Keeping my own voice

The thing that gives AI-assisted prose away is not bad writing. It is uniform competence. Every sentence fine, nothing alive. And the failure mode is sneaky: it does not arrive all at once, it drifts in wave by wave.

Here is how the drift works. Say each chapter gets a revision pass, and each pass calibrates against the chapter before it. Every adjacent pair reads consistent. Twelve chapters later the narrator is somebody else, and you never saw it happen, because your ear compares neighbours and the neighbours always matched.

The fix I landed on is embarrassingly unliterary: measure. Every chapter gets profiled against the story's trunk, the baseline voice of its human-written opening, on mechanical proxies. Contractions per thousand words. Mean sentence length. Paragraph blocking. Dialogue share. Each story derives its own numeric band from its own trunk, which matters, because a narrator from 1742 legitimately sits near zero contractions where a modern one should not, and fixing one toward the other is the same bug running backwards.

A chapter has to land inside its band to count as finished. Overshooting is as bad as undershooting, since the next pass calibrates to whatever you leave behind. The band is numbers because my ear is exactly the instrument this failure fools. Reproducible beats confident.