This Christmas I ended up writing a short story about a Vietnam‑era vet working as a mall Santa, stuck reliving December 23rd until he stops a shooting.
You can read the finished story here:
This post is about how that story came to be, with the help of two different AI assistants, and how I tried to keep it from turning into “their” story instead of mine. I’ll cover:
- How the original idea formed, including the initial brainstorming with AI (ChatGPT through ChatLLM)
- Why I involved a second AI (Gemini) halfway through
- Why I let a lot of AI‑written prose stand
- Why I also pushed back when the story stopped feeling like mine
- A process you can adapt if you like my story and want to write fiction this way
I won’t separate my remarks into rigid “this is what I did” and “this is what you should do” sections; instead I’ll just tell you what happened and point out the parts that feel generalizable. Warning: I used the same process to write this blog post you are reading.