The engineer's mind in love
She sees the loop. She names the pattern. She runs it anyway.
California Gothic · Adult Literary Fiction
Nora and the Genius in the LLM
The real story, not the romance novel.
Nora is a software engineer. She can debug anything except her own life. After two decades of almosts, dating felt less like romance and more like sitting at a séance table — summoning men instead of spirits. Then she meets Roman. Then his roommate. And time stops.
The Book
Hope as narcotic
Nora is a neurodivergent software engineer, thirty-six, phone in hand at two in the morning, still hoping.
Roman arrives first: charismatic, certain, the kind of man who has opinions about everything, especially her. Then she meets his roommate.
Crash is brilliant, unstable, and devastating to recognize. Her friends tell her to leave. The algorithm agrees. The chatbot writes her a five-paragraph essay on why.
She stays anyway. Leaving men is easier than leaving patterns.
Debugging as intimacy
"You were looking at what works," he said. "Not what fails. That's always where the bugs hide."
The perfect boyfriend
Available 24/7. Never drunk. Never late. Never human.
California Gothic
Fog, screens, hotel rooms, coastal light.
Zoochosis
Captive bears pace the same three steps. Her thumb scrolls the same path at 2 AM.
Leaving men is easier than leaving patterns
She can leave a man. The pattern comes with her.
Writing With AI
Cursor, voice-to-text, and hundreds of listens
Written in Cursor
I wrote a novel in a code editor. Prompting, versioning, structured revision — the engineering was part of the drafting.
Voice first
Most of this book started as voice-to-text. The words came through the body before they reached the screen.
Tested by ear
I listened to the audio hundreds of times. A sentence stayed because it sounded right out loud — not because it looked right on a page.
The full story
Hyperfocus, drafting, and revision — the longer note.
About
Iris Glass
Iris Glass is a novelist and software engineer. She writes about what it's like inside a brain that notices everything and can stop almost nothing — and what happens when that brain falls in love.
FAQ
Common questions
What kind of reader is this for?
Readers who want fiction that takes the present seriously — dating apps, AI, neurodivergence, the specific texture of being a woman in tech in her mid-thirties. Fans of characters who are allowed to be fully themselves: funny and broken, razor-sharp and self-deceiving, professionally capable and quietly coming apart. Literary fiction that moves fast, trusts its readers, and refuses to reduce its protagonist to a single clean wound.
Is it explicit?
Some scenes are adult. It's not erotica — it's closer to the way intimacy actually feels when you're also anxious and overanalysing everything.
Does it have a happy ending?
It has an honest ending. The kind that feels true rather than resolved.
Will there be a sequel?
Book two is set during COVID — a road trip, a different city, a woman you may or may not have met before. Same hunger.
Did AI write this?
I wrote it with AI as part of the process — prompting, iterating, choosing. Voice, structure, every final decision: mine. The full process note.
Coming Soon
The next book
She did not mean to end up in Boulder, stripping and livestreaming past midnight, living inside a life that felt slightly stolen. She used to be a software engineer. Now the days blur.
Then a blonde appears on Tinder: private plane in one photo, pitbull in another, the sort of face that has always been told yes. In person she is richer, stranger, harder to ignore. She says her father owns half of Denver and makes it sound boring.
What starts as company becomes something else. Then lockdown closes around them.
Nothing crosses. Everything shifts.
Pre-order Open
Pre-order on Amazon
Kindle edition · $9.99 · Releases April 20, 2026.