Paradigm 13
Notes to self
Production diary
It started with a dream. I woke up with Paradigm 13 in my head. I had to find out what it was, and it was nothing.
Eighteen years later, it turned into this.
—T
THE DIARY
- 2008In Manchester, the year I lived there, I dream the words Paradigm 13. I buy paradigm13.com.
- 2013At Devilfish I tell my ECD about an idea: a dystopian future where people time-travel, and live in different time zones depending on how wealthy they are. If they’re rich, they live in 1994 or something. He says it’s a really interesting idea, and do I want him to get someone to help me write it up? That made me think: wow, someone actually thinks this has merit.
- BY OCT 2023I stop paying for paradigm13.com and lose it. Someone else registers it on 27 October 2023.
- 22 MAR 2024My first chat with Claude: how to embed a video on a web page.
- NOV–DEC 2024Image prompts for Stable Diffusion. Pictures first, no story yet.
- 9 DEC 2024The first of 788 pictures for the trailer, Paradigm 13 Vol 01, made in ComfyUI. The last is dated 1 February 2025.
- FEB 2025Thorn appears in my image prompts, arriving in a toilet cubicle in Folkestone. On about 19 February: “want to explore some ideas for a sci fi novel?” The first idea on the table is the one from 2013: time zones by wealth.
- 19 JUN 2025The first Paradigm 13 writing repo.REPO
- 1 JUL 2025The neural net begins: linked notes on the whole universe, about 700 of them by June 2026.REPO
- 9 JUL 2025The pattern mixer, my writing sampler.TOOL
- 14 JUL 2025Ruby shorthand: writing the world’s rules as code.TOOL
- 24 JUL 2025SVC, my own voice-capture tool, so I can talk to Claude. The first transcript is saved at 19:58 that evening.TOOL
- 30 JUL 2025“Consistent characters were very hard … I’m now just working with Claude LLM just on the writing.”
- 8 SEP 2025paradigm13.net.
- 16 JUN 2026Draft four: a new repo, the one the books are written in.REPO
- 10 JUL 2026paradigm-13.com.
- 13–20 JUL 2026Compression Fields, chapters one to six.BOOK
- 21–23 JUL 2026A brick wall. The Paradigm 13 book is too big: it’s basically two books with nine main characters, a hard thing to thread even for an amazing writer. Claude asks: if you were just to write one character, which would it be? I bet it’s Eno. No. I want to write Brad Powers. I’m just so excited to write about Brad Powers’ world.
- 24 JUL 2026Brad Powers, Book One, The Clarence Problem: chapter one.BOOK
- 31 JUL 2026Book One, first draft complete: eleven chapters, a week after chapter one. It just flowed.BOOK
- 11 AUG 2026Book Two, The Mr Perky Coffee Company: chapter one.BOOK
- 7 SEP 2026Book Two complete: thirteen chapters. It flowed so much I went on to the second one.BOOK
- 9 SEP 2026Book Three, Speculate to Accumulate, begins.BOOK
- 24 SEP 2026Book Three starts to run out of steam, partway through chapter three.
- 25 SEP 2026I realise I need client-facing websites. Paradigm 13 becomes a place to publish: one of seven sites. It makes sense to build out the infrastructure a bit.
- 29 OCT 2026This website.