Creative Methodology: How The Border Within Was Written

Why This Disclosure Exists

In research, an undocumented method is not a method. It is an anecdote. I have spent my professional life in institutions where the procedure is expected to be as legible as the result, and I see no reason to abandon that standard because the output happens to be a novel rather than a paper.

Generative AI tools played a role in the development of The Borders of Existence book series and short stories. I am telling you because I believe transparency serves the integrity of the work and the broader conversation about human creativity in an age of AI tools. Readers should be able to choose what they read, knowing how it was made.

What follows is a detailed account of how this series is being made: who does what at each significant stage. The process described here was developed during the writing of The Boundary Within and applies, with minor variations, to all work in the series.

My Role: Systems Architect and Editorial Author

I want to be precise about what I contributed and what AI contributed, because honesty on this point matters.

My professional background is in systems engineering, project management, and research, not literary craft. That background shaped the way I worked. For over two decades my career has been at the upper levels of what engineers call the V-model: deciding what a complex system must do, specifying how it must behave, designing its overall architecture, and verifying that what was built meets what was specified. Others then carry out the detailed design and implementation within that architecture.

That is the structure of this novel's creation. I worked at the upper levels:

• Concept: The story world, characters, themes, and emotional architecture of the series
• Requirements: The Writing Style and Voice Document, a formal specification I created defining how the work must behave at every level of prose
• Architecture: Series structure, act structure, chapter planning, and scene-by-scene summaries governing all downstream work
• Detailed specifications: Beat structures, editorial criteria, POV consistency standards, and coherence benchmarks per scene
• Verification: All editorial passes, beta reading, and professional line editing, checking that the result met the specification

The AI worked at the implementation level: it generated first-draft prose within the architecture and specifications I defined and maintained.

I want to be clear about what this comparison does and does not say. The AI is a tool, not a collaborator with intent or legal standing, and the engineering analogy describes the shape of the workflow, not the legal status of anyone in it. The AI proposed and generated options, sometimes surprisingly good ones. I decided what was kept, changed, or thrown away. For readers less familiar with engineering, the nearest creative comparison is a director, whose contribution lies in vision and decisions rather than in operating every piece of equipment.

Ethical Context

Generative AI models are trained on large bodies of human writing, and the legality and ethics of that practice are being debated and litigated. I used these tools knowing this. The work of human authors is the reason they can do what they do, and that deserves acknowledgment rather than evasion.

I hold this position provisionally, as I hold most positions. If the argument against it improves, this document will be revised rather than quietly withdrawn.

Phase 1 — Architecture and Constraint

Before a line of prose existed, the novel was specified the way a system is specified: a stated problem, an explicit constraint set, and a design that has to survive interrogation.

1. 01MARCUSConcept and Foundation: I drafted the plot, subplot ideas, main characters, locations, and lore from scratch. I developed the comprehensive Writing Style and Voice Document. I drew on craft resources, including books and video essays on novel structure and plotting.
2. 02AIAI Brainstorming: I used generative AI in conversation to brainstorm improvements and explore new ideas for the plot and subplots. It functioned as a sounding board; the decisions were mine.
3. 03MarcusGenerated exploratory scenario variants against the constraint set — dozens of possible incidents aboard the Meridian, most of them discarded within minutes.
4. 04AISelected and rewrote the surviving scenario, discarding the generated language entirely and keeping only the structural idea.
5. 05MARCUSWrote the character architecture: Cameron’s professional history, Zee’s design lineage, and the institutional actors on Earth.
6. 06AIInterrogated the architecture — produced lists of internal inconsistencies, unexamined assumptions, and questions the outline could not answer.
7. 07MARCUSResolved each inconsistency by hand and froze the outline. Nothing generated in this phase appears in the finished text.

Phase 2 — Drafting and Structural Review

The drafting pass was entirely manual. Review was iterative, adversarial, and recorded — each report accepted or rejected in writing before revision began.

1. 01MARCUSDrafted every scene of the novel in my own words, in sequence, without generative assistance in the drafting pass.
2. 02AIRead completed chapters and reported structural problems: pacing collapse, unearned emotional turns, and information the reader had not yet been given.
3. 03MARCUSAccepted or rejected each report on the record, then revised by hand. Roughly half the reports were rejected.
4. 04AIChecked technical passages against the constraint set and flagged violations of orbital mechanics, timing, and consumables budgets.
5. 05MARCUSCorrected the flagged passages and re-verified them against source literature before locking the draft.

Phase 3 — Line Editing and Voice

The line edit was performed by hand, twice, on paper. Generative tools were excluded from this phase entirely. The voice of the novel is the one thing I was unwilling to subject to averaging, and any process that smooths prose toward a median would have destroyed the specific flatness Cameron’s narration depends on.

Phase 4 — Technical and Continuity Verification

The final pass verified the manuscript against the constraint set built in Phase 1: timelines, transfer windows, consumables, communication delay, and the internal chronology of Zee’s development. Discrepancies were logged and resolved individually, with the source for each correction recorded.

On Authorship

Authorship, as I understand it, is responsibility rather than keystrokes. I chose what this novel argues, and I am accountable for every claim it makes about consciousness, institutions, and grief. No part of that accountability is delegable to a tool, whatever the tool produced along the way.

Parallels With the Novel

I did not set out to write a book about creating a mind while creating it partly by machine. The irony arrived uninvited and refused to leave. The essay that accompanies this document deals with what that recursion exposed — and with the uncomfortable symmetry between Cameron’s position and my own.