A few months ago I blogged about a business plan as a joke. This month I’m writing about a real business plan. My first novel has just dropped on Amazon.

Somerset Maugham wrote in 1937: “There is an impression abroad that everyone has it in him to write one book… but if that means a good book, that impression is false.” What he’s really saying is that the difference between amateur and professional writers is craft, something arrived at through learning and practice, then maintained with sustained effort. The ever-pugnacious Christopher Hitchens improved on this, saying: “Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where… in most cases, it should remain.”

Well, I’m going to challenge that. I think lots of us have been struck by the muse and had a “golden nugget” idea that would make a great book. Perhaps, like me, you have a collection of such ideas jotted down in a notebook somewhere, or you even made a start but got no further than Roger Waters’ “…half a page of scribbled lines”. And while the craft of writing may be something we haven’t invested sufficient time to acquire, that doesn’t automatically mean the underlying idea is a bad one.

I’ve also noticed over the years that writing a book can become the last resort of middle-class folk who’ve fallen on hard times. They just rattle off a novel at the age of 50 or whatever, as if they’ve been doing it all their lives. How many of these are ghost-written? And what if you had your own ghost writer? When I first started toying with large language models a few years ago, I wondered if this might be the help I’d been looking for.

My early attempts to get AI to write anything decent were pretty fruitless. This was largely down to the small size of something called the “context window”, which you can think of as the AI’s attention span. If you asked it to write anything lengthy, it had to be done in small chunks, and there was no continuity between them.

As time went by the tools improved, and I beavered away learning how to get the best out of them. I built a suite of tools I jokingly refer to as “the fiction factory”, which gives me an AI-agnostic way to turn an initial idea into a book on my shelf.

This is a brief look at the three tricks these tools perform.

There’s a very old maxim in software: Garbage In, Garbage Out. The first trick is understanding that the initial specification must be detailed and precise. The first thing I do with my scribbled half-page is work with a chatbot, usually Claude (which has a particular knack for this sort of thing), to develop a book overview. This becomes the master plan: it describes the characters, maps the three acts, and sets goals and beats for each chapter. This is where I do the orchestral conducting, suggesting cadences and crescendos with instructions like “build tension here” or “shorten sentence length”. The better the plan, the better the draft. The output is a master overview file and a separate plan file for each chapter.

The second trick is getting the AI to write the thing without incurring a fortune in costs. Text generation is computationally intensive, and a standard twenty-euros-a-month ChatGPT subscription probably won’t cut it. This is where Openclaw came to the rescue. Acting as my ringmaster, it coordinates resources across the whole process. I have a dedicated PC running an open-source AI model locally. I’m always experimenting, but my current favourite is a Llama 70-billion-parameter model. This allows me to generate as much text as I like for free, well, for the cost of electricity, which runs to between five and ten euros a month (yes, I monitor it).

The third trick is accepting that AI cannot write a good novel without human intervention. My work in this area has evolved into a system built around an advanced editor that lets a human rapidly review the AI’s output, annotate it, and resubmit it for regeneration. The editor shows me one paragraph at a time, alongside the original “beat” instruction the AI used to generate it. I can either edit the text myself, or add a note telling the AI how to revise it on the next run. I’ve also built a lexical analysis tool that scans each draft looking for “echoes”: repeated words and phrases that AI tends to latch onto and overuse. Again, I can fix these manually or add them to a work-order that the AI uses to clean things up on the next run.

The first book to be published using this process has just been released, and it went through five drafts, five passes through the fiction-factory machine. The Mayfly Mutiny is a cautionary science fiction novel about the fate of an under-resourced Martian colony. The Kindle ebook is priced at about the cost of a cup of coffee, and the paperback is roughly what you’d pay here in Spain for a menú del día.

