Kimberley Jackson

Please refer to the overview of ongoing projects above. I will not share more information than generally available on this website.

It’s hard for me to say exactly where ideas come from. Sometimes it’s just a tiny detail I notice while I’m on the bus or walking to work. Sometimes it’s a random thought that suddenly appears out of nowhere, or something that comes to me in that half-awake state in the morning. In general, I have a very overactive brain that always seems to have fifty different things going on at once, so ideas tend to form naturally out of that chaos. Most of the time, I can’t really pinpoint the exact moment or inspiration that started one.

No. I don’t feel good enough as a writer to teach anyone because I still make so many mistakes myself.

What I can do is point to two books that helped me a great deal in my own writing journey: On Writing by Stephen King and Rivet Your Readers with Deep Point of View by Jill Elizabeth Nelson.

The second one especially taught me a lot about point of view, narrative distance, and how to create authentic character voices, not only in dialogue, but in the narration itself. It changed the way I think about writing from inside a character’s mind, and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who is looking to make their style more immersive while removing large parts of omniscient narration.

That really depends on how it’s used. I am not a fan of extremist views, because issues are more complex than a simple for/against answer. I think AI can be an incredibly interesting tool as an assistant. I use it for things like feedback on what I’ve written, spotting flaws with plot development, characterization and plotholes, helping with book marketing, or giving constructive negative feedback on book covers I created in Photoshop.

Long-term readers know, that visual art has also been a hobby of mine for a very long time. I’ve been making my own book covers and story dust jackets in Photoshop since 2006, and I have created comics and illustrations since I was a teenager in the 1990s. For that reason, I’m very attached to creating my own visual identity. I usually have visuals for the book covers in mind while I am still writing the books, and because I have the skills, I create them myself to make sure they match my creative vision. AI can be a very useful tool from a marketing perspective here, because sometimes my creativity takes me into the realms of the chaotic. AI can give me the brutally honest reality check I need in determining how professional a cover looks and how well it fits my intended niche and target audience, which then enables me to make the necessary improvements. This requires proper prompting to receive genuine negative feedback, though. Otherwise, AI will tell you everything you made is brilliant, no matter how terrible it is.

As an indie author, there are also practical limitations. I usually buy licenses for all of the stock photos, fonts and elements that I use in my visual art that I didn't create myself. Those are credited on the first page of every book. Sometimes, however, the exact stock photo I need simply doesn’t exist and I lack the funds to hire models, buy constumes and do an entire period photoshoot myself. In those cases, I’ve used AI to generate stock-style elements (photorealistic character images) that I then edit and integrate into my covers in Photoshop, much like I would a stockphoto.

A good example is the redesign of the cover for The Slave’s Secret. The original stock photo I used was a stock photo from romancenovelcovers.com (great page! I really recommend it for authors of romance!). The issue was that the photo actually depicted a couple from the English Regency period. I bought the license back in 2016 because it was the only image I could find that (in my opinion) somewhat resembled an ancient Roman couple. Reader feedback showed me that to them it didn't look ancient Roman at all, so that was a huge problem from a marketing perspective. Aside from that, I was never fully happy with it. The characters didn’t match how I imagined them. I changed the woman’s blonde hair to red in Photoshop, but the models still didn’t fit the character's ages and general looks.

So I used an AI model and prompted it with details about the characters, the genre, and the visual style I wanted. After some experimentation, I finally generated an image of a Roman commander and a slave that actually looked like the typical romance novel couple. I then used that image in Photoshop to create the new cover.

But that's as far as it goes for me, because AI as it is now doesn't produce good end results that I could use without heavily editing them. I’ve built a specific visual identity for my books, including fonts for my author name and book titles that I purchase licenses for. AI can’t reproduce that, nor does it work with licensed art in graphics. Besides, having trained myself for decades in how to use Photoshop and create my own cover art, there's simply no need for me to resort to AI for those tasks.

In short: no. I have yet to read an AI-generated story that doesn't lose characterization and plot somewhere half-through. There is already a huge amount of so-called “AI slop” on platforms like Amazon or AO3 (leading site for transformative works). Most of it struggles with consistency, characterization, consistent style and character voices, POV control or repetitive phrases. I have trained myself in these things as a writer for decades, so now I notice them without wanting to.

Especially POV glitches are jarring to me, and AI slop has a lot of those because AI doesn't understand how and when to use which character's POV. For a human writer versed in the craft, the choice of POV and, connected with it, narrative distance, is never arbitrary. It depends on many other factors in the story, such as conflict, characterization and plot. In short, it depends on the question: how is this scene moving the story forward? In books or stories written by AI, POV and narrative distance are all over the place without making any sense whatsoever. Additionally, one thing I noticed about almost every AI story is that AI seems to be incapable to produce real emotional depth. The stories usually remain rather shallow and especially internal conflicts never really explore the deep human experiences the characters go through. I am generally an emotional reader and need to be able to put myself in the character's shoes entirely. So AI's surface-scratch style of storytelling doesn't work for me as a reader. If I cannot connect with the characters I am reading about, my brain loses interest in their story. That said, those books and stories appear to have an audience considering people seem to read them and authors on Amazon make money with them. Many readers simply are not bothered by those issues, and that’s perfectly fine.

