Instagram montage for #heatedrivalryfanart. Illustrations by @menudo.desastre, @youn_hee_drawings, @jebjebby_art, @tanya_lily_jane_arts. All art used with permission.

I headed into the summer of 2026 with big writing plans: finish a first draft and revisions on another novel while prioritizing promotions for my November book launch. I couldn’t predict the veer the season took instead: the extent to which I got sucked into the vortex of the Heated Rivalry universe.

The stage was somewhat set for this, because in March of this year I started writing my first-ever romance novel. The push and pull of the story’s fraught feelings and circumstances, throwing two people together and then tearing them apart, already had my emotions all tender and tattered. I took this on at a time when I’ve been changing too, as a woman in a womanly body doing hormonal late-in-life things. So, for the past several months I’ve been walking around feeling all the lustful forlornness of my characters’ lovesickness.

Enter a bored weeknight when I finally decided to check the box and watch the queer hockey romance show everyone’s been talking about for the past year.

Readers, I binged it.

Fangirling in the HRverse

Then I rewatched it. Again, and again, and again. (This is called “reheating,” for those not familiar with the manic subculture that has sprung up around the Heated Rivalry ’verse.)

I read the books, part of a series by Rachel Reid called Game Changers. I began scrolling fan art, memes, clips, and analyses on Instagram until my algorithm refused to show me other content. Before long, I discovered the fan fiction, and the whole fanfic community of writers and readers, and now I am a “loon” through and through. (Why a “loon”? Too complicated to explain. It’s a Canadian thing.)

As I began to hint at my new-found addiction on social media, a friend messaged me to ask: “Have you always been a fan girl?”

Yes and no. I’m not a superhero or science fiction or manga aficionado, but I do have a few curated obsessions that I’ll probably never grow tired of. But I think there’s more to this obsession than that. These characters and their story have hit a nerve with people all over the world. As ridiculous as I feel sometimes about how possessed I’ve grown by HR, I’m fascinated by how many people from across demographics are giving into the emotion and pleasure of this fiction.

Part of it, I think, is due to the intricately drawn characters. The original main characters, as written by author Rachel Reid and brought to the screen by Jacob Tierney, are brilliantly complex and multi-dimensional—defying expectations for books that at first appearance are “just” queer sports romances. This has not only caused readers and reviewers to fall for them and root for them, in the canon books and show, but it’s inspired hundreds of fanfic writers to build whole adjacent worlds based on these characters.

Writing characters that we can’t quit

There’s so much depth to Ilya and Shane that the best fanfic works create intricate, tunneled worlds of back stories, alternate realities, and new dynamics that still feel true to the original characters while taking fans on indulgent explorations into the Sliding Doors versions of their lives. My favorite part of reading the fan fiction is how much these brilliant, talented writers are able to take the two main characters into virtually any scenario, time, or place—they’re surgeons! they’re fifty! they’re parents! one of them is a ghost! Ilya owns a bookstore!—and still build onto the original characters as depicted in canon.

Every single story I’ve read is as addictive as the originals, and I find myself caring passionately about what happens to the characters, pushing them back toward each other in my mind and heart. As an author, I can only aspire to create the kinds of characters who don’t just jump off the page, but move in and inhabit a reader’s soul.

And it’s the layers of these characters and their conflicts that have created the unshakeable yearning that we “loons” are carrying around with us this year, as we absorb these stories in all their forms.

Creating romantic tension by peeling back (and off!) the layers

Heated Rivalry often gets written off as “spicy romance,” as if it’s nothing but smutty fluff. And while that’s definitely one (very alluring) part of it, I think the reasons fans are so hooked is that we have to watch the characters shed or come to terms with all the coatings that keep them from being vulnerable enough to love each other. Their shame, internalized homophobia, societal ideas of masculinity; their family pressures, trauma, and culturally ingrained ideas; their fears of being ostracized, disgraced, exiled, even arrested or harmed; their mental health and neurodevelopmental differences.

The peeling away takes us readers and viewers on an emotional ride that’s so exhilarating we can’t get enough of it. We want to relive and study every heartbreaking misunderstanding, every small and quiet moment of joy, all the big hurts and slow healing. Through it all, we’re rooting for these boys. We’re holding our breath at every turn, willing them to find their way to each other as they learn bit by bit how to honor themselves and be happy. Through it all, we learn a little more about each character with each step of progress—enough to see how good they are to each other, and to urge them to become more honest, raw, and open.

I haven’t gotten tired of it yet, though I imagine the obsession will burn off eventually. But what I’m trying to take with me is a study in how to recreate this kind of passionate yearning—for my characters, and among the readers cheering them on.

My debut novel is coming soon! The Pearl Farmers is a multigenerational family novel about three sisters carrying on the legacy of their family’s cultured pearl farm in rural Tennessee—perfect for fans of Celeste Ng, Ann Patchett, and Claire Lombardo. Get more info at thepearlfarmers.com.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about how the editing is the writing—how the real work happens not in the exuberant rush of the first draft but in the slow excavation of revision. This has been my experience too: each round of revision lets me hone, shape, connect ideas, and perfect each word and sentence until the rhythm of the story feels like music.

But all the advice from authors who describe their months of painstaking revision often neglects to skim over the hard question: how do you know when the story is done? At some point, you have to stop revising and release that baby into the world. When do you know it’s time?

The feeling I can’t trust

Some writers describe a sensation: a click, a settling, a feeling of rightness. I have felt this too, but I don’t entirely trust it.

I’ve felt so perfectly confident that a draft was perfect, only to look at it again through fresh eyes later and realize it needed a full revision. The internal gauge isn’t precise—or more likely, it isn’t yet calibrated through enough experience.

By the time I’ve been over a manuscript fifteen times, I’ve stopped being able to read it. This is probably why so many writers swear by distance, becoming a stranger to your own work long enough to see it again. But this kind of forgetting takes a lot of time, which can sometimes be excruciating for this impatient writer.

Stopping when you can’t go on

The most honest historical version of this comes from Paul Valéry, in his 1933 essay on his own famous poem Le Cimetière marin. An excerpt of this poem has become a famous quote: “a poem is never finished, only abandoned.” His point was that for writers who care about their work, finished is not a category that exists—there’s only a moment when you can no longer bear to look at your work, or when an external force like a publisher or an editor takes it away from you.

Matt Bell, the author of Refuse to Be Done, wrote an essay on this exact question in his Substack last month. He starts by conceding that perfection can’t be the goal, because almost no manuscript is perfect; the real question, he says, is “how much imperfection can you allow before you submit it?” His own most useful signal turns out to be a forward-looking one. “Genuinely being ready to start another book,” he writes, “is one of the best reasons to finally submit the one you’ve been working and reworking.”

I love that this is a positive signal rather than an exhausted one. Valéry’s writer abandons the work because they can’t stand it anymore. Bell’s writer puts it down because the next book is already pulling at their sleeve.

Understanding your “why” can signal doneness

There’s a version of this I find more hopeful. Once or twice, deep in revising something, I’ve had the experience of suddenly understanding what the thing was actually about—not what I’d planned, but what it had become.

In The Art of Revision, Peter Ho Davies argues that revision isn’t the polishing of something you already understood; it’s how you come to understand it at all. We rarely know exactly what we mean when we start a draft. We revise to find out. And “doneness,” by his account, is a kind of epiphany—not the climactic insight we hand to a character or a reader, but a quieter one that belongs to the writer. “That’s how you know you’re done,” he writes: “when you understand why you told your story in the first place, what your intent actually was all along.” The satisfaction, he says, is “less perfection than wholeness.”

I find this more specific and helpful than “when you know, you know.”

Davies is honest that this doesn’t happen every time—but when that revelation does come, it can act as “a bulwark” against the anxieties that come after: reviews, sales, reception. If you genuinely know why you wrote the book, the opinions of others “no longer burden us,” or burden us less. Doneness, in his framing, is “in some sense the only judgment that counts.”

My upcoming novel went through probably a dozen major revisions and many, many minor ones. Through each phase I got closer to what the story was really about, and how I wanted to tell it. When I finally called it “done,” it was a kind of letting go: admitting that there was nothing more I was capable of doing, at that stage of my writer growth, to make it better. But also, Davies’ definite of “doneness” also helps me feel confident that I let go at the right time, when I felt confident I finally knew what the book was for.

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case

🎸 My writing soundtrack

Nothing’s About to Happen to Me by Mitski (her song “Where’s My Phone?” has become my summer soundtrack!)

📣 Shameless self-promo

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I knew from the time I was a child that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. The knowledge sharpened through high school, where English was my favorite subject and I won awards for essays. Writing was the thing I was born knowing how to do—though I had plenty to learn about structure and craft.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, in a small Ohio town without much exposure to the world of Career Possibilities, I assumed journalism was the only way to write words and get paid for them. So I went to journalism school.

In 1992, freshman year in j-school focused on teaching us how to work at a newspaper. We learned picas and column inches, the inverted pyramid, how to write obituaries—which, our news-writing professor told us, would likely be our first jobs out of school. I’m grateful for those skills. But by my second year I was restless with the just-the-facts cadence and scoop-chasing pace, and I started thinking seriously about switching majors to English. That career path might mean teaching someday, but at least it would let me be creative.

Then I met Pat Westfall, who opened my eyes to other possibilities.

Meeting a “real writer”

Professor Patricia Westfall taught magazine editing and production. She was a little kooky, with a strong personality and a weird, dry, sometimes biting sense of humor, and I adored everything about her. In her classes I didn’t just learn how to write and edit for magazines—I learned how to think about magazines: the target audience, the positioning, the visual identity, the editorial point of view. Looking back, it was an MBA crash course in magazine publishing for a bunch of sophomore college students. I had no idea at the time how meaningful that was.

Professor Westfall also wrote books. Plural. She had written the textbook we used in her classes, Beyond Intuition: A Guide to Writing and Editing Magazine Non-Fiction. She had recently published a memoir called Real Farm: Encounters with Perception, about the ten years she spent on an Iowa farm. She also wrote murder mysteries. She was the first person I had ever met in real life who wrote books, let alone multiple kinds of books, moving freely between them. I was in awe.

One afternoon, our class went to her house for a workshop. She took us upstairs to show us her writing room, which was painted a vibrant red-orange.

“Red stimulates creativity,” she told us as we stood gaping at the audaciousness of the room color.

I’ve dreamed about a red writing room ever since. More than the paint color, though, what I took from that afternoon was the realization that being a writer wasn’t a side hobby or a someday-dream—it was a room you walked into every morning. A door at the top of the stairs. A color you’d chosen on purpose.

Opening my eyes to new paths

Somewhere in my second year I must have confessed to Pat that I was struggling with journalism and wasn’t sure I belonged. She offered to do a one-on-one tutorial with me on literary journalism. Over a quarter, we read long-form pieces by Didion, McPhee, Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese. I learned how storytelling, perspective, sensory detail, and stylistic choice could interplay with reporting. It wasn’t journalism the way I’d been taught it. It was journalism that did what fiction did.

"I truly believe that non-fiction is the new American literature,” she told a student reporter in a newspaper article when her memoir Real Farm came out. “You have to get beyond mere journalism, mere reporting, in order to describe the essence of your subject matter."

This was one of her big themes: what is this really about? What’s at the heart of this story? What is reality, versus what is our perception of reality? For kids who were all trying to learn how to tell “the truth” in black and white, these were provocative and eye-opening questions that shifted how I approached my craft forever.

The widening of my world

I was a shy kid going into college—a small-town, introverted, self-conscious, neurodivergent kid with good grades, a gift for writing, and no confidence. I had a hard time believing I had anything interesting to contribute to a relationship with the accomplished professors I was suddenly surrounded by. Pat intimidated me especially: her sarcasm, her wisdom, and the easy confidence she had about her own creative life. I wanted to be her at the same time I was always trying to take up less space around her and people like her.

