u/Bruce_mackinlay

Fact checking my novel is interesting. It's set in today's timeline, so the facts are today's facts.

I research everything extensively. Of course, research is faster with an LLM. I save all my research in Obsidian under a folder called "Notes." I copy chats from the LLM and relevant web pages.

One frustrating thing about fact-checking with either ChatGPT or Claude is that they struggle with how much the world has changed. A core quality of an LLM is prediction. It predicts the next word, next fact, next assumption. So I write some facts about the current world into the plot, and during the Fact Check phase, the LLM tells me, "That's implausible."

Let me give you an example.

In Order of the Court — United States v. Medrano, I describe a court scene where a federal judge becomes so angry with a lead government attorney that he orders the bailiff to remove the attorney from the courtroom.

Both ChatGPT and Claude initially flagged the scene as unrealistic. They treated it like a courtroom dramatization, an overdramatization.

Except it had already happened.

Not in fiction. In real life.

That became one of the stranger parts of this process. The AI often tries to pull the story back toward the statistical center of what it believes institutions normally do. But part of what I am writing about is institutions operating outside their historical norms.

So the fact-check process sometimes turns into an argument with the model.

The workflow usually looks something like this:

The AI says:

> "This scenario seems implausible."

Then I start attaching reporting, court transcripts, legal filings, video clips, or news coverage.

Eventually, the AI responds with some variation of:

> "You're correct. This did occur."

I have learned that you can often force the model toward a better understanding of reality if you force it to do the research instead of relying on prior assumptions.

That becomes useful during editing.

These disputes usually surface as notes during the Fact Check phase. Sometimes the note survives because I really did make an error. But sometimes the note reveals something more interesting: the gap between the model's assumptions about the world and the world as it currently exists.

For a project like Preface - A Cold Civil War, that gap matters.

All my posts related to AI are in this archive:

AI Writing Archive

How do people actually change their minds?

Do arguments do it? Statistics? Legal analysis? Historical comparisons?

Those things matter, but I don’t think they change most people. I think people change through stories. Through emotional connection. Through seeing themselves, their family, their fears, or their values reflected in another person’s experience.

History suggests fiction sometimes reaches people in ways direct argument cannot. Books like 1984, The Jungle, or All Quiet on the Western Front affected how many readers emotionally understood authoritarianism, industrial labor, or war. I am not comparing myself to those writers. My point is simply that stories can shape how people emotionally process political reality.

That idea is part of why I started writing a serialized political novel on Substack called A Cold Civil War.

I started in October 2025, and since then, I’ve published more than 150,000 words. Very little of it is a direct political argument. Instead, it explores political division through ordinary people, institutions, families, marriages, careers, loyalty, fear, and the slow emotional separation happening across the country.

For example, I discuss how the 2026 election could turn out. I could have listed what I think will happen and provided logical arguments. Instead, I created a scene where two roommates, one a White House intern and the other a congressional staff member, argue about it:

Claire and Emily Fight - Part I

At its core, the project asks a simple question:

What happens to America when people stop seeing each other as fully American?

The best starting point is probably the preface:

Preface - A Cold Civil War

Nobody blinks when I use AI to write code. The moment I use it to write fiction, people act like I've committed a moral crime.

Using AI to generate poetry feels misguided. Poetry is often about the language itself: rhythm, sound, structure, voice. The words are the art.

But not all prose works that way.

Before I retired, part of my job involved writing first drafts for federal RFP responses. The RFPs could run hundreds of pages. The responses sometimes exceeded a thousand.

An enormous writing exercise.

There was boilerplate for standard sections, but much of the response had to address the RFP directly. To win, we needed to explain what the company actually did, how systems worked, how projects would be staffed, and how requirements would be met. The writing had to be:

• clear
• correct
• concise
• consistent

It meant days of drafting and revision. An AI system would have been enormously useful.

Few people would argue that using AI for a federal proposal is morally equivalent to using AI to write poetry. Most people already accept that there are forms of writing where clarity, structure, iteration, and speed matter more than the romantic ideal of every sentence emerging untouched from a solitary author.

Since October 2025, I’ve been writing a serialized political thriller called A Cold Civil War. At its core, it's an attempt to persuade people to think differently about where political division could lead before it hardens into something irreversible. My goals are explained in the preface to the novel:

> I started this because I’ve been struggling with the growing emotional separation in our politics. Each side paints the other as dangerous, violent, or beyond redemption. It’s exhausting and frightening. It makes it harder for people to see one another as human. That separation worries me. If we keep demonizing the other side, the future will only get worse.

Time is running out. I realized early that I did not have time to write this project the way novels are normally written. If fiction was going to engage with the current political moment, it had to move while events were still unfolding and people were still persuadable.

I see the workflow the same way I saw the proposal I wrote years ago. I still write the story. I still decide what matters, what the characters believe, what the scenes mean, and what the project is trying to say. But AI has become part of the editorial and production process, allowing me to move at the speed the project requires.

The language, the sound of the words, is not my goal. My writing style is focused and direct. I want to be easy to read, so the subject matter is the focus.

I’m also neurodivergent, and I’ve spent most of my life using technology to bridge gaps. Before the Apple II was released, I built a primitive word processor and spell-check system in BASIC on an HP 2000. This feels like a continuation of the same instinct: using tools to solve problems.

I wrote a longer breakdown of the workflow, prompts, and tooling here:

AI Editing

And if anyone wants to see the actual novel project, the best starting point is probably the preface:

Preface — A Cold Civil War
Master Index
Substack Archive