Blog

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.…

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…