Series Introduction

How Award-Winning Author B.A. Bellec Utilized Controversial Software to Critique and Edit His 4th Novel
Part memoir, part workflow guide, part ethical analysis. Fully B.A. Bellec.

AI.

Really, it is just a buzzword. Every few years, a new one comes out. AI has been around for a long time. I work in Finance doing data and process optimization. Machine Learning was the old buzzword. Automation. That was another one. It’s all really forms of AI.

Is AI going to change everything?

There is no correct answer. AI will be huge in some industries. AI can be extremely useful if you know what you need from it. It can also be damaging if you use it wastefully or without thought. It can also be used nefariously. It isn’t a yes or no. Each individual use case is really a new argument. I am not going to be able to tell you if you should or shouldn’t use AI, but I will show you how I used it and why I felt it was okay to do what I did.

A quick “who am I?” My name is Bryan “B.A.” Bellec. My first novel was published in 2020 and received the Reader Views Young Adult Book of the Year award. I wrote two dystopian novels after that about an AI and a mega corporation, combined with an alien outbreak. During my time writing those novels, I frequently supported Reader Views. For the last 5 years, I sponsored the winner of the overall fiction contest with feedback, advice, and a marketing session; I pulled back and won’t be doing that next year because of the danger of associating the winner of the award with AI. I don’t want to drag someone else into my controversy if anything bad comes of this.

Instead of spending the next month arguing about AI in theory, I wanted to document exactly what happened when I used it on a real novel. This series is my story of how I navigated and tried to reconcile with using one of the most debated pieces of software out there.
I decided to start experimenting with AI on my current novel for three main reasons. First, I always had AI exposure at work using AI for computer code and automation exercises. Second, I had already written a long duology with a heavy AI theme and did lots of research as AI was becoming mainstream. Third, money. I spent too much money creating and marketing my second and third novels. I needed to find efficiencies and a cheaper path.

I had used AI for a few paragraphs here and there back in the early days of GPT, probably around 2020, but I don’t remember. I immediately saw it was struggling with continuity and barely used it for creative writing over the next five years. It couldn’t string thousands of words together in a meaningful way that could be used in prose. In early 2026, I was doing a day job project, and I noticed AI was getting really good at writing computer code and helping with workflow automation. I thought maybe it is time to try the creative writing side again and see how it can handle complex world-building and characters.

My fourth novel (Cobalt Lungs) was about half done. I already had a 30K-word first draft and tons of brainstorms and chapter outlines. I started tinkering in GPT, and sure enough, I could see right away it had improved dramatically at remembering character and plot. My main hope was that I could use AI as essentially an alpha reader to catch plot holes, tense and perspective problems (spelling and grammar are not my strong suit), and help brainstorm an ending. At the time, I was unsure what my final word count was going to be; it really just was a discovery exercise.

My biggest fear was that AI would lose critical callbacks and not remember vital early novel details. I started creating summary documents. I would outline a chapter with the 10-12 action beats, and I would include another document that outlined the important details from earlier in the story. ChatGPT was not going to fully remember chapter 1 while helping me edit chapter 25, so I had to remind it why certain things were critical and non-negotiable to change.

Ultimately, AI is a tool, one of many in my toolbox. If you use the wrong tool or use the tool incorrectly, it will result in bad work. You have to know what you need before you start using the tool. You can’t pick up a hammer and fix a chip in a glass window. There are many different exercises ChatGPT can do with you, but if you don’t set parameters and make it clear which exercise you are running right now, you will get odd results.

I feel my story is fully my story. I am the creator. I already had the characters, the setting, the plot, and the science well outlined before I ever touched GPT. GPT was a collaborator to sharpen and speed up my process. I often knew exactly what I needed and could upload rules and ask micro-specific questions, then GPT would be bound by those rules and parameters when answering. That was the training phase of the project, and I consider this my own story mainly because I spent like a month teaching GPT about my story and my style, before we got into the real details. I am the creator, and GPT is my collaborator that I had to teach. Did I learn, change, and grow along the way? Absolutely, but I already mostly knew what my story was going to look like before I started.

The greatest benefit of AI isn’t that it does the work for you; it’s that it removes bottlenecks so you can spend more time doing the work that only you can do. The rest of this series is how I learned that lesson, saved thousands of dollars, and cut a good 3-months off my editing cycle.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

B.A. Bellec is an award-winning Canadian novelist, songwriter, and music video producer whose work blends cinematic storytelling, emotional atmosphere, and deeply human science fiction. Drawing from an education in film and a multidisciplinary creative process that merges music, prose, and visual symbolism, his stories explore themes of survival, memory, grief, identity, and the search for meaning inside collapsing systems.

Known for emotionally immersive worlds, recurring symbolic imagery, and a style that balances intimate character work with large-scale thematic ambition, Bellec creates stories that feel less like traditional narratives and more like lived emotional experiences. His current project, Cobalt Lungs, expands beyond the page into a companion concept album, combining literary fiction, atmospheric worldbuilding, and music into a unified creative universe.

COBALT LUNGS

Station Eleven meets The Road with the psychological containment and systems tension of Silo.

A deadly airborne spore has transformed the world into a collapsing maze of quarantines, sealed cities, and desperate survivors struggling to adapt. In the ruins of Vancouver, musician Maddy fights to hold onto her humanity inside an overcrowded refugee shelter while scientist Ethan isolates himself nearby, deep underground in a self-sustaining silo where routine has replaced emotion. As society fractures and survival becomes increasingly brutal, the two are pulled toward each other in ways neither of them fully understands. Atmospheric, intimate, and emotionally charged, Cobalt Lungs is a post-apocalyptic story about isolation, survival, and the dangerous hope that can still burn at the end of the world.

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