An Ironman, and other triathlons, are made up of three events: a swim (usually 1.2 miles), a bike ride (56 miles for the 70.3), and a run (13.1 miles in this case). They always occur in this order, and every competitor, even though they can do all three portions of the race, usually has one that is their strongest.

When you run an Ironman, whether as a pro or as an amateur, and regardless of the time you want to finish in, there is a specific set of proven steps in the training process. There are a few different approaches, but they all follow the same pattern: you start with a smaller run, swim, and bike based on your current aptitude for each and your individual physical fitness. Your increase distance and intensity over a directed period of time, often as long as a year in advance, and then a couple weeks before the event, you “cool down” your training, get plenty of rest, and manage your nutrition a certain way, so on the day of the event you are truly ready to compete.

The event itself has three acts, just like a lot of stories, and similar to the writing process itself. It’s a story with a beginning, a long middle, and a glorious ending, provided you are successful. But much like writing a novel, without going through the process of the phases of the event, you can’t finish. Unless you go through the process of writing a novel, the finish is, well, not always great. Let’s look at how this works.

Training to Write a Novel

There are all kinds and shapes of bodies competing in Ironman triathlons: I saw people my age with my body type, young men, older women, and everything in between. I’ve also competed in competitive gravel cycling events, and the mix is the same there, but every competitor has the same thing in common: they have trained specifically for this event.

That means they have practiced all three elements: swimming, cycling, and running. Not one of them enters the water without at least having swum that distance multiple times before. No one swims some laps at their local pool and thinks that is enough: these are all outdoor, open swims, and most athletes try to train in conditions similar to those they will be competing in, if possible.

How does this relate to novel writing? First, because you can write great poetry, short stories, or even legal briefs, environmental reports, or other long form content, that does not mean you are capable of writing a novel. This is not because you lack talent and skill, but because you lack training at the equivalent of an endurance sport. Not only is the structure different from that of a short story or a non-fiction piece, but the idea you start with must be larger, because the story must be longer and be able to hold up for a distance.

Story fatigue will kill your novel. Story endurance is essential, and you must train for it. There are no shortcuts. You might be a naturally talented athlete and embark on an Ironman and finish, but it is nearly impossible for you to finish well without proper training. It could happen, but lightning can also strike a specific tree in your front yard.

But you would not bet on that or build a career on it.

In order to write long form fiction, you need to train to write it, and while there are different approaches, structures, and types of instruction, doing this job without training is not only nearly impossible, but trying can be extremely frustrating.

Pros make competing in a triathlon look easy because of training, not in spite of it. Writing is the same. That pro, writing 3-5 K words a day and 4-6 novels a year, makes that look simple. But the likely story is they have trained for years to be able to do that at all (and the marketing and other career aspects are another story yet).

So how do you train? First, there is always a formula, and it starts with knowing your own writing talent (an honest evaluation) and your current level of experience in a few aspects of writing long-form fiction. (That’s another post for another day). You also, if you want to move from amateur to pro, likely need some education and professional coaching.

Education is easy, and usually I do not mean college. There are all kinds of courses and instructors out there, and some will speak to you more than others. For most writers, this does not mean college. A bad MFA program has ruined the voices of more authors than it has created author careers. There are a few good ones around the country, but most of them are pretty crappy, to be honest.

Coaching is a little different, but you can find good information out there. My son, who is taller than I am, had a professional bike fitting and other coaching along the way, and after the race, plans to revisit it again. For writers, this can be akin to evaluating your process, how you remain accountable, and more critical elements of the “bike” you ride to create long-form fiction.

But no one can do this alone. A trainer needs to spot you, look at your form, give you advice based on your goals, and help you set up the tools you use so you can have the greatest success.

The Event: Writing the Novel

Once you have trained for writing a novel, and you feel you are ready for “race day” it’s time to get started. Much like the novel itself, the process of creating one will have three main parts. (There are more, but again, that is a detail for another day).

The first thing a triathlete does it set goals for each stage of the event, based on what they have learned during training, their weaknesses and strengths, and their overall goals for the event: to simply finish, to match or beat their personal records, or to place, be an “early finisher” or for the pros who are truly ambitious, to win.

As a novelist, you must set realistic goals for your fiction as well. For your first sci-fi novel to win a Hugo award is a lofty goal, but that means a lot of different steps that most first time novelist don’t have the talent to complete, not to mention the cost for editors, cover designers, sales to get the attention of the right people who manage and even nominate the awards, and more.

But to finish your first novel and achieve modest sales goals, maybe even break even, is not unheard of. That, with the right training and business coaching at the same time, is possible.

For most authors, just like for most Ironman triathletes, their first race or first novel costs them money. In fact, most novelists and most triathletes for that matter, never make money from their pursuit. They pay to compete, and the rewards they receive are intangible, like self-confidence, personal physical and mental fitness and toughness, and more. This does not mean they spend any less money on equipment or any less time on training. It simply means they understand, unless they cross the line into being a pro, they will never make money by competing. That’s not the goal.

Why is this so important to writing? Because much of your mental health depends on setting expectations, and those expectations will help you endure when you don’t land that publishing deal or become the self-publishing sensation whose manuscript gets optioned for film by Ridley Scott.

If you start with the right expectations, it will be much easier for you to finish. In fact, the better you understand that every first attempt, or first draft, will be terrible and need a lot of work. Every Ironman is run in a different location and environment, and those factors can mean that even the pros struggle, and that sometimes they don’t even finish.

We’ll talk about that in a second. But starting with the right goals and mindset will help you be successful, because milestones will only relate to things you can control, and stop resting on things you cannot.

Beginning

Then you must start the story. For many triathletes, like many novelists, the start is the hardest part. Many great cyclists and runners struggle with the open-water swim that is a mile long, even though it is the shortest distance in the race and also the fastest. Many pros finish under 30 minutes, and many amateurs finish quickly as well. The swim, as the opening of your novel, is more like a long sprint. You need endurance, but there are no aid stations in the water. There is nothing for it but to as my son says, keep going.

There is one key to open water swimming, and it is called sighting. At the start, and in the water, it is easy to put your head down and swim but not look up to see where the turns and buoys are that keep you on course. This can cost a lot of time.

This is the same for a novel. Knowing at least enough about your characters and places, and the general direction the story is going, is vital. Stopping from time to time to “sight” for the next buoy or marker is critical to staying on track and setting the foundation for the rest of the race.

Transition 1

You don’t wear the same thing to ride a bike as you do to swim. Depending on the temperature of the water, swimmers wear a wetsuit or even a dry suit. Most wear one that is designed for a triathlon, which means it is easy to remove so they can take it off and transition to bike gear. Most have their biking “suit” on under their wetsuit.

As a writer, we know there is a transition from the first act of a story to the second. In the first we have had a hook (what got the reader reading in the first place), an inciting incident which is the point at which your protagonist cannot turn back from their journey, and then a moment of a “break into two” or the movement into the second act, where the journey the character will take in this book actually begins.

The Middle Portion

The bike, like act two of a novel, is the longest part of the triathlon, and at this stage, having a plan for nutrition, or feeding your story in a novelist’s case, is essential. Otherwise, you can either lose energy in the middle, which slows the athlete (or your story) down, or you can use up all of your story energy in this part of the book and have nothing left for the ending.

How do you feed your story and your story energy? Well, that is also another detailed post for another time, but it is not Mountain Dew and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. It does mean feeding your creativity, which can mean anything from poetry to music to consuming story through reading, listening, or even watching, although arguably reading is the best, since readers are the audience you are targeting.

Think of the middle, or act two of your story, like a buffet. You are trying to get to the next course, the next bit of nutrition, the next bit of the story. Even if you are a discovery writer, you may not know what the next bit is, but you know what it looks like. You’ve trained your mind and planned for it in your muse. Now is the time to do what you have practiced.

Transition 2

Just as you don’t wear the same uniform to swim as you do to bike, you also don’t wear the same thing to run. There are two key things you are going to change: your footwear and your headgear. While bike shoes are designed to clip in and secure you to the pedals, giving you more power through the course, running shoes are designed to both cushion and support your feet as you drive toward the finish line. You wear a helmet on the bike, but you swap to a hat or headband for the run, one that is breathable, but moisture wicking to keep sweat out of your eyes so you can still see where you are going.

This is because you are moving in to act three. Here’s the problem: the middle of the novel or the race is most often where athletes and writers get “off pace.” They lose momentum because it is harder to see where they are going. In the case of biking, there are often hills which produce conflict and try/fail scenarios, where the athlete must dig deep (as your protagonist must) to keep going. All three, the athlete, the novelist, and your protagonist, need a strong motive to keep going.

The third act is the most fun in many ways (at least for the novelist) but it is the place where pacing and your technical skills and talents are perhaps just as, or more important than the opening.

The Run to the Finish

The final push is where your nutrition so far in the race is most critical to an athlete. You can only carry so much nutrition with you, there are few aid stations in the final stage, and most importantly what you consume at this stage may not make it through your body in a way that can help you before you cross the finish line. This might be great for the after party, but it’s not going to improve your outcome.

This is true for the novelist as well. You cannot wait until the final act to feed your story properly. If you do, your story will fall flat and lifeless, and your ending may even disappear. The other critical thing in this final stretch? Pacing.

The first few miles of the run are at a steady pace. You just need to get where you are going, but then an athlete reaches the final 5K or three mile mark. That mark is when they give everything they have left to the finish of the race. Not a sprint, but an increased pace for sure, and that final mile you give everything to the race, leaving all of your energy on the course.

Have you ever finished a novel and been both physically and mentally exhausted? This is why. In your run to the finish, you leave everything, your heart, soul, and mind in the story. The story becomes, for a time, the only thing that matters. You might skip meals, sleep, hydration, everything you normally need until the story is complete. Why?

Because you want to finish well. Even if your draft is not perfect, the finish tells us everything we need to know about how to revise the rest. Because not finishing means we don’t know how this story ends. We know how a story ends: we have seen it, consumed it along the way to feed our muse. But we need to know how this particular one turns out.

And guess what? Just like sometimes even pro athletes do not complete an event successfully, the same is true of novelists. Some books or stories are ones you never finish, and that is perfectly okay and normal. Sometimes you finish, but you realize the story is not the best it could be. That is true of a disappointing time when an athlete finishes a race, too. They finished but did not finish well.

But we’re done. Time to cheer and celebrate, but now what?

The Debrief, or After Race Review

There is one critical difference between a novel and an Ironman triathlon. It’s this. For us, the race, the event, is a draft, and we can go back and fix what is wrong with it, most of the time. The triathlon competitor can only work on improving before the next race.

There is certainly a place for that in your author career, but at the moment, we can look back at the work we have created and figure out how to fix those slowdowns in the middle, or starting in the wrong place, or going off course along the way.

We can even change the ending and make a poor one into a good one. In fact, most drafts, or events, lose in certain areas. We fail. So we must take a moment to change that to success so that failure does not have to be permanent or even public.

But much like a military or race debrief, we should answer certain questions (this too is another detailed post for another time):

· What went right? What went well and according to plan? Why did that go well, and how can we duplicate that success next time?

· What failed? This is not things that just did not go the best. These are utter failures. If your draft has none of these, you are likely not being objective and critical enough of it, and you need to get professional help. Or, as we will discuss in a course I am working on about the series Breaking Bad, you can still have failure in a work, even a large one, and it can still succeed. You may not even see the flaw until you look back using that wonderful 20/20 hindsight.

