First: Editing for Writers is available now.

Should you buy this? No! It’s a curated collection of twenty-four essays that you can read for free in Shelf Life, but edited into a collection. However, if you want to add Shelf Life to your book shelf, or you like paying for stuff you can get for free, or whatever, it’s available. I’m just letting you know. Letting you know things is the whole reason Shelf Life exists.

I have a confession to make. I’ve been lying to myself about my writing for years.

Not about whether I was writing. I was writing. I have the word counts to prove it. What I was lying to myself about was how I was writing—how fast, how consistently, and whether I was actually on track to finish anything in any reasonable amount of time.

The spreadsheet I was using—and I know I’m not alone in this, because I’ve talked with enough writers to know that most of us are running some version of a homemade spreadsheet held together with conditional formatting and and bubble gum—told me how many words I’d written. That’s it. That’s all it did. It couldn’t tell me whether 800 words on a Tuesday was good or bad for me specifically. It couldn’t tell me when I’d finish my project at my current pace. It definitely couldn’t tell me how many hours a week I needed to write in order to hit the deadline I’d set for myself.

Word count is a vanity metric. I’m sorry. I know we’re all very attached to it. But word count without context doesn’t tell you anything useful.

Here’s the number that actually matters: words per hour.

Why Words Per Hour?

Words per hour is the metric that ties everything else together.

If you know your words per hour, you know:

• How long it will take to finish your project

• How many hours a week you need to write to hit your deadline

• Whether you’re a fast drafter who edits heavily or a slow, careful writer who produces cleaner first drafts (and, therefore, which kind of schedule works for you)

• On any given day, whether you were in flow or grinding it out

Further, for the freelancers in the room, the number that justifies your invoice. “I spent six hours on this” is a lot harder to argue with when you have a logged session history showing your start time, your end time, your starting word count, and your ending word count. That’s not an estimate. That’s receipts.

Enter ScribeTrack

ScribeTrack is a mobile app—available now on Android, iOS coming soon—that I built from scratch, by myself, for writers.

Here’s how it works.

You create a project. You give it a title, a target word count, and optionally a deadline. That’s it. You’re set up in about thirty seconds.

Then, when you sit down to write, you log a session. You tell the app your starting word count, your ending word count, and your start and end time. ScribeTrack does the math: it calculates how many words you wrote and how long it took, and it gives you your words per hour for that session.

Here’s the part I’m genuinely proud of: ScribeTrack automatically chains your sessions. The next time you open Quick Add to log a session for that project, your starting word count is already filled in—it pulls from wherever you left off last time. You just enter your new ending word count and your times. That’s it. Thirty seconds, maybe less.

Over time, the app builds a picture of your writing pace. It shows you your average words per hour, your longest streak of consecutive writing days, and—this is the Pro feature I built the whole thing around—a finish date predictor that tells you exactly when you’ll complete your project based on your actual pace over the last seven days. Not a guess. Not a motivational estimate. Math.

There’s also a weekly writing schedule builder that works backward from your deadline: tell it how many days a week you can write and how long your sessions tend to be, and it tells you whether your current schedule gets you to your goal in time — and if not, what needs to change.

Why Free Forever Is Not Lip Service

I want to be straightforward about this because it annoys the heck out of me when apps bury the useful stuff behind a paywall and call it “free.”

The free tier of ScribeTrack gives you:

• Up to 3 active projects

• Full session logging with words per hour

• Your writing streak

• 365 days of analytics history

• No ads, ever

The Pro tier ($2.99/month or $29.99/year) adds:

• Unlimited projects

• The finish date predictor

• The weekly schedule builder

• CSV export of your session history (useful for invoicing)

If you have three or fewer active projects and you don’t need deadline prediction, the free tier is a complete, useful tool. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I don’t believe in the model where free is hamstrung to get you to subscribe to pro. Free forever gets you a writing tracker that replaces your homebrew spreadsheet and brings you the analytics that will help you turn your writing hobby into a writing habit.

Who This Is For

ScribeTrack is for you if:

You’re a novelist who needs to see whether you’re actually on track to finish your draft, not just whether you wrote something today. The finish date predictor is built for you. Log a week of sessions and it will tell you, based on your real pace, exactly when you’ll type “the end” — or how far behind schedule you are.

You’re a freelancer who writes on deadline and needs to show your work. The session history is a clean, exportable record of your hours. It’s the difference between “I spent about fifteen hours on this” and a log that shows every session, dated, with start and end times.

You’re anyone who wants to treat writing like a serious commitment instead of something you do when you feel like it. That’s the honest version of why I built this. I wanted a tool that would hold me accountable to my own goals — not by nagging me, but by showing me the data. Sometimes the most motivating thing in the world is seeing your words-per-hour tick up over time.

A Note on the “Solo-Developed” Thing

I built ScribeTrack myself. The backend, the database, the API, the mobile app—all of it. I am not a software engineer by training. I’m an editor who learned to build things because I needed them.

I mention this not to brag but because I think it matters for how you understand the product. This is not a VC-backed startup with a team of engineers and a growth marketing department. It’s a tool I built because I wanted it to exist, and because I believe writers deserve better data about their own work than a word count and a vague sense of whether today was a good day.

ScribeTrack will keep getting better because I use it myself and I care about it. That’s the only roadmap that matters to me right now.

Download ScribeTrack free on Google Play.

iOS coming soon.

If you try it, I’d genuinely love to know what you think—drop a comment below or send me an email at hello at scribetrack dot ink.

If you have questions that you’d like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you’d like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you’re enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.

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The “No True Scotsman” fallacy happens when you start with a faulty generalization—”real writers write every day”—and then reject any counterexample by declaring it doesn’t count. This essay walks through the lies writers tell themselves: that real writers don’t have day jobs, don’t need editing, don’t struggle. If you’ve ever doubted whether you’re a “real writer,” this one’s for you. Spoiler: you are. The only requirement is that you write.

If you have questions that you’d like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you’d like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you’re enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.

Share Shelf Life

What makes a villain unforgettable? Not that we fear them, hate them, or sympathize with them. Dolores Umbridge infuriates us. Hannibal Lecter charms us. The T-1000 is just a machine. But they all share one trait: every great villain is the hero of their own story. This essay breaks down why that matters—and how to write a villain who believes they’re right, not just a jerk who wants power.

If you have questions that you’d like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you’d like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you’re enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.

Share Shelf Life

In Defensive Line, I use an extended football metaphor (bear with me—I only know roller derby) to talk about the difference between criticism and attack. Most writers feel defensive when someone critiques their work—that’s normal. The problem isn’t the feeling; it’s what you do with it. I share my own struggles with internal defensiveness, the mistake of dismissing feedback while pretending to accept it, and why learning to sort good criticism from bad is a skill you need long before you ever hear from an agent or editor. The goal isn’t to stop feeling defensive. It’s to stop letting that feeling control your response —and your revisions.

First: Editing for Writers is available for presale now on Kindle. If you preorder, it will be delivered to your Kindle on its July 27 release date. A paperback edition will also be available on July 27, but isn’t yet available for presale.

Should you buy this? No! It’s a curated collection of twenty-four essays that you can read for free in Shelf Life, but edited into a collection. However, if you want to add Shelf Life to your book shelf, or you like paying for stuff you can get for free, or whatever, it’s available. I’m just letting you know. Letting you know things is the whole reason Shelf Life exists.

Now: A confession. I’m obsessed with planners and planning. You may already know this if you’ve read previous Shelf Life articles like Getting Started With Bullet Journaling or Little Habit Tracker That Could.

Anyway: Bullet journals. Trackers. Logs. Anything that promises to turn the chaos in my brain into tidy little boxes I can check off. I absolutely love checking something off a list. Very few things produce that kind of dopamine for me.

I was diagnosed with ADHD in my mid-thirties, but I’d been building my own coping systems for decades before that. Some worked. Some didn’t. All of them taught me something about how my brain needs to see information in order to process it.

So when I dug the first draft of my novel out of the trunk and decided to make a real effort at revising it, realized I had no idea how.

I mean, I know how to revise. I know what to do. I’m an editor, after all. Revising novels is kind of my whole thing. It wasn’t the mechanics of revising that was my problem. It was staying organized. Keeping track of what I’d done and what was left to do. Organizing all the information of the revision in one place instead of 50 sticky notes, two half-filled bullet journals, a composition notebook, and 12 scattered Word documents.

That’s what the inside of an ADHD brain looks like all the time, by the way. Like Munch’s The Scream, basically.

So, in short, the tool I needed didn’t exist. (This is a recurring theme for me.)

I needed something that tracked plot holes and scene-level pacing and character consistency and line-level polish. I needed something that combined all the logs and trackers I needed for revision and also provided the daily, weekly, and monthly planning pages that would keep me on track, not for my life generally, but for my revision process.

I’ve been thinking of it as “the season of revision” but that’s a little too, I don’t know, live-laugh-love for my comfort.

