I wrote a novel

I read an article recently that made me sad. Many novelists are turning to AI to write their stories.

I love AI. I believe in its potential to transform how we live and work. I've written a whole book about it. But storytelling is central to the human experience. Since our ancestors gathered around fires in caves, we've told stories to share our grief, our joy, our boredom, our sadness, and the many emotions that make up a full, messy life.

The ability to write is something I cherish. It builds clarity, conviction, wisdom earned, and wisdom shared. I'm not talking about marketing documents or blog posts or legal contracts. I'm talking about stories that come from your soul to exist in the world and provide a moment of entertainment or a lifetime of insight.

So I wrote a novel. The old-fashioned way.

The Midnight Coder's Children

The book is a technothriller. On the surface. A cyberattack threatens to collapse the US financial system. A VP of Engineering knows who to call. A race against the clock. All the tension you'd expect.

But underneath the thriller is something I didn't fully expect when I started writing. The book is really about a woman named Gayathri Ramaswamy, a tech pioneer, an immigrant, a single mother who built systems nobody appreciated until they nearly broke. It's about her children, who must decode her secrets decades later. It's about legacy, trust, and the things overlooked people build that hold everything together.

I've been sharing early drafts with friends in tech. They came for the cyberattack. They stayed for Gayathri and her children. Every one of them told me the same thing: the characters surprised them. They expected a plot-driven thriller. They got people they cared about.

That's the book I wanted to write. A story about family and sacrifice wrapped in the artifice of a technothriller.

Why I wrote it by hand

My writing process took me in multiple directions. Some ridiculous. Some intense. Some fruitful. I removed several characters entirely. I strengthened the emotional heft of every sentence, paragraph, page, and chapter. I found focus. I found a theme of trust and balance, something I think we all struggle with every day. I learned a little about myself. I learned a lot about my family and my heritage.

This story would never have existed if I had shortcut it with AI. The detours were the point. The wrong turns taught me what the book was actually about. The characters revealed themselves slowly, through the messy, inefficient, deeply human process of writing and rewriting and rewriting again.

We've all got to make a living. I appreciate that authors need to play the numbers game. But I sincerely hope our humanity survives and thrives through the stories we share with one another.

Read it

It's a race against the clock to save the US financial system from total collapse.

Sydney McEnroe is the VP of Engineering for one of the world's most important financial institutions, and today is her worst nightmare. Her bank is the victim of a vicious cyberattack. She knows who to call. She knows what to do. What she hasn't accounted for? The key to restoring security is hidden in a former employee's missing cipher.

Decades earlier, tech pioneer Gayathri Ramaswamy predicted an attack of this magnitude while building the bank's systems, but no one listened. She engineered a safety protocol, one that could only be discovered by those who truly understood the sacrifices and strength of an immigrant and single mother. As the cyberattack escalates, Sydney must track down Gayathri's surviving children to piece together the mind and method of a misunderstood genius before time runs out and the global economy is catapulted into chaos.

A propulsive, emotionally grounded thriller, The Midnight Coder's Children is a novel about the legacies we make for ourselves, the fragile trust that holds families and civilizations together, and the extraordinary systems built, byte by byte, by overlooked people.

The book publishes September 18, 2026. Sign up for the mailing list at midnightcoderschildren.com to get updates, early chapters, and launch day news.