After I graduated, I left Ohio, worked in magazines for several years, then switched to digital marketing and tech. I used to think about Pat a lot, but I didn’t stay in touch. I always assumed I was just another awkward kid who passed through and blurred into her memories.

About a year before she died, I was back in my college town for a journalism alumni event. The j-school’s director, another of my beloved professors, encouraged me to pay Pat a visit. She was ill and struggling to get around, and I couldn’t imagine she’d care about seeing me. I worried the visit would be awkward.

To my extreme surprise, she not only remembered me, but twenty-plus years later she remembered our tutorial on literary journalism. Then she pulled out portfolios of paintings she’d done since retiring, mostly from her travels. She had thrown herself into art the way she had thrown herself into writing, magazine publishing, and farming. It was the same lesson she had always been teaching, just in a different medium. Create the room you want, choose the color, and walk in.

I slipped right back into the scared, self-conscious twenty-year-old I’d been in her classroom. I hope I told her how much she meant to me. I’m not sure I did.

I think about her a lot now—because I’d love to be able to drop by her house in the beautiful Ohio countryside some Sunday and tell her all about what I’m doing with my writing life now. I bet she’d not only be thrilled, but that she’d have plenty of ideas for things I could do to make the experience even more fun and enriching.

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

🎸 My writing soundtrack

I Built You a Tower by Death Cab for Cutie

🫶 Great reads and resources

The Anatomy of a Best Seller by Sacha Black

In my twenties, I learned a secret about my mother. The details aren’t the point of this essay, so I’ll keep them to myself, but what I can say is that the revelation reordered my entire understanding of who my mother was: why she’d made the choices she made, why our relationship felt the way it did, and what her youth had actually contained. It was the kind of information that should change a relationship.

But I had to sit on it. My mother never knew I knew. She carried that secret to her grave, the way she’d carried it for sixty-some years. After she died, I found out that my father and my stepfather had known the secret, but didn’t know many details. When my sister used her serious genealogy chops to start pulling threads, we uncovered more information that helped us understand why she’d kept it buried her whole life.

A buried family secret as plot engine

I realized halfway through drafting my debut novel The Pearl Farmers that the engine of the novel was a long-hidden secret about the family matriarch. Not my mother’s secret: the fictional one is less devastating. But as it did for me, the secret in the book reframes everything for the daughters: their understanding of who their mother was, what she was protecting, and what they inherited that they didn’t ask for.

I didn’t sit down to write a book about a secret. The secret arrived because that’s what I’d been thinking about, in some buried compartment, for two decades.

Family secrets in fiction sometimes seem like they’re everywhere. Many of my favorite authors, from Ann Patchett to Richard Russo to Tana French, build novels around them. I wonder sometimes if they’ve become a cliché—except that as a reader, they continue to be so tantalizing that I’m drawn to books with them over and over. And for writers, the family secret can be an excellent tool to make a story more layered, compelling, and human-feeling.

The human connection to family secrets

Author Lisa Montanaro, whose novel Everything We Thought Was True features a long-held family secret at its center, speaks frequently about how family secrets are natural and rich craft material for authors of virtually any genre. They generate built-in dramatic tension, double as backstory and antagonist, and create the conditions for genuine transformation.

The family secret isn’t just a device: it’s a category of authentic human experiences. Most readers either know a family secret, or they think they might. While it can be an effective tool that drives character development, story arc, and structure, a family secret lands because readers recognize it.

Also, depending on what the secret reveals, it can create turmoil in the life of the person who learns it, and that can lead to a roller-coaster of emotion that’s evocative in a protagonist. As I felt when I discovered my mother’s secret—and the Lockshire sisters encountered in The Pearl Farmers when they learned theirs—everything a person thought about themselves, their history, and their identity can shift in an instant. As Dani Shapiro wrote in Inheritance, a book about how a DNA test revealed a different biological father than Shapiro had always known:

Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

The rich possibilities of unraveling family lore

These days, people spit into tubes and find out their father isn’t their father, their cousin isn’t their cousin, and their great-grandmother had a whole other family in Poland. The family tree, as a stable document, is falling apart in real time. I find this thrilling as a fiction writer. Every family across the last several centuries has organized itself around an origin story that was probably wrong. The misattributed paternity, the swapped baby, the affair never named, the adoption never disclosed.

The opposite problem fascinates me too. My husband is third-generation American. His grandfather emigrated from Russia in the early twentieth century. Beyond passenger manifests, census records, and a few passed-along details, there’s essentially no record of the family before then: no preserved stories, no documents, no oral history. The family history has been erased rather than hidden—a quieter version of the same phenomenon. The absence is its own kind of haunting.

But as a fiction writer, isn’t it ripe with opportunity? Think about all the stories emerging from the gaps between what we believed and what was true—and all the different ways our various characters would be affected when a secret comes out.

How to keep the secret from feeling formulaic

Once you’ve decided your novel has a secret, the easiest thing in the world is to default to the genre version: someone holds it, someone discovers it, the reveal lands in act three, transformation follows. That works, but it can also start to slip into predictability or cliché territory.

A few things I’ve found helpful, drawn partly from Lisa Montanaro’s guidance and partly from working on The Pearl Farmers:

• Track the secret like you’d track a character. Who knows? Who suspects? What happens to the relationships based on who does and doesn’t know? Mapping out who holds it, who's protected by it, and how it ripples through your relationships keeps it from feeling tacked on.

• Decide what the secret is protecting, not just what it is. My mother wasn’t keeping a fact hidden; she was keeping a wound from being touched. Characters who keep secrets to protect themselves from shame, or to protect someone else from shame, behave very differently from characters keeping a strategic, operational secret.

• Let the secret be perceived differently by every character who knows it. No two people who share a real family secret understand it the same way. My sister and I know the same set of facts about our mother and have completely different relationships to them. In The Pearl Farmers, each sister is affected by their mother’s secret based on their relationships with their parents and the story of their family. Multiple POVs lend themselves to this beautifully; even a single POV can suggest it through dialogue and the shape of what other characters won’t quite say.

• Resist the clean reveal. In life, secrets come out sideways—partial confessions, slipped names, an unknown relative who shows up through a DNA test. The fictional version that mirrors that messiness tends to feel truer than the well-staged drawing-room confrontation. The less clean the reveal, the more complex the question becomes about why the silence existed and whether it was the right thing to keep.

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

We Are All Guilty Here by Karin Slaughter

🎸 My writing soundtrack

Vinyl! We got a new turntable and have been breaking it in. I’m finally listening to all the Cherry Tree fan club albums I’ve received over the years.

🫶 Great reads and resources

• The Creator Economy Is Rewriting the Rules of Author Careers - The Bleeders, Courtney Kocak and Jane Friedman

• The Specificity Problem - A.J. Saxsma: Your descriptions and action beats have a specificity problem

📣 Shameless self-promo

Sign up for my monthly author newsletter for news about my upcoming debut novel and other fiction projects!

Last week I watched a writer quit in real time.

I don’t know her, and I’ve never read her books. I’ve tried to find her Threads post again, without luck. I know that she writes historical fiction, has published several novels and won awards for them, and has received good reviews from prestigious outlets in her genre.

From what I could glean from her post, someone recently wrote a negative review of her book. Not only that, but they called her a “YA author,” which she isn’t.

And instead of licking her wounds, or rallying her followers, or laughing it off and blocking the account, she announced she was done. Pulling her books and never publishing again. She was terrible at this, she claimed, and she wasn’t going to embarrass herself anymore.

I don’t know what happened to her. Maybe she logged off, slept, and woke up embarrassed by the post instead of the books. Maybe a friend talked her down. Maybe she meant every word. But it’s stayed with me for weeks.

She was doing it. The thing a lot of us are grinding away at on lunch breaks and dreaming about at two in the morning—she was actually living inside it. People were reading her work, paying money, turning pages. A few of them didn’t like it, and one of them was rude about it.

That’s the dream working the way it ought to. Once we put our work into the world, people get to have opinions about it—and some of them will be bored, confused, having a bad day, or quietly building a personality out of one-star reviews. Maybe this author was feeling fragile that day, or maybe she was exhausted and burnt out from the grind of doing hard creative work for years with no guarantee. Whatever the reason, she read one stranger’s verdict and believed it over her own.

We are not imposters

For years I wouldn’t call myself a writer: first because I wasn’t published, then because I wasn’t traditionally published or agented, then because I’d only finished one book and Ploughshares had passed on a story. Because, because, because—I had a whole filing cabinet of becauses, each one a small permission slip to not claim the thing I was already doing.

There’s a name for this, and it’s older than most of us think. In 1978, psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes published the first study of what they called the imposter phenomenon—what we now call “imposter syndrome.” They described it as an internal experience of intellectual phoniness: a conviction that you’ve fooled everyone, that persists no matter how much evidence piles up against it.

That last part is the cruel trick. The achievements don’t fix it. You can publish the novels, win the awards, collect the good reviews, and still stand there certain that everyone’s about to find you out. Clance and Imes were studying high-achieving women who couldn’t internalize their own success. Forty-some years later, half the writers I know could have been case studies.

At some point, though, the math stopped working on me. People were reading my work and liking it. Not everyone, and usually not as-is—readers had feedback. But the work was landing. Pieces were getting accepted. The evidence got loud enough that the becauses finally sounded like what they were—a story I’d been telling myself to stay safe.

We have to champion ourselves

If we don’t stick up for our own work—flawed as it is, unfinished as we are, a far cry from the established authors we measure ourselves against—then no one will. Agents and editors and the occasional generous reviewer might champion us, but they can’t be the foundation. They’re not there at 5 a.m. when we’re deciding whether to leave our warm beds and face the unfinished draft. We are the only ones.

“Believe in ourselves” may sound like trite advice. I don’t mean we should wave off criticism and stop trying to get better. Championing our work and being ruthless about improving it aren’t opposites. They’re the same job, done in two different phases. We do the hard work, fix our shit, read it aloud until our eyes blur, and polish it until we can’t make it any better. Then we stand behind it as something we’re proud of, imperfections and all.

In her Dear Sugar column that later became Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed addressed a young writer who wrote in, paralyzed, convinced she couldn’t do it. At the end of her reply, Strayed summarized: “Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.” That’s the permission we need to give ourselves—and that includes the permission to keep going, even when someone poo-poos what we’ve worked so excruciatingly to put into the world. We grow from it, we learn, but above all, we stay in the game.

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

The Keeper by Tana French

🎸 My writing soundtrack

From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth by Future Islands (B-sides compilations)

🫶 Great reads and resources

• Writing Away from Yourself: How to Fictionalize a Character - Courtney Maum on Jane Friedman’s blog

• Writing Flawed Characters with Sarah Moss - The Writing Life Podcast

📣 Shameless self-promo

Listen to my interview on the Evolution/Revolution podcast about my side author “career.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever thought of myself as lazy, yet internally I’ve long brandished it as a sort of prod or threat whenever my dedication flags. Keep going, stop being lazy. Or, look at how hard everyone else is working, don’t be lazy.

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At the same time, productivity has always been the way I measured my value to the world. I didn’t use to think of it like this. Instead, I approached every opportunity that came my way as: this looks like something I’d love to try, I’ll take this on too. And then, I’d run around with my head abuzz, obsessed with how busy I was. Busy, busy, busy!

Now, after years of therapy and a lot of learning, I’ve begun to recognize how destructive this has all been—and also how programmed it is into so many of us, especially in America. In her book I Don’t Want a Job, Amie McNee talks about how, starting in the 1970s, the neoliberal movement began emphasizing the message that the harder and longer you work, the more secure you’ll be in the world — a story that became a moral imperative. She writes:

The idea that work is moral is not inherent to humanity, it is inherited from our recent history. Having an ability to work hard is not an innate sign of being a healthy or good human being. It is just a story that has grown more salient in the last few centuries. It is a lie being told to manipulate you.

So when one side of my brain — the side looking out for me, wanting me to heal, relax, or stay true to myself — sends out the signal that I don’t want to do something (a work assignment, a meeting, a networking event), the trained-rat side of my brain throws up the criticism: you’re just being lazy.

