copywriters (hi!), content strategists, editorial assistants — because companies no longer want to pay for writing. (We’re expensive, it’s true.) But the moment a writer uses AI themselves? Career over. Basically, we’re allowed to be displaced by it. Just not to adapt to it. And let’s be clear about what readers actually care about:

Here are AI’s current tells (from someone who’s been around language long enough):

• Every noun gets an adjective.

• Every action gets a weather simile.

• Light and dark metaphors everywhere.

• Lists of three.

• The construction something x, something y.

• The sentence that goes this isn’t x — it’s y.

• Em dashes separating two perfectly balanced clauses, over and over. Parallel everything.

• High drama, high emotion, technically flawless — and somehow completely airless.

• All of these are stacked on top of each other in every paragraph.

• No run-on sentences.

• No questionable grammar.

• No imperfections.

BUT: great writers constantly break rules. You see absolutely nothing imperfect? That’s the tell. There are no shortcuts to good writing. There never were.

According to Victoria Aveyard, the only true, irrefutable proof of AI use that can get a book pulled right now is a prompt left behind, an admission of use, or a whistleblower from inside the team. And if you’ll notice, it’s an author drawing the line, not a publisher. None of the big five has clearly defined these rules, and that silence is loud. In the meantime, writers are left navigating AI detectors that don’t work, cancel culture that moves fast, and the expectation that they market their own books — because publishers, by their own admission, don’t really know how to sell them. Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle testified under oath in 2022, saying that “they simply hope a few books stick.”

So far, the most comprehensive guidelines on AI use I’ve found are from the beloved Authors Guild, and honestly, I mostly agree with them. You can read their full AI usage policy here. What I personally love is that they acknowledge the gray area: that some writers use generative AI to research, outline, brainstorm, or work with as a creative partner. It makes a case for AI agents programmed solely on the author’s own work rather than on the algorithm. It’s a starting point. But the conversation needs to keep moving, and the industry needs to actually show up for it. This can’t all fall on writers to police and worry about while cancel culture sharpens its knives.

The case everyone’s talking about

In March 2026, Hachette Book Group pulled the U.S. release of Shy Girl by Mia Ballard and discontinued its U.K. edition after allegations that the book was largely AI-generated. Industry coverage called it one of the first high-profile instances of a major publisher retracting a commercial title over suspected AI involvement. Mia Ballard claimed her editor used AI, not her, and is suing her for it. But there’s another layer I find more interesting. This book reportedly moved through the full publishing pipeline — acquisition, developmental edits, line edits, production since Mia self-published it last February 2025. Multiple professional checkpoints designed to ensure quality and integrity. So how did it pass through all of that without being flagged earlier? If the concern is truly about quality or authorship, the breakdown didn’t happen at the level of the writer. It happened inside the system that’s supposed to evaluate the work.

In the early, visible cases of authors being publicly penalized for alleged AI use, a disproportionate number are women. That’s not automatically proof of bias — but it’s not nothing either. Publishing has a long history of questioning women’s authorship, credibility, and right to be in the room at all. Who really wrote this? Who got help? Does she deserve to be here? Those questions have always landed harder on women. So when a new, murky line gets introduced, one as slippery as “how much assistance is too much,” or as subjective as “this writing felt off, must be AI” it’s not surprising that enforcement feels uneven. We’ve seen this before. It just has a new name now.

AI was already inside the building

AI didn’t arrive in publishing in 2023. It’s been embedded in the workflow for years. The grammar checker in Microsoft Word has used machine learning for over a decade. Grammarly, which launched in 2009, now offers full-sentence rewrites, tone adjustments, and generative suggestions (I used it to improve the grammatical flow of some sentences in this article, and then promptly edited those sentences five more times, because I’m a writer). Amazon uses machine learning to determine which books are surfaced and recommended, which in turn controls what actually sells. Major publishers have publicly discussed using AI-informed tools to evaluate market trends and position titles. On the agenting side, tools like Publisher Rocket use algorithmic analysis to assess category demand before a book is even pitched. None of this is theoretical. It’s operational. So when we talk about “AI in writing,” we have to ask: what are we actually talking about?

But right now, those lines aren’t clearly defined anywhere. And the industry is already using these tools — selectively, strategically, and often invisibly — which makes it difficult to draw a clear moral boundary when those same technologies show up in writers’ hands.

What we’re seeing isn’t the arrival of AI in publishing.

It’s the redistribution of access to it.

Writing was never a solo act

I spoke with an editor at Penguin Random House last year who told me their imprint only takes on a handful of books a year because each one goes through five to seven full rounds of edits with their team. Every big book you see on bestseller lists has a team. A process. The reality is that editors shape manuscripts. Ghostwriters exist. Co-writers finish chapters. Entire books have been built through collaboration for decades. So the question isn’t whether assistance exists. It’s why this particular form of assistance is suddenly being treated as disqualifying, while all the others are normalized.

Where writers are actually learning now

Many emerging writers aren’t coming up through MFA programs or traditional pipelines anymore. They’re studying structure through film and television. Writing obsessively in private. Iterating quickly. Learning through experimentation instead of permission.

In a recent episode of her podcast, Victoria Aveyard discussed how fan fiction used to serve as a protected space — a place to try things out, be messy, and develop a voice without pressure. Now she describes it as a scouting ground. If something performs well, it’s no longer just a play. It’s a potential IP. That shift matters because it means there are fewer places where writers can be bad in private. Fewer places to experiment without consequence.

When I was learning to write, I tried on voices the way you try on clothes. I wrote like J.K. Rowling for a stretch. Then swung hard into Tolkien, overwrought prose and all, completely unironically. I’ve also spent years writing in other people’s voices professionally — Samsung, Netflix, cat food brands. You learn a lot about your own voice by inhabiting voices that aren’t yours. That’s actually how it works. I’ve been writing professionally for over a decade. Six to eight hours a day, for years. You don’t shortcut your way to a voice. You build it slowly, by noticing what doesn’t sound like you and adjusting. By following the thread of what does. By your boss saying “what if we tried this” seventeen times in a row until something finally clicks. It’s unglamorous. It takes forever. That process doesn’t disappear because new tools exist. If anything, it becomes more important. Because at a certain point, you can just feel when something is yours and when it isn’t. No tool can manufacture that instinct. And honestly? No serious writer wants it to.

My hot take? Let writers cook.

We’re in a transition period. It’s messy. People are angry. Like, really angry. And they have a right to be. Artists shouldn’t be replaced by robots. And new tools always create a phase where the rules aren’t clear yet, people experiment, some of it’s great, some of it isn’t. Trying to clamp down too early, without nuance or clarity, doesn’t protect the art form. It just narrows who feels allowed to participate. I’m not here to tell you whether to use AI in all or some of its myriad forms or not. I genuinely don’t know where I land some days, and I think that’s actually the honest answer right now. Gray areas feel gray. Unresolved. And I’d rather sit in that discomfort than pretend there’s a clean take I can hand you. I’m not getting into how AI was trained or how it’s stealing writing and building on that. We all know that’s wrong, and I don’t have a direct line to Sam Altman to change that. Also, these bro’s also don’t give af.

And in the meantime — I’m curious. Are you using AI in your writing process? What are your hard nos. Which tools? Or are you too afraid to say so out loud? Because honestly, that fear might be the most telling part of all this.

Share

*For my og subscribers who signed up for moon musings and frozen frog facts, I love you for it. I needed to widen my scope a little. What you can expect going forward is less of a theme and more serialized obsessions. Thanks for being here while I figure this out. That part’s actually the fun part.

Subscribe now

Sophie Cereal is a serial, monthly-ish transmission about writing, publishing, woo-woo stuff that actually works, and whatever I’m fixated on. Expect astrology tangents. Maybe a recipe. Definitely opinions about how to stay sane on the internet and how to make the digital feel analog again. I’m like if Yoko Ono and Aubrey Plaza made a poem about a caterpillar together in a Japanese garden.

Subscribe now

It’s for: art kids, deep-conversation people, writers, makers, anyone with a magical bent. If that’s you, subscribe. I’ll show up in your inbox with a weird story that makes you go… huh…huh?…huhh. Cool?

Cool.

Subscribe now