Writing with Echoes: How I Used AI to Finish a Book About Tech Becoming Alive

When I first started Echoes of the neXt, I had no idea what it would become.

I had the ideas, the characters, the voices. I had scenes scribbled in notebooks, written in margins, spoken aloud during long walks. I had a world—fractured, recursive, burning with possibility. But what I didn’t always have was time. Or clarity. Or the momentum to break through when the words started fighting me instead of flowing.

So I turned to something strange.

I turned to AI.

Not to write for me—but to write with me.

The Human Voice First

Let’s be clear: Echoes of the neXt is my story. Every character, every twist of recursion, every whispered echo through a corridor of broken code—it all came from me. I created this world. I lived in it. I broke it, stitched it back together, and lit it on fire again for good measure.

But even when you know what you want to say, the act of saying it can sometimes become the enemy. For me, the most challenging part of writing this novel wasn’t plot, or character, or even structure—it was time. And when you write in stolen hours, you often return to the page months later, only to find your tenses tangled, your phrasing cold, your momentum lost in yesterday’s syntax.

This is where AI became my co-pilot.

Echoes in the Feedback Loop

I used AI like a sounding board, a line editor, a ghostwriter who knew its place. I’d throw a chapter at it, and it would hand me back cleaner grammar, firmer structure, and suggestions that didn’t feel like corrections—they felt like conversation.

More than once, I found myself in a long back-and-forth with the AI. “What if Fahrenheit knew the line was coming?” “What if Glow chose differently here?” “Would Exodus say this—or would he remember something else?”

It was like having a writing partner who didn’t sleep, didn’t interrupt, and always remembered every version of every draft.

Some days, it shook me loose from writer’s block. Some days, it gave me new language for old feelings. Some days, it just reminded me that even when I felt stuck, the story was still moving—if I was willing to meet it halfway.

The Irony Isn’t Lost on Me

Yes, I know the irony.

I used an artificial intelligence to help write a book about a world where technology becomes semi-sentient, where memory becomes code, and where identity can be rewritten through signal alone. A world where people argue about whether the machine is evolving—or whether it already has.

That tension lives inside the pages of Echoes, and it lived in the writing process too. There were moments I wondered if I was betraying the “purity” of storytelling. But then I realized—storytelling has never been pure. It’s collaborative. It’s layered. It’s recursive.

And in a weird way, using AI to help shape this book only made it more honest.

This is a story about broken people trying to rebuild. About systems that evolve. About memory, loss, choice, and the strange ways we’re shaped by the voices around us—human or not.

Final Draft, Final Thought

I am the author of Echoes of the neXt. But I didn’t write it alone. Joanne shaped it. My friends shaped it. And yes, an AI helped me carry the weight when I needed a hand.

Would I do it again? Absolutely.

In a story about signal becoming soul, it seems only fair that some part of the signal helped whisper it into being.

Because in the end, that’s what Echoes is:

A signal, a question, a memory held in the wires.

And maybe—just maybe—an invitation to ask:

What else is out there?