I sat down and asked myself: What do I really need here?

• A planner

• For my trusty Goodnotes app

• That’s fully linked so I don’t have to swipe forever to find what I need

If you’re drafting or planning your novel? There are tons of these. Etsy is loaded with them. Revising? Not so much.

So I built it.

It’s called the Revision Planner for Writers. It’s a digital planner for Goodnotes and Notability. Fully hyperlinked. Undated. 67 collection pages across 7 sections: Setup, Structure, Character, Scene, Polish, Beta, and Final Pass.

I’ve been using it to revise my own novel, and I have to say: it’s the first time I’ve felt like I have a true bird’s eye view of what I’m doing and where I’m going. Not because it does the work for me—it doesn’t—but because it gives me a place to put everything I find. A structure. A map.

I’m not going to tell you to buy it. That’s not what Shelf Life is about. Instead, I’m going to walk you through it and show you some of the most valuable things inside so that you can get the value without buying it.

Shelf Life is not a sales pitch. Shelf Life is about me providing free value to you. So let’s do it. I’m going to walk you through a few pages from the planner and how they work. Then, at the end of this article, I’m going to share a link for a free mini-version of the planner that has the full setup section for you so you can give it a try.

Sound good?

Reverse Engineer Your Schedule

I can’t speak for anybody else, but if I don’t set deadlines I don’t get anything done. “Whenever you get a chance” means: “Right this moment or literally never.”

So the first thing I realized I needed was a schedule to stick to. A lot of being a production editor is project management. I have a lot of experience working backward from a publication date to find the date we absolutely, positively, drop-dead have to have that manuscript in production.

So, I apply the same philosophy with this page. Let’s say you have a deadline to complete your revision. Maybe it’s arbitrary. Maybe it’s based on something—maybe your agent is waiting for it, maybe you want to finish before your birthday, maybe you already have a pub date in mind and this revision is just one part of the work. So you start with your target completion date.

Next, you’ll estimate how many weeks you need for each phase. How much time do you want to spend on the structural revision? How much time do you want to allot for beta reading? And so on. Your next step is filling in the “weeks” column.

Then, you work backward from your target completion date:

• Does working backward bring you to a start date of today? Brilliant.

• Does working backward bring you to a start date that’s in the past? Then you need to either adjust your end date or tighten up somewhere.

• Does working backward bring you to a start date in the future? Then you can give yourself more time somewhere.

Once this high-level schedule is filled out, you can use the year at a glance to note when you’ll be handling which phases, and add reminders to the specific month and week pages where you’re planning to start various phases.

The Protagonist Arc Tracker

The protagonist arc tracker is a space to document your hero’s journey through the story.

One of the main structural issues that sinks manuscripts is a passive or static protagonist. (You can grab a free guide to the other big structural bugaboos here.)

Authors are attached to our protagonists. They’re basically a roommate that lives inside your head, sharing space in your brain, maybe for the rest of your life (TBD). It’s not always easy to look at our main character and diagnose the flaws in their arc. This tracker makes you examine exactly how your character grows and changes throughout the story. If you can’t do that—if you can’t show a meaningful change from the first box to the last, if you can’t articulate the choices your character makes that change the direction of the plot, then you have a flat character who’s going to sink your book.

This page does double duty. You can write down what’s actually in your first draft, and then you can duplicate the page and write down what should happen for this character, how they should grow and change, if they don’t actually do that in your draft.

The Month at a Glance

Why aren’t the dates filled out, Catherine? Because I want you to be able to use this planner forever. I don’t want to sell a new one every year (because I hate money, I guess). The blank calendar grid lets you fill in the dates for January, whether it’s January 2027, 2028, 2042, 2099—this planner is good forever.

This is a monthly page like you’ll see in a lot of planners, but with a twist. It’s not geared toward your month generally. It’s specifically about your month in revision.

• Fill in the calendar grid (or ignore it, I’m not your boss, do what you want).

• Add your revision goals for the month based on what you determined in the reverse-engineered schedule.

• Write down the milestones you want to achieve this month.

• Fill in your manuscript’s current status and color in the bar—how far are you at the beginning of January? Use one color. At the end of January, come back with a different color and fill the bar some more so you can visualize your progress.

Note that the month page links to each of five weeks (each week, in turn, has seven days). There’s also a roundup page for each month, something I migrated over from my hand-drawn bullet journals:

The roundup is a page to capture the month in review. You’ll look back at these later and see how you’ve grown and changed, what you’ve accomplished, and (perhaps most important) what you’ve let go.

Download Your Free Mini-Planner Now

No catch. No signup (although I’d love it if you did). Just click to download your free mini-planner. The zip file contains the mini-planner, which includes the cover; index; year at a glance; sample month, week, and day; and the complete setup section, including:

• Reverse engineer your revision schedule

• The revision roadmap

• The revision timeline template

• The revision readiness quiz

• “What kind of reviser are you” quiz?

• The manuscript status dashboard

The zip file also contains a PDF on how to use the planner, including importing it into Goodnotes or Notability and duplicating pages.

Click here to download your free mini-planner. If you enjoy it, let me know in the comments!

If you like it and want to upgrade to the full planner, it’s available in my shop.

If you have questions that you’d like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you’d like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you’re enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.

Share Shelf Life

In The Four-Maggie Problem, I tell a true story from my early freelance editing days about a romance manuscript I was hired to copyedit. As I worked through the book, I kept encountering a character named Maggie—first as a bartender, then as a sibling, then as an emergency dispatcher, and finally in another role that made me realize something had gone very wrong. The story is funny, but the point is serious: if a major publisher once signed a book with the particular problem I uncovered, then your own draft isn’t as hopeless as you think. Keep going.

In Beauty and Marketability, I adapt Ross McCammon’s “Two Beers and a Puppy” test to writing, sorting books into four categories based on whether they’re intrinsically good and whether the market wants them. I look at examples from One Hundred Years of Solitude (a Yes-Yes: beautiful and wildly successful) to Fifty Shades of Grey (a No-Yes: terrible but enormously marketable) to The Brief History of the Dead (a Yes-No: lovely, acclaimed, and largely forgotten). The goal isn’t to tell you which quadrant to aim for—it’s to help you define what success actually means to you before you decide how to chase it.

In The Blind Mind, I explore what it’s like to read and write with aphantasia—the inability to visualize images in my mind. I share how I didn’t even realize my brain worked differently until my thirties, when a coworker mentioned how strange it would be not to see mental pictures. For me, reading means keeping a list of descriptive details rather than watching a movie in my head, and writing description comes more easily because I’m already translating from words to words—no image required. I also talk about my friend Goñi Montes, an artist with hyperphantasia who experiences most of his thoughts as vivid, multidimensional visuals, and how our friendship helped me understand the spectrum of how human brains can work. This is a heartfelt look at what it means to create stories when your mind’s eye is completely blind—and why that doesn’t have to be a disadvantage.

Catherine Forrest argues that the first step to doing something well is accepting that you will be terrible at it first. Using her own experience of working furiously at roller derby only to remain painfully mediocre, she explains that persevering at something you're bad at is invaluable practice for writing or any creative pursuit. She warns against comparing your raw first drafts to polished, professionally-edited books you read for pleasure, and urges you instead to stop worrying about "getting good" and focus only on doing the work consistently, improving just a tiny bit each day from your own previous effort.

In this post, I break down what character voice really is—not just accent or catchphrases, but the way a character cannot help speaking. I argue that voice is a compound made of six elements: diction, syntax, rhythm and pace, formality register, catchphrases and tics, and emotional default. Using two seemingly similar characters—Rob and Harriet—I show how backstory shapes each of those elements, from Rob's sarcasm and rapid speech born of being overlooked in a large family to Harriet's overexplaining and formal register born of being an only child desperate to prove herself. My core message is that if you thoughtfully choose those six characteristics based on your character's history, their voice becomes not something you invent, but something inevitable.

I have a 3.5-octave voice. To put that in perspective, I can sing “Take on Me” by A-ha. I can sing “Under the Bridge” by RHCP and then sing “Chandelier” by Sia right after. I have a passaggio at E♭5 that I train relentlessly with a special karaoke playlist I use in my car. All this is to say I know a thing or two about voice.

Please invite me to karaoke I am begging you.

I just released a mini workbook on character voice so that’s at the top of my mind today and I want to share the goods with you. I still think you should get the workbook but only if you like what you learn in here.

What Voice Is and Isn’t

Voice is not as simple as a collection of verbal tics, although tics and catchphrases are part of voice. It’s not accent, or dialect. It’s not even the way the character speaks.

Voice is the way a character cannot help speaking.

Voice is inevitable. It’s not easy to alter your own voice. That’s actually why lots of writers have difficulty mastering character voices—because crafting character voice means subduing our own narrative voice in favor of the character’s voice. And we’ve all heard that every agent and editor and publisher wants a voicey narrator right now, so, if you’ve been perfecting your narrative voice you might find character voice even harder than usual.