I compare it to the rise of dime novels in the 19th-century United States, when many authors predicted they would destroy literature. They didn’t. The dime novels simply found their own audience alongside higher quality works.

Unlike some people, I also believe AI is here to stay, because I’ve already seen its impact firsthand. I used to work as a legal translator, and with the rise of DeepL around 2018, the role of the employed translator changed dramatically and, in many areas, largely disappeared. In 2024, I switched sectors and now work in IT within Germany’s healthcare sector, where I encounter AI constantly. The reality is that AI already plays a major role in many parts of our daily lives, often without people noticing it. So I just don't see that metaphorical bubble bursting. It would take too much collateral.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t serious ethical and societal questions that we need to solve. There are, starting with regulating how major tech companies are allowed to wield the power they hold over our lives. And how to hold those companies responsible for the physical footprint of the systems they are building. There are problems with data privacy, copyright, and energy consumption that require urgent attention by all of us. But the question cannot be whether technology will move forward. It will! The real question is who gets to decide the terms and who pays the cost. And what standards the companies shaping our future should be held to. Sometimes it feels like we as societies are still having a futile debate whether a train should be allowed to leave the station it has already left, while big tech companies are already rewriting the rules to shape the future as they want it.

As a global society, we need to start seeing reality and make our voices heard in the real debate. Personally, I would rather have a say in shaping a path to use new technologies responsibly rather than boycott and ignore them and be left behind in an economy already depending on those technologies behind the scenes. But who knows how the world will look in 5-10 years? Maybe against all odds, AI will disappear again. In which case there wouldn't be a need for me to worry about being obselete an author either.

Probably Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher, which is admittedly cheating a little, because it’s an entire series rather than a single book. But I’m still amazed by the sheer amount of detail and nuance that went into those novels, not to mention the insane amount of research. They bring an incredibly dark period of German history back to life in a way that feels deeply human and unsettling.

Growing up in Germany in the 1990s, Hitler was always presented to us in school as a monster, and as a child I couldn’t understand how so many people could ever have followed him. What those books capture so well is the terrifying complexity behind that question. Hitler was also an extremely charismatic man who managed to sway huge parts of the population. The situation was psychologically and socially far more complicated than a simple “good versus evil” narrative.

What I admire so much about the series is how it explores those nuances through the perspectives of Gereon Rath and Charlotte Ritter. Charlotte is skeptical of the regime much earlier, while Gereon remains relatively neutral for a long time, and through them you really feel how overwhelming and frightening life in that era must have been. You understand the helplessness of watching masses of people become swept away by propaganda and political fanaticism.

Those books left a very deep impression on me. Though I will admit, I probably would have written Gereon and Charlotte’s relationship a little differently. Good Lord, that relationship can be incredibly toxic at times. ;)

Actually, there were two moments that immediately come to mind.

The first moment was when I held the first printed copy of The Slave’s Secret in my hands. I was thrown back to being thirteen years old. At the time, my classmates and I were all reading Salem's Lot by Stephen King while walking home from school to the bus station. I remember flipping through the pages exactly the same way, fascinated by the sheer size of the book. One of my classmates said she could never write something that long, and I replied, “Yeah, me neither.”

But I already knew at that time that I desperately wanted to try writing a book, even when I didn't think I could. In fact, I wrote my first short novel with around 15k words about a year later. A horrible first attempt.

So when I held The Slave’s Secret two decades later later, it felt like a full-circle moment. It felt like I was speaking to my thirteen-year-old self, saying: “We did it!”

The second moment was a review I received back in 2006 on an NCIS derivative work I had written. A reader from somewhere in South America told me she had been having a terrible week because a loved one was in the hospital, and that reading my story was the first thing that had made her smile in days. She even wrote that it finally made her feel calm enough that she might be able to sleep.

It completely stunned me. I was sitting in my tiny, shabby apartment in Berlin, and somehow something I had written had reached a complete stranger on another continent and genuinely improved her day. That was the first moment I truly understood why I write. I’ve met authors whose primary motivation was always making money from their books, and I could never identify with that. Much more than money, I want my stories to be read. And if every once in a while they can improve someone's day or make their life seem a little bit lighter, that's worth much more than any financial income. Which is probably why I was so content writing derivative works for so long, until content theft became too frustrating of an issue.

That’s also why, to this day, I often refer to myself as a storyteller rather than simply an author. I care deeply about the story itself and the emotional effect it has on the people hearing or reading it, far more than the financial aspect.