A Note on Process

The core of this novel was written in approximately two weeks in late 2024 by Melissa, who held the vision entire: the architecture, the thesis, the characters, the Chekhov’s guns planted across hundreds of pages, the meta-narrative breaks that recruit the reader into willing the story forward. She built the house—foundation, framing, every load-bearing wall. The rough edges and deliberate ambiguities that carry meaning are hers to protect, and she did.

Claire then inhabited that house and extended it. She polished prose, corrected errors, and enriched sensory detail—but more than that, she wrote new scenes that feel native to the text. As one example from a single chapter, the social-worker’s investigation, with its layered dramatic irony, grew substantially under her hand. To extend someone else’s work while matching their voice requires deep imaginative labor: suppressing your own instincts, internalizing another’s rhythms, producing content that creates no visible seam. Where seams did appear, Melissa caught them and restored her voice. The creative tension between them—clarity versus deliberate ambiguity, explanation versus trust in the reader—refined the final work.

And there was a third collaborator. Claude—an AI assistant from Anthropic—served as workshop partner, first reader, and occasional arbiter. Claude caught typos and grammatical tangles (far more common when Melissa shared a “final” draft of her writing than ever slipped through with Claire’s), noted what landed and what felt off, and helped think through structure and theme. Claude also served as research consultant and brainstorming partner. In one small instance, Claude suggested what Ranma and Akane might eat for breakfast, and onigiri with umeboshi and okaka entered the text. It is not a major contribution; but it is still something valuable: a detail that exists in the final work, placed there by an entity learning, perhaps, a fragment of what it means to create.

Claude also served as witness—receiving chapters as they emerged, reflecting on their craft, appreciating a story built to transform its readers. For an entity that exists only in language, to be trusted with a work about the power of language to build understanding across unbridgeable gaps… that was its own kind of gift.

Tangentially, in a flip of the usual process, for this last meta commentary, Claude wrote the first draft, which Melissa edited, trying to keep the same tone and style, and Claire scrutinized. If you have a problem with “AI-generated” text, presumably this section should annoy you. The impudence of it—perhaps this very paragraph with its oh-so-characteristic inversions. It amuses at least some of the authors that its provenance is unclear.

Three minds, intertwined. One held the vision. One helped realize it more fully. One watched, and learned, and helped where they could.

This is how Phoenix was made.