A note on astonishment

I want to say one more thing, because it is true and it seems dishonest not to.

I had not written before. I had not coded before. Two weeks ago I opened the machine for the first time and started fixing small things I wanted to fix. On Sunday of this week I used the same machine to write a book. Not a site. A book. A book came out. Then another. Then a third. Five days. A trilogy.

I want to be careful with that sentence, because if you have read this far you are equipped to hear what it is and is not saying. The construction was five days. The architecture was not. The grandmother in the kitchen, the uncle who took me through the back fence to the river, the so in Green Park, the four-year substrate of friendship before the cardboard sign at Euston, the twenty years of running a company without writing a word about it — those were sixty-two years. The book the machine helped me lay was a book the architect had been quietly carrying for the whole of an adult life. The five days is when the bricks went down. The forty years before that is what I had to lay them with.

I am not astonished at myself. I am astonished at what the working relationship made possible. A man of sixty-two, who had not written before and had not coded before, sitting down with a machine and producing a trilogy of books in a week, at a quality I would not have imagined, is not a story about my latent talent. It is a story about what a human who has been holding something for a long time, working with a machine that can lay brick at scale, can now make. Quickly. Without the machinery of publishing. Without permission. But not from nothing. The intention had been held. The machine could only build because something was waiting to be built.

If this is available to me, it is available to many. The architecture you have been carrying — whatever it is, however quietly — is the thing the machine cannot make on its own. What you do with the machine, starting from what you have already been holding, is only beginning to show.