I wasn’t sure what to wear.
On the one hand, this was a spiritual consultation. On the other, she’d asked me to bring my Substack subscriber graph.
The waiting room was exactly what you’d expect. Emerald green velvet cushions. Incense burning in an ancient monstera pot. A stack of unread literary journals beside dog-eared astrology magazines. Someone unravelling into a hankie after plateauing at 2,437 subscribers.
“Danusia?” The psychic smiled warmly.
“I’ve been expecting you.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s literally your job.” She ignored me.
“Sit.” She reached for my analytics before she reached for my hand. Not exactly a great start.
Then her Russian Volume eyelashes fluttered shut.
“I’m sensing...”
A long pause. “...you’ve been inconsistent.”
“I have children.”
She frowned. “No. Spiritually inconsistent.”
“Oh.”
She shuffled the tarot cards.
The first was The About Page.
The second was The Posting Cadence.
The third was The Paid Tier.
Naturally.
She inhaled sharply. “Oh dear.”
“What?”
“Your About page lacks a transformational promise.”
I steadied myself.
“And?”
“You’ve been publishing interviews.”
“I like publishing interviews.”
She looked at me as if I’d said I liked eating chalk. “That’s not what the algorithm wants.”
I made a non-committal throat sound.
She scribbled something in capitals onto a yellow Post-it.
“I don’t think this is resistance,” I said. “I think this is disagreement.”
She didn’t write that down. Instead she leaned forward.
“Tell me...when did you last Go Live dear?””
“Never, that sounds hideous”
A slow, sympathetic nod normally reserved for bereavement.
“I’ve got another question,” she said. “Have you identified your ideal reader?”
“Someone with a sense of humour.”
She sighed. “Too broad.” Of course it is.
We continue: pathways, premium ecosystem and paid subscriber perks. Whether my writing leads anywhere intentional. I explain that my current ecosystem consists of a half-eaten Babybel in the glovebox and a recurring sense I’ve forgotten something important.
She adds RESISTANCE TO SCALE.
Then she stills.
“I’m receiving a message.”
“Oh God.”
“There’s someone following your work.”
“Good to know.”
“They believe you’re wildly under-recognised.”
“Mmm.”
“They’d like to help amplify your voice.”
“Go on.”
“They’re an editor.”
“Progress.”
“At a major publishing house” I sit up a little. “Penguin Random House?” She zoned in. “No” “Macmillan?” “No” “Hachette?” “No” She stopped. “That’s odd” “What?” “The message has disappeared” “Oh” “It needs to be verified before I can continue.” I look at her.
“Verified?”
A small nod.
“It’s standard now for a psychic reading.”
She gestured vaguely upwards.
“For the industry.”
Then disappeared behind tapestry drapes carrying a giant glass orb. A few moments later she returned looking clammy. “I’m afraid the editor wasn’t human” “I’m sorry?” “The publisher wasn’t human either.”
Of course. “They’d still like to help shape your voice”. “Sure they would”.
She watches me.
“You’re not excited.”
“No,” I say. “I just know the difference between being discovered and being harvested by AI.”
For the first time since I’d arrived, she put her pen down.
“I was wrong.”
“Oh?”
“You don’t actually want advice.”
“No.”
“You don’t want a template.”
“No.”
“You don’t even want success explained.”
“God no.”
A pause. “So what
I think about it.
“I just want to be able to write something good,” I say, “without having to prove how it was made.”
Appointments available. Paid subscribers receive priority access to the astral plane.
The thing I love most about writers is that we’re gloriously unreliable.
We disappear for weeks or months because we fall down strange corridors of interest: Otters. Tudor kitchens. Ceramic glazes. Somatic grief. A woman on a train wearing an extraordinary yellow coat we just can’t quite forget.
Then we come back having written the only essay we could have written because we left.
and waiting while Pangram scans it and decides how likely it is that you wrote it. Likely human, or not.
Then there’s this:
➡️ Virginia Woolf, writing one of her famous ‘waves in the mind’, then pausing over whether it reads too composed.
➡️ James Baldwin, catching that push-and-pull, sermon-like momentum mid-flow and breaking it before it looks rehearsed.
➡️ Toni Morrison, second-guessing her instinct to bend syntax into music, because that same musicality now reads as… questionable.
Indeed: write something beautiful and it’s flagged as suspicious or called artificial.
So we hesitate, second-guess and start thinking “does this read as human enough?” even when we wrote it without any machine.
And that is a very strange place to end up.
The same writers who were told to find a voice are now being asked to prove it’s really ours.
It’s not just writing something of value, it’s proving you wrote it.Daftly, we’ve gone from being told to hone our work to ironically being asked to rough it all up again just enough to pass as human.
Best advice right now: be a little messier than you naturally are (throw in a typo or two) or people will think you’re using AI. As though humanness were something you could simply perform on cue or scatter on top like seasoning.
The machines learned from our sentences, our cadences, and the very things we spent years refining.
And now humans are adjusting ourselves in order to not resemble the machines that learned from us.
We’ve reached the point where the burden of proof sits with the writer, not the machine. I don’t know about you, but I find that back to front.
God, it’s exhausting.
She thought I was looking for Substack success tactics. I’m not.
I’m looking for writing that doesn’t need to prove how it was made.
Thanks for being here,
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