· What can we improve? Some things may have gone well, or even just fine. But they could be better. We can up our dialogue, for example, or our physical character descriptions, or making more of our sentences in active voice. Some of that we can improve in this novel, depending on our goals and publishing deadlines, and some we can improve in the next book. At this point, we simply make two lists.

There are several details we need to look at in this area. We often need help at this point: beta readers, critique groups, or even professional book coaching and evaluation.

This step is critical. If you don’t know how you did, and what success looks like, you can’t move toward it faster. The athlete cannot improve their run time by simply doing the same training, nutrition, and race day routine over and over again. They must always be learning and improving. It is the same for novelists and creatives.

A Reality Check

I know some of you will be quite relieved that this is the last section in this lengthy article, but here’s a quick reality check: there is one more way that athletes and authors parallel, and it is important to mention and examine. We mentioned it above, and this could also be an article of its own, but here goes:

· Being a pro athlete in the triathlon space is as rare as being a full time novelist. Think of it this way:

· Many people say they want to run a triathlon, just as many people say they would like to write a novel, or a book of some sort.

· Of those many people, an extremely low percentage (something under 10% for writing books) actually even attempt it. Of those who attempt it, only a few actually make it to the “event” of competing in a triathlon or finishing a book.

· Fewer still make any money at all from their writing or their triathlons. Most novelists and athletes spend more money than they make, making that endeavor a hobby rather than a career. (This is not as discouraging as it sounds).

· Of those who do make money, even a little money from sponsors and other sources, only a select few make a living at writing or triathlon competitions. This is about the 1-4% of those who actually complete a book or a triathlon.

If we look at that total, it means that to be a pro triathlete or a professional novelist who writes for a living is less than a .25% of people who want to write a book, and a tiny percentage of those who actually get to the publishing stage. Does this sound discouraging? It does not have to!

The Cost of Greatness

Not a single person I have ever talked to starts a conversation about editing with, “I’d really like to produce at least a mediocre book, one that some people might think is okay. Can you help me do that?”

No. Every person who approaches me as an editor who is by no means cheap tells me they want their book or story to be great. They don’t even say, although it is often what they mean, “I want this to be the best that I can do write now with the skills and talent I possess.” No. Most of them have an idol or someone they look up to and would love to be like. They want not just their view of success, but the type of success that others will look at and admire them in the same way they idolize their heroes.

The problem is that to get to that level of greatness requires great sacrifice. It requires time and money spent training and studying. It means investments in coaching and editing, and many revisions of their work, especially if they are just starting out and need to gain experience and training.

As Yoda said to Luke, “Ready you are not.” Most successful books are not the author’s first or only work. They come 10-12 novels in, some of which are good, others that have potential, and only a few great ones. Because if every story was great, we would just have set a new standard for normal, and something great would have to go beyond that.

A great triathlete is not born, and neither is a novelist, musician, or any creator. There is such thing as raw talent, but talent left undeveloped never wins a race or the ITW Thriller award. And even then, you’ll need a bit of good timing and good luck to go with that talent and the truly great book you have written.

Greatness in one area of your life will cost you in others. That’s the simple truth, and that greatness may not even be publicly or widely recognized. You may be the bestselling novelist that no one has ever heard of.

But in pursuit of excellence (never perfection) even amateur athletes and authors sacrifice:

· They set aside money for training and conferences.

· They spend time in study and practice to make their craft, or their athletic fitness, better

· They pay editors, coaches, cover designers, and formatters to make their work the best it can be and the most commercially viable. Athletes pay coaches, bike fitters, physical therapists, and others to improve their form, their skills, and their mental acuity.

· They show up at events and compete, even when the chances of winning (or becoming a viral internet sensation) are low to non-existent.

· They finish, over and over, race after race, novel after novel, and then work to improve, revise, hone their craft and business acumen, public image, and more to attract sponsors (publishers, agents, superfans) and fans (readers).

The outcome matters much less than the event, the act of publishing or competing, itself. This circles back to the start.

You must revisit your goals, the ones you stated when we started the race. You must revise them to realistic, but hopeful, outcomes, especially related to things you cannot control.

And then you must do the training and the work needed to achieve those goals. For most of us, a sub-five hour triathlon and a New York Times Bestseller for 12 weeks in a row are both equally out of reach.

But winning is not our job. Doing our best is. Showing up. Competing. Finishing. Training. Improving and doing it all over again. That’s the only outcome that matters.

Not “needs work.” Broken. Structurally unsound, conceptually dead, embarrassing in a way that will follow me. I know this moment is coming. I’ve had it in every single book. I can practically schedule it. And it still gets me every time, because when you’re experiencing it, it never feels like a normal part of the process, but instead it feels like the truth finally catching up.

And here’s the thing I’ve learned across enough books to know better: that moment is not a malfunction. That moment is the draft, and my muse doing its job. It shows up right about when I’ve written enough to see what the story actually is, and far enough in that I can no longer pretend it’s the story I planned. The two don’t match. The gap between them hurts. Closing that gap is where every book I’ve written actually got better.

Which brings us to the argument writers are having right now.

The Fight Nobody’s Framing Correctly

The current craft debate — and it’s a loud one — goes roughly like this. One side says the friction of the first draft is essential: the pain, the rewrites, the discarded scenes, the not-knowing. That’s the crucible. Strip it out with tools and shortcuts and generated pages, and you get a book-shaped object with nothing inside and no depth.

The other side says: that’s romanticized suffering dressed up as craft. Writers have always used tools. Nobody mourns the typewriter. Nobody thinks spellcheck destroyed the novel. Clearing obstacles isn’t cheating, it’s just what we do. And a lot of the people preaching about sacred struggle have never had to draft a book in ninety-minute chunks at 4:30 a.m. before the day job and when the kids wake up.

Both sides are making a real point. And both sides are talking past each other, because neither one has bothered to define what kind of friction they mean.

That’s the whole problem. “Friction” is being used to describe two completely different things, and they behave completely differently, and if you don’t separate them you will absolutely make the wrong call about your own process.

So let’s do that.

Two Kinds of Hard

The first kind is generative friction. This is resistance that contains information about your story. You are stuck because you do not yet understand something, and the stuckness is the shape of what you don’t understand.

You don’t know why she lies to him in chapter nine. The middle sags and you can’t say why. Two characters keep making the same argument in different settings. The ending you outlined is technically correct and emotionally inert. You keep skipping a scene every time you sit down, and you’ve been telling yourself it’s because it’s boring, and it is not because it’s boring.

Every one of those is a message. The difficulty is the diagnosis. And you can only get the diagnosis by staying in the room with the problem long enough to listen to what it is telling you.

The second kind is mechanical friction. This is resistance that contains no information whatsoever. It’s just cost.

You can’t remember whether you named the deputy Reyes or Ruiz. Your software ate the chapter break. You need to know what a 1994 Crown Victoria’s interior smelled like and you have been on a police-memorabilia forum for fifty minutes. You’re reformatting quotation marks. Your outline is in three places and none of them are the same.

Nothing in that list is teaching you anything about your story or your characters. Not one. It’s overhead — the tax you pay for the privilege of working in a medium made of a hundred thousand small decisions.

Here is the rule, and it’s simple enough to put on a sticky note:

Eliminate mechanical friction ruthlessly. Protect generative friction with your life.

Every tool question, every process question, every “am I cheating” question resolves cleanly once you know which bucket you’re in. Use whatever gets Bucket B off your desk — I don’t care what it is, I don’t care who made it, I don’t care what it cost. But the moment a tool offers to relieve you of Bucket A friction, understand exactly what’s being offered: someone else’s answer to a question that was going to teach you who you are as a writer.

Why the Hard Part Is Load-Bearing

Let’s get concrete about why generative friction matters, because “it builds character” is not an argument and I’m not going to insult you with it.

Generative friction does three things nothing else does.

It’s how you find the thing you weren’t looking for. Ask any working novelist about their best material and almost none of them will tell you it came from the outline. It came from a wrong turn. A character who wouldn’t stay minor. A line of dialogue that surprised them. Discovery happens at the edges of your intention, and you only reach the edges by being in the draft, actively lost, actively searching. A frictionless draft goes exactly where you told it to go, which means it can only ever be as good as what you already knew before you started. That is a genuinely terrifying ceiling.

It’s how your voice gets calibrated. Voice isn’t a personality trait. It’s a muscle, and it’s trained by evaluating: this works, that doesn’t, here’s why. You build it by writing something bad, recognizing it’s bad, and figuring out how to fix it. If you never sit with a broken scene, you never develop the sense that tells you a scene is broken. And here’s the ugly part: research on cognitive offloading is starting to show this pretty clearly. The more you let a system do the evaluating, the worse you get at evaluating, and the more confident you feel about it. You lose the ability to tell whether what you’re looking at is any good, and you lose the ability to notice that you’ve lost it.

That’s the actual risk. Not that a machine writes your book. That you slowly become unable to tell whether your book is working.

It’s where voice lives. Voice is not style. Voice is the residue of ten thousand small choices that only you would make, most of them made under pressure, most of them made when you were tired and stuck and had to decide something. Take away the pressure and the stuckness and the deciding, and you don’t get a purer voice. You get a smoother one. Smooth is not the goal. Smooth is what everyone sounds like. Smooth is average, and average isn’t what you’re shooting for.

Plot Dude aside

Look, I’m going to tell you something most writers don’t want to hear, and I say this as someone who has coached a lot of people through a lot of drafts.

The vast majority of writers who tell me they need to eliminate friction from their process are not actually stuck on mechanical friction. They’re stuck on generative friction, and they’ve been calling it a productivity problem because that’s a problem with a solution that the right tool, process, or mindset can fix.

I see it constantly. A writer comes to me and says the drafting is too slow, they need a better system, a better tool, a better routine. And we look at it together, and what’s actually happening is that chapter fourteen doesn’t work, and they know chapter fourteen doesn’t work, and they don’t want to know why chapter fourteen doesn’t work, because the why is going to require them to rethink something they’ve been avoiding since page one. So instead they reorganize their outline. They try a new app. They go looking for a hack.

That’s not laziness. I want to be clear about that. It’s avoidance, and avoidance is human, and I do it too. Bucket B friction is comforting precisely because it’s solvable. You can win against a formatting problem. You cannot win against “I don’t yet understand my own protagonist.” You have to work it out, and sometimes that takes time.

So here’s the diagnostic, and it takes about thirty seconds. Next time you’re convinced you have a process problem, or you’re experiencing writer’s block, ask yourself one question:

“If a genie fixed my process tomorrow and I had perfect tools, a perfect routine, and no interruptions, would I know what to write in this scene.”

If yes, you have a real process problem. Go fix it, with my blessing, and don’t let anybody guilt you about the tools you use to do so.

If no, if the honest answer is I still wouldn’t know what to write, then you don’t have a process problem. You have a story problem. And no tool on earth is going to solve it for you, because the solving of those problems is the writing.

What to Actually Do This Week

Enough theory. Here’s the work.

Run the two-bucket audit on your current project. One sheet of paper. Left column, every source of friction in your draft that teaches you something about the story. Right column, every source that teaches you nothing. Be honest about which is which — and notice how much time you’ve been spending on the right-hand column. Most writers find the split shocking.