Carrying two careers

All of this is tangled with my proclivity for guilt—the pervasive worry that I’m letting everyone down or failing the world every time I stand up for what I actually want. What it boils down to: I’ve been pushing myself to keep going in directions I don’t actually want or need to go.

Right now I’m feeling the weight of all this as I’m balancing two careers. One is my 8-to-5 “day job,” a career I’ve worked thirty years to build. I’m considered a “leader” at a large, prestigious corporation. I run a big team. I make really good money, which I’m grateful for, because my family lives like people who make really good money: mortgage, Bay Area lifestyle, out-of-state college tuition. I have stock and a retirement account.

I’m so, so lucky to have this job. (Never mind that I’ve genuinely worked my ass off to get to where I am, for a long time. Obviously, it’s all about the luck!) I’ve worked at a lot of companies, and I do appreciate this one for its good people, friendly culture, and mission-driven products. I get to work from home. I’m in charge of solving interesting problems. I’m fortunate.

The second career is what I’m starting to think of as “the book business.” In the next few years, my plan is to publish a whole catalog of novels: book club fiction, romances, and mysteries. I know publishing is brutal, but my goodness does it ever push all the creative buttons I’ve been trying to figure out how to push for years. Writing great stories, building a brand, marketing to specific audiences, bringing beautiful work into the world that brings people pleasure. This is what I want to do.

Lately I’ve been feeling drained by the imperative of showing up at my day job—the one that pays, mind you—because I’m alive with excitement about my book business. Balancing both pushes all my guilt pedals constantly. When I’m working at the day job, I feel guilty about not being further along on my book business to-dos. When I’m working on book stuff, I feel like I’m cheating on my real job and mentally cataloging how I’m letting my team down.

When I look around, I see so many of my colleagues working tirelessly, speaking with passion about the work, and continuing to show up engaged. This makes my own conflicted feelings — my tiredness and emptiness when it comes to my primary career — feel even more suspect. Why am I so checked out? How can I let myself give in to this personal failing?

I’ve begun to recognize that chiding myself for being lazy and uncommitted is easier than admitting that the shape of the career I’ve worked so hard to build no longer fits me. I crave something different. I want my writing to be the thing, and the day job to be the support beam, but most days the proportions are reversed — and even on days when I can secretly sink my heart into the one and fake my way through the other, the guilt it stirs up leaves me depleted.

Changing the terms

Psychology professor Devon Price’s essay “Laziness Does Not Exist” makes a sharp case against the lazy label. He argues, in the original essay and the later book, that when we call a behavior lazy, we’ve stopped asking the real question: what’s actually going on when someone procrastinates, skips class, or falls behind? We never know what someone is dealing with — anxiety, executive-functioning struggles, mental illness, or simply the inability to excel against unreasonable expectations. He writes:

People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder.

Extend this, and it’s fair to say: choosing to fulfill the obligations of my job while pining for a different life — and putting my spirit and energy into building that life — is also not lazy. I know in my gut what I want my future life to look like, and I’m already several steps ahead in my imagination from where I am today. I’m working hard at staying compliant inside an arrangement I don’t fully embrace anymore. I’m not being lazy. I’m growing increasingly aware that I need something different.

“The fact you don’t want a job is not a personality flaw,” Amie McNee writes. Throughout the manifesto, she returns to what this kind of misalignment actually costs: “I grieve the art not made because we are exhausted from our ‘real jobs.’” And: “It is psychologically harmful to dedicate your life to something that means nothing to you.”

I’m a realist. We have to live in our house and educate our kid, and we enjoy taking lovely vacations, buying new things, and having good health insurance. American society is what it is, and to say we’re well situated within it is an understatement. I’m willing to keep making that tradeoff — I’ll work because the money means something to me, and I’ll keep doing this job because I’m good at it and care about the problems I’m solving and the people I work with.

What I vow to stop doing is dwelling on the guilt — that some days, I just don’t feel like showing up at 100%. That I might phone it in occasionally. That I may be in a bad mood, or wake up late, or wish I was doing something else. And I’ll stop killing myself to be perfect at both of the work lives I’m juggling. I’ll let myself drop a few balls, fall behind a little, be delayed, not know the answer.

I’ll stop sticking on the lazy label every time I want to rest instead of produce. Instead, I’ll give myself a little compassion. It’s okay to be tired, to wish everything was different, or to want to lie in bed a little longer. It’s not a moral failing. It’s innately human.

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

The Pacific Circuit by Alexis Madrigal

🎸 My writing soundtrack

Oldies but goodies: The Jayhawks and Ryan Adams

📣 Shameless self-promo

Sign up for my monthly author newsletter for news about my upcoming debut novel and other fiction projects!

4:30 a.m.

The alarm on my Apple Watch starts to vibrate.

I set it last night with big plans and great optimism. Reminding myself how much I will later feel grateful for the long, quiet, peaceful stretch of time to write and create before the noisy work day sets in. I hit snooze; I set it earlier than I actually want to get up because I know I’ll hit snooze. I hit snooze several more times, until I’m awake enough to lie there calculating how many more snoozes I can afford before the math turns against me.

Sometime between 5 a.m. and 8-ish, depending on when my first meeting is scheduled

I actually get up.

I rush through showering, the first cup of coffee, walking the dog. I take my meds. I dread my upcoming meetings. I want to crawl back into bed. And I resent that I didn’t get the peaceful stretch of time I promised myself last night.

9 a.m.

The meds kick in.

By now I’m usually a few cups of coffee in, and I start to enjoy my conversations. This isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. But I’m also multitasking, building my very long to-do list for today, because as soon as I get off all these meetings, I’m going to get so much done.

11:30 a.m.

The morning meetings wrap up, and I start working on a project I’ve been procrastinating on.

12:30 p.m.

The dog is staring at me. My stomach is growling. Because I just lost myself in an hour of hyperfocus on this project, and now it’s impossible to pull myself away long enough to think about food. The guilty Labrador retriever eyes and drooling finally do it. I’ve got to squeeze in lunch for both of us before my next meeting.

1:30 p.m.

Meetings are over for the day. Finally, I can start chipping away at my to-do list!

1:45 p.m.

I feel exhausted. My list is still staring at me, but now I have a pile of action items from this morning’s meetings, unread Teams chats, and no mental energy to tackle any of it. Maybe I should take a nap.

2:30 p.m.

Though I lay down forty-five minutes ago to take a nap, I worked on New York Times Spelling Bee instead. It’s time to get back to work. I re-prioritize my to-dos, make a short list of “three next things” to finish, and set an ADHD timer, tricking myself into time-boxing my tasks so I can knock them out.

3:30 p.m.

I’m on a roll again. One of my tasks has turned into a brand-new way of thinking about framing a project, and I’m down in the glory of building a shiny, smart new spreadsheet to represent it, with color-coding and fancy pulldowns. Fun.

4:30 p.m.

The dog is staring at me again. I haven’t walked him. I think about all the things I was hoping to get done today—all my writing projects, the rest of my work commitments, a workout, a hobby. I’ll work late tonight, I promise myself. No problem. I can knock all this stuff out. I go walk the dog.

5:00 p.m.

I’m back at my desk finishing my work project. There’s still a lot to do. I’m tired of sitting at my desk. I drag both my laptops, along with my day planner, a timer, and my phone, down to the living room. I’ll just camp out on the couch and get all this stuff done. Plus, I’ll lift weights, do twenty minutes of yoga, and practice my banjo. And polish off eighty pages of the novel I’m reading. No prob.

6:00 p.m.

Husband is home from work. Dog is staring at me again; it’s his dinner time. I start cooking dinner for us humans too. I’ll just multitask while I’m cooking, easy. I can knock out a bunch of to-dos while things are simmering.

7:00 p.m.

Dinner is done, but the kitchen is a mess, and I haven’t multitasked at all.

8:00 p.m.

I finally clean up the kitchen from dinner, and my husband gets ready to go to the gym. I stare at my laptops, but exhaustion has hit again. Maybe I’ll just watch one show, and then I will get back to it.

I watch an episode of Ted Lasso I have seen three times. I play with the dog. I chip away at NYT Spelling Bee. I scroll Instagram.

9:00 p.m.

I announce to my husband that I am going to bed to read. At least I’ll get my eighty pages done. I wash my face, brush my teeth, and crawl into bed. I read three pages.

9:15 p.m.

I fall asleep. At some point, I wake up long enough to put the book aside and turn out the light. But before I do, I set my alarm for 4:30 a.m. tomorrow.

I’m going to get so much done in the morning.

Last month I opened a manuscript I hadn’t touched in a while. It was a story I’d had so much fun writing the first time around. Drafting it felt like leaning into a warm wind—I knew exactly where I was going, and the going was easy.

But when I read the first chapter again, I felt nothing. Not loathing. Not embarrassment. Just—absence.

My first instinct was alarm. Have I outgrown this story? Have I spent too much time with it? Is the spark—that specific, shimmery thing that made me want to write the book in the first place—actually gone forever?

Dead feelings as diagnostic information

When I originally shared the first draft of the book with my crit partners, they enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it (with lots of constructive feedback thrown in, of course). So what happened during that hiatus when the book sat in the metaphorical drawer? Did I change so much as a writer during that time that I couldn’t call this story “good” anymore? Or, what if I—in letting this story I’d been itching to write spill out onto the page—mentally put the need to write it behind me, like it was some kind of bad memory I’d worked out in therapy and now could stow away forever?

Instead of panicking, I told myself: the lack of excitement is information. It could be helpful in diagnosing something that’s off about the story. For example:

• Maybe I’m avoiding a scene or a plot element that I haven’t admitted to myself I’m avoiding.

• Maybe the structure of the story drifted away from the original “what if,” the gleaming engine that kickstarted the book in the first place—so that now the manuscript is technically functional but emotionally hollow.

• Maybe the way I ended the book wasn’t really how I wanted to, and there’s an inner disappointment in the way it’s ended that’s keeping me from going back and dealing with it.

If I accept this premise, I can set out to re-examine the book. I can reread the early drafts with an eye toward what made me excited to write it in the first place. List out the scenes and find where there might be holes or ideas unexamined or unaddressed. Plot the energetic and emotional ups and downs across all the scenes, to find where the story might be flagging.

Settling into a long-term relationship with the book

Another theory is that maybe the spark is supposed to die. Or not die, exactly, but soften—turning into loyal affection, trust, and belief, maturing beyond the initial heart-fluttering excitement.

The first draft of a book is the falling-in-love: the rush and discovery of finding out who the characters are and what they need while you’re writing. By the second or third draft, the fireworks are gone. Writing the book becomes a bit of a slog. It can be confusing, frustrating, and hard. It’s the part of the relationship where you’re not just playing around, but you’re actually having to do the dishes and pay the bills.

Maybe the actual craft is showing up to a book you don’t currently feel anything about and trusting that the showing up is the whole point.

In addition to other book projects I’m currently writing, I’ve recently had to go back to my first book, which is coming out in November, to carefully proofread it for any final typos. I started writing this book in 2010. I’ve read it, rewritten it, tweaked it, and questioned it so many times over sixteen years that I can’t even tell if it’s good anymore. I read the prose and wonder if anyone will like it. I love the characters like they’re my own family, but will they appeal to anyone else?

Still, even if I don’t feel the overwhelming excitement when I read it, I do still find a quiet pride and affection for the story and my characters as I reacquaint myself with the book word by word. And that’s how I know I’m doing the right thing by bringing it into the world.

Taking it slow

I really enjoyed Anne F. Hag’s suggestions in “How to Reconnect with a Draft You No Longer Want to Write” on Jane Friedman’s blog. She suggested foremost that the writer investigate whether they might be facing creative burnout—which honestly, might be what’s going on with me. I’m juggling too many demands and projects in flight to properly take the time to enjoy the process, and that might be why I’m finding myself a little “dry” in the emotion department.

