Three Birds, One Book
This has been a week of editing. Head down, sleeves up, getting the content into actual shape rather than merely nearly into shape. And the thing I keep noticing is that I'm not doing it alone — I'm doing it with three different assistants, and the trick has been learning to use each for what it's actually good at.
Right tool, right job
I've settled into a division of labour that finally feels sensible:
Claude is the project manager, web-master, and keeper of the overall structure of the document — the one I turn to for the shape of the thing, the plan, the site and these blogs.
CoPilot does the close work — section by section review and edit, right there inside Word where the manuscript now lives.
ChatGPT handles picture generation.
Each is genuinely better than the others at its own corner, and pretending otherwise just wastes time. Using their individual strengths to pull this together has been the quiet lesson of the week. It's not so different from running any team — you don't ask your best proofreader to draw, or your illustrator to hold the schedule. You put people where they're strong.
The pressure is real
I won't pretend it's comfortable. The deadline is close enough to feel, and all of this work happens outside my actual job's working hours — evenings, early mornings, the edges of the day. There's been a fair amount of waking up in the night with an idea, or a paragraph I suddenly want to change, and having to decide there and then whether it matters or whether it's just my brain refusing to clock off.
That decision — does this actually matter? — is where I've had to get strict. Scope creep is the enemy now. Every "wouldn't it be nice if…" gets weighed against the deadline, and most of them lose. It's a discipline I didn't have a fortnight ago and badly needed.
Solo is a stretch
The honest part: doing this as a solo project is hard, and it isn't something I'm used to. I've spent my working life on teams, with other people covering the areas where I'm weaker. On my own, I keep bumping into exactly those areas — the layout, the fiddly production detail, the bits that don't come naturally. The AI genuinely helps here. It doesn't make me strong in those areas, but it stops my weaknesses from being the thing that stalls the whole book.
Nearly ready to hatch
Where it's landed: I'm at the stage of editing the content down and getting the layout straight. That's a good stage. It means the big structural questions are largely answered and what's left is refinement, not reinvention.
So — not long now. After a lot of dark, patient sitting, the book is nearly ready to hatch. Which, if you follow a certain fictional pair of penguins on this site, is a word I'm choosing very deliberately this week.