Talemaiker Storytelling Tools
Quickly Explore and Expand Your Story
I’ve built a set of custom AI tools to help you more fully envision the world you’ve created.
A session with me is about the fun part of writing – taking a detailed and beautifully illustrated journey through your universe, including the parts you haven’t imagined yet.
My sessions focus on creativity and joy: I want you to fall in love with your story again. 🖤
What We Create Together
In addition to dozens of pages of detailed session notes, we’ll create visuals like this as we go along. Most of these were taken directly from my World Builder tool, and the others come from me taking those concepts and upscaling them on other AI platforms. If you want me to do some additional, dedicated image creation for your WIP in the form of storyboards, character sheets, or world settings, I offer that as a separate service listed below.
How It Works
A work session with me is especially helpful if any of the following apply:
1) You’re at the beginning of your writing, with tons of ideas you want to chase down and tease out
2) You’re dreading doing X when you really want to focus on Y – let’s knock out the X together!
3) You’re in between drafts, with a pile of story edits to make but not sure where to start
4) You’re having a bit of writer’s block, or you’re generally tired of your work – this session will reinvigorate you!
During our time together we’re going to bring your story to life textually and visually through the creation engine I’ve built using a combination of AI platforms. Our primary tool will be my World Builder Assistant, which you can see in action here.
Our path through the exploration phase looks like this:
- You provide me with a baseline understanding of your story. This can be anything from a germ of an idea you want to explore, to a rough plot outline, to a full-fledged work in progress. Send over as much or as little as you want, including: query letter | character bios | world maps | art/sketches | sample pages | list of questions/ideas you’d like to explore during the session.
- Using this information, I’ll be able to construct a mental model of your world for the AI, which allows us to go into layers of creative detail both conceptually and visually for anywhere you like. You direct the action, and I’ll take us there.
- We are able to rapidly ideate, iterate, and prototype, quickly exploring new possibilities for any area of your story that you find interesting. These can be things that you haven’t had time to get into yet, things that you’ve avoided because they feel like a chore, ideas in the back of your head you’d like to play with but haven’t been able to justify time on, etc.
- My job as a story editor is to help you see your story through any lens you want, giving you a power brainstorming session that fires your imagination, addresses your relevant questions, and puts you into an excited writing mode again.
- Open up “Expanding Your World” for the next step . . .
I’m going to function as your story editor, giving you the tools and the time to dive deep into your world, expanding any of your current ideas into much greater detail, and opening doors to new possibilities you can explore. We’ll be using AI not as a writing tool, but as a brainstorming superpower to take us many places in a short time. Here’s how:
- Think of our session as an ideation meeting in a publishing house where you have access to a team of creatives. Led by you, the writer (main storyteller), facilitated by me (standing in for the creative director), overseeing contributions by our “team” of multiple AI platforms and tools (representing the development editor, line editor, technical writer, researcher, illustrator/artist, etc).
- You will come to this session with two things: 1) a set of specific questions you’d like to discuss, and 2) an openness to following the white rabbit. We can and will get into any specifics you want regarding setting, character, plot, conflict, or story structure, but I believe the real magic happens when you get excited about the surprising paths to explore, lighting up your mind with new potential expansions for your story.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for anything crazy in our session – crazy is what these tools do best. For example, if you have a mental picture of a scene in your head, or if you have two characters you love but no idea how to connect them, I can help put just enough structure around the prompting to get the tools to give us some plausible scenarios to evaluate and explore, all within the context of your story.
- You’ll take from our session dozens of pages of notes and sketches on how to enrich your story with more detail, more lived-in settings, more authentic characters, and a bunch of new ideas to start chewing on. Remember, this session isn’t about the hard work, it’s about the *FUN* work. You’re going to leave here excited to start writing again.
- Open up “Why Work With Me” for the final step . . .
I’ve made my living over the past 15 years as a digital creator focused on writing, editing, storytelling, and technical development (you can check the About page for more details). Along the way I’ve built a specialty in leading brainstorming groups of multi-disciplinary creatives, all working together to tell a cohesive story.
When I started learning how to build AI applications, my first thought was to bring all these experiences together to create a system of tools and processes that could make a small solo writer feel like they had access to a set of creative services to help amplify their work.
If you decide to work with me, I think you’ll do it because I have a history of leading ideation sessions with storytellers, only now I get to do it with amazing new tools that I’ve custom built for the job. I’m having a ton of fun helping you enhance your stories, and I believe you will too.
As we work together, I can answer any of your AI-related questions from a professional perspective (well, as professional as anyone can be in such a new field, anyway). I’ll help you figure out which platforms would be best for you depending on your needs, and give you some best-practice advice for prompting and getting the most out of them.
Additionally, if we work at least five hours together, you’ll get the opportunity to purchase lifetime access to all the writer tools I create – the same ones I use in my daily work. You’ll have some training and experience in getting the best results and be able to do it yourself going forward, forever.