Hag suggests giving yourself permission to pause. Even putting the draft away for a while until you feel a little bit of interest in it again. Then, she suggests going slowly:

Reaffirming your why may get you back to your draft, but I advise doing it slowly. Reread a scene or chapter you loved. Revision is not the goal here. The goal is to remember your own voice. And remember why you have to raise it.

And when you do start writing again, do it gently: set realistic expectations and honor them. Establish a structure that you follow, such as time blocking and using Pomodoro timers, to ensure you don’t overdo it. And keep the habit of rest! It makes life a more enjoyable experience all around.

Luckily, once I started diving into the ho-hum draft of my manuscript, I began to rediscover why I wanted to write it and why I loved it the first time around. I also got a new reader to help, a developmental editor I trust, who was able to give it fresh eyes and affirm that the story is actually working.

Little by little, I’ll keep working on building a long-term relationship with this story—even as the story, and I as its writer, continue to change and grow over time.

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

A Far-flung Life by M.L. Stedman

🎸 My writing soundtrack

Tsunami, Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman live at the SF Masonic

🫶 Great reads and resources

• Save the Cat is Why Your Story Feels Like Everyone Else's - AJ Saxsma

• Yet More Short Story Words of Wisdom - Kill Zone

📣 Shameless self-promo

Sign up for my monthly author newsletter for news about my upcoming debut novel and other fiction projects!

📖 Book news

My upcoming novel, The Pearl Farmers, is available for pre-order at thepearlfarmers.com!

I had a paper route as a kid, from the time I was about eleven through early high school. Six days a week, I looped through our subdivision on the edge of town, delivering newspapers to porches, mailboxes, inside the pro shop of a golf course, and inside screen doors. The route took me up long driveways, up and down hills, and up every street of the neighborhood—probably a two-mile route every day, regardless of weather.

The whole time, as I walked with the canvas bag of rolled-up papers thumping against my hip, I was telling stories to myself. Making up elaborate dialog, plot twists, and character relationships in my head. Sometimes I even whispered or murmured the narratives out loud. If someone had seen me, they probably thought I was a weird kid talking to myself. No one knew about the whole worlds I was inventing on those walks. During that time, I also started writing stories—and my best ideas, my favorite stories, always came to me on those routes, which I knew so perfectly by heart that I could let my mind wander to more captivating places.

I couldn’t predict it at the time, but this would become the primary way ideas for stories would materialize and click for me—on long, solitary, meandering walks.

Returning to the scene of the magic

It’s no wonder that creative output increases by 60% when people walk compared to sitting, according to a Stanford study. It doesn’t matter whether they’re walking outdoors in a beautiful setting or on a treadmill, the researchers found: either way, the study’s subjects were all able to develop creative responses to an experimental problem after walking. The study also found that walking is especially good for creative brainstorming, rather than focused thinking.

It makes total sense biologically. Walking increases blood flow and oxygen to the brain while also creating a relaxed, rhythmic flow that is essentially our brains’ happy place, quieting inner criticism and calming stress while fostering daydreaming and reflection.

Still, it’s funny to me that long walks have so unintentionally fueled my writing practice. Recently I took a hike with my husband and my dog on a trail in Oakland’s Redwood Regional Park. In the early days of living in Oakland, I did this wonderful hour-and-a-half hike all the time. It drops you down deeply into a fragrant redwood forest, then forces you to climb back out of it at the end—melting away all your stress along with it.

When I hiked that trail, I did it to exercise and relax. But what I was really doing was writing The Pearl Farmers. I didn’t even think about this until Andrew, Winston, and I were retracing the steps a few weeks ago. As I rounded a bend, I’d remember working out a sticking point in the plot, or ruminating hard on what I wanted for Penn or Anna as I pushed myself up the rough dirt path. Whole scenes assembled themselves. Connections I hadn’t seen before fell into place. By the time I arrived back at my car, sweating and happy, I was unblocked and ready to sit down and write.

I think now that The Pearl Farmers wouldn’t have happened without those hikes. The trail did half the work.

A tradition of writerly walking

There’s evidence that many writers through history have been compulsive walkers. By some estimates, Wordsworth walked some 180,000 miles in his lifetime—and wrote about the experience, with lines like, “Let the moon shine in thy solitary walk; and let the misty mountain-winds be free to blow against thee” Dickens took twenty-mile walks through London at night, and Virginia Woolf recited her drafts aloud as she walked. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway wrote about working out his stories while walking the quais of Paris:

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

The epiphanies that come to me on long walks have ambushed me in the past. I didn’t go out explicitly to find them, yet there they were: the idea showed up because I wasn’t necessarily looking for it.

When it happens, it feels like a gift. A few months ago, Winston and I walked a new path at Coyote Hills, a nearby regional park known for its nearly 300 bird species nesting in marshlands near the water. As we walked out along the spectacular San Francisco Bay, alone on a secluded trail watching hawks tilting overhead and pelicans bobbing for fish, a perfectly formed idea for a novel filled my mind. It wasn’t an idea I was even looking for—I already had three other books in progress, with no interest in writing in the genre of the book that came to me. But I had no doubt that this would be the next book I would write.

Preserving the practice with openness

Now that I’m aware of this phenomenon, I’m trying to figure out if this is something I could incorporate deliberately into my practice. What are the chances that this kind of serendipity will happen predictably if I go looking for it, instead of hoping it will keep happening accidentally and when I least expect it?

Part of the danger, of course, is that I’m now thinking about writing all the time. I dictate pieces of stories while driving, or I’ll stop and make notes in Notion whenever I come up with an idea while walking the dog in the mornings. All of this means I’m not recreating the conditions that have brought on these magically brewed story ideas in the past: unstructured mind-wandering, letting the blood flow freely through my brain, rejoicing at how my body was letting go of all its pent-up tension and the brain was releasing its cares.

Now that I’ve acknowledged the formula, can I ever lose my self-consciousness enough to get back to that place again?

I don’t know, but I’m definitely committed to trying. One long, rambling walk a month, in nature, with no podcasts or music. Just quiet, an eye for birds and a nose for pine, and the resolve to let it all go—opening up the space for new ideas to enter, if they’re so inclined. No disappointment if they don’t. Only gratitude if they do.

Writers: are long walks part of your practice too? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you.

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

Someplace Like Home by Bobi Conn

🎸 My writing soundtrack

New music by American Football and Snail Mail

🫶 Great reads and resources

• How to Build a Novelist Career (podcast) - Dear Whole Writer

• Going Indie (a series) - Samantha Bryant Is Dangerous When Bored

• What Writing Bravely Means Today - Linda Carroll

📖 Book news

Check out the new website for my upcoming novel, The Pearl Farmers.

I identify as a voracious reader.

I’m the kind of person who brings four or five books on vacation with me. Who piles books up beside my bed (and on many other surfaces around my house) with the sincere intention of reading all of them “next.” Who loves nothing more than to chat about books with friends and co-workers. Who can’t walk past a book store without going inside—and definitely can’t pass up the public library if it’s open and I have a few extra minutes to spare.

Although I’ve devoured books since I was a child (I always carried a book with me as an adolescent—at baseball games, restaurants, anyplace I could steal a few minutes to read), as I got into my teens and early twenties, I lost the knack for reading for pleasure. I had too much required reading for school. Only when I graduated from college and found myself with evening downtime and no papers to write or tests to study for did I rediscover the incredible pleasure of reading for recreation. After that, I could lose a whole Sunday afternoon to a novel, or board a plane with the private thrill that I could spend the next several uninterrupted hours reading, without anything else to do.

Since then, reading was how I relaxed—but also how I understood the world and recognized myself.

How my writing life killed my reading habit

Fast forward to my more recent reality.

I tend to have several “currently readings” going at once. I check out stacks from the library out of habit, then am plagued with guilt because I don’t read them all (or return them late because I feel obligated to read them, which is happening more often with no consequences, since my town doesn’t charge late fees). This is yet another form of literary guilt hoarding.

Even when I sit down with good intentions to read, my brain immediately wanders off the path. I start wondering what else I should be doing, or what else I should be reading, and what’s happening in the world that I’m missing by sitting here not checking in online. Every night I slip into bed early, eager to get comfy and dig in to my book-in-progress. Within ten minutes, though, I’m almost always asleep.

A lot of this is happening because of what my smartphone and the internet have done to my mind—I can’t go five minutes without feeling that nagging sense of FOMO, wondering what shocking news or critical communiqué I’m failing to absorb because I’m sitting here in stillness and quiet. (Surprise, surprise: it’s never anything important.) Part of it is also my late-diagnosed ADHD, which causes the pinball in my brain to spring from topic to topic instead of staying dormant so I can finish a chapter.

But also, my writing practice has colonized my reading. I’m often doing what Phoebe Lovatt calls in her newsletter “carnivorous reading”: tracking down sources, hunting for ideas, reading with a pen in hand. She describes “hungry focused speed-reading” for purposes of work and research, which is something I identify with: half the books I’m reading are for my own research, or to support other authors—still fun and rewarding, but not the pleasure reading I was once used to.

Then there’s the anxiety problem—which is really a silence problem. On evenings when I finally have free time and the house to myself, my reflex is to fill the stillness with noise. There’s something about the sudden empty space after a full day, the pressure drop of downtime, that makes me reach for the TV remote instead of a book. My nervous system apparently needs time to catch up with my intentions.

My fragmented and frustrating routine of reading in snippets instead of deeply and with focus has become so disappointing to me that I’m setting out to change my reading practice with intention.

How to return to deep reading

In his Substack Intimations, author and teacher Grant Faulkner talks about the difficulty he found in luxuriating in reading a book the way he used to. Only by purposefully retraining his brain did he begin to feel “the glimmerings of deep reading” returning:

I realized that our brains have plasticity. They can be trained. When I was younger, I unconsciously trained my brain to read. Now, I’ve unconsciously trained it for screens and devices. So I realized that I need to re-train it for reading, and to do so deliberately.

The word “rhythm” is important here because to read, my brain needs to move at a different pace than it does online. I need to find a way to transition to reading after a hard day’s work (or after a hard day of being attacked by screens, rather). Maybe I should listen to music. Maybe I should meditate. Maybe I should go on a walk. Maybe I should do all of the above. My online life is so intrusive that I need to consciously construct my environment to support reading in a way I never have.

The effort it’s going to take me to do this is worth it. Reading books—what Mairead Small Staid calls “vertical engagement,” because it involves immersing oneself deeply into a text rather than skimming across the surface horizontally as we do with the internet—is fulfilling and enriching in a way social media will never be. “Here, on the internet, is a nowhere space, a shallow time,” and social media is “a way to pass the time, not to live in it,” she writes in her essay “Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction” in The Paris Review.

Here are a few things I’m planning to try:

Reading only one book at a time—but keeping a written list of what’s coming next, so I can keep the “but what about that other book” voice at bay.

Dedicated daily reading time. I want to set aside a repeatable window, a couple of hours on weekend afternoons or weeknights, where I sit quietly and only read. Phone locked in the drawer upstairs. No laptops nearby. Just my current read, and a place to sit upright so I don’t fall asleep.

Reading dates. One afternoon or evening a week, I want to take myself to a coffee shop or bar with no laptop or to-do list and just read. Just that.

A reading soundtrack. Something I always play, so my nervous system gets the signal: this is what we’re doing now. I’m still workshopping this and am open to suggestions!

The bigger goal underneath all of this is getting back to a quality of attention I used to have. The pre-everything brain that let me sit still for hours without wondering what I was missing out in the world. I think of it as my mid-90s brain. How do I get back to that slower-moving, analog, not-knowing brain—and use it to love reading again? How do I use books as “mental medication,” as Phoebe Lovatt puts it, to heal my tortured, inundated mind?

I want to find the way.

How have you held onto reading for pleasure, or found your way back to it? What's worked for you? Share in the comments!

📖 Book news

Check out the new website for my upcoming novel, The Pearl Farmers.