Then clear the right column with extreme prejudice. Bracket the research. Use the tool. Make the template. Hire it out. Let it be sloppy. A first draft that says [DEPUTY’S NAME] and [SOMETHING ABOUT ENGINES] eleven times is a completely functional first draft. Mechanical friction is not sacred and defending it is just superstition.

Then schedule time to sit in the left column, and treat that time as the actual job. Not as prep for the job. Not as the thing you do once the real work is out of the way. It is the real work. Put it where your energy is best: mornings, late night, whenever your brain is actually the most creative, and don’t let the seductive, checkbox-friendly satisfaction of Bucket B eat those hours.

And when the hard part shows up, stay ten minutes longer than is comfortable. Not an hour. Not a heroic all-nighter. Ten minutes. That last ten minutes — after you’ve decided the scene is unfixable and you’re already reaching for your phone — is where the breakthroughs live with almost supernatural consistency. I don’t know why. I’ve stopped asking why. I just know it’s true, and I know almost nobody does it, and I know the writers who do are the ones who get better every book.

The Rug, Again

Back to where we started — that moment a third of the way in where I’m certain the book is broken.

I used to think the goal was to build a process so good the moment stopped coming. Better outlines. Tighter prep. Enough front-loaded thinking that I’d never have to be lost again.

I was wrong, and I was wrong in a way that took me a while to see, and for those I taught otherwise when I was working for a certain software company that shall remain unnamed, I’m sorry. The moment isn’t a failure of preparation. The moment is the real story and your characters showing up to replace the idea you had in advance. Of course it’s disorienting. Something’s being ruined. Something always has to get ruined before you know what ties the room together.

You can buy a floor covering any day of the week. Fast, clean, no mess, delivered the next day by Amazon Prime. Nobody will stop you, and honestly, sometimes a floor covering is what the deadline requires and I’m not going to judge you for it.

But the rug. the one that means something and makes a story special, the one people remember, the one that holds the whole thing together? You can’t get that one delivered.

You go find it. You go looking, and it takes longer than you wanted, and there’s a mess, and that’s the work.

That’s always been the work.

The Plot Abides. I Take Comfort in That.

Plot Nihilists believe in nothing. Don’t be like them.

Norman Kelleher has it all again: a revived career, a second chance at love, and the kind of success that puts a target on his back. Then he wakes up on a train with no memory how he got there—and blood on his hands.

As Norman’s blackouts grow more violent, accusations mount. A crusading journalist wants his career destroyed. The police want answers. And the woman he trusts most begins to wonder if he’s lost his mind—or is hiding something far worse.

Trapped inside a tightening web of manipulation, drugs, and buried secrets, Norman races to uncover the truth before his life, his freedom, and his sanity are erased. But the deeper he digs, the clearer it becomes: this isn’t about madness. It’s about control. And someone is determined to own him completely.

In this gritty psychological noir thriller, love becomes a weapon, memory is unreliable, and reality bends toward betrayal. Every step forward risks another lost night—and another crime he may not remember committing.

Ask ten writers to define voice and you’ll get ten answers: word choice, sentence rhythm, perspective, tone, the author’s personality on the page. All of those are partially right. None of them are the whole thing.

Here’s how I’d put it after years of coaching fiction writers: voice is the specific, irreplaceable way your worldview impacts your prose.

Not your style. Not your vocabulary. Your worldview. The way you see the relationship between people and power. What you find funny. What you find heartbreaking. The particular angle at which love or loss or ambition looks through your eyes. The things you cannot help coming back to.

When Cormac McCarthy writes about violence, it’s not just the prose style that’s his — it’s the specific moral weight he puts on it, the specific tragic dignity he extends to doomed men, the specific God-shaped hole in his cosmology. You couldn’t transplant his style onto a different worldview and get the same result. In fact, while we share some things in our distinct worldviews, I cannot write like McCarthy, and he likely could not write like me.

When Flannery O’Connor writes her grotesque Southern characters, the voice isn’t just the dialogue or the irony, but the influence her specific Catholic vision of grace as something that arrives violently, uncomfortably, through the wrong people at the wrong time. The voice is her theology invading her prose.

AI has no worldview. It has pattern recognition. It can produce a statistically sophisticated approximation of many voices. But it cannot have the specific stubborn particular vision that you get from being one person, in one body, living one unrepeatable life.

The writers whose work will never be mistaken for AI output are not the ones with a sentence structure you can copy. They’re the ones whose sentences are expressions of a vision that could only belong to them.

Plot Dude aside: I have a friend, and every one of his female characters, for a large part of his writing career, had very similar personalities. What does this tell us? This reveals how he feels about women in general. He likely had a model, conscious or subconscious, for those women. AI could write sentence structure like he does, but would be unlikely to cast women in that exact role, with the same personality traits. It might, but if it did so, that would be a result of recognizing the pattern, not knowing the person. And as he grew, his characters changed as well, and his female characters got stronger, and less, well, cranky, we will say for the sake of this article.

Those characters were a part of his voice and worldview. You have those plot and character tics of your own. They are all a part of your voice.

The Three Places Voice Lives (and Gets Killed)

If you want to build a voice that’s bulletproof — that could not be mistaken for anyone else’s, human or machine — there are three specific places to pay attention.

The image that goes one step further than comfortable. AI produces competent, somewhat vivid imagery. Most of the time, it adds too much, and metaphors or similes that go too far, and don’t really make sense. But you have your own way of describing things, based on your worldview and the unique way you see something. Someone will read your post and say, oh, that’s a strange way to see that, but that makes sense.

That’s where voice lives. Follow your instinct and create the tone you want your reader to feel. Do you want them to feel slightly disoriented? Afraid? Inspired? Happy? Angry? Write your imagery in the way you think and feel about those things in your story. When you’re tempted to swap it for something that isn’t “you” but sounds more literary or cleaner in some way, question that choice.

The sentence that doesn’t resolve the way sentences are supposed to. Voice lives in syntax. Not in fancy words — in the specific way thoughts move through you. Some writers think in long, accumulating clauses that pile up evidence until something gives way. Some writers think in short declarative bursts that feel more like punctuation than an actual sentence. Some writers mix the two unpredictably because their minds work that way. Pay attention to how you actually think and feel, and let your sentences reflect that instead of correcting it toward some averaged-out literary norm.

The detail that proves you were in the room. AI can write a scene set in a diner. It knows about diner details like vinyl booths, laminated menus, coffee in heavy mugs. What it can’t give you is the specific diner you ate in twice a week for six months when you were twenty-three and broke and writing your first novel somewhere you could escape the chaos of home. That detail only exists because you lived it, and only you can describe it the way you saw and experienced it. Most writers seed their work with these through the instinct that leaves a part of ourselves in every bit of prose we write. These are not necessarily autobiographical facts, but specific, particular, empirically precise observations that could only have come from your thoughts and feelings in that moment. That specificity is your voice, not to be edited out. Instead, lean into it.

The 45% Question

Here’s a number worth sitting with: according to the 2025 Author Guild survey, 45% of published fiction writers now use AI tools in some part of their creative process. Nearly half.

I’m not here to argue that’s wrong. I don’t think it is, necessarily. AI tools can be genuinely useful for plotting, research, getting unstuck, for generating options when you’re in the weeds of revision and run into that seemingly inevitable moment of writer’s block. I know writers who use them thoughtfully and produce work that’s clearly, entirely, unmistakably theirs.

But I think 45% of writers using AI tools means there’s a real risk that some percentage of those writers are using AI to patch the parts of their writing where they feel uncertain, and voice lives in uncertainty. If you don’t have doubts as you write your story, you are likely thinking too much and feeling too little.

If you’re using AI to smooth those moments and rid yourself of uncertainty, you’re not protecting your voice. You’re erasing it.

Use the tools if they help you. But use them the way you’d use a research assistant or a brainstorming partner — someone who generates options, not someone who makes the final call on what stays or goes in your draft. The final call is yours. The vision is yours. The risk is yours.

That’s where voice comes from.

What the Rug Teaches Us

There’s a line from The Big Lebowski that I keep coming back to over and over. The Dude’s rug gets ruined, micturated upon to be precise, and he’s in a low-grade state of grief about it for the entire film. Not because the rug is expensive. Because the rug was one of the few things that was his, and “That rug really tied the room together.”

I think about this when I read debates about AI and literary fraud and what makes human writing human.

Voice is the rug that not only ties your prose together, but your writing life as well.

It’s not your plot, not your themes, and not even your style, exactly, though style is close. Voice is the thing underneath everything, the thing that ties the room together, that makes a room feel like a home, a part of your sanctuary.

When voice is present, everything else — even the things that don’t quite work, even the structural problems, even the clunky dialogue — gets tied together by it. You know you’re in someone’s specific world.

That world is not only where I want to take readers. It’s where I escape from the bad of this world, and sometimes the things that are overwhelmingly good.

Want to stand out? Lean into who you are, uniquely as a human. Your story matters. And thankfully for all of us, The Plot Abides.

Sixty-two percent.

The writers in the study described having identity crises. Their aesthetic confidence eroded. They started questioning what “good writing” even was, whether their instincts could be trusted, whether the thing they’d spent years building had just been quietly rendered obsolete.

I understand that reaction. I genuinely do. But I think it’s pointing at the wrong problem.

The crisis isn’t that AI learned to write like those authors. The crisis is the question underneath that fact: What exactly did AI learn? And the answer to that question, if you follow it far enough, turns out to be one of the most useful things you can know about your own craft.

What Voice Actually Is

Let me start by dismantling the most useless advice in all of writing craft: “find your voice.”

Find it. As if you mislaid it somewhere between the inciting incident and the midpoint of your book. As if it’s a receipt left in a coat pocket when you need to return that horrible dress you bought to Marshall’s.

Voice isn’t found. Voice is built. And more importantly — voice isn’t primarily about style.

When writers think about voice, they usually think about prose texture. Sentence length. Vocabulary. The stuff MFA classes thrive on pounding into their brains. That’s like saying a person’s personality is the clothes they wear. The clothes can tell you something about them, sure. But the person underneath is wearing that same personality whether they’re in a Pendleton Westerly or a bathrobe.

Voice is a worldview made visible through thousands of tiny decisions you, as a writer, make on every single page.

What does your narrator notice first walking into a room? What do they skip? When you write a grief scene, do you stay in the body, like the specificity of noticing a cereal bowl still in the dish rack? Or do you write some kind of cleaver metaphor? When your characters lie to themselves, what type of self-deception do they reach for?

These aren’t style questions. They’re philosophical ones. They’re the answers to: Who do you think people are at their core? What do you think the world is made of? What do you think matters in this life, and even beyond?

That’s voice. And that’s also, as it turns out, what AI is actually learning when it learns to “write like you.”

Before We Go Further

This is not an anti-AI rants. the best writers I know who use AI in their process have learned what I am about to outline below, and what they do is challenging. Getting AI to produce what you are aiming for, the same as it is hard to write anyway.

Surface vs. Depth

Here’s what AI is actually doing when it mimics a writer’s voice: it’s learning patterns. Statistical regularities in word choice, sentence rhythm, structural decisions. It is extremely good at this. Better than most of us would like to admit.

But here’s the gap.

AI can replicate what you’ve already done. It cannot replicate what you’re becoming. It can’t travel into territory you haven’t mapped yet. It can’t generate the thing you’ve been too scared to write because it’s too personal, strange, or true.

The Berkeley study found AI was preferred 62% of the time. Here’s the follow-up question worth asking: what was that author’s new writing like? Had they been growing, changing, improving their craft and refining their voice as they grew as a writer, doing something they’d never done before? Or had they settled into a groove, producing work that was competent and consistent and, honestly, a little predictable? Running their own pattern on autopilot?

AI excels at recognizing and imitating patterns. The easiest target for mimicry is the writer who has found a groove and is riding it hard. The hardest target is the writer who keeps moving.

Voice isn’t a signature. A good forger can copy a signature. Voice is a living thing. The answer to this moment isn’t to protect your patterns, it’s to keep growing and allowing your voice to evolve as you do.

The Real Reason Writers Don’t Have a Voice (It’s Not What You Think)

In my work coaching writers, I’ve noticed something. The problem almost never is that a writer lacks a voice.

The problem is that the writer has a voice and is aggressively suppressing it.

You can hear it in workshops. Someone reads something genuinely different and alive and the feedback is less than enthusiastic, because it doesn’t sound like “this genre” or “misuses that trope.” Someone might even say, “Maybe pull back on the voice in this part and let the story breathe.”

Let the story breathe. Which usually means sand this down until it sounds like it was written by the committee of Every Writer Who Ever Lived.

Writers internalize this. They develop an instinct to remove those things that make their writing unique and valuable, and make it more universal, palatable, and frankly, forgettable.

That instinct is the enemy of voice.

Think about the writers whose work you’d recognize in a blind sample. Elmore Leonard. Flannery O’Connor. Denis Johnson. Raymond Carver. Toni Morrison. What they all have in common isn’t just style — it’s a total commitment to their particular angle on the world. Leonard believed characters were more interesting than plot and just trusted you’d follow along. O’Connor believed grace was violent and her stories said so loudly, without apology. Johnson’s people were broken in ways that somehow made them more human, not less.

None of them held that voice back.

The question isn’t whether you have a voice. The question is whether you’re letting it be as strange, as specific, as fully itself as it needs to be.

Plot Dude aside

Here’s the thing I see most often in the writers I work with, and I’m going to say it plainly because it doesn’t help to dance around it:

Most writers have been told, somewhere along the way, that their truest instincts are a problem to be managed.

Maybe it was a workshop or even, God forbid, an MFA. Maybe it was an early reader they trusted who told them something was “too much.” Maybe it’s just that we’re all marinating in the same cultural anxiety about whether what we make is good enough, literary enough, marketable enough rather than if it is ours, as unique as every writer is.

Whatever the source — you learned to “edit” your own instincts.

The way back is embarrassingly simple: find the places where you had an instinct and deleted it. The weird cultural reference you cut because it felt too obscure. The character moment you pulled back from because it was too raw, and maybe a little too much of yourself. The tone you second-guessed and replaced with something that felt more normal.

If your story reads flat all of a sudden, nine times out of ten it really lived where you over edited your own voice.

Stop doing that.

Practical Ways to Build and Protect Your Voice

Enough philosophy. Here’s what to actually do.

Audit your decision-making. Take a scene you’ve already written and list every specific detail you chose to include — not just what happens, but the images, sounds, objects, comparisons. Ask yourself why those details matter to you and others don’t. What that list tells you about what you value and fear and think is important in the world. Commit that to memory.

Protect your first drafts from yourself. Voice lives in the first draft because you don’t have time to cut it out (if you are drafting quickly and not editing as you go, like the Plot Dude recommends). The things that feel personal and reflect how you feel and believe and even think are the ones you should keep. Flag them instead of cutting them. Come back later and ask whether those words take away from the story, or make it exactly what it needs to be.

Read yourself out loud. Not to catch typos, but to hear where your voice goes flat. Voice has rythym and a feel you can hear. Usually it’s the place where you let caution trump creativity.

Write one thing a week that makes you uncomfortable. Cherish it, and keep writing things that present your truth as raw as you can. Let that bleed into your other writing. .

When you study writers you admire, study the decisions, not the style. Don’t ask “how do they write?” Ask “what do they notice? What do they describe? What do they inject into their characters that reveals their beliefs about the world?” Then ask yourself the same questions. That’s your philosophy of fiction, and the engine of voice.

Why This All Matters Now

Here’s the thing about this particular moment: voice has never mattered more.

Because the median is now extremely competent. AI can generate grammatically perfect, structurally sound, and somewhat emotionally coherent fiction. The floor has risen dramatically. Competent prose is just the minimum.

What AI can’t do is have a perspective that comes from living a specific life. It can’t carry the particular brand of damage that makes your characters’ self-deceptions feel recognizable. It can’t hold the thing you noticed at age nine that you’ve never stopped thinking about and that shows up, in some form, in everything you write.

That’s voice. And it’s increasingly the only territory where fiction made by humans will live that AI can’t easily take over.

This isn’t a reason for anxiety. It’s an invitation.

The writers who thrive in this moment won’t be the ones who write most like AI expects fiction to sound: clean, competent, and safe. They’ll be the ones who go furthest into the particular, the strange, the deeply personal. The ones whose work is unmistakably them.

You’re not competing with AI on its terms. You’re doing things it can’t: into your own experience and the particular way you understand the world.

To reference the Big Lebowski and the original Dude, the rug that ties the room together isn’t the rug that looks exactly like every other rug. It’s the one that’s specific enough, strange enough, thoroughly enough itself that when it’s gone, the room just doesn’t work without it.

Your voice is that rug.

AI can make a very good rug. It can probably make a rug that most people in a blind test would say is fine, even good. But it cannot make your rug — the one that came from the specific rooms you’ve lived in, the specific losses and joys and obsessions you’ve been dragging around since the first moment in your childhood when someone hurt you.

The answer to this moment isn’t to protect what you’ve already made. It’s to keep making the next thing. Go further. Write the thing that makes you a little anxious. Stand out. Be yourself, because everyone else is taken.

Like the Dude, your voice abides. Take comfort in that, and write on.

From the start, this is not a pro or anti AI post, and I am not going to even try to tackle all the crazy and controversial arguments over whether AI is a good or bad thing for the publishing industry overall, and whether a human or AI is better at telling stories or not.

I’m not even going to argue about AI voice, which Stacey Smekofske and I tackled on our podcast recently. This is not the usual Plot Dude Rant. Instead, I’m taking a step back and asking a more fundamental question, taking the time to “Question the Premise” as Becca Syme preaches says.

And I’m going to step beyond AI writing for a moment, because using AI to draft your book is only one aspect of what is happening in the publishing industry and beyond, to “content creators” in general, including journalists and others.

We’ve adopted AI to save time, work faster and more efficiently, and increasingly writers I talk to are more stressed out, busier than they have ever been, and some are even quitting writing altogether because of fear. So what the heck is going on, and why?

AI Can Save You Time, But Usually Doesn’t

First, I would like to tackle the argument that, “I just use AI for marketing copy, ads, creating email drafts, and posting on social media. All the things I don’t want to do anyway. That will give me more time to write.” Will it? let’s look at the reality for most writers (and people in other industries as well).

· With AI I can write email drafts faster, which means I should send out more, right? But because AI can make mistakes, I do need to review all those drafts, edit them as needed, and push the send or schedule button, right?

Yes, you do. We’ve all seen the blowback when an author sends out an email when the prompt somehow ended up inside it, or even accidentally in the subject like, and since they didn’t review it, now all of their readers not only know they used AI, but they know the prompt used to create the email, which can be less than flattering.

· With AI, I can post more often on social media. And the ideas it comes up with related to my books and work are better than mine anyway.
This is great. Same as above, I need to review and schedule them rather than trusting the AI 100% to do this for me but compared to coming up with ideas and drafting posts on my own, this is so fast and efficient. The review process won’t take any time at all in comparison.

· AI can create images and video for me. That is way faster than using Canva, BookBrush, or Photoshop. And I have more options than just with stock photos and backgrounds. I can be more creative by letting AI do the work for me. Of course, I have to be careful and review these, and I need to become pretty good at prompting, too. But my posts will be so much better.

· In fact, now I can make book trailers. I had to hire someone before, but that is so expensive. Now AI can do it for me, with the right prompts. It just keeps getting better and better, and even faster. Of course, I have to edit and stitch those clips together, but AI can even do that for me. I can use AI to edit the AI! This is so much fun!

· In fact, I can make AI movies now. Just feed my novel into a machine, and it writes a script and makes a movie for me. Of course, I need to go in and produce, direct, and edit that, but AI makes all that possible. I never planned to make movies of my own work, but now, since I can, I’m going to add that to my list of things to do! I’ll take a couple of courses, learn to do this myself, and my fans will love it.

· Oh man! Did you know AI can edit your novel for you? Those editors are expensive, and all they are charging me for is their time to read my book and make some comments. AI can do the same thing and just make changes for me. It’s so fast and easy, and the results are amazing. The work AI does is so much better than what I can do, and human editors make mistakes. AI does not make those human errors, and the process is way faster and cheaper. Of course, I still have to review the changes, and AI is certainly not the best judge of story quality, since it is a predictive model not a creative one, but that is good enough for me.

· I can even create my own covers. Of course, there are some things that have to do with fonts and graphic design I need to learn, but I can take a course quickly, and then just do my own covers. Why not? Look at all the money I am saving on those cover designers, not only sparing me the back and forth when they create something I don’t like. Sure, these covers are rarely spectacular, but they are good, and better than anything I could create on my own.

Do you see the trap here? You aren’t really saving that much time when you still have to review and schedule drafts, and you have lost your voice to the AI; although it can write like you, it cannot be you, with your thoughts and feelings.

And writing, even emails and social media posts, is an exercise in thinking and feeling. If you think and feel, the reader and even your social audiences will as well. But even if you win that argument, and those social media posts perform as well or better than the ones you create, notice you have done something else.

You’ve added tasks to your list that you would have never done or attempted before. Because the ability to do so has convinced you that you should. The best quote to summarize what this means comes from Jurassic Park in 1993:

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” -Dr. Ian Malcom

Without relating to AI companies and the premise of this increasingly popular and soon-to-be increasingly expensive technology, let’s instead relate it to ourselves. Just because we can create our own book covers, movie trailers, and even films, does that mean we should? What we produce using AI is often adequate, but seldom excellent and almost never brilliant (in this context of emails, covers, movies, social, etc.). We’ll get to drafting a story in a moment.

We are sold on using these tools because they are fast and efficient. But is that what your social network, readers, trailer and movie viewers, and even audiobook listeners want? Have you ever read a book or watched a movie, and said, “Wow, five stars! That was well engineered and created quickly and efficiently!” No.

AI creates well-engineered scripts, social posts, emails, movies, and more. But without skilled human direction, they are rarely excellent.

AI movies can be great, with talented scriptwriters, directors, editors, animators, and more. It is likely that you, as an author, are not an expert video editor or movie producer, and taking time away from writing books to become one will not likely positively impact your career unless you are switching careers.

The same can be said for being your own cover designer, your own editor, and all the things listed above. Why are you using AI for those things?

If it is to make certain parts of marketing faster and more efficient for you in reviewing drafts and creating automations, awesome. If, by using these tools, you continue to add items to your list (and monthly costs to your AI subscriptions), then stop, and consider whether some of those things are things you need to do at all.

AI Generally Intensifies Work Rather Than Reducing It

When we look across industries, including writing and publishing, what AI is capable of tends to make workers (and writers) believe they are more capable as a result, and take on tasks they would have previously avoided.

In fact, according to a Harvard Business Review eight-month-long study of how Generative AI changed work tasks, “employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so.” What did that look like?

· The type of tasks workers performed expanded: “workers increasingly stepped into responsibilities that previously belonged to others. Product managers and designers began writing code; researchers took on engineering tasks; and individuals across the organization attempted work they would have outsourced, deferred, or avoided entirely in the past.”

· Boundaries between work and non-work became blurred: “Because AI made beginning a task so easy (it reduced the friction of facing a blank page or unknown starting point), workers slipped small amounts of work into moments that had previously been breaks.”

Sound familiar, authors? You can do more things, so the question of whether you should or should not do them blurs. You simply, and often subconsciously, conclude that because you can, you should.

But another problem emerged: multitasking. We as authors know this is a bad thing for drafting fiction, and focused time rules. We are less efficient and produce lower quality work when we multitask, but AI gives us an illusion of focus: I can focus on this thing while agents do work for me in the background, or while AI does this thing, I can do another.

Like it or not, psychologically we still feel the need to check on that thing that is running, or we get a notification when one task is complete, and we lose focus. We technically might get more done, but we feel busier, more stressed, and less satisfied with our work.

This is in part because of speed. We don’t have a true demand to be faster, but the new “normal” for authors who produced two books a year to now produce one a month has impacted our thinking. This is the rapid release philosophy that burned out so many writers but amplified. Even though AI is picking up some of that “work,” we are still creating the same “pressure” mentally that rapid release did, which, for most writers, was unsustainable.

Why Would You Draft Stories and Novels Using AI?

I remember being six years old and drafting my first “book” titled George and the Giant Castle. I remember working over the prose and illustrations (by six-year-old me) over and over, trying to get it right.

My first few drafted novels in both high school and college were terrible. I understood story, but not long-form story structure, so while I had talent, I didn’t know how to shape one longer than about 5,000 words, even though I read extensively. It took some education to learn the rules, so I could also learn to break them.

I spent a ton of time trying to get those early drafts just right. That process taught me, along with constructive feedback, how to write a novel.

The point? At that time, and really at no other time in my writing career (although I did dabble with the idea of rapid release for a moment or two before figuring out it wasn’t right for me), was writing about being fast and efficient.

For me, writing was about crafting my stories, the ones I felt like I needed to tell, and getting them out in the world for others to enjoy. That started with the traditional route but quickly transitioned to indie publishing, with some traditional thrown it (about 80/20 for a while before that 20 number decreased).

The drafting process is sacred. This is where the magic happens, where the stories in my head become real, lived out by real characters in places that feel as real to me as the office I am writing in. I got better at structure, studied it extensively, but the reality is the soul of my stories, the voice of my stories is me.

Do I want them to be well-structured, or “engineered” if you will? Yes. Do I want the prose to best convey my voice and meaning? Yes. Do I need AI to do that? Do I even want it to?

The answer is no. Because that part of my writing career is not about speed and efficiency, at least not at its core, I don’t want or need AI to draft. Can I use it, though, even to help the process? Sure! In fact, it can be quite useful for an intern to do some tasks for me that require a minimal amount of skill and experience.

· If I am stuck, AI can help me brainstorm what is next, as long as I understand these models are predictive engines, so this will likely not be a wild, personal idea, but the most likely next step according to the model training.

· AI can help me outline, or even reverse outline, a novel, and analyze it to an extent. I do need to use caution, though, as AI can, and has hallucinated (even models like Opus 4.6 with large context windows). So I still need to check its work.

· I used to say you could use AI to generate names, but with the recent studies showing how often the models repeat names, I have taken to using a little more old-fashioned methods for name generation.

· AI can help surface information from earlier in the draft by creating a series bible for me. Again, you need to check the work AI produces, just as you would the work of an intern.

And while, arguably, according to some, AI can conceivably draft a story, it will do some things that, at least for me, that doesn’t mean I want it to create drafts for me.

· AI adds its own voice. The more you try to prompt it out of using that voice, the more robotic that voice sounds. Stacey and I covered this in our podcast recently, but dozens of studies back this up.

· AI is predictable. As it has been trained, and is being trained, on a limited dataset of fiction, it is unlikely to come up with the idea for books like Dungeon Crawler Carl or even my own Call of Karen or Tilting at Windmills.

· Even large context models can “lose the thread” over long texts and create the same inconsistencies we as humans do.

While I have heard the argument that through iterations, this voice can be removed, and some of these mistakes, my question here is not “can we draft with AI?” but “should we draft our work with AI?” And this has everything to do with motive.

Can AI Draft Publishable Work?

Arguably, yes. It may not be great fiction, but it could be readable, especially by a voracious Kindle Unlimited audience who just wants to read as much as possible of the same formulaic fiction over and over, and is not necessarily vested in “great” or “amazing” or unusual stories, but “good” ones.

Hell, Danielle Steele built a career on that assumption.

So did the old-time pulp writers.

Formulaic fiction is not new and is often created by human writers as well. If that is what you want to create, that is fine. If you want AI to create it for you, or heavily assist you, so you can create faster and make more money on KU, awesome.

If that is your “why.” Because if you are just out to make money, there are a lot easier ways to do it. This business is both brutal and difficult, but sincerely? If your motive is to create as much consumable content as possible for the Amazon machine, or even your own sales platform so you can be a writer who “makes a living” at this, go for it.

But is that really your why? Is that the reason you started writing? For me, the answer is no.

I’m not even going to address the copyright issues or the issues with the court of public opinion and the problems recently illustrated with publishers’ reactions to AI (again, not saying they are correct or incorrect, but they are real).

If you want to be an AI writer, and this is how you want to put your work into the world, embrace it. There is an entire community of AI writers who will embrace you and even teach you how to get better at it.

But for me, the next question is more important.

Should We Use AI to Draft Our Stories?

For me, the answer to this question is no. This is not for ethical reasons, although there are those. This is not about environmental concerns or even concerns about readers or publishers and their reactions to AI use.

There’s only one reason for my answer. Motive. My why.

The reason I started writing was to get my stories and my voice into the world. AI is not my voice, nor is it entirely my story. For me, it would be like hiring an intern or even a ghostwriter to create my story. It would be like someone else, in this case a machine, fleshing out my ideas, and then me claiming them as my own.

My why doesn’t include that. Do I still use AI for some business things? Yes, but I am reconsidering its use in some areas, including those where I need to humanly connect with my audience, my readers, and build my community.

The hype got me at first, but I have determined some next steps for me, and maybe they will work for you as well. But will I be drafting my books with AI? Nope.

Next Steps to Avoid AI Burnout

Okay. To avoid insanity, and to slow things down a bit, here are some next steps. The key to all of this is to slow down. We don’t need to, in publishing or life, to move so damn fast.

Figure Out What AI Can Do for You, and What it Can’t: AI is not the answer for everything. I don’t want it to draft books, but emails and ad copy are fine, as long as I am not expanding the scope of what I was doing before. That means I really do save money and time. I’m also looking at a lawn mower that uses AI to map and mow my lawn, and even decides how often and when the lawn needs mowing. That’s a good use of AI.

Take Intentional Pauses: Take a day off, keep break times sacred, and learn to relax a little. Just because you can remotely start and even check on tasks Claude Co-Pilot is running on your phone as you eat lunch doesn’t mean you should. Take a technology pause and go walk your dog or something.

Sequencing: do things in order of priority and one at a time, even if you are using AI to do them. This prevents you from multitasking and burnout. The exception to this rule is things like cleaning up your email inbox or social media posting automations. As long as you don’t need to actively check on them, let those run in the background for you. Just be sure you are adding your human touch to them before they are automated.

Human Contact and Grounding: As AI becomes your chat and work partner, don’t forget the value of human interaction and input. AI can be just as addictive as anything else, and people using it as a counselor, or as one woman in Japan did, a marriage partner, is a foolish use of this tech. Take the time to talk to and listen to humans as well as machines. Social exchange supports and enhances your creativity as well.

The final step? Immerse yourself in story. Get back to your “why” for writing in the first place. You might find yourself breaking up with AI drafting or embracing it more. Either way, be sure you are making a conscious choice, not just following the crowd out of a fear of missing out.

Your story matters. Your voice matters. Ultimately, make sure it’s your choice how it makes its way into the world.

That’s not an exaggeration. Before I have clear memories—before I could tell you the color of the walls in the house or what my parents looked like at that age—there was a dog. My first birthday, Chattanooga, Tennessee. The photos show a kid and a dog, and apparently the dog convinced my parents pretty quickly that they needed to move somewhere with more space. That’s not a joke. The dog literally changed the trajectory of my childhood.

After that came Ricky, a black lab who was enormous and sweet and ultimately too much dog for a single mom to handle. He went to live with my cousins, where he had a good home, even if they didn’t have much more room than we did, and I still got to see him often. I still remember the shape of him—big and warm and always in the way in the best possible sense.

Then JJ. A cocker spaniel and blue heeler mix, which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. JJ was an escape artist. Could get out of anything. Eventually my mom found him a home on a ranch with some distant second cousins, which was probably what he’d been trying to tell us he needed the whole time.

Houston followed, once I was an adult and had gotten divorced for the first time.

Houston was a mutt. He started out as my roommate’s dog, but somewhere along the way he became mine—the way dogs do when they decide you’re the one. He was with me for about fifteen years. He went blind toward the end, and one afternoon he wandered into the road and was hit by a car. I was there. I don’t really like to talk about the details of that day, but I’ll tell you this: Houston is why Sparky exists.

If you’ve read Stray Ally, you know Sparky. A dog who shows up when a man needs him most, who stays loyal through the kind of danger no animal should have to face. Sparky isn’t Houston, exactly. But the feeling of that bond—the way a dog becomes your anchor when everything else is shifting—that’s Houston through and through.

After Houston, there was Indie. A yellow lab. Ninety-five pounds of pure, unrelenting affection. He lived to about fifteen, which is a long time for a lab that size, and when he finally went it hit me harder than I expected. You’d think after a lifetime of loving dogs you’d get used to losing them. You don’t.

Now there’s McClane.

Yes, like Die Hard. He’s a German Shepherd, seven and a half years old, and right now he’s lying about two feet from my chair. That’s where he always is. Every word I’ve written in the last seven years has been written with a German Shepherd breathing nearby, shedding enough fur to build a second dog, and occasionally nudging my elbow when he decides I’ve been working too long.

Lord, all the hair.

But here’s the thing: I wouldn’t trade it. Not a single fur-covered keyboard, not a single nose-print on my monitor, not a single 4 a.m. wake-up because he heard a squirrel three blocks away. McClane is the reason my office feels like a place where work happens. He’s my writing partner in the most literal sense.

Maybe the closeness I’ve had with dogs—from the very start of my life, before I have clear memories—is why so many of my stories have dogs in them. They’re not props. They’re not there for comic relief or cheap emotional beats. They’re there because that’s how I experience the world: with a dog always nearby.

In the Max Boucher series, Russ isn’t just Max’s dog. He’s the only relationship in Max’s life that isn’t complicated by guilt or grief or suspicion. Max can’t fully trust the people around him—that’s the nature of the work and the nature of what he’s lost. But Russ? Russ just stays. He doesn’t care about the case. He doesn’t care about Max’s track record. He’s just there, every morning, ready to go.

That’s what dogs do. And if you’ve ever had one—really had one, the kind that chooses you—you know exactly what I mean.

I write dogs into my fiction because leaving them out would be dishonest. My life has never been without one. My characters’ lives shouldn’t be either.

So here’s my question for you: which book dog is your favorite? Russ from the Max Boucher series? Sparky from Stray Ally? Someone else entirely? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response, and honestly, talking about fictional dogs might be my favorite kind of email to get.

Meet the Dogs

Harvested (Max Boucher #1 — meet Russ): https://geni.us/Harvested

Teaching Moments (Max Boucher #2 — Russ returns): https://geni.us/Teaching_Moments

Stray Ally (meet Sparky): https://geni.us/ALOpl

Talk soon,

Troy

P.S. McClane says hi. Well, he looked up from the floor for about two seconds, which in German Shepherd is basically a standing ovation.

Joel Gouveia recently wrote a piece that should have every author’s attention, even though it’s about music. The article, “The Death of Spotify: Why Streaming is Minutes Away From Being Obsolete,” lays out a devastating case: the streaming model that was supposed to save the music industry has instead commodified it into oblivion. Music, Gouveia argues, has been reduced to tap water—an undifferentiated utility pumped through identical pipes to everyone, everywhere, for practically nothing.

Jimmy Iovine—the man who co-founded Interscope Records and helped build Beats and Apple Music—has said that streaming services are “minutes away from being obsolete.” When the guy who helped build the machine says the machine is breaking down, you pay attention.

Now here’s the part that matters to us: the publishing industry is walking the exact same path. We’re just a few years behind. And if authors and publishers don’t learn from what’s happening to musicians right now, we’re going to end up in the same ditch, wondering how we got there and why nobody warned us.

Consider this your warning. Pour yourself a White Russian and settle in.

Books Are Becoming Tap Water

Gouveia’s central metaphor is near-perfect: when every streaming platform offers the same hundred-million-song library, music becomes a commodity. The only differences between Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music are interface design and playlist algorithms—neither of which constitutes a real competitive advantage. The product itself is identical. It’s tap water.

Now look at ebooks. Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Barnes & Noble—they all sell the same widely distributed catalog. Same books, same prices (give or take a dollar), same reading experience delivered through slightly different apps on slightly different screens. If you’re a reader, it doesn’t matter much where you buy. If you’re a retailer, you have no unique inventory to differentiate yourself. The product is the same everywhere.

But here’s where it gets worse for books than it ever was for music: Amazon, Apple, and Google can afford to let ebooks be a loss leader. They don’t need to make money on the books themselves. Amazon sells Kindles. Apple sells iPhones and iPads. Google sells ads and data. The ebook is just a reason to keep you inside their ecosystem, using their device, generating their data. They’re not in the book business. They’re in the everything-else business, and books are the bait.

That means stand-alone book retailers—the ones who actually need to make money selling books—are fighting a losing battle. Margins never improve. The product isn’t unique. And they’re competing against companies that can afford to sell at a loss indefinitely. It’s the same problem Spotify has: when you can’t differentiate the product, you can’t build a moat. And when you can’t build a moat, you’re one algorithm change away from irrelevance.

The Dude’s rug tied the room together. But if everybody has the same rug, it doesn’t tie anything together anymore. It’s just carpet.

Kindle Unlimited: Publishing’s Spotify

If the wide distribution model is the publishing equivalent of streaming’s commodification problem, then Kindle Unlimited is publishing’s answer to Spotify—and the parallels are almost eerie.

KU does offer something the wide market doesn’t: exclusivity. To be in Kindle Unlimited, your ebook has to be exclusive to Amazon through KDP Select. That’s at least a structural difference from the everyone-sells-everything model. But the problems underneath are deeply familiar to anyone who’s followed what Spotify does to musicians.

The algorithm benefits the few at the expense of the many. A small number of authors dominate the visibility, the recommendation engines, and the page-read payouts, while the vast majority churn out content and hope the machine notices them. Sound familiar? It should. It’s the exact dynamic Gouveia describes in music streaming: a system designed to surface what’s already popular while burying everything else.

And just like Spotify, Amazon doesn’t give authors the tools to build real relationships with their readers. You can’t message your readers directly. You can’t access their email addresses or know where they live or what else they read. You don’t own the relationship—Amazon does. You’re a tenant, not an owner, and the landlord can change the terms of your lease whenever they feel like it.

Gouveia asks why Spotify prevents artists from messaging their fans, accessing their own fan data, building community on the platform, or selling directly to listeners. The answer is simple: because keeping that data and those relationships on their side of the wall is what gives Spotify power. Amazon operates the same way. Your readers are Amazon’s customers, not yours. You just happen to be the product they’re consuming this week.

Page-read payouts fluctuate month to month. Amazon can change the rules of KDP Select whenever it wants. Authors who built their entire business on KU exclusivity have watched their income swing wildly based on decisions made in a boardroom they’ll never set foot in. This is not a business model. This is sharecropping with a Kindle.

The Death of the Mass Audience, the Birth of the Micro-Community

This is the part of Gouveia’s argument that authors need tattooed on their forearms:

“We are witnessing the death of the ‘Mass Audience’ and the birth of the ‘Micro-Community.’ The music industry has spent a decade obsessing over how to get a million people to listen to a song once. The next decade will be defined by artists figuring out how to get 1,000 people to care forever.”

Read that again. Let it marinate. Then read it one more time, because this is the single most important idea in the creative economy right now, and it applies to books every bit as much as it applies to music. This is what Johnny Truant says in the Artisan Author. What Monica Leonelle and others are trying to get authors to notice. Joe Solari and the crew at Author Nation, one of the largest indie-author conferences around, and arguably one of the best. You can add the Plot Dude and Edits by Stacey to that list.

The publishing industry—and especially indie publishing—has spent the last decade chasing the mass audience. Write to market. Optimize your keywords. Nail your categories. Run Amazon ads. Pray to the algorithm. Get a BookBub deal. Hit the bestseller list. The whole game has been about getting as many eyeballs as possible to glance at your book for a fraction of a second.

But what if the game is changing? What if the authors who thrive in the next decade aren’t the ones who figured out how to get a million people to notice their book once, but the ones who figured out how to get a thousand readers to care forever?

A thousand readers who buy every book you release on launch day. Who preorder without waiting for reviews. Who show up at your events. Who tell their friends. Who join your community and stay there, not because an algorithm told them to, but because they genuinely love what you do and want to be part of it.

That’s not a fantasy. That’s a business model. And it’s one that no platform can take away from you.

What Musicians Are Doing (That Authors Should Steal)

Gouveia points out something critical about Spotify’s failure: by refusing to build community tools, fan messaging, data access, and direct sales into the platform, Spotify has forced all the highest-value interactions in the music business to happen somewhere else. Artists are cobbling together solutions from five or six different platforms—Laylo for texting, Discord for community, Patreon for subscriptions, Substack for newsletters, Bandcamp or Shopify for direct sales—because the streaming platform that’s supposed to be the center of the music industry refuses to let them build a real business there.

The smart musicians aren’t waiting for tech giants to fix this. They’re building their own ecosystems. They’re moving fans off rented platforms and onto owned ones. They’re collecting email addresses, building SMS lists, and creating communities where the relationship between artist and fan is direct, unmediated, and durable.

And it’s working. Gouveia notes that artists with as few as 15,000 monthly Spotify listeners are selling out multi-hundred-capacity venues. Why? Because they have a core base that actually cares. The algorithm doesn’t matter when you’ve already built the relationship.

Authors need to pay very close attention to this. Because the tools musicians are using—email, SMS, community platforms, direct-to-consumer stores, subscription models—are available to us right now. The infrastructure exists. The question is whether authors will use it or keep renting audiences from Amazon and hoping for the best.

AI Gives Authors the Tools to Build Their Own Thing

Here’s where the story takes a turn that the music industry didn’t have five years ago: AI.

Not AI as a replacement for writing—we’ve covered that argument before, and you know where I stand. I mean AI as infrastructure; AI as the thing that lets a single author or a small publisher do things that used to require a development team and a six-figure budget.

Want to build a custom app for your readers that delivers your books, bonus content, and community features in one place? AI can help you prototype that. Want to create a direct sales storefront with automated email sequences, reader analytics, and personalized recommendations? The tools exist, and AI makes them accessible to people who don’t write code for a living.

Authors and small publishers can now build their own reading experiences. Custom apps. Membership platforms. Interactive story worlds. Community spaces where readers connect with each other and with the author directly. Serialized content delivered on your terms, through your channels, with your branding.

This is the piece that changes the calculus entirely. Gouveia argues that whoever builds the integrated platform for musicians—combining streaming, community, data, and direct sales in one place—wins the next era. In publishing, the answer might not be one big platform. It might be a thousand small ones, each built by an author or publisher who decided to stop waiting for Amazon to give them the tools and built their own instead.

The technology barrier that used to keep authors dependent on third-party platforms is crumbling. And with it, the argument that you have to be on Amazon, or in KU, or distributed wide through the usual channels, because there’s no other viable option. There are other options now. They’re multiplying. And they put the author in control.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let’s get concrete, because vision without execution is just a daydream in a bathrobe. Here’s what the direct sales, community-driven model looks like for an author right now:

• A Shopify store (or similar platform) selling signed editions, ebooks, bundles, and merchandise directly to readers. You set the price. You keep the margin. You own the customer data.

• An email list and SMS list that you control. Not Amazon’s “follow” button. Not a social media algorithm. A list of real people who gave you their contact information because they want to hear from you.

• A community platform—Discord, Circle, a private Facebook group, or something custom-built—where your readers can interact with you and with each other. This is where fandom lives and breathes.

• Subscription or serialization models through Substack, Patreon, Ream, or your own website, where readers pay for ongoing access to your work and world.

• AI-assisted tools for building unique reader experiences: custom apps, interactive content, personalized recommendations, and automated reader engagement that feels personal because it’s built on real data you own.

• Launch strategies that don’t depend on Amazon’s algorithm. When you have a direct line to a thousand engaged readers, you don’t need BookBub to tell people your book exists. You tell them yourself.

The key principle running through all of this: you own the data, you own the relationship, and no platform can pull the rug out from under you.

Pun very much intended.

The Dude Abides, But Only If He Owns the Bowling Alley

The music industry learned this lesson the hard way. Musicians spent a decade building their careers on platforms they didn’t own, feeding algorithms they didn’t control, and generating data they couldn’t access. Now those platforms are crumbling, and the artists who survive are the ones who built something of their own along the way.

Authors are watching the same movie. We’re just a scene or two behind. The streaming model commodified music to tap water, and the wide-distribution-plus-KU model is doing the same thing to books. The margins are thin. The platforms are indifferent. The algorithms serve themselves.

The tools to build something different are right here. AI has lowered the barrier. Direct sales platforms are mature. Community tools are accessible. The infrastructure for a thousand micro-communities of devoted readers exists today, waiting for authors to use it.

The rug ties the room together, but only if it’s your rug, in your room, in a house you own. Stop renting your audience. Stop depending on a platform that sees your books as one more product in a catalog of millions. Build something that belongs to you.

The mass audience is dying. The micro-community is being born, and the authors who figure out how to get a thousand people to care forever—instead of chasing a million people who won’t remember your name—are the ones who’ll still be here when the next platform shift hits.

The Dude abides. You can, too. We can all take comfort in that.

That’s the truth. He wasn’t on a whiteboard or in a character bible or scrawled on a napkin at some late-night brainstorming session. He showed up the way most of my best characters do—uninvited, fully formed, and impossible to ignore.

Here’s what happened: a publisher sent me a writing prompt for a series they wanted to develop. The idea was interesting enough that I sat down and started writing, and almost immediately this guy appeared on the page. A former Seattle homicide detective who’d lost everything—his daughter murdered, his wife vanished—and had rebuilt himself into a PI who took cases involving missing pets because that’s what paid the rent. He was broken in a very specific way. Not self-pitying. Not reckless. Just… unable to let go.

The publishing deal fizzled. It didn’t go anywhere. But Max’s story? That was already alive. He was already in my head, refusing to leave.

So I kept writing.

That became Harvested—a book about missing dogs in Seattle that turns into something much darker. And then Teaching Moments, where Max takes a missing-horse case in small-town Idaho and walks into a murder that nobody’s telling the truth about. And now Baker Street, the prequel, coming this May, which goes back to the moment after Max lost his wife—when his client’s father is murdered, and the case becomes more personal than anything he’s faced.

Three books in, and I’m not done. I don’t think Max is either.

People ask me what makes Max different from other thriller protagonists. I think about that a lot, actually. The genre is full of brilliant detectives and ex-cops and haunted investigators, and I love them—Bosch, Reacher, Lisbeth Salander, all of them. But Max isn’t the smartest person in the room. He’s not the toughest. He doesn’t have a special set of skills or a photographic memory or a dark past that makes him cool.

He’s just a man who can’t let go of a case.

Every investigation Max takes turns personal. That’s not a coincidence—it’s who he is. He can’t separate the work from himself. The missing dogs in Harvested pull him back to his own loss. The murder in Teaching Moments forces him to confront how grief distorts the way he sees evidence. And in Baker Street, the victim’s father mirrors his relationship with his own, which means every instinct he has is compromised from the start.

I think I keep writing Max because I understand that feeling. Not the detective part—I’ve never chased a suspect through a warehouse or been abducted at gunpoint. But the “can’t let go” part? That I know.

Every book I write is a story I have to finish. I have to know what happens to the characters. I can’t walk away from a half-written manuscript any more than Max can walk away from a half-solved case. We’re both stubborn that way. We both lose sleep over the pieces that don’t fit. And we both keep going past the point where a reasonable person would probably stop.

Maybe that’s why Max feels real to readers. He’s not a fantasy of competence. He’s a portrait of persistence—messy, costly, sometimes misguided, but real. And his dog Russ is right there beside him, which is the most honest relationship in the whole series, because dogs don’t care about your track record. They just stay.

I’m excited about Baker Street. It’s the book that answers the question readers have been asking since Harvested: who was Max before? And I think the answer is going to surprise people—not because it’s some dramatic twist, but because it shows how much a person can change when the worst thing happens, and how much stays exactly the same.

That book arrives in May. I’ll have more to share soon—cover, first chapter, the whole thing.

In the meantime, if you haven’t met Max yet, here’s where to start:

Harvested (Max Boucher #1): https://geni.us/Harvested

Teaching Moments (Max Boucher #2): https://geni.us/Teaching_Moments

Thanks for reading. And if you’ve already read Max’s stories, I’d love to hear from you—what moment stuck with you? What do you want to see in Baker Street? I always look forward to hearing what you think.

TL;DR

I didn’t create one of these for this article because I want you to read the entire thing before you comment. So if it is too long for you to read, please don’t comment.

The reason is that the topic of this article came up again yesterday, as it has several times in what has already been a long year.

People are commenting on posts containing links to articles and videos that they have not even watched or read. The comments reveal that they saw the title or topic and immediately formed an opinion before reading or listening to what the author had to say.

You say, “Dude, this has been going on for years.” You’re right, but we are at a delicate time in our country for both politics and religion, but I’m not even going to talk about those (at least not in this article). Because instead, I’m going to talk about publishing, which is where I live every day.

Authors already have a lot of struggles, and there is a lot of insecurity and fear in this business. The rise of AI is adding to the fear. There are common questions that at least two camps answer in different ways, and while the truth likely lands somewhere in the middle, many times neither side is truly listening to the other.

They see an article or video title and jump on it because of what they assume is inside, even if that assumption is not true. Bias fuels assumptions, but these same commenters will explain how they are not biased. But that, in itself, is a problem.

Here are some common topics and the common arguments about reading the article:

· AI will replace human writers, and authorship will no longer be a viable career in five years or less.

Comment: I disagree. I’m not reading an article on this, but I sure as hell will leave a comment.

Or:

I agree. I’m quitting and applying for jobs right now. This person is an expert and clearly knows more than I do.

· AI will replace human editors, and in some ways already has. The job of editor will no longer be a viable career in three to five years.

Comment: I disagree with this too, and I have all the reasons. But I won’t read this article to see who wrote it and what they think. It doesn’t matter, because they are wrong and I am right.

Or:

This person is right, and even though I just got a degree in editing from BYU, I’m giving up. Who would be foolish enough to think this is a viable career in the age of AI?

· Your work is copyrighted upon fixation. You don’t need to buy your own ISBNs or register your copyright. Just use free ones, and don’t bother. It’s an extra $65 you don’t have to spend.

Comment: This is not only wrong, but it can cost you big money. I’m not reading the article, but I disagree.

Or:

I agree. This person is clearly an expert. There’s no reason to seek another opinion.

· You can copyright AI generated work, but only if it has X% of human input.

Comment: I don’t need to read this article. I will just make sure I add that much humanity to my work, and I will be fine.

Or:

You should never use AI in any percentage of your work. It should not be something you can copyright. This is BS

· You don’t need to disclose to Amazon or the Copyright Office whether you used AI to create your work or not. Your work, your choice. It’s none of their business.

Comment: What? Of course, you have to be honest. What if you get caught? Besides, it’s wrong to lie.

Or:

Yeah! It’s none of their business how I write my books. I won’t get caught, and I’m just a small author. No one is going to steal my work, so I’ll never have to sue.

The problem with all of these? The article might have really good information or arguments about either side, and by not reading it, you remain uninformed, and you stay in a bubble of confirmation bias that may not be true. The problem with an article like this one is that because of the topics I added to the list, some people will never read the rest of this post. They’ll stop and argue about their side of the bullet points above without reading on.

So please, keep reading.

Admitting Bias

This is tough, but I have both an illustration and a personal example. In editing a manuscript for a Christian therapist (who shall remain nameless, at least for this article), I encountered a statement at the beginning of the book: “I hope this book reaches Christian and non-Christian parents alike.” But the author has a clear bias, which defines his audience. Yes, non-Christian parents might benefit from the information, but they also might be turned off by the volume of religious content in the material.

So we modified the statement to clarify that the author knows he is biased, and that while others might benefit from reading his work, his clear target is Christian parents.

As an editor who is not a practicing Christian, I come to work with my own bias, which works to his advantage. As a Christian school graduate and a Bible college attendee, I know both the language and the bias we want to approach the work from, but I can illustrate to him the instances where he leans too far into his bias.

When it comes to AI and copyright, I definitely have a bias. With AI, my bias is to use it with caution: AI is a great tool for some things, not great for others, and can positively impact your author career in many ways. I worked with a client who has Parkinson’s and could no longer type. He used AI to help write his manuscript, and I edited it for him at a steep discount to help him get it into the world. I have no problem using AI to help in any part of your writing process.

But when it comes to copyright, I am a literalist, and that’s the way I interpret the “copyright clause” in the Constitution. That said, I am not an attorney. My bias is to help authors do the very best things they can to protect their work under the law, so I consult with experts to help me fulfill that mission (a part of my bias for sure) in as strict a manner as possible under the law, as those experts explain it to me, and I understand it.

If you don’t read or consume anything outside your bias, though, you may struggle to learn and grow. Your bias could be born out of another issue: ignorance.

Admitting, Accepting, and Correcting Ignorance

There is a huge difference between ignorance and a level of intelligence. The level of your intelligence can be improved, to a certain extent, through practice, but we all have a certain mental capacity, and usually for different things. I’m much better with words than math, for example, even though I can do math reasonably well.

Ignorance is not always a choice. Sometimes, it is a circumstance. What it means is that you have the intelligence to comprehend something, reach conclusions when presented with facts (signs of intelligence), but you have one of these reasons for being ignorant:

· You have never been presented with the facts, so you had no opportunity to learn them.

· You have avoided the facts for an emotional or personal reason. (This often happens in religious circles, and even has a name: Spiritual Avoidance)

· You have had an opportunity to learn the facts, and they have been presented to you, but you choose to ignore them anyway. This often happens when you encounter something outside of your usual confirmation bias (which we all create for ourselves, even subconsciously) and you think, “That can’t be true” without carefully examining the facts in front of you.

· Or lastly, you just aren’t that interested. I find string theory fascinating, but I don’t plan to take the time away from the things I really love and learn more about it to remedy my ignorance about it.

The problem is that ignorance is perfectly normal. In the wide breadth of knowledge in today’s world, you can only know so many things and can only be deeply knowledgeable about a few. But there is a shame (some would call it “toxic shame,” but that’s a different article, because we see that in publishing as well) surrounding ignorance.

Rest assured. Everyone you know is ignorant of something. Ignorance is normal, and sometimes it is, indeed, bliss. However, this leads to yet another issue with TL;DR situations. You can be aware of something and even understand it, but that does not mean you are well-versed in it or an expert.

False vs. Genuine Humility

Commenting on an article or video without reading or watching it is saying to the author, “I don’t need to read this. I already know what is in it, and I feel compelled to give you my opinion.” There is only one thing that drives this: pride.

I find that whenever I read an article, even if I disagree with it (like some of the doomsday AI stuff mentioned above), I learn something. This means I erase a tiny bit of ignorance and hopefully bias that I had about the topic before reading or listening. It happens almost without exception. At the very least, I learn something about the author, and often about their bias.

But I have to read those articles to reap those benefits. Because what I understand is that the more I learn, the more I understand how much there is in the world that I don’t know. Because you need a dose of true humility from time to time.

Someone with false humility will phrase it like this: “I still have lots to learn, but in the meantime, let me tell you everything I have learned so far, because my understanding is far superior to yours.”

We had a copyright attorney on our podcast recently, and although I have been in the industry for around two decades now, have worked for big publishing houses in editor and managing editor positions, have owned two publishers, and been published and have self-published multiple times in that period, I learned things in that session about contracts, terms of service, and copyright law.

I know a lot, but experts know more than I do, so I defer to and learn from them, and realize at the end of those conversations that there is so much more that I do not know yet. As an author and a human being, I know you have likely gained areas of expertise (ask me about obscure serial killers or body disposal methods, or how money laundering actually works). But you likely have a lot more to learn.

“I Am an Expert.”

