The Book I Couldn't Write but Wanted to Hear

It started with a simple question: What if there was a book I desperately wanted to read, but couldn’t justify spending months or years actually scribbling?

For the past few years, I’ve been “vibe scribbling” with AI. Not prompting for finished work. Not trying to replace the creative process. Just... playing. Sketching ideas. Following threads. Seeing what happens when you treat AI as a collaborator in the earliest, loosest stages of creation.

The Curious Order of Ink & Flame came out of that experiment.

Something for me. A gift to my own imagination.

I’ve spent my career telling stories for screens. Alias, Lost, Heroes, Hannibal, Star Trek: Discovery, blah-blah-blah. I know how to build worlds under deadline pressure. But this wasn’t a job. It was a playground. I wanted to create a fictional pulp author from the early 20th century, give him adventures and philosophies and a mysterious disappearance, and then compile it all as if his great-grandson had discovered the legacy.

So I started generating pieces. A biography section one month. Podcast scripts from the descendant’s perspective another. A fake newspaper review. An interview with fictional contemporaries. Philosophy documents for a made-up creative order. Robot ethics predating Asimov. Noir detective stories set in 1930s Hollywood.

Each piece was its own experiment. Some worked immediately. Others needed multiple passes, different approaches, rethinking the premise. AI didn’t write this for me. It wrote with me, responding to what I brought to each session, building on ideas I’d sketched, surprising me with connections I hadn’t seen.

Then came the synthesis. Taking all these scattered documents and using Claude Code to weave them into something coherent-ish. A book with a narrative frame. Jack Prescott, the struggling filmmaker grandson, discovering his ancestor’s trunk and compiling this volume. Voice threading through the biographical sections, adding personal reflection to the historical record.

The result is something I genuinely enjoyed listening to. That was always the goal. Not to publish it traditionally, not to prove anything about AI, just to make a thing I wished existed.

A book with an audience of one.

What did I learn? AI collabs work best when you bring strong creative vision to the table. When you know what you’re aiming for, even if you can’t execute it solo. When you treat the technology as a sketching tool rather than a finishing machine.

I posted The Curious Order of Ink & Flame on YouTube as an audiobook, so I could listen to it whenever I’m seeking inspiration. It’s weird, niche and exactly what I wanted.

If you want to explore a Claude Coded Wiki filled with all my Curious Order materials — CLICK HERE.

Semper curiosus. Semper creatrix.