Before any of the machines, I wrote books. I still do. More than seventy novels under several names, counting collaborations; over forty with my own name alone on the spine; a run on the New York Times list; and a shelf of work that lives under the pen name Foxxe Frey, which is where the L.A. Witch series and a good deal else belong.
The two are not separate careers. A novelist’s whole trade is the modelling of minds from the outside, which is also the cyberpsychologist’s trade and, lately, the question everyone is asking about the machines. When I say a language model is not an artificial intelligence, I’m saying it partly as someone who has spent thirty years making readers believe in people who don’t exist. I know what the trick looks like from the inside.
Where to buy them
Stór is my own bookstore, built into Anseo, the calm, ad-free community platform I run out of Donegal. Buying there means the book comes from me, the margin stays in Ireland, and nobody’s engagement metrics get fed. The catalogue is the Foxxe Frey titles first, with the rest following as it fills out. If you’d rather, toddmccaffrey.com has the full list under my own name, with links to the usual shops.
Side projects
This autumn I put out an L.A. Witch colouring book in paperback, A4, forty-eight pages, and I’m building the Cody’s War companion to the same spec. The eighth Cody’s War novel is in progress. There’s also a multi-voice audiobook pipeline, Scéal, under construction, because I want the books read aloud properly and the cost of doing it the commercial way is absurd.
The Books section here will carry the pieces about writing: on voice, on working with a machine that has read everything, on what changes and what doesn’t. The novels themselves are at Stór.