I spent most of yesterday staring at a stack of paperbacks on my desk, thinking about how stubbornly we cling to the idea that a book is just a bound collection of dead trees. There is a specific, almost holy comfort in the weight of a physical spine, the way the paper smells like a … Read more
There is a specific kind of quiet that settles over a room when you realize the story you’ve been carrying around for years might actually stay locked inside your head forever. It’s a heavy, slightly suffocating feeling. Most people call it writer’s block, but I think it’s more of a structural collapse. We’ve been told … Read more
There is a specific kind of quiet that settles over a room when you realize the old way of doing things is finally, irreversibly broken. For years, the dream was the Big Launch. You’d spend eighteen months huddled over a keyboard, emerge blinking into the light, and throw your soul at a retail platform, praying … Read more
There was a time, not so long ago, when you knew exactly what you were getting with a cozy. A small town, a punny bakery name, a protagonist with a precocious cat, and a murder that felt about as threatening as a spilled cup of Earl Grey. It was a formula that worked until it … Read more
I spent most of last Tuesday staring at a flickering neon sign outside a diner in Austin, Texas, wondering if I had finally reached the point where the act of writing was no longer about the words themselves. It feels like every time we settle into a rhythm, the floor moves. We used to just … Read more
The glow of a smartphone at three in the morning used to be the universal sign of insomnia or perhaps a misplaced sense of urgency regarding a work email. Now, it is where the modern American novel is actually being written. We have spent years mourning the death of the long-form narrative, weeping over the … Read more
I spent most of yesterday staring at a condenser microphone that cost more than my first car, wondering why I was still trying to punch in the same paragraph for the fourteenth time. My throat felt like it had been scrubbed with sandpaper. That is the glamorous reality of traditional recording. We tell ourselves that … Read more
The screen is flat. We have spent the last two decades pretending it isn’t, layering shadows and gradients over our interfaces to trick our brains into sensing depth where there is only glowing glass. But for those of us in the self-publishing trenches, the flatness has become a ceiling. You pour a year of your … Read more
The glowing rectangle in your hand is a lie. Well, maybe not a lie, but a very expensive habit. We have been conditioned to believe that the path to a reader’s heart, and more importantly their wallet, runs through a single massive warehouse in Seattle. We upload a file, we cross our fingers, and we … Read more
There was a time, not even that long ago, when hitting “publish” felt like throwing a message in a bottle into an ocean made of plastic waste. You did the work, you suffered the syntax, and then you handed sixty or seventy percent of your soul to a storefront that treated you like a decimal … Read more