By RJ Redden

Spring 2022. I'm driving home, radio low, one hand hovering over the blinker before I've even consciously decided to turn, because my body knows this route better than my brain does.

I come up on my usual Starbucks, read the sign, and do the sigh. Because I already know how this is gonna go. I’ll walk in, ask for my coffee, get The Face from the barista (kind, but useless), and walk back out holding whatever's closest on the menu. A consolation prize dressed up as a decision.

My favorite coffee is burnt butterscotch latte. And I do mean burnt: the kind that tastes like caramel that almost escaped the pan but didn't, sweet with a smoky shadow trailing right behind it. Starbucks makes a great one, but only in the fall.

So I'm sitting at a red light doing math on exactly how disappointed I'm about to be. And a thought saunters in sideways, hips first, like it already knows it's about to rearrange my whole life.

You see, I'd just started poking around with this GPT thing.

What if, instead of settling for whatever's next, I skipped the counter and ask AI how to build the drink myself?

I drove straight home, and my answer came back: butterscotch extract and a little liquid smoke, just enough to smell like trouble. I poured it over a shot of espresso still ticking hot from the machine and took a sip standing at my own kitchen counter. No barista, no apologetic face anywhere in sight. Burnt-sugar smell curling up out of the mug like it had been waiting just for me.

It worked. It actually worked. The whole mug tasted like a campfire had fallen hard for a butterscotch sundae. And somewhere behind my eyes, my brain cracked open like a jar giving up its seal.

If I can build one recipe this way, I thought, I can build more. The coffee shop stuff is always so boring anyway.The same fourteen syrups just wearing a different trench coat depending on the season. Surely I can do better than that…

Then One Recipe Turns Into a Hundred

So I went hunting for extracts, and not politely. Picture the counter of a woman who has fully lost her sense of reality: little glass soldiers of extract lined up like a spice rack that had a breakdown, vanilla and toffee crowded next to one bottle that just says “smoke #3” in Sharpie because I'd run out of names. My whole kitchen started smelling like a bakery that couldn't decide what it was baking.

I was off to the races, writing recipe after recipe, and somewhere around recipe number two, still cradling that first burnt butterscotch latte like a trophy, a second thought sat down right behind the first one.

This drink needed a real name, something that belonged to my world, the fantasy tavern I'd been building in my head for years called the Come Write Inn. A harmless project, right?

So I had GPT pitch me titles. I picked one. I had it pitch descriptions, then did what I always do. I took what it gave me, and marked it up in red pen

Then I kept going. A whole slate of coffees, each one carrying a name and a sliver of story poured right into the cup.

A hundred coffees later, that is still exactly how it works.

The Loop, Explained Like a Barista Who Can’t Quit

This is the part I need you to actually get, because it's the entire point. I do not take what the AI gives me and call it finished, not on coffee one, not on coffee ninety-four.

Think of it the way a judge on Chopped sends a plate back for missing the mark, except the plate is actually a paragraph. I ask GPT to write the description for a coffee called the Widow's Toast. Round one comes back.

It's fine. It's technically words in a row, just not words that sound like they came out of my mouth. So I send it back. I tell it exactly what's off and what needs to go. Round two comes back closer, but still not quite it. I cut a line here, sharpen a phrase there. Out that description comes again.

Four rounds. Six. Sometimes ten, if that recipe's being stubborn. Every pass, the only question that matters is whether the words are finally right. The answer is no, right up until the second it isn’t.

That's the loop, spelled out plain: draft, critique, resubmit. Then again. And again, until it's something I'd actually put my name on. The AI hands me the first draft. I'm the one doing the shaping, and somewhere in the back of my head Ted Allen is already clearing his throat to ask what inspired this coffee.

The point isn't the material. It's refusing to stop shaping the draft until the page is right.

Then the Pictures Started Talking Back

Chapter two of this saga: I had roughly ten coffees fully written and wanted images to go with them. GPT couldn't generate images yet, so I grabbed stock photos that were close enough and called it good for now. Flat and generic, tasting of nothing much at all. Understudies standing in for stars who hadn't yet been cast.

Then the day came. The tool could suddenly generate images, and I was at the stage door before it had even finished opening. I took the description already written for a coffee, fed it to AI, and asked for an image. What came back was so much closer than I’d ever been. My world went from two dimensions to three in as many seconds.

I saw it. My world. Right there on the screen. It’s that moment when you’ve been carrying something around with you so long, something that no one else had ever seen.

Then, because apparently I don't know the meaning of leaving well enough alone, I pushed one step further. I took the finished image and fed that back in too, asking a different question this time, one layer deeper than the coffee itself: tell me the story of how this exact picture came to be.

Out came an extended backstory nobody had asked for, lore behind the lore. Same loop, just a bit larger.

A Hundred Coffees Later, I Still Can't Stop

That loop is still running right now, today, probably while you're reading this. Every coffee in my world has a title, ingredients, a description, a backstory, a character sheet, and in some cases a whole time-shifted history of how it came to sit on that tavern's menu.

We’re in over a hundred coffees deep. Forty-seven extracts currently live on my kitchen counter, lined up like a chorus line waiting for their cue, right next to a coffee machine that runs most of the day. A shrine nobody asked me to build and everybody who visits comments on anyway.

It isn't finished.

New flavors keep showing up. And somewhere along the way they stopped being just coffees. Characters started climbing out of them, and whole places came trailing right behind, magic items and all.

Start With Something That Doesn't Matter

This is the idea I actually want you to walk away with. I started with something fun and harmless.

Nothing was going to explode if a coffee description flopped. No client was waiting on the other end of a bad latte name. People write throwaway coffee shop copy every day of the week. It's about as low-stakes as language gets, and that's exactly why it made a safe door to walk through.

I fully expected the whole experiment to go nowhere. If that had happened, I'd have shrugged and gone on with my Tuesday.

Instead, one silly, doesn't-matter-if-it-flops drink order turned into the spine that holds up my entire fictional world. I'd tried building this world by hand before, with tea and notebooks and big brave stabs at a “series bible”. I stalled every time.

It just felt too big. I never knew which wall to start painting first. What actually cracked the world open was smaller than any plan I'd ever tried: one small idea nobody would miss if it flopped. Looped on with zero pressure to be brilliant. Then my whole world snuck in sideways while I was busy naming a latte.

CALL TO ACTION

If you want your own kitchen-counter moment, the kitchen's open. I'm hosting a Free Week of my NO BS AI class: seven days, two real things built by your own hands, no coding required, and I’m here to help you through. https://nobsai.now/free-week

About RJ

RJ Redden is your digital fairy godmother for audience engagement. Her wand wields AI, chatbots, and augmented reality to create experiences so engaging, your readers will forget Netflix exists. She also speaks fluent human in a world obsessed with algorithms. Find her at The Come Write Inn.com. This article was edited with AI assistance, because this fairy godmother believes in using every tool in the workshop — ethically and transparently.

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Pictures contributed by the author