There was a time, not actually that long ago, when the dream of every self-published author involved a half-empty bookstore in a strip mall, a stack of cooling lattes, and the faint hope that someone might wander in out of the rain to hear a chapter read aloud. We called it the grind. We looked … Read more
The silence of a finished manuscript is often the loudest thing in a writer’s room. You spend months, maybe years, living inside the skull of a protagonist, memorizing the way they take their coffee or the exact cadence of their nervous laugh. Then you hit publish, and they belong to the world. Or, more accurately, … Read more
I was sitting in a drafty coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, watching the rain smear the window into a gray blur, when I realized that the way we price books is essentially a relic of the nineteenth century. We pick a number, usually something ending in ninety nine, and we let it sit there until … Read more
There was a time, not so long ago, when the act of writing was a lonely, almost monastic pursuit. You’d sit in a room, perhaps a cramped studio in Chicago or a quiet corner of a library, and wrestle with shadows until a story emerged. You held all the keys. You were the sole arbiter … Read more
Static pages are starting to feel like a quiet room where nobody is allowed to talk. I spent the last week walking around a damp, grey Seattle morning thinking about why I haven’t finished a non-fiction book in months. It isn’t a lack of discipline. It is the friction of the medium. We are living … Read more
There was a time, not so long ago, when the only way a reader could touch a piece of the world I built was to wait for a publisher to decide a plastic keychain was worth the shipping costs from a warehouse in Ohio. It felt hollow. We spend months, sometimes years, obsessed with the … Read more
The coffee shop I frequent in Seattle has this one table with a wobbly leg that everyone ignores because the light from the window is just too perfect to pass up. I was sitting there last Tuesday, staring at a half-finished manuscript and wondering if the traditional path of begging for an advance was finally, … Read more
I was sitting in a drafty coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, watching a woman browse the “Local Authors” shelf. She didn’t read a single blurb. She didn’t check the reviews on her phone. She simply walked her fingers across the spines, pulled one out, stared at the front for exactly three seconds, and put it … Read more
There is a specific kind of silence that happens right after you finish reading a sentence out loud and realize it sounds like absolute garbage. It isn’t that the grammar is wrong or the vocabulary is lacking. On the screen, the words look sophisticated, perhaps even elegant. But the moment they hit the air, they … Read more
The screen glows in a dark room in Seattle. It is three in the morning, and someone is scrolling. They aren’t looking for a new blender or checking the news. They are looking for a world to disappear into, and usually, that search leads them straight back to the same three or four giant retailers … Read more