How STORiCORE Started and Where It Is Now
Updated [9/7/2026]
Back in the spring of 2023, I set out on a life-changing adventure. I chose to turn much of my focus to keeping up with the advancements in AI, deciding to see what I might learn and be able to incorporate into my areas of interest, writing, graphic novels, filmmaking, blogging, video games, and my newfound interest in app creation.
Things didn't exactly start that way. There was a serious young woman whom I had never seen before on a news show in February of 2023, and she was talking about the jobs AI was most likely to take. Writing was one of the ones she highlighted. Not only was I concerned with what might happen to screenwriting and novel writing, but also with any other type of work I might be able to make money doing if what she said was true. It was a moment of existential dread when I realized that a machine or machines could potentially replace me and the value I can provide with my mind and my hands.
Then I realized that even if that were to happen, we still had some time before all of that was possible, because the tools had not gotten to the point where they were replacing anything. There was value in what they were outputting. But the moment had not yet arrived when they would replace all of us. It may come. Maybe sooner than we think. Maybe later than some expected.
We may still all end up like those obese passengers on the spaceship in Wall-E, with nothing to do but look at a screen and be moved around with little to no physical exertion, while your every whim and impulse is rewarded by a personalized automation system designed to keep your mind preoccupied with the screen.
Instead of walking the wrong way down a narrow street, I chose to fumble into the woods of uncertainty and learn all I could about AI to see if I could make some of my long-held creative dreams a reality.
As a storyteller, I have thirty years of experience. Once I had gone through that initial dread phase in early 2023, I began doing constant research on the ever-changing AI landscape.
What does this have to do with STORiCORE? Everything! Sorry for shouting like I was Luthen Rael in Andor. Loved both seasons.
If I hadn't embraced AI back then, there would be no 1st Draft app and no STORiCORE. If I had dismissed the call instead of answering it when I did, I might still have answered it sooner or later, but I wouldn't have started a business, and I wouldn't be sitting here now with a working production pipeline and thirty years of unpublished stories that finally have somewhere to go.
Am I what is called an early adopter? No. Early adopters are those who actually had some tangible experience with earlier AI models back in at least 2022. It has been interesting to see those whom I began to follow when I decided to make the leap. They are being hired by big companies or finding their own niche, while some are gaining a foothold as powerful influencers with massive followings that big tech looks to when they release products or seek advice. Those who are truly thriving are those who have actual computer science or at least coding backgrounds.
I am not a computer scientist but a creative soul who is inquisitive by nature and willing to learn and stick to building something until it is finished. I found this out about myself working on the four-part Monarch series. I knew once I had finished releasing all four books within a year that I could write anything. My creative confidence could only have been higher had I sold millions of copies.
As expected, it has gotten easier for newcomers to adapt to this new AI-driven world than it was in 2023. For those just joining in, it may no longer be necessary to take all the courses and do all the research that I did over the past few years. Now you can jump in and be up to speed in no time. That same rapid speed of change is exactly why what I'm building now is possible at all. What would have been a studio's worth of work three years ago is something one person can attempt today.
The apps came first
The 1st Draft app was part one, and it's live at 1stDraftApp.com.
I tried to simplify it as much as possible. Press Start and start talking. Can't get much simpler than that. It's a voice-first writing app designed to let you talk about your story, speaking it and having it transcribed into text instead of having to sit down at a computer like I did for thirty years to get my ideas down on a page. Use it at your desk, or out and about living your life. I like to use it when I'm out for a walk or a hike.
Why build that first? Because something occurred to me in 2023 while I was consuming all the AI info I could consume. I was thinking of all the stories that have gone untold because people are busy, or never learned how to write, or for a whole host of other reasons. Hearing perspectives we've never heard before seems valuable to me. There are few emotions I have felt in life that compare to finishing the first draft of a story. Before 2023, that journey was arduous, and I have the scars to prove it. That doesn't need to be the case anymore, especially for people who aren't writers but who have a story to tell. Everyone has a story. Not everyone wants to spend a year trying to write it.
I had two more apps in mind. They're each "in progress", and I may still finish them. But they are no longer the main event, and I want to be honest about why.
By the end of 2025, it stopped making sense to lead with apps. Not because I stopped caring about helping people, that hasn't changed, but because the thing I suspected while I was knee-deep in building software turned out to be right: very soon, everyone would be able to create the software they needed for their own specific situations. And sure enough, that's now possible. At the same time, agents hit fever pitch. That's when I started dreaming about the second half of STORiCORE, the half I'd actually been circling since 2023.
I don't regret my focus on apps. I had wanted to learn more about coding for a decade. The one class I took in 2015 did nothing but tell me how much I still had to learn. Building 1st Draft taught me what a class couldn't, and I use that fluency almost every day now.
What I'm building now
A creative pipeline.
What the hell does that mean, Pitters?
It means taking what I learned from those classes, from building and shipping apps, from writing in different formats for thirty years, from making short films, and from everything else a lifetime built into me, and using all of it alongside the best AI tools available to build a system that takes one of my stories and carries it into other media.
It handles comics, graphic novels, and trading cards today. Podcasts and audio drama are next. Movies, TV, and games are wired in and waiting on my go-ahead, they're built, but I'm holding them until the tech is where I need it and the costs make sense. I'd rather get genuinely good at comics, graphic novels, and cards first, so that when I go off and do something else, I can come back to it and not miss a beat. That has been my approach to everything I've learned through the years, AI and storytelling alike.
I would have liked to use the tools other people have built. But they cost a lot of money, and none of them worked the way a writer with a catalog actually needs them to work. So I built my own.
Here's the part that matters most to me, and the part I won't move on. Five things never leave my hands:
- The writing. Every word of source material is mine. The pipeline adapts what I wrote. It does not write it.
- The visual approvals. No character, location, or design becomes canon until I've looked at it and said yes.
- The voices. I perform every character myself. The tools transform the performance; they don't replace it.
- The process. No part of this system rewrites its own instructions.
- The reference vault. Once a look is locked, only I can change it.
An AI can learn a story. It cannot have taste. That's why those gates exist, and that's why they aren't going anywhere.
The comics are the way I serialize a story, releasing digital issues over months before collecting it into a graphic novel in digital and physical form. The cards run alongside as their own format, not merchandise, but story fragments, where every card is a piece and the full set is the tale. I'm a longtime fan of non-sports cards, and the 1962 Mars Attacks set has been my north star on this. They are cards that actually help tell a story.
One of my uncles collected sports cards. Another collected comics and lost the whole collection in a flood. When we visited in the summers as kids, going through those collections was the best part of the trip. The story-based card set is a way of honoring them and their hobbies. I'll have more to say about that when the first set is ready.
Where things actually stand
I'm in the build-and-prove phase with the pipeline.
Michaelmas had been my test case, the story I ran through the pipeline to find out where it breaks. House Fly is next in line, and it's the one I'd most like to eventually push through every stage of the pipeline, front to back, because it stands on its own and the story is ideal for a game.
Not everyone is wild about AI movies and art. That won't change for some, and I understand it. I spent thirty years toiling away at storytelling the old-fashioned way. But I think there's an enormous opportunity here for me and for everyone else sitting on stories they never got to tell. Telling those stories and sharing them is worth more than clinging to how it used to be done.
All I can do is put my head back down, get back to work, and wish you well on your own creative journey.
Without a proper story, it's all just noise and light.
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