The Thirteen Minute Guide
You bought this book because you want to know how a seventy-nine-year-old first-time novelist wrote two novels totaling more than 160,000 words and published them in less than six months.
Fair enough.
I’ll give you the short version first.
Everything else in this book simply slows down and explains these same ideas in more detail.
I did not lock myself in a cabin. I did not take a writing course. I did not hire a team of editors, designers, and publishing experts. I did not spend years learning complicated software.
Before I started, I did what most people do. I went looking for books about writing.
I found plenty of them.
The problem was that almost all of the books had been written before the recent explosion in artificial intelligence and voice technology. They were filled with useful advice about plot, character, dialogue, and discipline, but they assumed a writing process that revolved around sitting at a keyboard and typing every word yourself.
That was not the world I was entering.
Then I looked for newer books.
Those had a different problem.
Many of them focused on using AI to generate entire stories, entire books, and even entire publishing businesses. The author became more of a supervisor than a storyteller. That approach never interested me. I did not want a machine to write a novel for me.
I wanted to write the novel myself.
What I was looking for was something in between.
A practical guide for someone who wanted to remain the storyteller while using modern tools to remove friction from the process.
I never really found that book.
So I built my own workflow instead.
The stories are mine.
The voice is mine.
The technology simply helped me tell them faster.
Here is what I did.
First, I stopped typing.
For most of my life, I assumed writing meant sitting at a keyboard and pecking away one finger at a time. The problem was that my mind moved faster than my hands. By the time I typed one sentence, I had already thought of three more.
Then I discovered dictation.
Every morning I put in my AirPods, opened Microsoft Word, clicked the microphone icon, opened a new document, and started talking. Not perfectly. Not carefully. Just talking.
I treated the computer like a tape recorder and told the story the same way I would tell it to a friend sitting across the kitchen table.
That changed everything.
Second, I gave every writing session a simple intention.
Not an outline.
Not a chapter plan.
One sentence.
What needs to happen today?
Who wants what?
Where is the emotional ending?
For example:
“Today I want to tell the story of Chet trying to tame the horse that had already broken his leg. Mary Ellen walks out carrying a rifle and tells him that if he doesn’t get off the horse, she isn’t going to shoot him—she’s going to shoot the horse.”
That was enough.
The intention became my diving board. Once I knew where I was headed, I started talking.
Third, I stopped trying to write perfectly.
This may be the most important lesson in this entire book.
Drafting and judging cannot happen at the same time.
When I dictated, I gave myself permission to be messy. Repeated words. Awkward sentences. Missing punctuation. None of that mattered.
My only job was to move the story forward.
I could clean it up later.
Fourth, I used AI as both my first editor and my research assistant.
Not my writer.
My editor.
After dictating a scene, I asked ChatGPT or Copilot to clean up punctuation, organize paragraphs, remove obvious repetition, and point out places where the writing became confusing.
I always gave the same instruction:
“Preserve my voice.”
The stories remained mine.
The memories remained mine.
The characters remained mine.
The AI simply helped clean the windshield.
But that wasn’t all.
Almost every writing session, I’d hit a question that could have stopped me for hours.
What color hat did a Texas Ranger wear in 1940?
How cold was the cockpit of a C-46 flying the Hump at twenty-seven thousand feet?
Would there have been ice on the inside of the windshield?
What did a truck stop coffee cup look like in East Texas in 1958?
Instead of leaving the manuscript and disappearing into an internet rabbit hole, I simply asked.
Within seconds I had enough information to keep writing.
That may have been one of AI’s greatest gifts.
It protected momentum.
Research became something I did along the way instead of something that stopped the story.
If I needed more time to research something, I made a note and came back to it later. Research is one of my favorite parts of writing, but I learned not to let it interrupt a story that was already moving.
Fifth, I wrote almost every morning.
Not all day.
Not eight hours.
Most mornings I wrote for about two hours.
At dictation speed, that usually produced between 1,500 and 2,500 words of raw material.
On one memorable morning I dictated more than 6,000 words.
Some days were better than others. Some scenes were later cut. Forward momentum mattered more than perfect sentences.
I wasn’t trying to write a finished book. I was trying to create something worth coming back to tomorrow. The polishing would take far longer than the drafting.
But the story stayed warm because I kept returning to it.
Sixth, I joined a writers workshop.
This may have been as important as any technology.
Every few weeks I shared pages with other writers. They found weak spots, confusing sections, and places where the story dragged.
More importantly, they encouraged me to keep going.
Writing may be solitary.
Finishing often is not.
Seventh, I learned publishing one step at a time.
I did not become a technology expert.
I became a student.
Whenever I got stuck, I asked ChatGPT to guide me through the next step.
I used Vellum to format the books.
I used Amazon KDP to publish them.
I learned about covers, categories, keywords, trim sizes, proof copies, author pages, and marketing.
None of it was as difficult as I feared.
Most of it simply required patience and a willingness to ask questions.
Finally, I kept going.
That sounds simple, but it is the real secret.
Most books are not abandoned because the writer lacks talent.
They are abandoned because the writer stops.
The story cools.
A week becomes a month.
A month becomes a year.
I tried very hard not to stop.
One morning became another morning.
One scene became another scene.
One chapter became another chapter.
Eventually, two novels existed where none had existed before.
That is the thirteen-minute version.
The rest of this book explains each step in more detail, shows you the mistakes I made, the tools I used, and the lessons I learned along the way.
If you remember only one thing, remember this:
You do not need to know how to write a book.
You only need to know how to tell a story.
Then protect your momentum.
Come back tomorrow.
One morning became another morning.
One chapter became another chapter.
One day I looked up, and there were two novels sitting on my desk where, not long before, there had only been an idea.