In my day job—the work for which I get paid (at least for now)—I spend most of each day talking and thinking about AI.

Specifically, I’m involved in discussions about how to make the AI work better, how to design software products that are “AI-native,” and how to get our teams to use AI to work more efficiently and intelligently in their day-to-day work.

I also talk about AI in my private chats with co-workers. But mostly, these discussions revolve around:

• Why AI can never truly replace us—but how we fear our employers will replace us anyway.

• How everything’s moving so fast we simply can’t keep up with it all, and aren’t sure we even want to.

• How all the human imperfection of business life is causing siloes, games of telephone, fear, defensiveness, old-world thinking, moving too fast or slow.

• Our kids, parents, friends, time in nature, wonderful vacations, crazy analog hobbies we’re developing. (Shout out to my colleagues learning to eat fire and training to cycle 100 miles around Lake Tahoe!)

• Our feelings. Sad, happy, angry, annoyed, tired, scared, relieved it’s Friday, grateful for each other, hopeful for good things.

While the world is pushing us to embrace AI as the way to work, the things we truly, privately care about are human. The problems in business are created by humans—imperfect, messy, well-intentioned, mood-driven humans. We react and make decisions based not just on data and inputs, but on feelings and instinct, which are inherently human.

It’s ludicrous when I find myself constantly defending our human roles in the value chain. We get context. We have empathy. They can’t do this without us! Yet, I’ve also been around Silicon Valley for 25+ years, and I know the truth: company leaders and investors prioritize speed, efficiency, and profit over people.

We’re not here for people. We’re here to build cool shit, faster, and sell it to someone who needs it, or will need it once we convince them that they need it. (Never mind that those buyers happen to be human. They’ll adjust.)

The inherent problem, one that futurists and ethicists are starting to ponder, is what happens to humanity when AI begins to disrupt the natural way humans build ideas, interact with each other, and build societies. As an essay from the Center for Humane Technology puts it:

Our relationships influence how we think. Our thinking impacts our work. Our work builds our identity. Our identity shapes our inner world. And our inner world informs how we relate to others. When one pillar is weakened by AI, the others strain. When several are undermined at once, we risk the foundations of a meaningful life crumbling.

The human moments that refresh us

The sycophant-like gushing over AI is having the opposite of the intended effect on me. Instead of jumping on the train—er, the light-speed starship, because trains are so 1800s—I’m emotionally opting out. I’m focusing my mental energy on small, complicated problems that take time and heart to solve. I’m talking with my colleagues more—listening, processing feelings, encouraging them to take care of themselves.

Though I love working remotely full-time, I’ve also recently discovered the phenomenon of spending time with other people. Ultimately, it exhausts me—because neurodivergent introvert here!—but it also lights me up. Each time I’ve gotten to spend a few days with my leadership team at work, I walk away feeling grateful for them, energized, and trusting of my team.

Part of this, I think, is that I get to know them as humans. In the in-between moments of the week—the car rides to and from the office, the coffee breaks, drinks in the hotel bar at night—I learn about one colleague’s teenager, someone’s childhood, another’s sick mother, the screenplay my colleague is secretly writing at night.

These experiences give me a boost, to want to get up the next morning and “do more AI.” Because I want to do it with them, the humans I care about.

To make art is to be human

I’ve been thinking about all of this as it pertains to writing. The AI phantom is looming in the publishing industry too. Everyone’s holding up the examples of how AI is infiltrating authors’ territory. Publishers are printing AI-written books. Some agents and editors are (supposedly) using AI to review manuscripts. Everyone’s scared and pissed off. Of course, this is all happening at a time when the publishing industry itself is at a crossroads. There’s more supply and less demand than ever before. Profits are at stake—because at the end of the day, the industry isn’t about art, it’s about business.

Enter efficiency, speed, predictability. Put the formula into the machine, and spit out a sure thing on the other end in fifteen minutes. Done and done.

Except that, again, humans are the consumers in this equation. And as human authors, we’re all trying—slowly, messily, uncertainly, incrementally—to write about the human experience. Humans writing for other humans, trying to find meaning one word, sentence, and page at a time. Trying to connect with each other by finding new, fresh ways to convey that meaning.

I love how Andy Horwitz writes about this in his essay “In Praise of Inefficiency”:

The cult of efficiency is predicated on the conviction that the merely human is insufficient. But there is something extraordinary in the merely human and messy, the slow, unproductive, inefficient processes of experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, deliberation — the way our multiple intelligences and imaginations, when directed towards a shared problem or set of ideas, can come up with multiple possible interpretations and outcomes, and through the collaborative process of juxtaposition, editing and re-assembling, create something novel and surprising and, frequently, enlightening.

Art is a way of thinking and being in the world that requires great swaths of seemingly ‘unproductive’ time. As Miles Davis once said, ‘Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.’ And behind every technology is a human being, usually many of them working together, who brought a previously unseen world into existence. It seems likely that inefficiency is a feature, not a bug, in the operating system of human experience and so has inherent value.

A quiet revolution

My private rebellion against this anti-human movement is to try to be as human as humanly possible. As someone who has always pushed my brain and body to work like a machine, now I move more slowly and deliberately. I do one thing at a time. Take breaks. Take walks. Pet my dog. Listen to birds. Rest when I need to. Read print books. Cook and eat food slowly. Spend quiet time with people I love. Knit and sew. Honor what my body needs. Drink water. Seek joy.

The irony is that my whole career took off in the 90s because I jumped on the internet bandwagon and never looked back. But now, that story makes me a dinosaur—the internet is old news! Every time a colleague shows up demonstrating something they built in Claude Code, or reveals how they generated something in 15 minutes that used to take weeks, I mentally surrender. I’m never going to catch up, and I don’t want to.

I want to keep coming back to humanity. Do my art with perseverance, discovering what my brain can conjure and connect without asking a large language model to solve the problem for me. Write as a human for other humans. Humanity is what we uniquely have. I’ll keep claiming it and owning it. AI can have everything else.

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

Reader Magnets by Nick Stephenson

🎸 My writing soundtrack

Goldie Boutilier, Mitski, and The Autumn Defense

🫶 Great reads and resources

• Even the Greats Get This Wrong - #AmWriting by KJ Dell’Antonia: “When you can’t tell who a book is for, it doesn’t matter who wrote it.”

• The only thing human writers can do that AI can never learn from us - Hello Writer! by Linda Carroll: “I sure do love me some deeply human writing. And only we can do that.”

• Sarah Collins: Burnout and the pressure to have it all - Women & ADHD podcast with Katy Weber: The very best podcast episode I’ve ever heard about neurodivergence and work/creating/entrepreneurism. I related to every single moment of this interview!

📣 Shameless self-promo

Sign up for my monthly author newsletter for news about my upcoming debut novel and other fiction projects!

I recently took an online course by Destiny Salter at The Book Clinic called “The Obsession Trigger,” content I’d purchased back in the fall when I was still planning to query agents. While the premise of the course was about how to attract an agent with your story, the real value for me was the focus on narrative intimacy: how to create the sense for readers that they’re inside the story, rather than observing it from the outside.

Psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock dubbed this phenomenon “narrative transportation,” characterized by focused attention, emotional engagement, mental imagery, and a detachment from reality while reading. Narrative transportation happens when a reader feels as if they have entered the story's world, feel empathy for the characters, and are enchanted by the plot.

This effect doesn’t happen by accident: it’s intentional and achievable. As writers, we just need to know what levers to pull. Here are some suggestions for how to captivate readers and build narrative intimacy.

1. Make sure your story has an emotional core, or a “heart.”

Every story should have a soul-deep reason it matters, beyond plot events. What is your character truly struggling with at a human level? What does the story cost them emotionally? When readers understand why the events of the plot matter to the character personally, they care about everything that happens. Without this, even a clever plot feels hollow.

2. Readers fall in love with characters, not plots.

Plot only matters because of what it does to your character. If readers aren’t invested in who the character is and what they stand to lose, no amount of exciting events will keep them turning pages. Get readers to care about your character first, and they’ll care about everything else automatically.

3. Deep POV makes readers feel like they’re inside the story.

The goal of effective fiction is to anesthetize the part of the brain that knows it’s reading. Deep POV removes all filtering distance between the reader and the character, delivering unfiltered thoughts, physical sensations, and emotional reactions to the world around them. Rather than telling us a character is terrified, we feel the tightening in their chest ourselves. This is what creates that “I couldn’t put it down” experience.

Omniscient insight into a character’s psyche is one of fiction’s great advantages, writes Christina Ward-Niven in Fiction Writers Review. In stories, we can allow readers to see into our characters’ minds and connect with them. But it’s also a challenge to get that deeply inside a character’s thoughts and feelings. Authors can use confession, reflection, and gesture to create intimacy, Ward-Niven says.

4. Great writing is visceral and somatic.

The most immersive prose creates what you might call phantom sensation—readers can almost hear what’s happening, almost feel what the character is touching, almost smell the room they’re standing in. This goes beyond the familiar “show don’t tell” advice. It’s about manufacturing a full sensory and emotional experience so vivid that readers feel personally present in the scene.

The neuroscience backs this up. Studies have found that the brain regions associated with narrative transportation appear to suggest a link with sensory and motor imagery—meaning when a reader is fully transported, their brain is doing something that resembles experiencing the events, not just processing them. The body is engaged. Which means the writer’s job is to give the body something to respond to.

5. Momentum comes from personal stakes, not pacing.

A fast-moving story with nothing personal at stake is forgettable. Think action movies where you don’t care if the hero survives. A slower, quieter story where every event has real consequences for a character you love is unputdownable. At every turn of the plot, readers need to understand exactly what your character stands to gain or lose — and why it would devastate them to fail. That emotional weight is what creates momentum.

6. Structure your story so every chapter creates a new question.

The most bingable stories use a “compound” structure. Each chapter resolves one tension while opening a new one, like dominoes falling in sequence. This isn’t about cliffhangers for their own sake; it’s about making sure the reader’s emotional investment keeps building rather than plateauing. Each new question should feel more urgent and more personal than the last.

Developmental editor David G. Brown explains that a reader’s immersion is broken the moment a reader stops and wonders anything about the text itself—who’s speaking, what that word means, why that backstory is appearing right now. The story’s structure must keep readers moving too fast for that to happen.

7. Voice and specificity make a story feel alive.

Generic characters, emotions, and descriptions create narrative distance, where readers feel like they’re watching from the outside. Specificity does the opposite: a distinctive character voice, a unique setting, surprising but real-feeling emotional reactions. These are what make readers feel like they’ve met a real person, transforming a competent story into one they’ll never forget.

This is also where intimacy and confession intersect, says Ward-Niven. When we witness characters acting on impulse, blurting things out, or doing something totally strange, we come to see them as capable of anything. In other words: we believe in them, which is the first step toward intimacy.

Giving readers the safety to feel vulnerable

The flip side of a writer building intimacy is allowing readers to be vulnerable—without negatively manipulating them. Author Hiromi Goto writes:

The entire construction of a fictional narrative is, on one level, the manipulation of words into a specific form. One must manipulate in order to succeed. But what are the terms? What is shared? Who gives? Who takes? How much? Are there junctures in the narrative where the flow of power shifts? Does the writer leave space for the reader to maintain a sense of autonomy? Does the writer love and respect the reader? Does it matter if she does or doesn’t?

To open yourself to a story is to be open to real impact—to care about fictional people, to feel things that aren’t happening to you, to be changed by events that didn’t occur. Readers are doing something brave when they give themselves over to a book. They’re trusting us.

That's worth holding onto every time we sit down to write: remembering that we’re creating stories for readers who are showing up ready to feeling something.

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

The Midnight Taxi by Yosha Gunasekera, No One You Know by Emma Tourtelot

🎸 My writing soundtrack

New music by The New Pornographers and Snail Mail

🌺 Little fictions

• Read my flash fiction story “The Machine,” drafted for a writing exercise

• Download a copy of my short story “Two Funerals,” published this month in Waxing & Waning

📖 Book news

The Pearl Farmers, my women’s fiction/multigenerational family saga about three sisters who are heirs to their family’s pearl farm in Tennessee, is now available for pre-order!

