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The Hero's Journey as Scaffolding

The hero's journey is scaffolding you build with, then take down The hero's journey is a circle with seventeen stations on it. Ordinary world at the top, then the call, the refusal, the mentor, the threshold, all the way around. You've seen the diagram. I've leaned on that circle…

Leaving Wordpress

Easy to move in, terrifying to move out WordPress is simple to start with and frightening to leave. That asymmetry is deliberate. It's the whole shape of lock-in, and it's why the internet is full of people who meant to migrate three years ago and never did. I was one of them. I …

21 Books, Free, Including 7 You've Never Heard Of

Episodes 1 through 7 of Book Battles are now open to everyone. No account, no paywall. That's 21 books and series argued over across 7 episodes. 8 of them have dropped out of the conversation, and those are the ones I'd start with. What Book Battles is Each episode does 3 things …

Readers into Members

The room with the lights off When I audited my own site through a stranger's eyes, the community page said "No activity yet." Zero threads. A forum with nobody in it. That's worse than not having one. An empty community is a shop with the lights off and the door unlocked. A reade…

The Character You Shouldn't Like

Walter White. Amy Dunne. Tyrion at his worst. The Jackal from Red Rising, who I have no business rooting for and root for anyway. You have your own list. And you know the feeling on it: the small private embarrassment of being on someone's side while some other part of you files …

A World You Can Play In

A book page is a poster Back in the first post I said I write worlds with rules you can poke at, and that I wanted a reader to actually poke. This is the post where they can. Here's the thing a static book page can never do. A reader finishes the sample, falls for the world, and …

Love Under Impossible Conditions

You've had the thought, probably at a moment you'd rather not admit to. Is this real, or is it just the situation? Some of us met someone during a bad year. A deployment, or the 8 months when everything was coming apart and one person kept showing up anyway. And later, when the y…

Selling Direct

The page that quit before the sale A reader emailed me last year to ask where she could buy the second book. I had the book. I had a page selling it, with copy I was actually proud of, the kind that makes someone want the thing. What I didn't have was a button. The honest answer …

Owning The List

The list was the last thing I moved MailerLite has an Export button that hands you your whole list as a spreadsheet. I'd been paying them for a year and never once clicked it. The morning I finally did, I understood exactly what I'd been renting. The file that came down was every…

One Engine, Two Faces

One engine, two faces I needed a second website, and I already had the code for the first one sitting right there. The obvious move was to copy the folder. Copy the folder, point a new domain at it, change the colors, done by lunch. Every author-dev who's ever run two sites has f…

The New Character Template

The Character Template: Build a Character You Can Come Back To Every writer has a graveyard of half-finished character sheets. Mine used to live in Word documents named things like char_notes_FINAL_v3.docx. The template was fine. The problem was everything around it: no consisten…

Why I Built a Platform

I stopped renting my readers Last spring I clicked the most important button on my own website and hit a locked door. The button said "Read Free Stories." I'd put it front and center, the thing I most wanted a new reader to press. I pressed it myself, pretending to be a stranger.…