Before we get to any actual story content, a quick note. As I mentioned in Hello Worlds, I wrote a few books back in the ‘90s. Those were the days of dial-up internet—AOL, CompuServe, PowerPCs running Mac OS 8, and Windows 95/NT 4. For my first two books, I used FrameMaker on the Mac, paired with a fancy grayscale beast of a monitor and a dot-matrix printer. The last two books, written in the late ’90s, were done in Microsoft Word using a custom markup system—that’s how the “For Dummies” books were written back then, anyway.
Today, I’m writing on a MacBook Air with a gigabit wireless connection. I’m relying on Gemini AI and Gemini Notebook to hold all of my grounding truths, chapter drafts, and background research while exploring ideas and reviewing text. The workflow is remarkably seamless: I’ll kick off a discussion with a question or pitch a theme, and Gemini uses the story's full context to maintain continuity. A quick search shows I’m not the first to apply this tool this way. When NotebookLM first landed, I played around with it and was instantly impressed—if I had a tool like this when I was a grad student, or during my career, or when I was writing those books, it would have been incredibly helpful.
I’m not even using the Pro version—just the freebie for now.