The plate for Chapter 20, in the art deco style. That’s Seth, his dog Cooper, and the long way home.
A little over a month ago I started writing my first novel – Zero Knowledge.
I decided to publish it chapter by chapter on the Internet to accomplish a few things.
- Get my shitty first draft out there in public and get real-time feedback on it.
- See if I could write it with my primary AI alter-ego agent (Phin Argofy).
- Try to build a system for doing this that is part of AuthorMagic.
- Have fun. I love to write but I’m bored of non-fiction after nine books on entrepreneurship.
I’m twenty chapters in (of 97). Still free, still no login, still no paywall. Each chapter goes live as I write it.
If you’re new to this, Zero Knowledge is a near-term sci-fi quantum-crypto-thriller. Three twenty-something MIT grads run a quantum startup called Basalt Labs in Basalt, Colorado. One of them, Samantha, invents an algorithm that breaks classical cryptography – RSA, elliptic curves, and every public-key lock the financial system runs on. Bitcoin dies. Every secret anyone ever encrypted becomes readable. The post-quantum schemes survive, so the world has a migration path, which makes it a race instead of an apocalypse. The three founders can’t agree on what to do with the most dangerous math ever written. I wrote more about why I’m doing this and how it went live if you want the backstory.
I’ve added a few things beyond just the text since I started the project.
The book now has a cast. The chapter art keeps faces turned away or in shadow on purpose since I wasn’t confident in AI-generated faces being consistent across 97 chapters. So, the cast page holds the locked images. Some readers like this, others don’t, and if the Samantha in your head looks nothing like the one on the page, yours is the correct one. But, for those who like manga, comic books, and graphic novels (me, me, me!), the cast is a treat.
Every chapter also has a plate – one image, in the spirit of an old serialized novel. You get to pick the art style. Minimalism, art deco, brutalism, pop art, or psychedelic. They were made with an image model from a written brief per chapter.
Through chapter 20, here are people you will meet.
- Samantha Hale – Basalt Labs’ CTO. She wrote the algorithm, and she was alone in the lab when it worked.
- Marcus Reed – the CEO, and the face of the company. Everyone knows Marcus.
- Vlad – the third founder. He’s a ghost, deliberately.
- Seth – their investor, four hours down the valley in Boulder. He always answers his phone and responds immediately to email.
- Nadia – runs an atomic-physics lab up the hill at CU Boulder.
- Sable – a mysterious bad something.
There are more coming. The cast page only shows someone once you’ve actually met them, so it grows as the story does.
I’m a planner, not a pantser, so everything was locked before I wrote a sentence – 97 chapters across three parts, mapped backward from the ending. It all lives in git, the same as my software and the rest of my writing. Phin, my AI collaborator, drafts a chapter from the beat and the canon in my voice. I take that and rewrite a lot of it. Phin then reads my edits as a diff and folds what it learns back into the canon and my voice profile, so the next chapter starts a little less wrong than the last one. It’s still fundamentally my writing. Phin is a writing partner and an editor with an infinite tolerance for my bad ideas.
I don’t want this to be a one-off trick that only works because I happen to live in a terminal all day. So I’m seeing if I can turn this into a product that has two layers.
AuthorMagic is the one authors will touch. It already does the unglamorous side of being an author – sales, royalties, ads, Amazon rank monitoring, web site creation, and a bunch of other things every author now needs to do to promote their book once it is published. Now I’m adding a book creation and living book engine: chapters people can read online, a feedback system, and an agent who knows the book and will interact with anyone around it. All of this works without asking a writer to learn git or open a code editor. This was inspired by my friends Andy Sack and Adam Brotman who just released their book Agents, Inc. written with their AI agent Vera Brown.
AuthorOS is the layer underneath – the operating system that works with an author the way CompanyOS runs a company. The canon, the outline, the voice profile, the publish-and-notify pipeline, the feedback loop. Zero Knowledge is tenant number one, which is a polite way of saying I’m building this for me and tolerating all the broken things as I go so I can find them and fix them. I’m building the tools on the book, and the book on the tools, at the same time. If the workflow is any good, it should survive being handed to someone who isn’t me. Soon-ish.
Finally, the part I love as an author, but has been hard to do in the past. While there are a few tools for getting feedback on manuscripts, I’ve never found them satisfying or effective with my own workflow. So, I’m creating a system for this as I write.
Go to any chapter and select the text you want to comment on. A little box opens and you leave a note anchored to the exact words you highlighted. The first time, it asks for your name and email so I know who said what. The note lands in a database and I get an email the second you write it. It’s the margin of a manuscript, except the margin is the internet. If a line is confusing, tell me on the line. If a character does something dumb, say so where they do it. If the cryptography is wrong – and plenty of you know more of it than I do – point at the exact sentence. I’d rather learn a chapter is broken now than after I’ve built eighty more on top of something invalid.
Each note I’ve gotten has improved the book. So, by name, thank you: Fred Koehler, Terri Lonier, Paul, Sean Wise, Kate McKeown, Kristin Miller, Josh Schachter, Mike Joyce, Stavros Stathopoulos, Homan, Troy Henikoff, Rocco, Emcye, and my brother Daniel. You are my early editors!
If you want the chapters to show up in your inbox as they happen, just subscribe.
While I still don’t know if I’m any good at fiction, and am definitely a rookie in the category, I’m having a blast creating Zero Knowledge. While it might be terrible, I’m comfortable trying, and failing at stuff in public, and getting better as I learn.
Come read it, and tell me where it sucks.