Where this came from

It was built backwards. I write, and I wanted a better reader for my own manuscript than I could find or afford, so I set about making one. I read some thirty books on the craft and took notes on the specific manoeuvres each one teaches, skipping the general encouragement. Then I spent a year tinkering against my own pages until it was actually useful.

One instruction was there from the first day and has never been relaxed: always tell me why, and say where the reasoning comes from. Never read the pages and then reach for whichever explanation happens to fit. I wanted a reader that was constructive and a little severe, and that could point at the actual place and say what to do about it.

I never wanted a machine that writes for you. There are plenty of those, and they all end with a book you did not write. This one stays away from the prose. It reads, it explains, and then you do the work.

I built it for one situation and it turned out to cover more. A draft too raw to show anybody. A manuscript that came back with three lines that explained nothing. Notes from a reader you are not sure you believe. A book that is nearly there. In every case you are stuck and cannot quite see where.

Two things surprised me. Seeing the holes in my own draft got much easier when something else did the looking. And I learned a lot of craft along the way, because nothing ever arrived as a bare verdict.

The writing itself I still do on a machine with no internet on it. That part is mine and stays mine. The rest I judge by whether I would go back to working without it, and I would not.