So as I was saying: Voice is inevitable. That’s why faking an accent requires concentration and is exhausting after a while. It’s why we get mentally and emotionally tired in situations where we have to speak in a way that’s unusual for us (like job interviews or business lunches). And it’s why excellent character voices are so hard to write.

But turn that aphorism around on its face: Voice is inevitable. If you know your characters, their voices become inevitable too.

Voice Is a Compound

Voice is not just one thing. I mean, nothing is just one thing. An atom is just one thing. Everything else is a compound. Including voices.

Theory: there are six elements of voice.

1. Diction. The words this character chooses and uses.

2. Syntax. The order they put their words in.

3. Rhythm and pace. The speed at which they speak. Their urgency or hesitancy.

4. Formality register. How formally or informally this character speaks.

5. Catchphrases and tics. The words, sounds, or phrases this character repeats over and over.

6. Emotional default. The emotional state of your character at rest.

If you thoughtfully choose those six characteristics for each of your speaking characters, and then write their voice based on what you decided, your character voices will be unique and differentiated. That’s it. You can stop reading now. That’s the whole show.

Or is it?

So how do you develop a character voice that’s authentic to your character? You let backstory guide the way you choose the six elements. Let’s look at how it works in practice.

The Alchemy of Backstory

Consider two characters that seem demographically alike on the surface. Let’s say they:

• Are the same age

• Go to the same school

• Study the same subjects

• Run in the same friend group

• Belong to all the same clubs

• Enjoy the same sports

One of these characters is, uh, let’s say “Harriet.” And the other one is, um, “Rob.”

They still sound totally different based on their backstories.

“Rob”

• The youngest boy out of seven siblings—he’s used to being overlooked, spoken over, or pushed aside.

• He’s not the “most” anything of his siblings—he’s not the smartest, or the funniest, or the bravest, or the best in school.

• His family struggles financially, which he’s embarrassed about.

How does this affect his voice?

• Sarcasm. “Nobody can be disappointed in me if I’m not trying.”

• Speaks quickly. He’s used to trying to get his thoughts in edgewise around eight other family members.

• “Blimey.” Catchphrase belies his socioeconomic status.

“Harriet”

• The only child of two highly educated, gainfully employed parents.

• She’s not from a magical background, so she’s anxious to prove that she’s just as knowledgeable as her peers.

• She’s used to being the smartest person in the room.

How does this affect her voice?

• Overexplaining. She’s used to being the one who makes things make sense for others (she does a lot of heavy narrative lifting in the story when she explains magical things the reader might not know).

• Chooses complex words and uses a formal register. She’s not about to be caught out not knowing something; she’s painfully eager to sound smart.

• “Honestly.” She’s perpetually exasperated that others around her haven’t already overthought whatever she’s been overthinking.

Developing Character Voice

Let’s look at how each periodic voice element maps to backstory.

Diction

The words your character chooses and uses are deeply tied to their backstory. First, consider their education level. A character with a low level of education choosing words like “loquacious” and “comely” is unexpected. If you want to go that route, there needs to be a mitigating factor—do they read a ton? Are they overcompensating?

Education isn’t the only factor, though. Imagine how the word selection might differ between:

• A highly educated character who is trying desperately to fit in.

• A highly educated character who is trying desperately to show off.

Syntax

Syntax, or sentence structure, is also closely tied to education level but might also be a signal of a character’s trustworthiness (or lack thereof). For instance, a character who speaks in long, complicated sentences might be:

• Trying to obfuscate or hide the truth.

• Trying to show off their knowledge of a subject, or hide their lack of it.

• A thoughtful, dreamy character who lets their words meander alongside their thoughts.

Rhythm and Pace

The speed at which a character speaks, their urgency or hesitancy, can usually be traced back to their original wound. Are they:

• Afraid to speak up or speak confidently? Someone in their past has torn down their ideas.

• Rushed and hurried when they speak? They’ve already decided that no one has time for them.

• Slow and careful with their words? They may have inadvertently hurt someone they care about with careless words, or been hurt themself.

Formality Register

Every character’s formality is on a sliding scale. Nobody talks to the cops the same way they talk to their best friends (don’t talk to cops). But every character has a default level of formality. For instance, we recall that Romulus Wellbeing does not have the same inherent formality as Hermeneutics Grainfed.

A character might have a more formal speaking register if:

• They grew up isolated from their peers.

• They’re used to translating for parents who don’t speak the local language.

• Their job puts them in frequent contact with authority figures.

A character might have less formal speech if:

• They had siblings or same-age friends they were close with growing up.

• They’re trying hard to fit in.

• They come from a privileged background and see no reason to adjust their tone to suit the people around them.

Catchphrases and Tics

Use with caution. Catchphrases and tics can help differentiate a character voice, yes, but they can also exhaust the reader if you use too many of them. A character who says “literally” in every dialogue exchange—is just me from my memoir, actually.

“Catchphrases and tics” overlaps with diction a little bit in that it can be more of a repeated word choice than a true catchphrase. For instance, a character who responds to shock with, “oh my god,” versus a character who responds to shock with an expletive.

You might ask yourself:

• What deity does this person call on in moments of heightened emotion like surprise, fear, or even exasperation? An American valley girl might say “oh my gawd” while a high priestess in a fantasy series might say, “oh, stars.”

• What expression does this character reach for when words fail?

• Does the tic have to be an actual word? Or can it be expressed by a tendency to trail off or interrupt oneself?

Emotional Default

Finally, the most important of all these elements is the emotional default. Is the character curious by default? Or defensive? Consider how two characters, for whom all other elements are equal, might respond to something that makes them angry:

• “Why would you do that?” is a curious response. The first instinct is to ask “why” even as they’re making an accusation.

• “This is all your fault!” is a defensive response. Their first instinct is to make sure the blame is placed squarely on someone who isn’t them.

How does a character come by their emotional default? They grow up with it. Their history and experience shapes it. Even twins might have a widely different emotional default if there were inequities in their early experience.

The Character Voice Lab

As I mentioned earlier, I did just make an entire workbook on this topic and I’d love if you checked it out. It’s got all the theory above, plus some helpful worksheets and three case studies (the one I used here plus The Echo Wife by Gailey and This Is How You Lose the Time War by El-Mohtar and Gladstone).

If you have questions that you’d like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you’d like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you’re enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.

Share Shelf Life

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Today’s the day.

I’ve been teasing The Editor’s Pass for weeks. Mentioning it at the end of other posts. Tucking coupon codes into deep dives. Promising you a complete system for self-editing your novel.

Today, I deliver.

I hope you’ll give me a few minutes of your time this morning to tell you about this workbook, who it’s for, what it does, and how to get it.

The Problem This Solves

Not every writer can afford a professional editor. Developmental editing runs thousands of dollars. Copy editing isn’t cheap either. And even if you can afford it, maybe you don’t want to hand your manuscript to someone else just yet.

• Maybe you want to polish as best you can before querying an agent.

• Maybe you’re self-publishing and want to get your manuscript as clean as possible before hitting “upload.”

• Maybe you want to revise it yourself before hiring that pro editor, so they can work on the best possible version of your manuscript.

• Maybe you just want to understand what professional editors actually do—so you can do it yourself.

That’s why I built The Editor’s Pass.

What It Is

The Editor’s Pass is a complete family of workbooks that guide writers through the revision or self-editing process. It’s the macro-to-micro methodology that professional editors use every day, written for writers.

No gatekeeping. No secrets. Just the tools.

Here’s the full ecosystem.

1. The Flagship Workbook: The Editor’s Pass

$44.99 | Get it here →

This is the big one. 174 pages. 58 worksheets. It covers the entire editing process from macro (structure) to micro (word).

Inside, you’ll find:

• Structural editing (plot, pacing, narrative tension)

• Scene-level editing (entry/exit points, stakes, scene purpose)

• Character editing (arc, motivation, voice, consistency)

• Point of view (locking in, head-hopping elimination)

• Line editing (sentence-level craft, rhythm, clarity)

• Copy editing (grammar, punctuation, style consistency)

This is the full process. Written for writers to revise and self-edit their own work. You can print it once, twice, as many times as you need. Every manuscript, every revision.

2. Individual Chapters

$9.99 each | Get them here →

Not ready to commit to the full 174-page workbook? No problem.

All 10 chapters of The Editor’s Pass are for sale separately. This is a lower price point for readers who:

• Are having difficulty with a specific part of the editing process (e.g., you know your POV is a mess but your plot is fine).

• Want to test out the workbook before committing to the full thing.

Each chapter comes with a coupon for your money back when you upgrade—$9.99 off the retail price of the full workbook or Complete System Bundle when you upgrade on my website.

3. Individual Worksheets

$2.99 each | Get them here →

If you have a very specific bugaboo, or you want the smallest taster to see if you like the workbook’s vibe, you can grab an individual lesson.

