Category: Writing Life
Posts on the working life of a writer — drafting, revising, publishing, rejection, the long arc of building a body of work, and the everyday discipline of putting words on the page.
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Fable 5 Saved My Fables
A beta reader stole this novel in the early ’90s, so I shelved it for thirty years. When I finally finished it, something still felt off. Then Claude’s Fable 5 named the problem in seconds.
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The Story You Didn’t Realize You’ve Been Living Inside
You’ve been living inside a story all along — you just haven’t noticed. Here’s how to read the narrative of your own life.
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When Did My Books Become “Literary Thrillers”?
A strange thing has been happening lately. I’ve been running my books—new ones and old ones—through various AI assessment tools. Not because I need validation (I’ve been doing this long enough to know what I’m capable of), but because I’m curious how contemporary systems categorize work that was written across different decades. And again and…
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The Overlap Between FicInt and Dark Academia
In recent years, two terms have found increasing relevance in fiction, fandom, and aesthetic theory: FicInt, short for fictional intelligence, and Dark Academia, the moody, intellectual subgenre where knowledge often comes at a cost. Though they arise from different traditions—one from speculative architecture, the other from cultural and aesthetic movements—they often converge in fascinating, shadowed…
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Dark Academia and Me: When the Patterns Start Talking Back
There’s a point in a writing life when the work gets large enough to start revealing things you didn’t consciously plan. For a long time, I thought of my books as belonging to different projects, different moods, even different phases of my life. Southern Gothic in one corner. Dark Academia in another. A time-travel story…
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Fiction, Fact, and Fallout: The Story Behind a Biological Weapons Plot Point
Back in the mid-90s, when I was first writing Access, my “research process” didn’t look anything like it does today. The World Wide Web was barely more than a curiosity—maybe 500 pages total if you believed the jokes at the time—and I was still prowling electronic bulletin boards in the middle of the night, looking…
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When Government Conspiracy Research Walks the Line Between Fiction and Fear
In the earliest drafts of Access, I filled the pages with scraps of research scavenged from late-night dives into electronic bulletin boards and obscure government documents. This was the mid-90s, when the “information superhighway” was more like a gravel road, and part of the fun was seeing what strange, unsettling things you could turn up…
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Ideation CliftonStrength: The Constant Spark of New Stories
There’s something almost electric about the moment a story arrives uninvited, demanding to be noticed. Ideas never stop showing up at my door. They come while I’m making dinner on a Tuesday evening, leisurely walking through neighborhoods that suddenly make me wonder about the people who lived here a century ago, or watching rain trace…
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Energy-Based Workflow: Creating While Ill
For the past couple of weeks, my body has been calling the shots. Sinus infection, throat infection, vaccine fatigue—it feels like I’ve slept more than I’ve been awake. I’ve lost whole stretches of days to rest, naps, and doctor visits. And still, the work goes on. Not in the full-force way I love. Not in…
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The Grief Book Returns, Expanded
I’m going back through my older non-fiction (and fiction) books that have been off the market for eons, making some minor updates and expansions, including cover changes and reformatting, and getting them back out there. This one was written for writers and creatives trying to work while grieving, but is useful to anyone carrying loss.…
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Writing for the Fourth Turning
There’s a quiet kind of writing that doesn’t chase trends: it listens for what’s coming next. It’s like anticipating the seasons of next year. Not the next trope. Not the next genre wave. But the next emotional need society hasn’t quite named yet. The deeper ache beneath the headlines. The psychic fatigue that’s been building…
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I Asked 5 AI Models to Analyze My Workflow—Here’s What I Learned (and Why You Might Want to Try It)
It started with a simple question: Could an AI help me understand how I actually work? I’m a high-output writer—fiction, blog posts, audiobooks, formatting, metadata, cover art, automation, the whole publishing pipeline. I’d been logging my work habits for 2 months, watching myself churn through chapters and marketing, edits and uploads, sprints and stalls. So…
