Topic AI Generated Fiction

The Keyboard Has Never Been the Author

Auburn-haired author Alara debates her enormous manuscript with white-haired editor Tomiko, wearing sunglasses, a green editor's visor, and holding a red pencil. Behind them, a personified printing press, silk loom, typewriter, computer, and retro-futuristic AI robot compete for attention.

A machine can write a paragraph in seconds. Sometimes it's even a good paragraph. But does that make the machine an author — or the person using it a fraud?

Writers have always relied on tools, collaborators, editors, researchers, and ghostwriters. Generative AI introduces extraordinary new capabilities, but it also raises serious questions about copyright, creative ownership, professional livelihoods, and the integrity of published work.

In The Keyboard Has Never Been the Author, Doc Tomiko challenges the assumption that legitimate authorship requires personally producing every word. Through examples from fiction, journalism, publishing, and developmental editing, she argues that the true work of writing lies in imagination, intention, critical judgment, and responsibility for the finished product.

AI can generate prose, suggest revisions, and help people tell stories they might otherwise never write. It can also produce mountains of mediocre garbage and give publishers new excuses to stop paying professionals.

The question isn't whether a machine helped write the words. It's who decided what those words should mean, whether they belong, and whether they're any damned good.

The keyboard was never the author. Neither is the AI.

On the Matter of Crayons and Carp

A white-haired woman in a tan leather coat swims in an aquarium with a cobra-fish and a beaked swordtail.

Sometimes the safest place in the world is the one that should kill you. In the fishtank, where the rules say you aren’t supposed to breathe, she finds the only kind of silence that doesn’t eat her alive. There’s a dead goldfish to carry, tunnels that only run one way, and walls begging to be colored in before the filters scrub everything clean again. The farther she swims from the surface, the clearer it gets: somebody has to decide which deaths are accidents and which ones are crimes, and the water is not nearly as confused about it as the people on land.

Children of a Forgotten Tomorrow: Part 6

A young woman with a faint scar above her brow stands beside an old pickup truck loaded with boxes, a duffel bag, and a computer monitor. A teenage boy leans on the tailgate, smiling shyly as golden autumn light filters through the trees around a quiet suburban street.

In The Last Straw, hunger and circumstance drive Doc back to the house she fled, where old ghosts wait behind every doorframe. Her friendship with Bill, the only mind that ever matched her own, glows briefly and ends too soon in a crash that René witnesses from the wrong side of a body bag. Peachy drifts into borrowed identities, the town unravels, and Doc—scarred, exhausted, furious—watches it all from the eye of the storm. By the time she boards the westbound bus, she’s outgrown the gravity of the poisoned river and the broken pumps. She carries only the hum of memory and the strange mercy of surviving long enough to start over.

Children of a Forgotten Tomorrow: Part 5

A teenage girl with a bandaged brow sits on the floor of a dim apartment beside a duffel bag filled with glowing computer towers and cables. Snow drifts outside the window where parallel train tracks fade into the distance. A McDonald’s visor and a bike helmet rest near her in the cold blue light.

The Blows at Home follows Doc as violence inside her house erupts into open daylight. A ringing phone, a flash of temper, a blow that leaves blood and a scar. She walks away and learns survival by repetition: the salt of McDonald’s fries, the hum of the fryer, the long bike rides between school and work. Winter hardens around her, teachers give up, friends drift. When petty crime and hunger meet pride, she turns a failed burglary into proof that she can master the system that once mastered her.

Children of a Forgotten Tomorrow: Part 4

Inside a rusted brick pumping station at sunset, three teens stand among massive green pumps and broken rails as light filters through cracked windows.

In The Sky and the Blows, the trio’s fragile friendship begins to fracture inside the humming shell of an abandoned pumping station. René’s jokes curdle into dangerous ideas, Peachy flirts with faith and self-destruction, and Doc clings to machinery as proof that order still exists. Between thunderclaps, flashbacks, and a final accident that draws blood and silence, childhood collapses into something heavier and irrevocably adult.

Children of a Forgotten Tomorrow: Part 3

An abandoned house marked “HQ” stands among black reeds and oil-slick puddles in a poisoned marsh, its porch collapsing under the gray spring light.

In The Superfund Spring, the thaw comes everywhere but the old dump site where Doc, Peachy, and René discover their so-called HQ—a crumbling house surrounded by poisoned marsh. What begins as another reckless adventure turns grim as they piece together the truth: they’ve built their clubhouse on a wound in the earth. Between blackened reeds, rainbow-slick water, and relics of lives long gone, laughter turns to unease. It’s the moment when childhood curiosity meets the adult realization that some places remember what was done to them.

Children of a Forgotten Tomorrow: Part 2

Three teenagers stand on the frozen marsh of the river beneath a full moon, watching a glowing, four-lighted UFO pursued by military helicopters across the winter sky.

Under a full winter moon, Doc, René, and Peachy walk the frozen edge of the Bush River and witness something that defies explanation. Between the hum of turbines and the silence of the ice, the trio see lights move against the grain of physics—an elliptical object chased by Army helicopters, vanishing and returning like breaths. Whether test flight or visitation, the night leaves them changed, their laughter brittle against the cold, and their certainty of the world forever fractured.

Children of a Forgotten Tomorrow: Part 1

A fourteen-year-old balances on a rusted railroad trestle high above the Gunpowder River, winter-gray sky stretching overhead as rapids crash against the rocks below.

This epic about the forgotten children of gen-x opens with The River Children, a meditation on growing up amid the poisoned rivers, abandoned factories, and winter marshes of rural Maryland. Doc and their friends trespass through a landscape of danger and wonder—bridges, quarries, and dreams of underground libraries—learning to hear the world’s warnings before they arrive. It’s a story of vigilance, identity, and the fragile holiness of survival in a place that never quite forgave its children for surviving it.

The River Takes What It’s Owed

Painting of a lone rowboat gliding out of a dark stone tunnel into a sunlit bay bordered by rocky cliffs, symbolizing emergence, renewal, and peace after hardship.

A woman follows a forgotten city drain that becomes a river and then a reckoning. What begins as curiosity turns into a one-way journey through darkness, memory, and release. The River Takes What It’s Owed is a story about leaving behind the noise that defined you and discovering what quiet actually sounds like.

Powder Blue

A powder-blue double-wide trailer under drone searchlights at dusk, its siding glowing faintly in the haze.

A family hides inside a double-wide while armored troops and surveillance drones sweep the sky outside. What begins as a tense, procedural siege—searchlights, thermal scans, the sick choreography of authority—shifts into something stranger.