Each PDF printable contains 1 lesson + its associated worksheet. Pick exactly what you need and nothing else.

Each worksheet comes with a coupon for $2.99 off the full workbook or Complete System Bundle if you decide to upgrade later.

Don’t see the worksheet you need? Check back—I’m releasing them a few at a time.

4. Deep-Dive Mini-Workbooks

$7.99 each | Get them here →

Okay, “mini” might be a misnomer.

These are 30–50-page deep dives into specific topics. Each contains lessons, worksheets, email templates, case studies, and checklists to guide you through revising’s stickiest, trickiest wickets.

The Tension Architect

34 pages | 4 worksheets | 3 case studies (The Hunger Games, Gone Girl, The Shining)

A workbook on how to create a graph of narrative tension, diagnose what the graph is showing you (the Flatline, the Sawtooth, the False Summit), and adjust accordingly for perfect narrative tension throughout your book.

Get it here →

The Beta Blueprint

44 pages | 5 worksheets | Email templates | The Beta Reader Contract | The Beta Reader Questionnaire

This workbook walks you through running your beta read like a pro to get actionable feedback, prevent reader ghosting, and triage the feedback you get so you can actually use it.

Get it here →

The Character Voice Lab

43 pages | 6 worksheets | 3 case studies (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Echo Wife, This Is How You Lose the Time War)

Teaches you how to cook up unique character voices that leap off the page. Distill voices alchemically from character backstory and circumstance, differentiate voices like a boss, and avoid narrator voice contamination.

Get it here →

The POV Lock

35 pages | 6 worksheets | 3 case studies (Six of Crows, Dolores Claiborne, The Hobbit)

A workbook on how to choose the right POV for your story and lock in to prevent head-hopping. Teaches strategies to impart information to the reader when your narrator doesn’t have it.

Get it here →

5. The Complete System Bundle

$64.99 | Get it here →

This is the best value. You get:

• The Editor’s Pass flagship workbook ($44.99 value)

• All 4 deep-dive mini-workbooks from my shop ($7.99 each, a $31.96 value)

• PLUS 1 bundle-exclusive mini-workbook not sold separately

Total value if bought separately: $84.94 | Bundle price: $64.99 | You save: $19.95

Bundle-Exclusive: The Reader’s Emotional GPS

35 pages | 6 worksheets | 3 case studies (Pride and Prejudice, Misery, Room)

Teaches the reader’s emotional compass points and how to use them to guide the reader through your novel. Get your reader emotionally invested to keep them turning pages from “once upon a time” to “the end.” Available only in the Complete System Bundle.

Launch Window Special

Because you’re here. Because you read these emails. Because you’ve been along for the ride. Because you’re unusually attractive and interesting people.

From May 25 through June 9, use code FOUNDER40 at checkout on Etsy for 40% off The Editor’s Pass flagship workbook—dropping the price from $44.99 to $26.99.

But that’s not the deal. Here’s the deal:

Buy. Review. Get the Complete System Upgrade Free

1. Buy the workbook on Etsy using FOUNDER40.

2. Leave an honest review by June 9. (Doesn’t have to be glowing. Just honest. I mean it.)

3. Screenshot your review (or email me your Etsy username).

4. I’ll email you a download link for all 5 deep-dive mini-workbooks—including the bundle-exclusive The Reader’s Emotional GPS.

That’s the $64.99 Complete System Bundle for $26.99. This is my thanks, to you, for being a Shelf Life reader.

The math:

• Workbook MSRP: $44.99

• Your price with FOUNDER40: $26.99

• All 5 deep-dive workbooks, free when you leave an honest review

• Your effective cost for the complete system: $26.99

Just buy. Review. Then email me.

Why am I doing this? Because Etsy reviews help other writers find these tools. And because you’re a Shelf Life subscriber. That’s the only reason.

A Warning (Because I Like You)

This offer isn’t open forever. It’s for the launch window only: May 25 to June 9.

After June 9, the code sunsets and the review bonus goes away.

This is not a “maybe later” situation. This is a “buy it, use it, review it, get $40 worth of workbooks for free” situation.

But Don’t Take My Word For It

Here’s what professionals are saying about The Editor’s Pass:

“In The Editor’s Pass, Catherine Forrest demystifies the most intimidating stage of writing: revision. Drawing on more than twenty years of professional editorial experience, Forrest walks writers through a clear, macro-to-micro self-editing process—starting with structure and ending with the final polish. Packed with smart explanations, diagnostic questions, and hands-on worksheets, this workbook teaches writers not only what to fix but also how to think like an editor while preserving their unique voice. It's an indispensable tool for any fiction writer. I wish I had this when I was working on my first manuscript!”
—Tricia Knight, Managing Editor, Bloomsbury Academic

“I highly recommend The Editor’s Pass to anyone with even a passing interest in storytelling, either as part of their job or as a hobby. The knowledge Catherine imparts is steeped in experience. It’s direct yet conversational, easy to follow, thoroughly explained, and sparks the vital, often difficult self-reflection a writer needs to improve. The lessons give readers every tool they need to start writing the story they’ve always wanted to tell or to edit a finished draft into being the best it can be. The Editor’s Pass should be a well-used guide on all writers’ desks.”
—Joshua Sorensen, Senior Staff Writer

“The Editor’s Pass covers the entire process of manuscript editing, from developmental to copy editing, in an organized and accessible format. This workbook can help anyone polish their draft manuscript for professional publication.”
—Amber Bennett-Groves, Editor

“Welcome to rigor! With The Editor’s Pass, Catherine Forrest has provided fiction authors with tools and methods that enable them to step back, critically evaluate, and effectively edit their own work. The guide is an immensely valuable resource.”
—Wayson R. Jones, BA, The Human Copy Editor

Which Path Is Right for You?

• Start with a $2.99 worksheet if you have one specific problem and want to test the waters.

• Buy a $9.99 chapter if you’re struggling with a specific area (like POV or dialogue) and want deeper coverage.

• Grab a $7.99 deep-dive if you need intensive work on tension, beta readers, character voice, or point of view.

• Get the $44.99 flagship workbook if you want the complete macro-to-micro editing process.

• Or, for launch week only, grab the FOUNDER40 deal on Etsy: $26.99 for the workbook, then get all five deep dives free when you leave a review.

Where to Buy

• The Editor’s Desk on Etsy — Use FOUNDER40 for 40% off the workbook through June 9

• If you’d rather buy directly from me: Visit my web shop.

Not Ready to Buy?

Fair. There’s no rush. In the meantime, grab my free 2-page PDF, The 7 Structural Red Flags That Kill a Manuscript Before Page 50. Diagnose fatal story problems in 3 minutes—no workbook required. Free when you sign up for updates from editorsdesk.co.

Get the free worksheet here

One More Thing

I built this system because I’ve been an editor for more than 20 years. I’ve watched smart, talented writers spin their wheels on problems they could solve if someone just showed them how.

The Editor’s Pass is that “how.”

It’s not vague advice like “raise the stakes” or “show, don’t tell.” It’s worksheets and rubrics and case studies and checklists. It’s concrete. It’s repeatable. You can use it on every manuscript, every revision.

You can print it as many times as you need. Mark it up. Write in the margins. Spill coffee on it (though maybe not on purpose).

You never have to buy it again.

The Only Question That Matters

I’m not asking you to buy anything. I’m asking you one question:

If you had a professional editor’s methodology in a workbook—step by step, worksheet by worksheet—would that make your manuscript better?

If the answer is yes, you know where to find me.

If the answer is no, that’s okay too. But watch this space. Because I’m always building tools for the problems you actually have.

As always, I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for reading.

Now go write something amazing.

P.S. Remember: every individual chapter and worksheet comes with a coupon code toward the full workbook or bundle. So if you start small and want to upgrade later, you’re not losing money. That’s just fair business. You’re not paying for the same thing twice—not in my shop.

P.P.S. The FOUNDER40 code expires June 9. The review bonus expires June 9. This is not a drill.

If you have questions that you’d like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you’d like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you’re enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.

Share Shelf Life

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This post is adapted from my editorsdesk.co blog. Read it here, read it there, I don’t care, read it anywhere. We’re talking about one of the sneakiest problems in fiction.

Writers tell ourselves lots of lies.

• “I’m not a real writer.” (Whew, that’s a big one.)

• “If I just put my book out there, people will find it.” (Extremely damaging.)

• “A single bestselling book is all I need to quit my day job and be a full-time writer.” (Not even close.)

• “I manage point of view intuitively. I never have to think about it.”

That last one is what we’re talking about today.

“You know,” I say, “I’m a pretty solid POV writer. I’m a professional editor, after all. I know what I’m doing. I stay locked into my POV. One head per scene.” Then I start writing and by page three I’ve been inside four different skulls like some kind of literary revenant.

I’m not doing it on purpose. That’s what makes it so sneaky.

You’re writing along in close third, locked into your protagonist’s experience. Then you need the reader to know something your protagonist doesn’t know. So, without thinking, you slip into another character’s head for just one sentence. Then you slip back.

Congratulations. You just head-hopped. And your reader felt it. They probably didn’t say, “Aha! Gotcha! A POV violation!” They’re not the POV police. Instead, they might have said:

• “Something’s off.”

• “Wait—what?” (they go back and read the passage again)

• “Hold up, who’s thinking this?”

And then, the worst-case scenario—they put your book down.

The most important sentence in this (or any) article about point of view

Point of view isn’t about who’s speaking. It’s about who knows what.

You can write a whole novel in first person and still violate POV if your narrator knows something they couldn’t possibly know. You can write in omniscient third and still fail if you head-hop without purpose.

That’s why I made The POV Lock.

What’s in this workbook

This is a 35-page mini-workbook that does one thing and does it thoroughly: It teaches you to lock into your chosen point of view and never accidentally leave.

Inside you’ll find:

• The POV spectrum. From deep immersion inside a single character’s skull to a godlike camera floating above the entire world—and where your story should land on that spectrum.

• First, second, and third person. What each does well, what each is terrible at, and when you should (and shouldn’t) use them. (Pro tip: Second-person POV, not even once.)

• Narrative distance. How to intentionally move closer to or farther from a character’s internal experience.

• Head-hopping audit. A concrete tool to find every place you drifted into the wrong skull.

• The POV diagnostic. Ten questions that tell you which POV is right for your novel (not just the one you always use or that your genre favors).

• The information gap worksheet. For when your protagonist doesn’t know something the reader needs to know. Three legitimate ways to solve it. None of them involve head-hopping.

• Three case studies of masters at work: Six of Crows (rotating close third), Dolores Claiborne (unreliable first person), and The Hobbit (omniscient with a personality).

Plus a working POV checklist you can run on every scene, and the two-sentence test that instantly reveals whether you’ve drifted.

A quick example of what I mean

Here’s head-hopping in the wild:

Sarah watched him cross the room. He looked tired. But really, he was furious. He couldn’t believe she’d said that. Sarah wondered if she’d gone too far.

Four sentences. Four perspective jumps. The reader has no anchor.

Here’s the same moment locked to Sarah:

Sarah watched him cross the room. He looked tired, but the tense muscle in his jaw said otherwise. She’d seen that tightness before. Had she gone too far?

Same information. Same scene. One head. The reader knows exactly whose story they’re in.

That’s what this workbook teaches you to do. On every page. Without thinking about it.

Case study: Six of Crows

(No, really. Pay attention.)

Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows is a masterclass in close third person with rotating narrators. The book has six point-of-view characters. They never get boring. It never gets confusing.

Here’s how she does it:

1. Each POV character gets a named chapter heading. The reader knows immediately whose head they’re entering.

2. Within that chapter, the POV lock is absolute. No head-hopping. No accidental drifts. Even when two POV characters are in the same room, the reader sees the other character from the outside.

3. Each character has a distinct interiority. Kaz thinks in strategy. Inej thinks in balance and blades. Jesper thinks in impulses. You could cover the chapter heading and still know whose head you’re in.

The workbook breaks down exactly how Bardugo pulls this off—and how you can steal every single trick for your own rotating-POV novel.

(And a warning from the workbook: multiple POVs won’t fix a boring protagonist. If your reader dreads leaving Character A to enter Character B’s head, more POVs isn’t the answer. Rewriting Character B is.)

The camera lens

Your story is a room. Your reader is standing in the doorway. Point of view is the camera you hand them.

If you keep jerking the camera around—pointing it toward one corner, then another, then another—the reader gets disoriented. Their photos don’t show them a coherent picture. They give up and leave the room.

If you hand them a steady focus and say, “stay with this character, watch what they watch,” they can explore the whole room through that character’s eyes. They feel oriented. They keep reading.

The POV Lock teaches you to hold the camera steady.

One more thing (and why I’m telling you this)

The POV Lock is a mini-workbook. It complements my full system, The Editor’s Pass, which launches May 25.

If you buy this deep dive and later decide you want to upgrade to the complete system, I’ll discount the full price by exactly what you paid for this one. There’s a coupon code on the last page of the workbook.

Not because I’m generous (well, maybe a little). But because I think it’s fair. I don’t want you to feel like you wasted money if you upgrade. That’s it. That’s the whole reason. I have a whole thing about ethical business practices.

You can print this PDF once, twice, as many times as you need. You can use it with every manuscript, every revision. Mark it up all you want. You never have to buy it again.

The only question that matters

I’m not asking you to buy anything. I’m asking you one question:

If you could lock into one character’s head and never accidentally leave—would that make your manuscript better?

If the answer is yes, you know where to find me.

If the answer is no, that’s okay too. But watch this space. Because I’ve got a lot of tools coming for the problems you do have.

Can’t wait for The Editor’s Pass, or you think The POV Lock might be too in-depth for what you need right now? Sign up for updates at editorsdesk.co and receive a free worksheet to diagnose your manuscript’s structural problems in 5 minutes or less.

P.S.—if you already subscribe to Shelf Life, just plug in the same email address to get the worksheet. It’s all one list. You won’t get duplicate emails.

P.P.S.—I’m trying to find the right balance between giving you information in this Substack, for free, that you can truly use, and also offering you my paid content. If I’m getting it wrong, I hope you’ll reach out and let me know.

As always, I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for reading.

P.P.P.S.—I think the Six of Crows case study alone is worth the price of entry. Bardugo rotates through six narrators and it never gets confusing. But don’t take my word for it. Go read Six of Crows if you haven’t. It’s one of my favorite books.

If you have questions that you’d like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you’d like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you’re enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.

Share Shelf Life

We’ve all heard a lot of vague writing advice in our day. You know what I’m talking about. The kind of advice that isn’t actually advice, that’s just a platitude posing as advice.

• “Raise the stakes.”

• “Show, don’t tell.”

• “Never use adverbs.”

(We are simply never going to yeet an entire part of speech in this blog. Not happening. Time may be a construct but you can’t tell it without adverbs.)

So, anyway, narrative tension.

You: The Writer. You can probably tell, intuitively, when your pacing is off. When your plot feels sluggish in parts. Maybe your beta readers lose interest and don’t finish the book. But when you ask for guidance you get more unhelpful advice and sound bites like:

• “Just raise the stakes.”

• “I didn’t feel dread—I wanted to feel dread.”

• “You need faster pacing.”

(They might also hit you with the good old “Show, don’t tell!”)

Anyway, you already know you need to raise the stakes, create narrative tension, and speed the pace. That’s not advice you can use. That’s a diagnosis. Nobody is giving you a prescription.

Hello, it’s your good friend Catherine from Shelf Life and I have the prescription. I am not licensed to dispense pharmaceuticals. Do not let me take your blood pressure. I am not a real doctor. This isn’t Health Life.

So: You leave the conversation knowing something is wrong with your manuscript but having no idea how to fix it. And, worse, now you’re maybe a little embarrassed to ask again, because someone already told you “the answer” so confidently. Surely, you just don’t know how to interpret it. Surely, the problem is you.

The problem is not you. The problem is the person you went to for advice is just parroting what they were told when they asked the same question and they don’t want to be the first guy in this long chain of guys to point out that, you know, maybe I’m crazy, but, it kind of seems like the emperor has no clothes?

“Just raise the stakes” is the (second) emptiest plate in the buffet of writing advice (after “show, don’t tell”).

I know because I’ve been an editor for more than 20 years. I’ve watched smart, talented writers spin their wheels on this exact problem.

The mistake many of us make

When a manuscript feels slow, most of us reach for the same lever: action. Add a chase scene. A fight. An explosion. Surely more stuff happening means faster pace, right?

Wrong. Action without tension is just motion. Imagine a pizza delivery guy. He’s zooming from place to place to place on his motorbike (or his beat up 2006 Honda Civic, who am I to judge?). He’s delivering pizzas. He hands off a pizza every six-and-a-half-minutes. Things are happening rapid fire but there’s no tension.

I’ve seen writers actively damage their manuscripts by adding action set pieces to try and speed the pace. Scenes that should have been tense but landed flat because the reader didn’t actually care about the outcome. Action as filler is worse than no action at all.

So if action isn’t tension, what is?

Tension is the gap between what the reader knows and what the reader wants

That’s it. Not action. Not conflict. Not even suspense (which is tension with a ticking clock).

Tension is uncertainty. It’s the reader leaning forward, not knowing whether or when or how the outcome they want will happen.

Unless you’ve written a novel in which the narrator is clairvoyant and the reader knows everything at all times, then every scene in your manuscript has tension. Either you put it there on purpose, or it’s there by accident. Either it’s working for you, or it’s working against you.

(I take that back: You could still have narrative tension even if the reader knows everything at all times. When the reader knows important information that the protagonist doesn’t have yet? Tension goldmine.)

Action without tension? That’s the pizza deliverator metaphor from above.

Tension without action? Totally possible. Imagine a romance novel. Will they kiss or won’t they? Maybe they’re just sitting on the sofa watching Netflix. Nobody is moving. No action is happening whatsoever. But the tension is crackling because the reader doesn’t know if their desired outcome (the kiss) is coming or not.

What I built (and why)

When I edit, I map tension in my head. I do it without thinking after 20 years of doing this. A graph of peaks and valleys, ranges and averages. When I tell an author, “this chapter is slow when it should be fast,” I’m not basing this feedback on vibes. I know when a middle sags or when a climax arrives too early or when a reader is going to put the book down and never pick it up again.

I’ve only recently figured out how to teach that intuition.

So I sat down and built the thing I wished for because it didn’t exist: a repeatable, concrete system for measuring and mapping narrative tension.

I call it The Tension Architect.

It’s a workbook that walks you through:

• A 1–10 tension rubric (no vibes, no guesswork)

• A scene-by-scene inventory of your manuscript

• A tension graph that reveals the shape of your narrative

• Named problem patterns (the Flatline, the Sawtooth, the False Summit, and more)

• A diagnostic and revision plan that tells you exactly what to fix

No more “the pacing feels off but I don’t know why.” No more adding explosions and hoping for the best.

You graph the problem so you can see its shape. Physically, with your eyeballs. Then you fix it.

The fishing pole

Here’s how I think about narrative tension.

• Your premise is the bait.

• Your conflict is the hook.

• The reader bites.

Then what? You don’t just let them sit there. You reel them in.

That’s what narrative tension does. It’s the fishing line connecting your hook to your hand. It’s the tool you use to pull your reader through your novel. Every scene either pulls the line tighter or lets it go slack.

The Tension Architect shows you exactly where your line is tight, where it’s loose, and where the fish might give up on your bait, however juicy and worm-y, and swim away entirely.

A quick example: The Shining

Stephen King’s The Shining is a masterclass in tension architecture.

Nothing supernatural happens for the first hundred pages. No hedge animals attacking. No roque mallet swinging. Just a family, an isolated hotel, and a slow, inexorable unraveling. But you feel it tightening like a blood pressure cuff around your arm.

Why?

Because King introduces threats long before they activate. The mallet appears early. The hedge animals are mentioned. The Overlook’s history is laid out. The reader knows something crucial that Jack doesn’t (tension goldmine, remember?).

Because that’s Chekhov’s roque mallet.

That gap—between what you know (that the Overlook is going to do something terrible to this family) and what you want (for the family to make it out safely and together)—is the tension. And it climbs. And climbs. And climbs.

That’s what “raise the stakes” actually looks like when someone shows you how.

One more thing (and why I’m telling you this)

The Tension Architect is a mini-workbook. It complements my system, The Editor’s Pass, which launches May 25.

If you buy this deep dive and later decide you want to upgrade to the complete system, I’ll discount the full price by exactly what you paid for this one. It has a coupon code on the last page.

Not because I’m generous (well, maybe a little). But because I think it’s fair. I don’t want you to feel like you wasted money if you upgrade. That’s it. That’s the whole reason. I have a whole thing about ethical business practices.

You can print this PDF once, twice, as many times as you need. You can use it with every manuscript, every revision. Mark it up all you want. You never have to buy it again.

The only question that matters

After reading this, I don’t need you to buy anything. I need you to ask yourself one question:

If I could see the shape of my manuscript’s tension—every peak, every valley, every flatline—would that help me?

If the answer is yes, you know where to find me.

If the answer is no, that’s okay too. But watch this space. Because I’ve got a lot of tools coming for the problems you do have.

I’m trying to find the right balance between giving you information in this Substack, for free, that you can truly use, and also offering you my paid content like The Tension Architect. If I’m getting it wrong, I hope you’ll reach out and let me know.

As always, I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for reading.

If you have questions that you’d like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you’d like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you’re enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.

Share Shelf Life

• The political climate is actively harming my life.

• I’ve been busy. Like, really busy. You would not believe how busy.

• I wanted to give myself a break. (Remember Science of Break-Taking?)

I had to give myself a little breathing room somewhere and Shelf Life yielded that breathing room.

Things have changed. I’m taking a sabbatical from the W2 life. I’m launching a business I can’t wait to write about. I have time to do the things I love, which includes writing Shelf Life. And in the two years I’ve been away, I’ve gained a tremendous amount of new knowledge to share with you.

Shelf Life’s original cadence was a hard-and-fast, twice-a-week, five-to-ten-minute read. I’m not going back to that rigidity. I’m still committed to delivering the valuable content you love to read; in the same irreverent voice you’ve come to, well, tolerate; with the same deep insights that help you sustain and improve your creative practice. I’m not committed to the every-single-Tuesday-and-Thursday delivery. When I have something valuable to share, you’ll get a Shelf Life. Free, as always, forever.

So, brace yourself for incoming Shelf Life. If you don’t already subscribe, now’s the time.

In the mean time, if you want to see what I’ve been up to:

I’m glad you’re here.

If you have questions that you’d like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you’d like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you’re enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.

Share Shelf Life

Life has felt like an adventure lately. I am ready for life to go back to being boring.

I’ve been reading a lot of adventure novels lately, mostly fantasy romance–style ones about people going on epic quests, and it got me thinking about the adventure genre generally and what’s so appealing about it. First, I’m not even sure I can call it a genre because it’s a type of story you can find in every genre. There is adventure fantasy (like The Hobbit), adventure science fiction (like Ancillary Justice), horror adventure (like Dark Matter)—there’s a whole subgenre of seafaring adventure like Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea—there’s adventure nonfiction like Into the Wild . . . adventure themes touch many kinds of book.

Regardless of genre, adventure stories all have a few things in common and these commonalities are what make them so appealing. If you’re writing an adventure story, you’re going to want to make sure your tale has all of the below, and plenty of each.

Danger

Every adventure story needs an element of danger. Personally, I don’t think this has to be physical danger—although that’s the easiest sell. Emotional danger propels a lot of romantic adventure stories and financial, legal, or political danger, likewise, fuels thrillers. The important thing is the protagonist has to be exposed to some sort of danger that threatens adverse consequences—usually serious ones, but in the case of “cozy” adventure the consequences could be more trivial.

The feeling of being in danger is universally understood. I dare say that literally every person has had the experience of feeling danger at some point. Maybe it was such an everyday thing as a near miss on the highway, or almost missing one’s flight, or catching a serious mistake in one’s work. It could be the perception of danger where there wasn’t any, really, like when I see a spider or find myself in a high place. I think we’ve all experienced the physical stress responses—the burst of adrenaline that supports the fight-or-flight impulse, the sweaty palms, the increased heart rate—that is our body signaling to us that we’re in danger. The hormonal response is Whoopi Goldberg in the movie Ghost (1990) and our brain is Demi Moore.

Because this sense of peril is universally relatable, imbuing your protagonist’s journey with danger in ample quantities will drag your reader right into the thick of things, which is just where you want them.

Risk

The protagonist must have something to lose.

It’s not enough that the protagonist has something to gain, although that may be what motivates them at the outset. The risk of losing something must join the fray at some point—some point before the midpoint, preferably—to ensure the protagonist cannot turn back and return to their status quo—whatever their status quo was before the inciting incident happened.

A protagonist might turn away from an opportunity to gain something when the going gets really, really tough. There has to be a risk of loss—an untenable loss—to keep the protagonist striving toward a resolution in their darkest times. Whatever it is the protagonist values most. That’s what should be at risk.

Opportunity 

The protagonist must have something to gain.

It’s not enough that the protagonist has an untenable loss in the cards if they don’t succeed, although they have to have that, too. There has to be something the protagonist can gain—that puts them in a better place or position than their original status quo—to satisfy the reader. In other words, it can’t be all doom and gloom—it can’t be all avoiding the worst possible outcome. There also has to be the hope of a reward if the protagonist is successful.

Risk and opportunity together equal the story’s stakes. Stakes are critical in any kind of story.

Uncertainty

Even if you, the reader, going into a story, know that it’s going to have a happy ending—for instance, when you’re reading a romance novel—uncertainty is required for adventure.

Danger, risk, and opportunity cannot exist without uncertainty. If the outcome of a situation is known to be safe? Danger can’t exist. If the outcome of a gamble is a sure thing? Risk doesn’t exist. Likewise, opportunity can’t exist when there’s no chance of failure—then it’s just a gain, not an opportunity.

Whatever your protagonist has going on in their adventure, you (the author) have a duty to inject uncertainty into the outcome. You have to craft the odds carefully: If the odds are so stacked against the protagonist that they can’t win, then you eliminate uncertainty—the reader knows a deus ex machina or some other cheat will have to save the day. But if you don’t stack the odds enough against your protagonist, then their success is a sure thing and the reader will get bored with the story early. 

The goal is to leave the slimmest possible odds of your protagonist succeeding without crushing the reader’s hope that they can pull through. Important distinction: Feel free to crush your protagonist’s hope that they can succeed. Just leave the reader a little thread.

Speed

The final thing every adventure story requires is a speedy pace. Fast-paced stories build excitement and dramatic tension that propel the reader through the story. An adventure story is a really hard sell if it’s told at a slow or even a medium pace. The danger, uncertainty, and risk—the adventure factors detailed above—are all heightened by a fast pace. Moving through the story quickly, and encountering new twists and turns at rapid intervals, leaves the reader with little time to reflect, chill out, and absorb. This is what you want in an adventure story—you want to engage the reader to experience it the same way your protagonist experiences it. Frantic, frenetic, fast, and furious. Keep the reader, like the protagonist, on the edge of their seat.

Pacing is something that’s best fine-tuned in revision. Don’t stress over it while you’re drafting if thinking about the pace could slow down your writing, but do ask alpha and beta readers to give you feedback on the pace and adjust for speed if they don’t describe your pacing as fast. Adventure isn’t for the faint of heart or the slow of pace.

If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

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We all want to make money. It’s a very human desire to see the things you worked hard on pay off for you. Not everybody writes for the joy of writing, or not only for the joy of writing. Some people write to make money, either as their sole reason for writing or as one of their reasons for writing. This is a totally good and appropriate reason to write.

Today’s Shelf Life is on the mathematics of making your self-published book pay you.

When it comes to making money off your book, there are factors within your control and there are factors outside your control. Inside your control are costs and price. Outside your control is the number of units sold. You cannot control how many copies you sell. If a company tells you they can guarantee a certain amount of book sales—for instance if you contract with them to do your book’s marketing?—they’re very likely scamming you. Trad publishers can’t guarantee book sales either. Nobody can guarantee units sold unless they’re actually offering to purchase those units themself.

You can control what it costs to make your book and the price at which you sell your book. This means what you can control is your contribution margin.

Contribution margin is a percent calculated by taking your revenue (the money you will make from the sale of your book), subtracting the variable costs (the money you spent to create your book), and then dividing by the revenue. To improve your contribution margin, you can raise the price of your book or decrease the cost of making your book. 

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re going self-publish your book on Amazon through the KDP program. If you spent zero money on editing, cover design, proofreading, layout, et cetera, then you might be thinking the cost to make the book was zero. However, if the list price of your book is $3.99 per copy, you do not earn $3.99 per copy. Amazon earns $3.99 per copy, of which they pay the author (you) a royalty of either 70% or 35% depending on the terms you choose, but let’s go with 70%. 

Amazon pays you a 70% royalty on the sale of the book, but in reality it’s just as correct to say that you pay Amazon 30% of the book’s list price to manage the sale for you. This is equivalent to a wholesaler’s discount if you were selling books via a distributor. 

So looking at it this way—let’s theorize that you sell one copy at $3.99. Your revenue is $3.99. That’s the money you made on the book. Your variable cost—the cost of selling the book—was $1.19. That’s the amount out of your $3.99 revenue that you paid to Amazon. To calculate your contribution margin, then, you would take:

($3.99 – $1.19) / $3.99 = 70%

Your contribution margin on this book was 70%. That’s obvious—because you paid 30% to Amazon and you kept 70% at the end of the day. Whether you sell 1 unit or 1 million units, if those terms stay the same then your contribution margin will remain the same at 70%. 

You’re no dummy. I said you could control the contribution margin by controlling your price, but no matter what you do with your price, this contribution margin stays the same—because Amazon’s take stays at 30% of whatever your list price is. True.

However, you’re unlikely to have only a fee to pay to Amazon calculating into your contribution margin. This is the simplest possible calculation in which you have no costs at all except for the cost of doing business through Amazon. But what if you spent $500 on cover design?

($3.99 - ($1.19 + $500.00)) / $3.99 = yikes

That is not a good margin—because you’re paying the entire cost of your cover design out of the sale of one book. What happens if you sell 500 books?

($3.99 - ($1.19 + $1.00)) / $3.99 = 45%

In this scenario, each unit sold (500 units) paid $1 toward the cost of cover design and $1.19 toward cost of doing business with Amazon. The more units you sell, the more units over which you can amortize the cost of creating the book. In this scenario, raising the list price also affects the margin. Let’s assume a list price of $5.99 and 500 copies sold.

($5.99 - ($1.79 + $1.00)) / $5.99 = 53%

The margin improves when the list price is increased if the costs remain the same. Likewise, consider a list price of $3.99, and 500 units sold, but you only spent $250 on the cover design:

($3.99 - ($1.19 + $.50)) / $3.99 = 57%

This tells us the margin would be improved more by cutting the cost of cover design in half than by raising the list price by $2.00.

You can use my handy and free Self Publishing P&L Sample to total up your costs. (For more information on the costs associated with self-publishing, check out Budgeting Your Self-Publishing Project, Part I and Part II.) 

Go ahead and open the sample profit-and-loss statement now and try it out. (Make a copy to edit the file.) Put in any money you’ve spent, or expect to spend, on your book, and enter the list price. Start with unit sales of 1 unit. I’ve followed our thought experiment so far—$250 for cover design, 30% to my retailer (Amazon), and a list price of $3.99. The outlook is grim—because the entire cost of the cover design couldn’t be absorbed by the sale of one unit, so in this scenario the author loses big.

Personally, I hope your book will make it big whether you choose to self-publish or publish traditionally. I hope you’ll be a breakout bestseller. But as you’re getting your start, if self-publishing is the path for you—or if you’re trying to figure out whether self-publishing is the path for you!—I trust you’ll find this explanation of publishing profit margins helpful and hopeful.

A healthy contribution margin would be somewhere around 70%. Take some time with the calculator to figure out how you’d have to price your book, how many units you’d have to sell, or how you’d have to cut your costs to come up with a healthy margin.

Spoiler alert: Without changing anything else, I see that I reach a healthy margin of 70% if I sell 300 units.

Now: I already stated—unequivocally—you can’t control how many books you sell. This remains true. However, you can predict—you can make an educated guess. Every author has to start with some kind of projection. I know if I put a book up for sale tomorrow, I could sell 10 copies. My family and friends would be good for 10 copies. Could I take 100 copies to the bank? Three hundred copies? No. 

However, if I knew I had to sell 300 units to make my book turn a comfortable profit, then I can work toward selling 300 copies over whatever amount of time I consider the book’s “selling lifetime.” Could be six months, could be 10 years, whatever.

The key is that profitability isn’t in how much money you make from the sales of your books, but a function of what proportion of that money was taken up by the cost of creating the book.

You can’t control the number of units you sell, but you can make a projection and a goal. Once you have that goal, you can develop a budget for your book and set your list price accordingly. It isn’t a bad idea to consider what your margin would look like at various lifetime total sales. Let’s say your goal is 300 lifetime sales to make the profit you want. What does your margin look like if you make 150 lifetime sales instead? At what number of unit sales will your book break out of the red and into the black, having paid back all its costs?

Today’s Shelf Life got it’s title from the razor-thin profit margins in the publishing industry. Many books don’t break even and pay for themselves. This is true in self-publishing and just as true in trad publishing, where bestsellers that bring in tons of revenue subsidize the cost of the books that don’t succeed.

If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

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A long time ago now, I reached the end of where I could advance in my role as a production editor at the place where I worked. The only way to continue to grow in my career at that company was to move up into management, so that’s what I did. The VP who promoted me into a management role said, “You will never lose more friends in one day than on the day you become a manager.” This turned out to be correct. I still have some friends from that workplace but mostly among people I never managed.

Over the years, I have considered whether I can find a position where I can move back into a functional role: Can I go back to being a production editor? The answer has been, consistently, no. I can’t make enough money in a functional editorial role. I always have a figure in mind that is the pay cut I’d be willing to take to return to a functional editorial role, but the pay cut I would have to take is always significantly more than that amount. The only roles I have been able to find for the last fifteen years that pay enough for me to consider have been management roles.

The issue I have with this is I do not see the personnel management skillset as inherently more valuable than the functional role skillset. I don’t really think others see it that way, either, if you ask them: All things considered, are managers more valuable than functional staff? And yet, organizations often—but not always—pay a premium for people managers.

My partner works in a federal government administration in an IT department. She has said to me more than once that I should apply for management roles in her organization. I don’t think I’d be good at that, because I don’t have an IT background. According to her, many of the managers in her organization do not—they’re expected to have just the personnel management skillset and need not have any background in the functional skillset of the people they manage. This is alien to me. I’ve always managed people who do the type of work I know how to do. 

But I’m bring this up because, in her organization, there’s differentiation between manager role and functional role. They’re not different seniority levels of the same thing. A personnel manager isn’t necessarily a skilled IT worker who has come to the top of their step-and-grade payscale and “graduated” to management. Her office seeks people with different skills for the personnel management role.

The other organization I want to bring up is Amazon, where several of my friends work or have worked. Amazon was having an issue with “brain drain” for this reason. Their best engineers were reaching the top of their salary cap and, wanting to earn more, moving into management—leaving the pool of functional engineers and entering the pool of personnel managers. Amazon found it made more sense to create a growth path for those who wished to stay in the functional role rather than move into management. You can move up through your functional technical path or you can move up through a management path. It’s “either or,” not “first one then the other.”

Some of the skills that make a good engineer probably cross over and contribute to being a good personnel manager. Likewise, some of the skills that make a good editor can cross over and make a good manager. However, not every good editor will be a good manager. Just because someone is at the top of their game in a functional role does not mean that they will be an excellent manager.

The Peter Principle states that everyone in an organization ultimately rises to the level of their incompetence. In short, a person who is good at their job will be promoted to a higher-level position that requires additional skills. If they’re good at that job, the process will repeat—and will continue to repeat until the person is promoted to a job they’re not good at, and then they will not be promoted further.

A great way to “Peter Principle” somebody in the workplace is to promote them to management when they don’t have an aptitude for or an interest in management, simply because they were good in their functional role. The functional role often requires different—and sometimes vastly different—skills than the management role. When you promote someone thus, you’re gambling on whether they’ll be good at the skills required to be a manager. And if not—there they’ll stay, not doing right by the workers who report to them.

I’ve been in a situation with a boss who I believe was “Peter Principled” into her management role. She had been with the company a long time, and was personally well-liked, but hopelessly out of her depth in the leadership role into which she’d been shuffled. Her direct reports (including me) were also personnel managers, and she over-relied on us—on me at least—to bolster her management performance. Her oversights or failures with her own boss were shrugged off as a failure or oversight of one of the managers under her. Unsurprisingly, once I left, I found out she had been shuffled out of that role and into some other management role shortly after. She continued to be shuffled around the organization until her retirement.

But she had been a brilliant editor. Well-liked by her peers and the company’s client and extremely effective at her job. That glow of good performance followed her into her leadership role, which had executives scratching their heads. “She was so good, what happened?” Not everyone who is excellent in their functional role will be excellent in management.

I humbly think I’m pretty good at personnel management but where I have excelled the most is in workflow management and continuous process improvement, which is part of an editorial management role. I’m fortunate that moving into management allowed me to do the work I’m best at. If I had been offered the choice, twenty years ago, to continue as an editor in an increasingly responsible and increasingly well-compensated functional role versus moving into management to reengage my stalled career, I likely would have taken the first option. I might also still be with the company that had given me that option, two decades on.

But the good news about having migrated to a leadership role is, I’m in a position to make the business case for a career path that allows a functional role to grow and develop parallel to the management path. I have attempted this, with varying levels of success, everyplace I’ve worked since I worked for the Peter Principled boss.

If you find yourself in a position where your career is stalling and the only way to get it moving again seems to be a move up into management, ask yourself if you actually want to go into management or if you just want the opportunity for growth, development, and advancement. If the latter, ask your organization’s leadership what opportunities they can provide for you to continue to grow on the functional role path, rather than the management role path. Or look for an organization where this is a possibility for you.

Personnel management isn’t the pinnacle of every job. Don’t get shoehorned into it just because you’re good at whatever you do.

If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.

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All you can do is all you can do.

What I mean is, it’s impossible for you to do more than what you can do. There’s no point in trying to do more than what you can do and, importantly, there’s no point in feeling bad about not being able to do more than you can do. All you can do is all you can do. If you did all you can, that’s all you can do.

It’s shocking, to me at least, how many people don’t internalize this as a truth and, after doing all they can do, feel discouraged or regretful that they cannot or did not do more.

Not everyone can do everything. I often give in to the belief that if I can do something, anyone can do that thing. After all I am the least competent person I know so if I can do something then obviously anyone can do that thing. This is not remotely true. For instance, I can hit all the notes in “Take On Me” by A-ha. Most people cannot.

I was not born able to do this. Babies can’t sing. Vocal range is determined by two things: One is the anatomy of your vocal apparatus and the other is training or practice. Each factor limits the other. You cannot develop your voice past what your vocal anatomy will allow. And without development, your voice can’t reach the limit of what your vocal anatomy will allow. A person might be able to get a whole additional octave through training and development but if you started with three octaves, no amount of training will get you to five. Likewise, if you start with four and never develop your voice, you’ll always, only, have four.

Because I was naturally born with a voice apparatus that supports a decent amount of notes and then practiced a lot, I can do a neat party trick at Karaoke night that a lot of people can’t.

On the other hand, I am not athletically gifted. Neither have I taken a consistent approach to developing my athleticism. There have been a few times in my life where I have devoted months or years to trying to learn a sport. I did it once with kickboxing and once with roller derby. What I learned was that no matter how much work I put in, and for however long I put in that work, I will never be as good at a sport as someone who is putting in the same amount of work and is athletically gifted. There is no amount of effort that can turn me into a great athlete just like there’s no amount of vocal training that can completely supersede the reality of someone’s laryngeal anatomy.

All you can do is all you can do.

Okay so one more thing about me: I am, if not good at singing, then at least gifted with a decent range. And I am not athletically gifted. Third thing is, I’m incredibly depressed. Chronically and in spite of taking enough psychiatric medication to knock out an elephant—which helps but doesn’t completely alleviate the symptoms. 

Sometimes I can’t do something, not because it’s physically impossible for me like jumping four feet in the air like Michael Jordan or singing across five octaves like Morten Harket, but because I cannot summon the motivation to do that thing, no matter how much I want to. This is also a limitation on what I’m able to do. This is why depression is a disability.

I was talking with someone today about a situation that took place several months ago and we both expressed that we should have done more at the time to address the situation because now it’s several months hence and we’re mopping it up. However, it’s impossible to say whether we could have done more in the past, even given the benefit of hindsight. So that’s the last factor of this platitude. Sometimes you might look back and think, “I could have done more,” but as long as you know you put your best effort into something you can feel confident that whatever you did was all you could do. 

It’s very easy to Monday-morning-quarterback yourself and list all the stuff you could have done differently, but all you could do at the time was probably all you could do. If you could have done more at the time, and chose not to do more, then you knew that at that time. Six-months-later you shouldn’t be allowed to make that judgment on six-months-ago you.

Anyway, as I was saying earlier, I always think that if I can do something then anyone can do it. We have established that this is not true. But most of us have some level of facility with writing. If you’re reading this Shelf Life, you are literate. You have the ability to read and write words. It’s not a natural ability, by the way, but an acquired one. Nobody is born literate. You may be born with the anatomy to hold a pen and the eye-hand coordination to write letters but you’re not born knowing what those letters are.

Most of us are at least at this baseline of “can write words.” You can think words and then you can write them. This is the level of facility of writing you need to write an email.

Then there are the all-time great prose stylists. Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, and probably lots of other dead white people whose names start with J. And Ernest Hemingway, we musn’t forget him. There are writers we are able to hold up as paragons of the written narrative and say, “these folks are the best of best. They have taken the skill of writing as far as we know it can go.” I spend a lot of time thinking about how one develops their skill to go from point A to point B. 

Writing is not the same as athleticism or vocal range. Both of those depend, to some degree, on anatomy. An average person might be able to jump one foot straight up and a professional basketball player at the peak of their athleticism might be able to jump four feet straight up. The basketball player was, at some point, an average person who trained their ability to jump. The height of their jump is ultimately limited by their anatomy—how dense their muscles, how tall they are, and so on.

One’s ability to write well is not limited by any part of human anatomy. It’s only limited by the mind. On the flip side of that, though, writing well can’t be measured. It’s not like we can measure the quality of writing like we can measure the height of a jump or the range of someone’s voice.

No one is going to come behind you and say, “this writing has reached the limits of a human’s ability to write well.” I mean maybe if they give you the Nobel that’s what they’re saying to you. But the only person who can determine whether you’ve reached the limit of your ability to write is you. You have the authority to say, “this is all I can do, which is all I can do.” Or to say, “this is not all I can do; I can do more.”

Somewhere out there is the single human being who is best at a specific, given thing. Someone out there has the potential to jump higher than anyone else. Someone out there has, potentially, the greatest vocal range of our species (it’s probably Mike Patton). Someone out there must be the best writer, with the potential to write better than anyone else. For all we know, it could be you.

I am always saying some dog out there must be the softest dog out of all the dogs there are, and there’s no reason to think it’s not my dog Maxine.

But you also have to make room to be kind to yourself. Sometimes you have to be willing to say:

• I can’t write this story any better than I have, this is the best I can do.

• I don’t feel like writing today, I’m going to take a rest.

• I’ve written all I can write for right now, I’m stopping.

All you can do is all you can do.

If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.

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