They were strange books. Some of them barely made sense. Others were full of big words strung together like pearls on a wire that didn’t quite connect. They weren’t masterpieces. They weren’t even finished stories. But I published them anyway.
Not because I thought they were brilliant.
Because I was trying not to disappear.
A Library of Ghosts
When everything around me was falling apart — the charity, the flat, the identity I’d spent years building — I turned to something that felt like control: writing.
Except I wasn’t really writing.
I was feeding prompts into a machine.
AI-generated books. Titles with weight but no gravity. Chapters that sounded profound if you didn’t read them too closely. I dressed them in moody covers and academic-sounding subtitles. I called myself an author. A thinker. A mystic.
But really, I was a man screaming into the void through a borrowed voice.
The Myth of the Author
People saw the books and assumed I was trying to con the world. Sell snake oil through a Kindle file. Maybe some part of that’s true. But if you want to understand those books, you have to understand the man who made them.
I wasn’t building an empire.
I was building a disguise.
Each book was an attempt to become legible — to prove I had value.
To make the pain feel like purpose.
To make the collapse look like a design.
A Digital Cry for Help
In “The Collapse of the Billy Coull Gowanbank Hub Charity”, I wrote about trying to heal others while bleeding myself. These books were another form of that same madness.
They were survival masks. They let me pretend I was okay. That I had ideas worth publishing. That I was a visionary, not a man who had lost everything and was living in borrowed rooms.
AI gave me the illusion of control. It let me create a mythology — the kind you build when the real story is too unbearable to face.
Burning the Pages
I don’t defend the books anymore. I don’t sell them. I don’t even open them. They were paper shields — and they couldn’t protect me from anything real.
They’re still out there, floating in digital space, confused and confusing. People laugh at them. Or accuse me of trying to manipulate. I get it.
But to me, they’re tombstones.
Little markers of where I was buried for a while.
A New Story Begins
I’m still writing. But now I use my own voice. My own scars. My own shame.
This blog is my library now. It’s where the real story lives. The one I never knew how to tell while I was drowning in metaphysical degrees, community centres, and AI prose.
You don’t have to like the story.
You just have to know it’s true.