All Updates
Every story, chapter, and update — in order of release.
Recipe for Disaster - Soft Opening
Marcus Chen has been waiting five years for this night. The oysters are at thirty-eight degrees, the duck has been dry-brining for forty-eight hours, and the press preview will make or break his opening week. Then she walks in. The woman from the wedding in Maine. The one who left at sunrise.
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…
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 …
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 …
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…
Book Battles - Episode Eight
Sci vs Fi Xanth vs The Wheel of Time Piers Anthony turned 92 last week. He's currently writing Xanth 53, and he has several finished Xanth novels stacked in a queue waiting on a publication slot. Robert Jordan planned 3 books. He finished 12 before cardiac amyloidosis killed him …
Book Battles - Episode Seven
Sci vs Sci The Dresden Files vs Murderbot Diaries Two of the most beloved narrators in modern genre fiction are dangerous, wildly competent, allergic to sincerity, and desperate to be left alone. One is a wizard. The other is a machine. Neither one gets its wish. Harry Dresden, J…
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…
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 …
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 …
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…
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 …
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…
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.…
Acceptable Losses
Perfect for readers of character-driven military science fiction who love the moral command dilemmas of David Weber's Honor Harrington and the crucible academies of Ender's Game.