I’ve published the book under the pen name Maureen Avis. The idea is to build a brand, and my face probably wouldn’t be the best starting point for that. Two more sci-fi books are well underway, and I’ve got ideas for about a dozen more on the back burner. The business plan is to build a following by delivering regular, consistent quality storytelling: enough to elevate the brand above the AI slop that is inevitably coming to long-form fiction. While I was learning how to format the paperback version of Mayfly, I watched a YouTube video of a woman who claimed to have written a romance novel in three and a half hours using AI. She’s busy flooding the market with hundreds of similar tomes. Knowing what I know now, I’m confident those books won’t be very good.

In the world of investing, businesses need a "moat": a barrier to entry that slows competitors down. AI puts most business models at risk of being replicated overnight, but fiction has an unusual property: readers are the moat. A reader who trusts a name on a cover, who pre-orders the next book without reading the blurb, is not a customer easily stolen by a better-funded competitor or a faster algorithm. The race being run here isn't to build the best AI writing tool. That battle is already lost to the corporations. It's to build a relationship with an audience before the market floods. Somewhat ironically, AI authorship may be one of the rare business models where the technology is merely the means of production, and the thing it cannot replace, a consistent human voice and the trust that comes with it, turns out to be the most durable asset of all. Fingers crossed!

The Mayfly Mutiny is available as a Kindle eBook or paperback from your region's Amazon store.

 

For the longest time I've kept a notebook with business ideas in it. Most are complete nonsense, others get promoted to the lofty rank of “business plan” yet go no further. They march, chest out, straight from vaguely plausible scribble to failed start-up, without ever troubling the world with pesky details like customers, profit, or taxation. Others never see the light of day at all. They remain in the notebook, fermenting quietly like an under-ambitious cheese.

I was flicking through it the other day and came across an idea I still think is properly banging, except for one tiny flaw: it fails on capital. It needs a shop. An actual, physical shop. And it would cost a small fortune to stock, because the whole concept revolves around imported inventory. You can’t run it as a pop-up on Etsy because the purchase is, in a weird way, location-dependant.

Anyway, I present it to you here. Run it up the old flagpole and see if anyone salutes. If you want to pick it up and sprint off with it, it’s all yours. I gift it to you in the spirit of Gnu. (Which are currently out of stock, but I can offer you a charmingly wrong substitute from Helsinki.)

The business is called: Anywhere But Here

A souvenir shop in your city that sells souvenirs for every tourist destination in the world except the one you’re standing in.

So for example, if you’re in Madrid, you can buy:

• Arc de Triomphe paperweights
• Moscow fridge magnets
• a “Greetings from Singapore” tea towel
• a miniature Statue of Liberty (that looks faintly embarrassed to be abroad at the moment)
• A fluffy kangaroo in an I ❤️ Sydney T-shirt

…but absolutely nothing Spanish. Not a flamenco doll. Not a bull. Not a “Madrid” keyring. Not even a postcard of a breakfast churro. If you ask, the staff look at you with the polite concern reserved for people who’ve tried to pay with a Blockbuster video card.

“Spain?” they say. “Is that near Belgium?”

The Mission Statement (printed in tasteful italics on the wall)

We believe travel is about disappointment, confusion, and buying objects you do not need.
We specialise in the disappointment and confusion, and we’re open seven days a week.

The Branding

The shopfront is beautiful. Warm lighting. Tasteful shelves. A little bell on the door. Everything says curated. A place for discerning travellers.

The sign says:

ANYWHERE BUT HERE Souvenirs for places you’re not in

Inside, a big world map with pins everywhere except your country, which is just… blank. A tasteful void. A cartographic snub.

How It Works

You walk in. You’re a tourist. You’ve got that “I’ve just paid €4.60 for a coffee” glaze in your eyes. You want something to take home. Something that says I was here.

We give you the opposite.

The categories are:

1) The Wrong City Wall

A whole display dedicated to the nearest famous landmark you are not visiting.

So for example, in Madrid you would see:

• Paris: Eiffel Tower keyrings, Arc de Triomphe paperweights, “I ❤️ Paris” berets (made in a factory in a country that has never heard of Paris).
• Rome: Colosseum snow globes (no snow, just small bits of dust that may or may not be historical).
• London: “Mind the Gap” mugs, tiny red buses, a Queen’s Guard figurine that looks like it’s been through a long day.