The exercise prompt

Pick 3 works of literature from my bookshelf. Choose a random number (mine was 26) and, on that page of each book, find 2-3 phrases that pop out. Write a >1,000-word story using several of the phrases.

I chose phrases from page 26 of Little Women, Rabbit Redux, and Anne of Green Gables. The phrases included:

• Dress circle

• The curtains flew apart

• A gloomy wood

• A slouched hat

• Burst out in a wild strain

• The machine is a baby

• Like spirits, without shadows

• Lips pinch in

• Scalloped glass dish

• Prepared a couch

• Lighted a candle

The story

The Machine

That Saturday, it rained an incessant silver torrent of rain. We woke up to the insistence of it against our east-facing window. Then we sneaked a mutual smile across the mattress at each other. Agreeing without words the weather wouldn’t keep us inside.

In those days, we tried to go to the theater every weekend. As grad students we still lived simply then, on ramen and peanut butter and day-old bagels. But we’d chosen New York, and we weren’t shy about our gluttony for the eternal tide of art flowing without end here.

We could only afford the off-off-off-Broadway productions, and then only the matinees. Sometimes it took three trains and several-block walks to get to some of those makeshift theater spaces, spare and claustrophobic blank, black spaces inside warehouses or above martial arts studios. I found the plays in the listings at the back of the free weeklies, after the exposés about legalizing pot and police scandals but before the ads for XXX clubs and the sleazy classifieds.

The plays we picked ranged in style and story. Usually they ended up being absurdist, a bit silly, and occasionally disturbing. We once saw an adaptation of The Glass Menagerie, but all the characters wore frog costumes and ate flies instead of sipping drinks.

All we knew about the play that Saturday was that it was called “The Machine” and had been described by a Village Voice reviewer as “a force of symbolism and emotion.” We fought our way down to the train through the downpour. The city was crossing the bridge between summer and fall, no longer steamy but still muggy and unpleasant in the subway tunnels. Julia wore a purple dress with chunky, yellow Wellington boots and the slouched felt hat she’d claimed from her grandfather’s house when he died. She looked like Christopher Robin.

Because we arrived early and the rain kept people away, we scored seats in the dress circle. I held Julia’s hand. At stage left loomed a giant black box. The lights went up for the first act, and a young woman stepped into the spotlight and narrated some lines about the technology revolution, bio-technological relation and determinism, accelerationism, and human evolution. I was paying attention, but it was lost on me. Another pretentious production.

The majority of the play involved people arriving on stage in various work costumes—nursing scrubs, police uniform, businessman’s suit and tie, blue work coveralls and neon orange vest. Each actor would deliver a short soliloquy, then feed the looming black box, which was supposed to be some kind of machine. Unpleasant groaning and grinding sound effects played every time they inserted paper, scrap wood, and random tech accessories through a slot in the box. The machine was a baby, devouring every item with rapacity in its infantile id.

The parade of characters reminded me of one of those Richard Scarry picture books I read as a child. Or of The Village People. I began to enjoy myself, not because the play was good, but because I found it so absurdly bad. I found myself already thinking about the fun Julia and I would have discussing it over dinner.

By the time we emerged from the theater, the daylight was waning and the rain had stopped. We walked hand in hand in the peach-purple light to a tiny Italian restaurant tucked several steps down from the street.

Not until we were settled at our romantic little table and the hostess had lighted the candle in its scalloped glass dish between us did I actually glimpse Julia’s face and realize that she wasn’t amused. Her lips pinched in; a deep sorrow had sunken into her eyes.

“Oh, what’s wrong?”

She shook her head. The waitress brought over a carafe of chianti, placed two glasses in front of us and poured, then disappeared into the back. We were the only patrons in the place at this early hour.

“Julia, what is it?”

“It’s just…that play.”

“Ridiculous, wasn’t it?”

“But not, really. What if that’s what our life will become? What if that’s what we’re heading toward?”

Without thinking, I scoffed. Her worries seemed ludicrous at the time. We were both in prestigious grad school programs. We were young and healthy and beautiful. We had dreams: traveling the world, making a difference in our work. The future was vague, but there was no reason not to feel optimism.

“You’re being overdramatic! It was an awful play with heavy-handed symbolism. Stop being so hyperbolic, Julia. Cheer up.”

I wanted to laugh with her, like we always did, to clink our glasses of cheap wine and relax for a change.

I couldn’t have known at the time that a brief flicker of life had flared up inside Julia, minuscule but all-consuming, burning long enough to change her appetite and turn her inside-out in a clash of fear and hope. And that just as quickly as it had disappeared as quickly as it came, leaving her deflated and grieving, queasy, exhausted.

There’s no way I could have guessed, but Julia made up her mind about her own future right then. Because she could glimpse what I would become.

If you try this writing exercise, please paste a link to your story in the comments!

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A couple of weekends ago, on a trip to Sedona with my two high school best friends, I had an epiphany about what I want my publishing journey to look like.

I’ve written a lot here about my writing practice, but not much about the other side of the coin: getting my work into the world. After a few years of learning everything I could about publishing, I’ve taken away two big realizations. First: “it’s tough out there, baby” if you’re trying to catch the brass ring of a scoring a literary agent and a Big 5 deal. Second: there have never been more options for taking matters into your own hands.

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Maybe I got sucked into one of Sedona’s vortexes. Maybe I was in that rare and magical headspace of feeling wholeheartedly supported by people who love and believe in me. Or maybe ideas I’d been turning over for months finally snapped together. When the epiphany landed, it couldn’t have been clearer:

I’m done waiting for permission.

No more waiting

I spent a couple of years, off and on, querying agents for my debut novel The Pearl Farmers. I got a lot of interest but no takers. Then I found She Writes Press — an alternative model in which, if you have a fabulous manuscript and are willing to share some of the financial risk, a team of publishing experts gives you the full-service publishing experience without requiring you to woo an agent first.

As I was sealing that deal, I was finishing writing my second book, a mystery. I’d been flirting with going indie for this planned detective series, but decided to give agent querying one more shot.

Then I had my moment of clarity in Sedona. And I asked myself: what do I really want out of all of this?

In the book community, there’s so much talk about how to land a literary agent. Courses. Books. Workshops. Consultants who’ll critique your queries. Agents on social media explaining why none of us are landing agents. In my Instagram feed, “landing an agent” has started to feel like “losing 20 pounds” did a few years ago: the consumer desire that advertisers assume is eating me up inside, and that everyone’s promising to fix with their unique, clever, and costly programs. Never mind that it was a goal I was never going to achieve in spite of all that money spent.

None of this is a diss on literary agents or traditionally published authors. It’s just that — like the shedding of 20 pounds — I’ve decided landing one is something I no longer want to waste my time and energy on.

Traditional publishing is brutal right now. Agents are drowning in submissions. Publishers aren’t buying. Editors are getting laid off. Any book I’m pitching has to survive the AI inbox screen, fit the ultra-specific hole in an agent’s list, and land in front of the right person at exactly the right moment. It feels a little like playing the Mega Millions lottery.

And then there are the rules. Don’t mention in your query that you’re writing a series — agents hate that. Your comp titles have to be from the last three years or you look out of touch. Agents publish their “manuscript wishlists” with insanely specific wishes. (One MSWL I saw recently listed a desire for stories about “BIPOC vampires.” I’m not writing anything close to what that agent’s repping.)

When I started questioning why I was jumping through all these hoops just to pay someone 15% of my royalties, the answer got uncomfortable: turns out, I’ve been chasing traditional publishing for validation. I’ve been refusing to call myself a “real author” because the old-guard gatekeepers haven’t officially let me through.

But I no longer require validation. I’m publishing a book. I’ve won a prize. People read and love my stories.

Screw the gatekeeping, and screw the subliminal message that we haven’t “made it” until the old guard says so.

DIY or die

In February, the Counter Craft Substack published a brilliant piece called “Why Literature Needs a Punk Rock Mindset.” Prompted by the death of the Washington Post‘s literature section and all the publishing upheaval I just described, author Lincoln Michel issued a call to arms:

What I wanted to suggest today is that we who care about literature need to adopt a punk rock mindset. It is DIY or die. We have to do this ourselves. We need to build our networks, fund what we can if we have the resources, and steal what we can from institutions while we can, knowing those resources will always be ephemeral.

He was talking about promoting books now that traditional media is fading. But I heard it as a battle cry for my entire writing venture. Stop waiting for someone to lift the gate. Build the path yourself.

So, what do I actually want? I’m not publishing to get rich, or to end up on a Target checkout stand. I’m publishing because I love writing and I’m creating stories I believe will entertain and resonate with some people. I’d love to build a business around finding those people and making stories for them. Someday I’d like this to be my only job — but until then, it’s a channel for creativity and passion, and that’s enough.

My epiphany reminded me that I’m indie by nature. I’m neurodivergent. I’m an entrepreneur who founded and ran a company and is always happiest building something new. And I’m a motherfucking Gen X woman in that glorious phase of life where external validation and people-pleasing have lost their hold on me.

I’m inspired by this quote from an interview with Michelle Zauner — Japanese Breakfast — in The Creative Independent. She’s a superstar musician and bestselling author now, but she started where a lot of us start: doing it herself when the institutions wouldn’t let her in.

I think part of it is with DIY you have literally nothing and your spirit and ambition and resourcefulness just finds a way to make it work. Venues won’t book you? Rent a generator and stage a show under a bridge and text all the punks you know. Booking agents won’t give you the time of day? Book yourself a tour across the country using Bandcamp to find bands in every city and pay it forward when they come to yours.

I’m not entirely sure yet what my path forward looks like for the next books. But I know I’m going to find a way to get them into the world — on my timeline, by my own rules— and in front of the people who want to read them, with the support of my amazing writing and friend community. Embracing that certainty has given me a huge boost of energy and optimism to start planning what comes next.

This week’s goodies

🫶 Great reads and resources

• Negative Capability - an article about the writing technique of allowing complexities and uncertainties in writing—without trying to resolve them

• Tiny Stories, a childhood memory - Writer Linda Carroll runs a “tiny stories” thread every week on her Substack Hello, Writer! This week people wrote emotional, 100-word stories in the voice of themselves as a child, and it was magical.

📣 Book news

My debut novel The Pearl Farmers will be released on Election Day in November 2026. Pre-order it now!

As a Child of the Eighties, I once saw a movie about a novelist who moves to the country to write in peace in picturesque surroundings. Every morning, he would ascend to his attic studio overlooking a gorgeous lake and begin working on his great American novel, pecking away on his typewriter.

I never watched that movie again—honestly, I forgot about the movie itself. (I recently had to look it up: it’s Funny Farm by Chevy Chase, and I can probably survive the rest of my life without a rewatch). However, the image of the writer at an upstairs desk, gazing out at sparkling water and secluded by woods, has always stuck with me. Whenever I daydream about what my writer life will look like in the future, this is the exact picture I conjure up.

I’m thirty years into a successful career working on other kinds of “content”—first as a journalist, then in marketing and branding, and for the past decade leading content teams for software design. I’m grateful for this career: it helps my family live in comfort, has allowed us to send our daughter to good schools, and it’s given me the resources to pursue my dream of becoming an author. I get a lot of satisfaction out of the work, and I’m proud of what my teams and I have accomplished. All is well.

Enter the daydream

But, I’m also tired. Corporate life, management, and long days are demanding. My brain and body have grown weary. When I begin to daydream about what it looks like to hop off the hamster wheel, one of these days seceding from my full-time job in lieu of a more creative, part-time way of making a living, my mind instantly snaps back to my lifelong daydream: retiring to my country writing cottage.

Maybe I’m also mesmerized by examples of writers I know who are actually living this life, like my crit partner Lynne, who publishes the most spectacular photos of the views from her writing cottage.