Packages & Rates
- 20-Minute Demo Session $20
I'll show you how my system works and what we can do with your story
- 60-Minute Work Session $200
Create our first output together, usually around 25 pages and 10 images of story-specific work
- 90-Minute Work Session (DISCOUNT) $250
This is the sweet spot for producing the best results most efficiently
- 120-Minute Work Session $400
Best for returning clients getting into deep work
- Lifetime Tool Access $500
After we've done at least 5 hours of work together, you can purchase lifetime access to all the custom AI tools I've built so you can use them yourself
- Custom Image Creation quote
Character sheets, storyboards, illustrations
- Custom Tool Development quote
I can build an AI tool to your specifications to aid in your writing process (ideation, research, editing, prompting, etc)
Client Feedback
FAQs
I’ve built my toolset using popular publicly accessible platforms like ChatGPT and Claude, which means that any conversations we have with the AI will live on servers in their ecosystems. This is standard practice whether you’re inputting conversations at home on your own or during a session with me. My tools don’t collect or store any data from you beyond what the platform is already using to function. Any time you use a public-facing AI platform, this is the tradeoff you make: generating results at the cost of your content rolling through their ecosystem.
Their usage policies state that you own all the input you provide to the service, and they assign all rights, title and interest of any created output to you as well, as long as you comply with the terms of service (which we will).
Everything should be fine legally, which is the important part. If you’re worried about an illegal information breach, I can tell you that on the Hacker Scale of Valuable Stolen Information™, yours will be at the very bottom of the list. Either way, you are always in charge of the amount of information we use in our session. If you want to run the exercise with more vague information instead of proprietary, it’ll still work – just not quite as well or quite as fast.
If after all these notes you’re still 100% against any AI company getting even a whiff of your content, then this session probably isn’t for you. As a consolation prize, however, you can expect to see me begging at your door for some bread after our robot overlords complete their domination of the planet. (Just for the record, I prefer sourdough.)
I think that’s a good position to take, and I’m sure the majority of writers at this point in time feel the same way. I can tell you two other things to ease your mind:
1) My AI tools don’t do any writing for you at all – they simply provide idea generation in the directions we point it.
2) I don’t use AI to write anything on this site or on my social media feeds either, unless it’s for product demos or experimentation.
I don’t have a very strong opinion either way at the moment, but I lean toward the artist side. This technology is really new, and I’m waiting for all the battles to be fought and the dust to settle to see where we land, and then I’ll be happy to abide by whatever rules are put into place. In the meantime, when I’m using AI image generators, as a personal boundary I don’t ask for “art in the style of [Artist Name].” I articulate more of the general art style I’m looking for rather than the individual artist, because I don’t feel good about stepping over the work they’ve done.
Yes, the process works equally well for any genre. It probably shines a little bit more in fantasy and sci-fi because it excels at imaginative hallucination and unique illustrations, but all the real work done through the system is just as effective for literary fiction and other real-life genres. I mean, if you’re writing a super dry biography on the inventor of the fastening pin we may struggle to add a lot of extra value, but we’ll slog through that mire when we get to it.
Sure, you can always reach me by using the Contact page.
I should probably make it just for first-timers, but for now I’m keeping it as it is. Abuse away! Just make sure you feel kinda bad while doing it.
I subcontract out as an editor with certain agencies, so if you found me through them and you can sign up through them, please do so for as long as you want.
I do a lot of other things, both in this realm and in others. As far as creative editing and AI work is concerned, I’m actually open to pretty much anything as a one-off project right now. If you want to work with me on something you don’t see listed on the page, for sure drop me a line and let’s talk!
Related to my historical career field, I still do contract work for creative agencies, helping them create marketing campaigns (AI-focused or traditional) for client brands. I also have a personal portfolio of building large communities and philanthropy programs.
If you want to get a feel for my capabilities, check out Work With Me, Skeleton Crew Creative, and LinkedIn.
The upside:
- I’m giving you lifetime access to all the custom tools I’ve built for writers – the same ones I use during our sessions
- I will continue to upgrade the tools that I (now “we”) have and also build more, and you’ll get access to those as well. This also protects you from unintended platform changes, since anything that harms the tool, I will fix
- I’m not trying to hoard access to the tools in order to force you into more sessions with me. Getting access to these products drastically lessens the need for you to do any more sessions with me
The downside:
- Although I believe these tools will remain useful for many years with or without my maintenance, they are built on the AI platforms’ technology, so if they make major changes that somehow disrupt a functional aspect, I have no control over that
- Eventually, at some point in the (probably far) future, they will fall into disrepair, and I won’t be around to fix them. I plan to actively maintain them as long as I’m using them myself, although they should last far longer than that
- Some of these tools can be used freely, while others will require you to have a paid subscription to the AI platform in order to function
These potential downsides are why I’m making them available as a bundle for lifetime use at such a low price, instead of treating each one as a monthly subscription service. If I do eventually end up billing them out as a subscription service, you’ll be grandfathered in as a free account for the tools you have at the time. Look at you being early to the game!
Here are the tools you get access to when you purchase: [link to product list]
No, I wouldn’t consider myself a proper writer in that sense. I usually say that I’m a creative technologist who happens to be able to write. I do read a lot, though. When we get into a session, you’ll see that all the walls of my office are lined with 50’s and 60’s sci-fi paperbacks with all that awesome cover art. You can close your eyes and see exactly what I’m talking about, can’t you?!? I also collect Dell Mapback books from roughly the same timeframe. I read a lot of sci-fi, both classic and modern, along with classic fantasy. I have a soft spot for well-done comics and graphic novels, like Gaiman’s “Sandman” series and Willingham’s “Fables” series. And then my dining room has been converted into a library filled with, you know, books and stuff.
I'm Also a Story Editor At:
