About
The Author
Michael P. Hamilton, Ph.D., is a field ecologist who spent 36 years in the University of California's Natural Reserve System, including 26 years as Director of the James San Jacinto Mountains Reserve. His research pioneered the use of embedded sensor networks for environmental monitoring—work that earned him co-PI status on a $40 million NSF grant through the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).
Now retired to the Canemah Nature Laboratory in Oregon City, he writes about systems thinking, human-AI collaboration, and the stories that emerge when decades of field experience meet new ways of working with information. He remains a devoted birder.
In the Society for Creative Anachronism, he is known as Broichan maqq Kynat—a Pictish persona that planted seeds he didn't know would grow into this novel.
The Novel
Hot Water began incubating from conversations I had at hot springs, where the boundary between the scientific and the mystical tends to dissolve. The Picts found me through the SCA around the same time. For thirty-two years, both obsessions waited for a form that could hold them.
The story weaves together quantum physics, evolutionary biology, Pictish archaeology, and the hot springs of Northern California into a meditation on consciousness, documentation, and what it means to be observed by something older than awareness itself.
The Collaboration
This novel was developed through a methodology I’ve developed for extending my capacity for creative design and story telling via a highly structured AI collaboration. The AI (Claude, Anthropic) did not generate the story from nothing; it helped excavate and cohere material that I had accumulated over decades between my field and research notebooks, and personal bucket lists.
The approach is documented in three technical notes:
- The Novelization Engine — Drafting methodology - The Serialization Engine — Format-agnostic story systems - The Revision Engine — Systematic revision at scale
I take full responsibility for the content, accuracy, and creative decisions. This transparency reflects a belief that AI-assisted authorship, done thoughtfully, can be acknowledged openly rather than hidden.
The Experiment
Hot Water is also a living document—revised in the open, sometimes between one reading and the next.
The Revision Engine implements quantified diagnostic tools: engagement scoring, voice fingerprinting, dropout zone detection, and visual heatmaps that reveal manuscript-level patterns invisible to sequential reading. The novel has now been through a comprehensive revision pass, reducing word count by nearly half while sharpening character voice and eliminating prose problems. Another pass will further refine the narrative arcs and with input from readers like you I’ll decide when to call the process a “wrap” and set it free.
This is not traditional publishing. There's no frozen manuscript waiting for a print run. Instead, you're seeing a novel develop in real time—the methodology applied to its own product.
If you return and find a chapter reads differently, that's the work continuing. The story remains the same. The telling improves.
If curious, I have written extensively about this process at Coffee with Claude.
The Structure
Hot Water is a novel in three parts:
- Part 1: Signal — Discovery. 66 million years. The K-Pg boundary.
- Part 2: Chronicle — Navigation. Across 500 million years. All of Earth's complex life.
- Part 3: Ancestor — Revelation. Billions of years. The original world.
Reader Trust
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Contact
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