My husband Andrew and I talk a lot about where our future home will be, and I often insert these wish-list items into that dreamstorming: it needs to have access to good nature, a room with a view, a quick walk or jaunt to a coffee shop that will let me camp out with my laptop. And, it has to be affordable enough that we can live without massive debt, because we write for love, not for money.

Getting real

I’ll probably never let go of my “funny farm” daydream, but I also need to consume a dose or two of reality. For example:

Would I really thrive as a full-time fiction author? At the moment, because my full-time job consumes most of my time, the few hours I get during the week to work on fiction projects are so precious and glorious to me. While I’m working on my “author business,” I fantasize about how exciting and fun it would be to do this all day, every day. But I often wonder if it all might become tedious if I did it for eight hours a day. Would I find myself just as weary, mentally and physically, as I do with my full-time job now?

We need to acknowledge that we’re city people. Andrew and I would survive exactly forty-five minutes living in the Driftless region of Wisconsin or a tiny town in Maine—at that point, one of us would start asking where the good bagels are or what there is to do nearby. The trick is going to be finding a place that’s “city enough” while delivering all the characteristics of a writerly haven.

I’m doing just fine without a funny farm. This past week, I flew home from a personal weekend trip and then had to attend an offsite for my leadership team in another part of the Bay Area. It was a lot, but I also had some writing goals I wanted to knock out. Here is a partial list of all the places I wrote this week: on the couch, on my back porch, on my phone in line at the airport, in the hotel bed early in the morning, in the hotel bed late at night, hiding in a conference room during a lunch break, on the toilet (seriously), and maybe once at my actual desk.

I remember reading an article a few years ago about a musician (I’m sorry to say I don’t remember who it was) who’d written a novel. Talking about his process, he said something like: “I’m not precious about when and where I write. I write whenever I can.” He essentially wrote his book between sound checks and shows, on the tour bus, and in hotel lobbies.

I hope someday that I will not have to write like this—but I’ve worked hard to not need the quiet attic studio and long stretches of uninterrupted time in order to make progress.

All I hope for, in the near-ish future, is a little less of being pulled in so many different directions, a little more time to prioritize my creative projects. Even if the daydream doesn’t materialize in the exact way I imagined it as a young, aspiring writer, I know I’ll appreciate a more open and accommodating schedule for writing because I fought so hard for so many years to fit it into my life.

This week’s goodies

🎸 My writing soundtrack

The tour by Michael Shannon & Jason Narducy and Friends covering R.E.M. songs has me crawling social media for videos from shows—and working my way through the whole R.E.M. catalog again. I can’t stop listening to Accelerate and Life’s Rich Pageant.

📣 Book news

My debut novel The Pearl Farmers is now available for pre-order!

When I moved to the Philadelphia area in my early twenties, the local public radio station often played music by the singer-songwriter Dar Williams, whose whimsical, observant songs spoke to me at that time of my life. One of her lyrics especially stood out:

I am older now, I know the rise and gradual fall of a daily victory

The sentiment appealed to me. I liked the idea of approaching each day as a set of quiet, small challenges, rather than trying to take on the entire war.

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Still, I was only in my twenties then. As Williams’ lyric suggested, I didn’t yet know how to laser-focus on the little things right in front of me I could control—how to cruise up and down the soft hills of each day—rather than trying to charge up every steep mountain with fervor.

Now, in my fifties, I’m returning to this lovely idea of tiny, gentle daily wins.

I’m especially keeping this idea top of mind as I re-enter the literary agent querying process. It’s been a couples of years since I last dove into the querying trenches and emerged battered and disheartened. This time around I’ve promised myself I’m just testing the waters. I’m keeping my expectations low and protecting my hopes. Still, it’s always a punch in the gut to get the first rejection. Then the second. Then the third.

Embracing the bumps

So when the bad news arrives, I take myself for a walk and indulge in some self-talk.

I remind myself of the tiny, bright victories: an author I admire generously agreed to read my novel and provide a cover blurb. A co-worker told me they feel like they can be themselves because I provide them with a safe space. These are the wins I forget to give myself credit for; instead, I instantly check them off in my mind and move on to the next problem or challenge, without stopping to remind myself that these are the moments that matter the most.

Acknowledging these little wins, and congratulating myself for a change, helps me steel myself for when a project hits a bump, a crit partner doesn’t like something in my writing, or an agent takes a pass.

Why do I immediately catastrophize these small losses while completely disavowing the small wins? Why does every dip and pothole in the journey feel more like I’m falling into a pit of failure, stirring up exhaust fumes of shame and flagellation?

Instead, can I accept that the road ahead is long, that every down will bring an up, and that regardless of the rises and falls, the road will still take me where I’m going?

Refocusing on what matters

I originally set out on this author journey with humility and low expectations. Write a page, then write another. Finish a draft and expect nothing else.

Somewhere along the way, I began to have more hopes, then optimism. This led to expectations. Soon I began to demand things: continuous success, validation, shortcuts that made it all feel easy.

Now, I’m trying to reset how I think about what I’m doing.

What are the things I truly care about? Why am I investing so much time, energy, heart, and sweat equity into this pursuit?

Can I slow down and face where am I today—only a few miles in to a long, winding journey—and recognize that, despite the slowdowns and speedbumps and thanks to the occasional clear, straight stretches, I’m making progress every day?

Can I snap back into the moment to marvel at the scenery, discover the unexpected, and make memories along the way?

Can I gracefully embrace the non-wins, conceding that not every road is meant to be taken? Could I even feel grateful for them, knowing they’ll help me stay humble and focused on my true goals?

Most importantly, can I celebrate each minor, miraculous victory—then sleep peacefully and wake up to do it all again tomorrow, with the same earnest resolve?

Writers: I’d love to hear about the rise and gradual fall of your daily victories. Share in the comments!

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

The Names by Florence Knapp

🎸 My writing soundtrack

New music by Snocaps and Jay Som, soothing synth-pop from Future Islands, ‘90s throwbacks from Throwing Muses

🫶 Great reads and resources

• Tricks for fixing a sagging middle

• Why Literature Needs a Punk Rock Mindset

• Anxiety Knob (tension in storytelling)

📣 Shameless self-promo

My short story “Two Funerals” has been published in the literary journal Waxing & Waning this week.

Because I’m always all up in my own head, overthinking all my problems, my therapist always reminds me I need to come back into my body.

How does it feel in your body? she asks. Does that emotion have a shape? A color? A smell?

So, yes, that’s how I ultimately discovered I have a giant, purple, boulder-shaped furry monster of grief and shame plunking around in my gut.

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But it’s also a good reminder to me as a writer that feelings must be felt. For feelings to count, we have to make them visceral and sensory. And they have to show up anywhere in our bodies except in our monkey brains.

The detachment of thought verbs

Recently, I had a crit partner call me on how I’ve been keeping a main character at arm’s length from the reader. Paul, my protagonist, over-intellectualizes things—that’s one of his character traits. But my crit partner pointed out: “As a reader, I feel outside Paul, not inside him. I don’t experience along with him. I get the ‘analysis of him.’” She reminded me that even if he’s up in his own head, he’s feeling too—and as his narrator, I’m not doing a good job of helping readers feel along with him.

Here’s an example of a passage she called out:

He remembers when Nicole went through a Marie Kondo phase before Covid, filling up their cars with baby gear, CDs, photo albums, and old camping gear to eliminate their house of unnecessary clutter. The elimination of the junk in some ways had felt like a relief, but it also left Paul feeling a little empty.

“I’d like to feel this, not be told about it,” she told me. “It’s a summary. It keeps the reader at arm’s length.”

Author C.S. Lewis once wrote to a fan: “Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was ‘terrible,’ describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was ‘delightful’; make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description.”

In other words, the job isn’t to report the emotion — it’s to engineer the conditions under which the reader produces the emotion themselves. That’s a completely different task.

Chuck Palahniuk, in his now-famous 2013 essay on craft, recommended banning what he calls “thought verbs” entirely — words like thinks, knows, understands, realizes, believes, wants, remembers — in favor of “specific sensory detail: action, smell, taste, sound, and feeling.” Thought verbs summarize, and summarizing is the enemy of experience.

Get into the body

Emotion lives in the body before it lives in language. So the first move is almost always physical.

So I must ask myself: what happens in this character’s body when they feel this? The throat tightens. The hands go still. The character notices the wrong things, hyperfocusing on a mundane detail while something enormous is happening around them. There’s an example of this in my novel The Pearl Farmers, in the moments after the character Anna’s husband walks out on his family:

Anna sat at the kitchen table for an hour after Bran walked out the door that night, her eyes locked on the jaunty, Dutch wooden wall clock, a wedding gift from one of Bran’s relatives. The children looked at their plates, then followed her eyes to the clock. For the first time Anna noticed the meticulously drawn eyelashes of each cartoonish bluebird, the strange pleats painted into each heart. The lines were all she could see. Each stroke so deliberate, yet without logic.

Every moment after that was like one of those brushstrokes. She took one at a time, moving forward, but without a sense of where she was going. Two years plodded by. With each step she felt like she wouldn’t be able to take another. And then she did.

Of course, the “show, don’t tell” rule can sometimes get oversimplified by emerging writers, to the point that we misunderstand, believing that every emotion must be acted out.

“The warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out—don’t tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams ‘yay’ and jumps up and down for joy—when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language,” explained Francine Prose in her book Reading Like a Writer.

Precision is the key: choosing words that create sensation rather than words that describe sensation. The goal isn’t a pantomime of emotion—it’s language so specific and alive that the reader feels something move in their chest without quite knowing why.

Another one of my crit partners, Jasmine B. Sandoval, recently published the brilliant book The Writer’s Rx, to help writers improve how they can write and evoke feelings. Jasmine is a nurse who educates writers about how emotions show up physiologically—and how we can get specific and accurate in how the brain, hormones, glands heart, or lungs might react to situations. These body cues can not only suck readers into the moment, they can help build a character’s specific personality.

One of my favorite parts of Jasmine’s advice is how we can use the science of empathy to transfer the character’s emotion over to the reader, who will mirror the character’s emotions when the writing is specific and relatable enough. “Readers are basically emotional freeloaders, hitching a ride through their favorite characters’ chaos…” she writes. “So go on, feed their addiction. Give them the drama, the tears, the spicy heartbreak smorgasbord.”

Rewriting for more feeling

So, how should I rewrite the passage above that’s leaving my readers detached? Here’s my first shot at it:

Before Covid, Nicole read Marie Kondo’s book and spent several weekends in a row filling up the trunks of the car with items that no longer “sparked joy:” baby gear stained with milk spit-up, crates of CDs abandoned in favor of digital streaming, camping gear still covered in dirt from the last hiking trip they’d taken together, years before Gillian was born. After she carted them away, Paul had lingered in the doors of the closets, breathing in the liberating new space opened up in their home and lives. Still, for a few weeks afterwards a dull heaviness hung around in his gut, a vague sense of loss he couldn’t quite explain. All that junk had just been things. Yet, they’d been his life.

What do you think? I’d love feedback on what I could do even better.

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

Portmortem by Patricia Cornwell

📣 Shameless self-promo

My debut novel The Pearl Farmers is now available for pre-order!

I’m currently reading a fantastic historical fiction novel for my book club—but I have a complicated relationship with the main character.

As I read, I keep asking myself: do I actually like this character? In real life, I’d probably cross the room if I saw her coming and avoid sitting next to her at dinner. She’s arrogant and dismissive in a way that would turn me off. She takes up space and does and says what she wants, sometimes regardless of feelings and consequences. The author clearly loves her, but I’m not sure she’s my cup of tea, even if I respect the hell out of her.

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And I’m grappling with whether that’s actually a problem. As writers, we’re often told we need to make our characters likable. After spending years with my characters, I personally love them in the way I love long-time friends and family members: I see their flaws, but we have history, and I adore them scars and all.

