Blog

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.…

Introducing the Studio

Craft Tools Accessible from Anywhere Most of the tools we lean on as writers live somewhere else. The character sheet is a Word doc in a folder we forget the name of. The worldbuilding notes are scattered across three apps. The "read it out loud and catch the lumps" pass happens …

The Writing Resources Page

I keep my working craft notes on one page of this site. It's called Writing Resources, and reaching it costs nothing but a free account. I mean the actual notes. The template I fill in before I name a character. The ten-part slog I went through to build a believable world for my …

Chapter Endings as Contracts

A chapter ending is a contract. Most writers sign it without reading. Every working writer has had this talk with a beta reader. The pacing felt off in the middle, they say. You ask which chapter. They can't point to one. So you go back and revise the chapters in that range. You …

The Chapter You Can't Write

The Chapter You Can't Write Every craft podcast tells you to push through. On this, every craft podcast is wrong. Or to be fair: right about half the time, badly wrong the other half. And nobody teaches you which half you're in. Most working writers have lived the bad version. A …

Book Battles – Ep6

Watch Book Battles on YouTube. Episode 6 (July 2026) Sci vs Fi has The Vor Game vs Ender’s Game. Two Hugo Winners, two undersized boy geniuses handed command years too early, and two completely opposite verdicts on the same question: what do you do when the order is wrong? Someth…

Writing YA Fiction

Imagine your whole school can see your stats A sixteen-year-old, one humiliating half second, and the reckless thing he does to prove it wasn’t the whole story. You already know where you rank. Somebody decided years ago, the label stuck, and most days it feels settled. The athle…

OODA Loops by Example

Last time, I argued that revision is an OODA loop, and that the step most writers skip is Orient — the move where you frame what you’ve read against what the passage is actually for, before you change a single word. That’s easy to assert and harder to show. So this dispatch is on…

OODA Loops for Editing

When you’re stuck in rewrite hell — version after version, none of them actually better — the problem usually isn’t your writing skill. It’s something quieter that most writers never name. Most revisions fight themselves. Here’s why. Every working writer has felt the difference b…

In Defense of the Adverb

The adverb prohibition was never a rule. It was a Strunk & White nervous tic that became orthodoxy — and our prose got worse for it. The prohibition isn’t entirely wrong. There’s a real craft problem buried inside it, and the rule was an attempt to solve it. But somewhere between…

Naming as Theme

A few episodes ago, I told you about a moment in a short story I wrote called “Signal Zero.” A military sergeant gets ambushed by an alien intelligence — and inside that ambush, the system gives him a designation. It calls him Sentinel. And next to Sentinel, a number: Frame: Seve…