Yesterday, I had to check yet another “Did you use AI…?” box on a query form.

(I clicked NO, btw, like every good citizen oughta.)

But then I stared at my submission and had the dumbest thought. What if they don’t believe me? So I skimmed it again, looking for any “tells,” and my heart sank. I’d missed one.

For this agent, I’d sent version 7 of my proposal, nearly identical to version 6 except for one key change: I’d rewritten it in first person instead of third. I’d learned that nonfiction proposals are supposed to be polished and professional, often written in third person, which made sense. Until I realized every agent expects something different, and my memoir is in the first person. And that made more sense—putting it in first person, that is, to match my actual book’s POV.

So I painstakingly flipped the POV throughout. It’s near the end where I missed a line; I’d referred to my dad as “the father” still, a third-POV remnant. I mean, I just overlooked one little thing, right? A single line. But in this new climate, my brain doesn’t stop there. It jumps straight to: what if they think I cheated?

Right now, writing feels like walking into a room where everyone’s already suspicious of everyone else, and you’re trying not to make any sudden moves with your sentences.

I didn’t even send that many queries before I hit the brakes. A few. Two rejections so far. Some no-replies, the publishing equivalent of yelling into a canyon and hearing your own voice back. I know I have plenty more rejections to come. Still, I’ve learned a lot from just these two. I tightened my pitch. I got sharper. I could feel the work improving in real time.

But the thing that’s starting to itch isn’t rejection. It’s the new layer of performance.

I’ve already changed my writing style once in a way that mattered. I grew up writing fantasy, living comfortably in third person, where you wear distance like armor. Switching to first-person memoir was like stepping into a maelstrom. Suddenly, every sentence had to be fiercely mine, and not just in the grammatical sense. It had to carry my breath. All my feels. My particular brand of seeing a thing and surviving it.

That shift made me a better writer. It made me braver, too.

What I didn’t expect was having to change again, not for the sake of craft or honesty, but for the sake of avoiding the mere appearance of AI. E.g., I love the em dash. Always have, always will. It’s not a gimmick for me. It’s how my brain actually moves: a hinge, a pivot, the moment where a thought catches and turns. For years it was part of my natural rhythm on the page.

Now I find myself cringing when I spot one while editing my prose. Not because it’s wrong. Because it’s automatically suspicious. And sure, learning restraint isn’t a bad thing. The em dash can be a nervous habit. It even became something of a stylistic crutch. Making rules for myself has forced me to choose my pauses more deliberately, and that’s improved my writing.

But there’s a difference between evolving your style because it serves the story and sanding down your sentences because you’re afraid someone will mistake you for a machine.

That’s the trap, especially if you’re a perfectionist writer. And if you write with ADHD, it’s a trap with extra levels. Because the ADHD brain already comes with this cursed feature: the ability to revise for-ev-ver. (Say it like Squints from the Sandlot.) The idea always feels one notch away from just right. The sentence always feels like it could be tighter, sharper, cleaner, more impressive, just better.

Then add querying to the mix. Add the pressure of writing not just well, but convincingly human. Of course, not too human or too well. Now add the fear that your natural rhythm—your favorite tools, your specific syntax, even the words you choose—might look like evidence against you. And suddenly you’re not just trying to write a good pitch. You’re trying to look innocent.

Here’s the irony: I didn’t stumble into this. I built it. I’m a storyteller who taught herself how to build stories.

Truby. Weiland. Mary Karr. Those are my touchstones. I track braided threads. I map the Lie/Truth arc. I have templates and outlines and an embarrassingly large file of writing notes, dubbed “writing porn,” that could qualify as a small religion. That’s not AI. That’s years of caring.

But in this moment in publishing, caring can look like computed. Efficiency can look like cheating. Clean structure can look like automation. And if you’re a person who’s spent your whole life trying to get your thoughts to line up in a way that makes sense, it’s a mind-fuck to find out that sense itself has become suspicious.

So I’m trying to make a new rule for myself. Not a rule about punctuation, or a rule about sentence length. Not a rule designed to pass someone else’s vibe-check. A rule about intention.

I’m done writing to avoid being suspected. I’m writing to be understood.

If that means I use an em dash when my thought actually hinges there, then I’ll use it. Because it’s mine. It’s how my mind functions. Because the whole point of a voice is that it sounds like a real person who lived a life, not like a docx trying to prove it.

inspo: this new suspicion baked into most QueryTracker forms // a single POV slip as existential crisis // the paranoia of looking too polished // the subtle violence of proving you’re human // loving the em dash and feeling ashamed of it // perfectionism + ADHD + querying // the anatomy of story writing in this new world order // mostly, choosing to honor my voice like tAoM taught me to

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

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