Once I got feedback from a critique partner about Penn, the youngest sister character in my upcoming novel The Pearl Farmers. The reader suggested Penn might be too cold and unfeeling—maybe a borderline psychopath.

Harsh.

I see Penn more as laser-focused on pursuing her dreams, the same way her parents were, with some emotional damage thrown in that keeps her at arm’s length. I know this about her. It doesn’t resonate with some readers—but on the other hand, some readers really get it. Penn might be unlikable, but to know her is to care about her.

Interesting characters aren’t always likable

We want readers to root for our characters, but we need to avoid conflating likable and compelling. A character needs to be one of those things, but not necessarily both.

Author Claire Messud has been outspoken on this subject. When a Publisher’s Weekly interviewer asked if she’d want to be friends with the angry, bitter protagonist of Messud’s novel The Woman Upstairs, she shot back: “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections?” She went on to say that “literature that’s worth something is not about being appealing; it’s about being true.”

The pressure to write likable characters — especially likable women — is real, and it runs deep. Messud has argued that “likable” is often just a polite way of saying agreeable, unthreatening, easy to digest. This is a cultural expectation.

As I internally shun the WWII agent character I’m currently reading, I remind myself of this. What would I prefer her to be—soft-spoken and polite? Palatable and easy to get along with? Am I not just playing into the “strong women are bitches” bias that continues to keep women from gaining power? She’s saving people’s lives, for God’s sake. Who cares if she’s annoying?

Last year, a writer shared the feedback she received from an award-winning author while on retreat: “I don’t want to hang out with either of these characters, but I can’t stop reading them.” The writer quoted it as a turning point — not just for how she saw those characters, but for how she understood her job. “The goal isn’t to create people readers want to be friends with,” she wrote. “It’s to create people readers can’t look away from.”

My beloved, flawed characters may be your bitter tea

I’ve been working on for a while now on a police detective character named Jules. She’s a hot mess. She makes questionable decisions, and she has blind spots she can’t see around. Most readers enjoy her, but occasionally someone suggests I should sand some of her rougher edges.

But now that I’ve gotten her exactly how I want her, I don’t want to change her. I love her not despite her messiness, but because of it. I know exactly who she is and why she is that way, and I find her completely fascinating. I would absolutely want to have coffee with her—actually, martinis—even knowing she would probably show up late, drink too much, and say awkward things.

I’m rooting for Jules in a way that feels almost protective. And that’s what will make her interesting to my readers: I’m invested in her, even obsessed with her. Sometimes I have to be mean to her, putting her through all the levels of hell for the sake of the story, but I know she’ll come out the other end stronger, wiser, or at least more deeply drawn because of it.

Still, I resist the urge to make her likable to everybody. Because I’m seeking truth, and the truth is that we all have different taste and tolerances, and one person’s Earl Grey is another’s rooibos. Readers might find Jules mouthy or stubborn or promiscuous in ways that are not to their liking—but all I care about is that they get her, and that that understanding makes them care about her enough to keep turning pages.

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

The Midnight Taxi by Yosha Gunasekera

🎸 My writing soundtrack

New music by Daughter, old music by Volcano Choir

📣 Shameless self-promo

My debut novel The Pearl Farmers is now available for pre-order on Amazon! Release date is November 3.

🫶 Great reads and resources

• How to write a story outline - Writers.com

• Creative repurposing - Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act (subscription)

• The 3 mandates of the literary sentence - Devon Halliday

This past weekend I gifted myself two days at the San Francisco Writers Conference. After a completely exhausting work week, I took a vacation day Friday and immersed myself in panels, talks, social time, and lots of chit-chat about my favorite topics, writing and publishing.

My brain came alive. You should see my notebook—full not just of notes from the talks, but of story ideas, self-talk, lists of books to read, and many doodles as I tried to channel my concentration. Plus I pitched my mystery to a (truly amazing) agent who wants to read more.

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I always come out of conferences like this believing the universe is delivering meaningful messages to me. Here are a few that stood out:

Great storytelling takes time

In a session on navigating the “occupational hazards” of self-doubt, panelists spoke about resilience, insecurity, self-comparison, and the dangers of society’s message that we need to “go faster.” Nayomi Munaweera put it beautifully:

“This is an ancient job. There’s always been the storyteller at the center of the tribe who’s holding the tribe together with the story of the people, and the people are coming together at night around the fire. We are the people that knit together personhood and community. Now, how we do that in capitalism is the trick, because we live in a society that doesn’t honor or understand the importance of it, especially at this moment.”

What I took away: a story takes the time it takes. There’s an incubation period it must go through—time for an author to learn who the characters are, what they need, and what the story is really about. Rushing that process steals from the depth and meaning of the work.

This session inspired me to move a developmental editor appointment from next week—a deadline I was going to have to panic to meet—to a couple of months from now. I want more time with my characters. I want to feel like I’ve truly taken the manuscript as far as I can take it before handing it off.

I’m resolved to fight against this fallacy that I have to produce faster. I want to move at an ancient pace.

Resist the urge to write “on trend”

I heard this from writers, editors, agents, and publishers throughout the conference. Keenan Norris said it plainly:

“Write what you’re going to write, you know? A book takes way too long to just do something because you think it’s going to be popular. That makes no sense. It’s very possible your vision for your project will be trending later. Nobody knows what trend is going to take off, until it takes off. Nobody knew until Gone Girl blew up, and then there were a hundred Gone Girls. So your book might be the thing that takes us off in a different direction. And nobody knows.”

Our keynote speaker Raina Telgemeier, the graphic novelist, talked about her journey developing autobiographical graphic novels that no publishers could figure out how to sell for years. She kept at it anyway, setting up at little comic book fairs and developing a tiny niche following—until graphic novels took off and she found a fanbase among school kids at the Scholastic Book Fairs.

The point: write your truth, the story only you can uniquely write. It will find a way, and a readership, even if it’s not “on trend.”

Always put the character at the center

Time and again, panelists reminded us that what we’re doing is telling the story of characters—through their eyes, based on what they’re seeing and how they feel about it. If you need a change of scenery while writing, take your character with you so they can sense the place you travel to. If you’re writing about the world—politics, history—what you’re really writing about is how your character is affected by that world. An atmospheric setting only moves readers if they can feel how the character moves inside it.

More important: there needs to be a story about what happens to the character. The book can’t just be about white supremacy, or the Trojan War, or depression—it has to be about what happens to a person living through those things.

One writer said he keeps a sticky note on his computer that says “It always gets worse.” Because he has to keep adding new challenges and conflicts to deepen his character’s story. Another panelist pointed out that a character is made up of culture plus trauma.

Hone two brains

Many panelists pointed out that we must cultivate a practice of creating without inhibitions or limitations, without self-editing or trying to meet a mold. But it’s also important to hone our sentences, get closer to our characters, understand what readers are feeling, and know the market we’re writing for.

Romance writer Rebecca Hunter talked about how she separates these modes:

“I find that I really need to separate. The creative brain and the analytic brain really work differently. The creative brain is really exploration, it’s generative. Whereas you’re narrowing your possibilities with the analytic brain. For me, it’s really important, so that I can keep writing, that I really need to separate those.”

She dictates her story plot on morning walks, then returns to edit that into actual written prose, reads it out loud, then edits again. Every writer finds their own way of switching between generating, structural editing, sentence-level editing, and marketing. The key is recognizing these as different phases requiring different brains—and knowing when to employ one over the other.

This week’s goodies

📚 What I’m reading

Code Name Hélène by Ariel Lawhon

🎸 My writing soundtrack

Daughter: Stereo Mind Game, Wednesday: Welcome to My Blue Sky

🫶 Great reads and resources

• Mental Health and Creativity - I Should Be Writing Podcast

• How Do I Know When It’s Done? - Art of Flash, Kathy Fish

• Fast is Slow and Slow is Fast (A Love Letter) - Fall in Love with Your Writing, Charlotte Rains Dixon

📣 Shameless self-promo

An excerpt from my upcoming novel, The Pearl Farmers, is included as the Best Adult Fiction contest winner in this year’s SF Writers Conference anthology The Words You Were Looking For, now available for sale on Amazon!

Last weekend, I sat in my local cafe and spent two hours mapping out every writing goal I have for 2026, breaking down well-architected plans for meeting my goals with enthusiasm and optimism.

This week, it all blew up in my face.

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I went on a business trip this past week. It wasn’t anything strenuous, just sitting in conference rooms for three days with my manager team planning team goals and work for the year, with evening fun time built in. But what I didn’t account for was the way this in-person time drained my battery, while my brain tried to keep tabs on dozens of projects, conversational threads, and problems—not to mention keeping track of where I stuck my hotel room key.

I really did have aspirations of waking up early to write in my hotel room, or taking myself down to the hotel bar in the evenings to make some dents in my writing goals. Instead, I struggled to stay upright and crawled into bed early, too exhausted to handle much more than a dumb sitcom and a few hilarious Reels before falling asleep.

When I got back home on Friday, I felt the heaviness of total failure. I’d lost five valuable days when I should have been making progress toward my writing goals, and I was feeling behind, bummed out, and not a little exasperated with myself.

When life gets in the way

Jessica Brody, author of the Save the Cat books, recently wrote about what happens when “life gets in the way” of our writing plans:

Life is always changing. We can make plans all day long, but in the end, sometimes we have to go with the flow, rather than try to force the flow to go with us. When life gets in the way, just know that your characters are not going anywhere. They’re waiting patiently for you to return. Like the trusty friends that they are.

It’s a nice thought. But when I finally sit down and spend time to get organized, create an elaborate plan, and gather the confidence that I’m going to accomplish everything I’m setting out to do, how could I not feel discouraged when I almost immediately let myself fall behind?

Why we make the plan

The truth is, I made that plan because it gave me a sense of control. It helped me overcome the impatience that often overtakes me—wanting to do everything at once, feeling like I’m never doing enough, grappling with all the ideas and ambitions that come tumbling at me. A plan gives me solace that I have a strategy for addressing each one of these goals in time.

But what if sticking to the plan isn’t the point? The plan might help me think through priorities, identify what matters, and get excited about the work—but it also has to be flexible enough to allow me to be human, with a full-time job, a family, and a life. It can serve as an optimistic wishlist, but it can’t be so rigid that it doesn’t account for business trips, family emergencies, the flu, a work fire drill, insomnia, or just a day when I’m not feeling it whatsoever.

The work will always be there

The story waits for my return. Every time I show up to chip away a little at the big block of ice I’m carving into something unique and beautiful, I should be proud. The block is still too big, but it’s maybe a little smaller than the last time I faced it, and more beautiful and intricate than when I started.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Recovery doesn’t require perfection. I don’t need to “catch up” on all the writing I missed this week. I just need to write something today. Even if it’s 200 words instead of 2,000.

• I can lower the bar temporarily. My brain does better with tiny, achievable goals when it’s already overwhelmed. Not “finish chapter 12” but “edit for 20 minutes.” Not “write 5 weeks of Substacks” but “outline your next couple of articles.” Momentum builds from micro-movements.

• Breadcrumbs will be there for the future. As Jessica Brody suggests, if we’re heading into a week where things might go off the rails, we can leave ourselves notes about where we are in the story, what we’re struggling with, and what questions we’re trying to answer. This is our gift to future us.

• Structure yes, rigid schedules no. I need structure to function, but rigid schedules that collapse with the first disruption just lead to shame spirals. The difference: rigidity is “I write exactly 1,500 words between 6 and 8 AM or I’ve failed,” whereas structure is “I write in the mornings.”

Keep showing up

When I do return to my work, my characters are still there. Stories are patient in a way we rarely are with ourselves. The growth is in learning how to be gentle with myself when my plans fail, showing up anyway, and starting again and again—messy, behind schedule, but still there.

Like so much about writing, the process doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs me to keep showing up.

This week’s goodies

🫶 Great reads and resources

• What the reader thinks of your writing is none of your business - Linda Caroll

• Naming what’s so - Frank Marquardt

• There is no secret - Devon Halliday