I started a new book project. Working title is The Republic of Birds. It's fantasy, which is the genre I've always actually read: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, David Eddings, His Dark Materials. That whole lane. So it makes sense that when I finally sat down to write something for myself, that's where I landed.

Here's the thing though. I've written a lot for other people. Business books, frameworks, the whole thing. Never fiction. And I've written fiction for fun before, but "for fun" is exactly why none of it ever got finished. For fun means it's the first thing to go when the week gets busy.

So this time I wanted to treat it like a project that gets done. Not a project I enjoy.

That's a small distinction but it changed everything about how I'm doing it.

The system is the same system

Turns out the process I used for business books transfers almost completely.

1. Story bible first. Before any prose. Characters, world rules, magic system, geography, timeline, what's true and what everyone only believes is true. For fantasy this is doing a lot of work. It's the thing that stops you writing yourself into a corner in chapter nine.

This is also where the research lives, which I wasn't expecting.

2. Chapter-level beats. Not a detailed outline. Just the basic story beats per chapter. What happens, what changes, where the reader ends up.

3. Then you write, and you check back. Every chapter, I go back to the beats and confirm I actually hit them. That's it. That's the whole quality control loop while drafting.

What that gives you is permission to write in peace. I know where the chapter is going, so I'm not making structural decisions and sentences at the same time. One problem at a time.

The research nobody warns you about

I genuinely thought fantasy meant you make it all up. You don't. You make up the surface and then you borrow the machinery underneath from real life, because otherwise it doesn't hold weight.

A republic has to actually function. Someone collects something, someone enforces something, someone gets left out. So I've been reading about how real political systems handle succession and dissent. How trade routes shape which cities matter. How a place stays fed. Birds, obviously, more than I planned to. How flocks make decisions, how migration works, what happens when a group has no single leader.

None of that ends up on the page as research. It ends up as one line of dialogue that sounds true.

Two things that keep it from eating the whole project:

  • Timebox it. Research is the most comfortable form of procrastination there is. It feels like work and produces nothing. I give it its own slot, not my drafting slot.
  • Never research mid-draft. If I hit something I don't know, I drop a [CHECK] in the manuscript and keep writing. I'd lose entire mornings to Wikipedia otherwise. Checking is a separate job, same as editing.

Anything I find that matters goes back into the story bible, not into a notes app I'll never open again.

The actual writing time

2 to 3 blocked sessions a week. Saturday is the big one, 6am to about 12pm. In that window I can fully draft about 3,500 words.

And it's messy. Loads of typos, sentences that don't work, placeholder names. I don't fix any of it in the chair. Drafting and editing are different jobs and doing them at once is how I used to lose whole mornings to rewriting one paragraph.

Knowing you can fix it later is genuinely what makes it easier to write badly on purpose. Grammarly catches the mechanical stuff afterwards. The rest is a later-me problem.

Where AI fits, and where it doesn't

I use AI tools constantly. I'm not precious about it. But I don't hand the prose over.

What it's actually good for on this project: pressure-testing the outline, spotting gaps in the worldbuilding, asking me the questions I haven't thought about yet. "You said this culture has no written language, so how did that treaty get recorded." That kind of thing. For a fantasy book with a lot of moving internal logic, that's a real job and it's useful.

But the writing is the part I'm doing this for. Exporting that out would defeat the point.

Why this feels good right now

I've been talking about content creation on this blog a lot and honestly it's a rollercoaster. Some weeks it clicks, people respond, and you feel like you've cracked it. Other weeks the reach just dies for no reason you can identify and you're refreshing numbers wondering what happened.

Writing a book is the opposite. It's slow and entirely within my control. I sit down, I put words in, the thing gets bigger. No algorithm involved.

Until promotion. Then it becomes exactly the same problem again. But that's future me.

Your next step

If you've got a book idea sitting in a notes app right now, don't start writing it.

Block one two-hour slot this week and write your chapter one beats instead. Five to seven lines. What happens, what changes, where the reader ends up. That's all.

Then next session you get to just write, because the hard decision is already made.

If you want the full version of this, I've got a Notion doc that walks through the whole thing in five steps: story bible, beats, drafting, research, revision. It's the actual process I'm using on this book, not a theoretical one. grab it here, it's free.