Here’s the final word, because this article is too long already, and my WIP wants these 2.5K words toward the conclusion of that story: I am an expert. So are you. But we are experts in different areas, and there is nothing wrong with that.

For example, I’m an expert in museum operations, but in a very specific niche. I’ve established and ran the research department in a museum, completed the digitization of archives at major universities and state agencies as part of that project, consulted with museums on collection and accession policies, and more. I’m also an expert in the mining history of my state, and to a lesser extent, the history of silver and gold mining in the western United States.

How did I gain that expertise? Through going from the position of a generalist to a specific expertise through both study and practice. I took courses, read books, and then acted on the knowledge I gained in a variety of circumstances.

I’m an expert at publishing and editing. I’m known as the Plot Dude because I not only practice plot through writing, but I actively study story, plot structure, and everything related to that through both college courses and more informal learning (including two master’s level courses on story structure and semiotics just two years ago).

Those are earned expertise: gained through both education and practice. This is much the way other professions work as well. You get a degree (that’s the education part) and then you apply that study through doing the job you trained for. For example:

· My life partner Holly, is a dental hygienist. She obtained her Bachelor of Science degree, completed clinicals (similar to what doctors and nurses do), practiced for over two decades, and continues to take continuing education every year. She is an expert.

· My daughter is finishing nursing school. She is already licensed as an LPN, is getting her BSN and RN this year, has done clinicals as part of her education, and is actively working in healthcare at hospitals and in pediatrics, her chosen specialty.

· Lawyers study and pass the bar, then go into practice.

· Doctors graduate from medical school, and then do clinical rotations under a mentor, then practice for years.

· Editors get a certain amount of education, practice editing, often for publishers, and then, as freelancers, take continuing education constantly.

You get the idea. Here’s the rule: expertise equals education plus practice. If you read a lot of contracts (like I have, and like my business partner Stacey has) and have engaged with copyright law on behalf of editing and publishing clients (which we both have), we are extremely knowledgeable about copyright law, but we are not experts. An expert practices law as well, dealing with clients daily and arguing cases in front of judges in court. Those experts are copyright and IP attorneys. Good attorneys are constantly educating themselves because new case law is emerging all the time, and courts rule, and legislation passes.

They are the experts. There is a difference between understanding something (the cure for ignorance) on a basic level, becoming well-versed and knowledgeable, and being an expert. The only way you reach that expertise is through education and experienced practice. (It’s like watching a commercial on TV that describes your symptoms, researching the drug on Google, and going to your doctor to tell them what medication you need. Good thing that never happens. That would be a nightmare!)

Those experts also have legal protection. They have malpractice and other forms of insurance that protect them because of their expertise. An insurance company does not issue malpractice insurance to someone who is not a doctor or a nurse, so a person who represents themselves as a medical expertise without the correct certification and documentation has no legal protection when it comes to the advice they give, and they cannot legally perform some of the duties of their profession because of the inherent danger of false expertise.

You don’t get true expertise by not reading an article and sharing your knowledge. You don’t get that by commenting on a YouTube video you did not watch, but you read the title and saw the first few minutes (if any), so you already know everything you need to know about what’s inside.

You only learn through openness, humility, and doing your best to set aside bias at least for a moment (that last one is almost impossible). You gain it through the study of reliable sources, and in some cases, through obtaining a degree coupled with rigorous testing of your skills.

So, instead of putting a TL;DR at the top of an article, or summarizing it with AI, then commenting, how about we slow down and read things? Allow yourself to think, feel, and digest the content. Learn from those people who are truly experts in their field.

Then your comments will be much more intelligent and well-received. And you might just be a better person armed with new knowledge. It might even reduce division if we can take the time to understand each other.

In The Solitaire Series, that chaos just got a name—Charles Pickard Jr.
His friends call him Pick. You’ll call him unforgettable.

Episode 17: The First Joker isn’t just another step deeper into the shadowy world of Solitaire—it’s a gear shift. A sharp turn. The moment the deck doesn’t deal what you expect.

Pick didn’t ask for any of this.
He didn’t ask to be left a card in a safe deposit box.
He didn’t ask for the cryptic note from his dead father.
And he sure as hell didn’t ask for a meathead in a bad wig to threaten his life over something that looks like a standard playing card.

But that’s what happens when your father—Lieutenant Charles “Chuck” Pickard—wasn’t just a soldier in Vietnam. He was something else. Something buried in the history of Solitaire’s rise to power. Something powerful enough that the secrets he left behind are still being hunted decades later.

And now Pick? He’s holding the key. Or, in this case, the card.

🎙️ Who Is the Joker in This Deck?

Pick is... not your typical noir protagonist. He’s loud. He’s flamboyant. He wears bright Hawaiian shirts and skate shoes to the beach. But don’t let the theatrics fool you—he’s clever, fast on his feet, and more dangerous than anyone expects. Especially to the guy who tries to take the card by force.

What begins as a strange encounter near the boardwalk turns into a full-blown street fight, a bloody nose, and a chase that leads straight to a bank vault and an envelope Pick’s been ordered not to open—until now.

Inside that envelope? A name, a date, and a cipher that leads deeper into the Solitaire mystery.

🎧 Listen Now — Wherever You Are

If you’ve been following The Solitaire Series, this is the episode where the tone shifts and the stakes grow fangs. We’re talking coded messages, mysterious inheritances, and the kind of blood-in-the-sand brawls that would make John Wick proud.

And if you haven’t started the series yet? The First Joker is a wild introduction to what makes Solitaire different: bite-sized audio noir full of twists, characters you won’t forget, and a conspiracy that stretches from Vegas to Vietnam and back again.

You can listen now, wherever you prefer:

🔊 Spotify: Find The Solitaire Series on Spotify
🎥 YouTube: Watch or listen on YouTube
🃏 Direct Purchase: Support the creators & own the episode here

💬 Why This Episode Matters

Jokers aren’t just for chaos. In Solitaire’s world, they’re game-changers. This is the first step in a new thread that will tie past and present together—and if you’re the kind of listener who loves following a breadcrumb trail into something bigger, deeper, and more dangerous? You’re going to love what comes next.

🔥 Don’t Wait. The Game Is Changing.

In a series where every episode is a card dealt from a dangerous deck, Episode 17 brings the wild card into play. You won’t want to miss the moment chaos enters the system.

Listen. Subscribe. Share. And keep your eyes open—because Solitaire doesn’t play fair.

Episode 16, "The Five of Spades," takes us on a journey through time, weaving together the glittering facade of Las Vegas with the dark, hidden underbelly of the Vietnam War. It's a story of ambition, secrets, and the enduring power of a single playing card.

The episode opens in 1969, a pivotal year for Las Vegas. The city is transforming, shedding its "Sin City" image and embracing the mega-resort era. But beneath the neon lights and the family-friendly facade, the shadows of the past linger. Organized crime, fueled by the spoils of war, still holds sway.

Enter Chuck, a supply officer with a lucrative side hustle. He's caught between the allure of quick cash and the promise of something far more valuable – a seemingly ordinary Five of Spades. In a deal brokered under the cover of night, Chuck takes a gamble, unaware of the forces he's about to unleash.

"The Five of Spades" delves into the moral ambiguity of this era, exploring the choices people make when faced with temptation and the consequences that follow. Chuck's decision sets in motion a chain of events that will echo through decades, impacting not only his own life but also the life of a son he'll never meet.

The episode masterfully blends historical context with personal drama. We're transported to the battlefields of Vietnam, where the war's dark influence seeps into the heart of the story. The Five of Spades becomes a symbol of this era, a card that holds the secrets of a city built on chance and the spoils of war.

"The Five of Spades" also expands the world of Solitaire, revealing the organization's deep roots in the city's history. We see how the chaos of the Vietnam War provided fertile ground for their expansion, and how the secrets they amassed continue to shape the present.

"The Five of Spades" is a compelling episode that explores the dark heart of a city built on dreams and secrets. It's a story of ambition, legacy, and the enduring power of a card that holds the key to a kingdom. Don't miss this gripping installment that will leave you questioning the true cost of ambition.

Subscribe now

In a deal brokered under the cover of a desert night, Chuck is offered a choice: co…

Read more

This episode isn't about subtle intrigue or intricate plots; it's about the raw, visceral reality of the underworld. Blackjack's narration is a punch to the gut, a gritty, unapologetic look at the violence that lurks beneath the neon glow of Las Vegas. We're immersed in his world, where cracking skulls and breaking bones is just another day at the office.

But "The Jack of Clubs" isn't just a brutal action piece. It's also a story about discovery. Blackjack and his partner, Tony, are sent to retrieve a seemingly ordinary card – a two of spades. But as they soon discover, this card is anything but ordinary. It holds a secret, a hidden danger that threatens to unravel the delicate balance of power in the city.

The episode explores the theme of unexpected discoveries in the most violent of settings. Blackjack, a man who's used to dealing with problems with his fists, finds himself caught in a web of intrigue that requires more than just brute force. He's forced to confront the reality that there are players in this game who operate in the shadows, pulling strings and manipulating events from behind the scenes.

"The Jack of Clubs" expands the world of Solitaire, revealing the hierarchy of power and the dangerous secrets that lie hidden beneath the surface. We see the organization from a different perspective, through the eyes of a man who's more comfortable with violence than with subtlety.

"The Jack of Clubs" is a powerful episode that delivers a brutal dose of reality while also hinting at a larger, more complex story unfolding in the shadows. Don't miss this gripping installment that will leave you questioning who's really holding the winning hand.

What are your thoughts on Blackjack and the mysterious card? Share your theories in the comments below!

This time, it's a simple job: retrieve a card. But simple jobs have a way of turning ugly. One minute, I'm cracking skulls and breaking bones, the next, I'm staring at a c…

Read more

"The Seven of Diamonds" opens with Carl in a white, sterile room, shackled and beaten. He's being interrogated, but the questions aren't just about information; they're about control. And at the center of this control is a woman named Nancy.

Nancy is a femme fatale for the modern age. Her voice is like glass, her words sharp and cutting. She offers Carl "friendship," but it's a twisted, dangerous kind of friendship, one where compliance is the only currency. Carl quickly learns that Nancy and her organization make Solitaire, his employer, look like a schoolyard bully. They are the sharks, and Solitaire is merely a piranha.

This episode delves into the psychological tension of Carl's situation. He's trapped, not just physically but mentally, forced to navigate a treacherous landscape where trust is a liability. We witness the power dynamics at play, the subtle but menacing ways Nancy manipulates Carl, making him question his loyalties and his very survival.

"The Seven of Diamonds" is a masterclass in noir storytelling. It's a dark, atmospheric episode that explores the themes of power, control, and the dangerous allure of a twisted alliance. Carl, a man with a checkered past, is forced to confront his own vulnerabilities and make choices that could seal his fate.

The episode also expands the world of Solitaire, hinting at a larger, more sinister organization operating in the shadows. We get a glimpse into the hierarchy of power, the fear that even those at the top feel. The seven of diamonds card itself becomes a symbol of this hidden power, a key to unlock doors Carl never knew existed.

"The Seven of Diamonds" is a chilling reminder that in the world of Solitaire, friendship is a loaded gun, and survival is a game of high stakes. Don't miss this gripping episode that will leave you questioning every alliance and every motive.

Listen to the episode, and then share your ideas. What are your thoughts on Nancy and her organization? Share your theories in the comments below!

Listen Elsewhere