Quotapunk
Book Clubs
Nora refreshed the usage meter on her phone for the third time in ten minutes, watching the thin progress bar like a patient reading a thermometer. Eleven percent remaining. Four days until reset. She had enough for maybe two, three more exchanges if she kept them tight, and she still needed to finish the last scene of her story before Thursday.
“You’re doing it again,” said Marcus, not looking up from his laptop across the café table. “The stare. The little lip thing. You’re rationing.”
“I’m not rationing. I’m being strategic.”
“You used Opus for dialogue again, didn’t you.”
Nora said nothing, which was confirmation enough. Marcus shook his head slowly, the way he always did when someone in the group made what he considered a tactically unsound decision. Marcus wrote on Haiku exclusively. He planned his prompts on paper first, longhand, in a pocket notebook he carried everywhere. Each prompt was dense, pre-edited, engineered for maximum output per query. He claimed he could get a complete short story out of four exchanges. Nora thought his stories read like it, too, but she kept that opinion mostly to herself.
Their book club met every Thursday at Leda’s apartment, which smelled permanently of cumin and old paperbacks. Five of them, always five, gathered around her kitchen table with whatever they’d managed to produce that week from twenty dollars a month worth of AI, split across the weeks however the service chose to portion it. The free tier was generous enough to be useful and stingy enough to be interesting, which was precisely the point.
The rules were simple. You used your allotment. You wrote fiction with it. You brought what you wrote. Everyone read everything. Then you talked about it.
Javier had proposed the idea six months ago, back when he was between jobs and bored enough to treat constraints as entertainment. “Think of it like a game,” he’d said. “You’ve got a budget. A token budget, a turn budget, whatever. The challenge isn’t just writing something. It’s writing the best thing you can with what you’ve got.”
It had started as a joke. It was no longer a joke.
By the time Thursday arrived, Nora had squeezed out her ending with one exchange to spare. She printed five copies at the library, because Leda insisted on paper. No screens at the table. That was Leda’s rule, and since it was Leda’s apartment and Leda’s cumin, nobody argued.
The reading took forty minutes. Five stories, passed around in rotation, pencils scratching occasional notes in margins. Marcus had written a procedural about a locksmith. Javier produced a flash piece about a father driving his daughter to college that was either deeply moving or emotionally manipulative, depending on whom you asked. Priya’s story was the longest, a slow burn about two chemists falling in love over a shared laboratory notebook, and Nora could tell immediately that Priya had burned through her entire weekly allotment on it, probably in two days, leaving herself nothing for revision.
“You went Sonnet?” Marcus asked Priya, and it wasn’t really a question.
“Sonnet,” Priya confirmed. “I needed the length. Haiku doesn’t sustain voice over two thousand words.”
“It sustains voice fine. You just have to establish voice in the prompt and let the model carry it.”
“That’s not sustaining. That’s hoping.”
Leda cleared her throat. Leda’s story sat in front of each of them, three pages, cleanly structured, about an elderly woman deciding whether to sell her late husband’s boat. It was, as Leda’s stories reliably were, the best one at the table. Leda used Sonnet for her first draft and then revised without the AI at all, by hand, on paper, crossing out and rewriting until the pages looked like architectural blueprints.
“The boat story is unfair,” Javier said. “You’re a better editor than any of us. You’re essentially getting two writers for the price of one.”
“The tool is the tool,” Leda said. “What you do after is craft.”
Nora listened to them argue about model selection and felt the familiar tightness in her chest that came from caring too much about something that was, on its surface, absurd. Five adults managing free subscription like it was a household budget during a war. Agonizing over which model to burn a query on. Printing stories at the library. And yet, in six months, she had written more fiction than in the previous five years. All of it flawed, most of it rough, some of it genuinely surprising. Last month, Javier had submitted a story to a literary magazine and received a personal rejection, which he framed and hung above his desk, because a personal rejection meant a human being had read his words all the way to the end.
“We should have a name,” Priya said suddenly. “For the group. If we’re going to keep doing this.”
“We’ve been doing this for six months,” Marcus said. “You’re proposing a name now?”
“Six months means it’s real. Real things get names.”
They kicked it around for twenty minutes. Javier suggested “Token Economy.” Marcus offered “The Free Tier Five,” which everyone hated. Leda said nothing, waiting.
Nora looked at her phone, at the usage bar, at the tiny number that governed her creative week. The constraint that somehow became the engine.
“Quotapunk,” she said.
Nobody spoke for a moment. Then Leda smiled, which settled it.