If you point out you’re not in those cities, the assistant nods sympathetically, as if you’ve just told them about a long illness.

2) The Deep Cut Shelf

This is where you earn your keep as a retailer of nonsense.

• “Greetings from Reykjavík” oven mitts
• Ulaanbaatar shot glasses
• A hand-carved wooden moose from “somewhere in Canada, probably”
• “I Survived The Hague” t-shirts (nobody survives The Hague, they simply endure it)

3) The Confusion Range

Souvenirs that are wrong in more than one way.

• A Stonehenge dinosaur diorama
• A Dubai rain poncho
• A Venice beach towel
• A Sahara lighthouse ornament
• “Welcome to Edinburgh” flip-flops

A customer will stare at these items like they’ve just seen a dog solve a Rubik cube.

4) The Ethical Luxury Corner

For people who want meaning, but also want it to be inconvenient.

• a recycled-glass ornament shaped like Mount Fuji
• artisanal “authentic” New York subway tokens (made yesterday)
• a candle called Eau de Glacier that smells like expensive melancholy

5) The Kids Section: “Where Are We?”

Little plush toys and sticker books, all themed around places you are not.

• Furry Aardvarks in a city where the only wildlife is pigeons with opinions
• a sticker sheet titled “My Trip to Antarctica”
• a cuddly toy gnu (sold out, again, obviously)

Staff Policy

This is the important bit. The shop only works if the staff commit.

Rules:

1. If a customer asks for a souvenir of your city, you act genuinely confused.
2. If they insist, you offer them something nearby but wrong.
   • “Madrid? We’ve got Marseille?”
3. If they start getting angry, you guide them gently toward the Customer Support Penguin, a life-size cardboard penguin wearing a lanyard that says “I’m Listening.”

If someone demands to speak to the manager, the manager appears wearing a Clown costume and says, “We don’t carry local.”

The Loyalty Scheme

The Frequent Disappointer Card
Collect stamps. Redeem for rewards available only in:

• countries you have never visited
• cities you cannot pronounce
• places that may be fictional

After ten stamps you qualify for the Golden Wrongness tier, which gets you a free upgrade to “a bigger version of the same mistake”.

The Best Part: The Reviews (already written, because the internet is inevitable)

⭐☆☆☆☆
“Asked for a magnet that said Madrid. They sold me one that said Minsk. I don’t even know where Minsk is.”

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Absolutely brilliant. Bought an ‘I ❤️ Tokyo’ t-shirt while standing 50 metres from my Barcelona hotel. My wife hasn’t stopped laughing.”

⭐☆☆☆☆
“They told me Spain is ‘out of season’. This is ridiculous.”

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Came in angry. Left with a Chicago Cubs 47 Brand Wrigley Field Marque Fitted baseball cap. Couldn't be happier. I respect the commitment.”

Why It Would Work (in a parallel universe where I had money and serotonin)

Because tourists don’t buy souvenirs. They buy a story. They buy a prop. They buy the ability to say:
“Look at this. I don’t even know why this exists.”

Also, the shop becomes a destination in itself. People don’t come for the merch. They come to experience being gently gaslit by tasteful retail shelving.

The Fatal Flaw (and why you’re reading this instead of visiting my shop)

Capital. Rent. Stock. Shipping a thousand tiny monuments to a thousand wrong places. It’s a money bonfire, and not the warm cosy kind.

So instead, I’m doing what every failed entrepreneur eventually does: abandoning my dreams and blogging about them.

The Flagpole Bit

If this idea made you smile, here’s my offer:

Take it. Steal it. Launch it. Franchise it. Build it into a global empire of tasteful nonsense. I officially gift it to you in the spirit of Gnu.

(Still out of stock. Supply chain issues. Try again next week.)

And if you do open one, please do me just one small favour:
On the quiet, put a single, lonely postcard of the local city behind the counter, face-down, like contraband.

Because we’re not monsters. We’re just… curated.