Nobody asks painters why they paint. Nobody corners a sculptor at a cocktail party and says, genuinely, “But why sculpture?” Writers get this constantly. Why writing? Why words? Why not something you can hang on a wall?

It’s a fair question. I’ve been sitting with it.

A painting exists in one place. You have to go to it. Words go wherever you go. They’re portable. They live in someone’s head, in the dark, on a Friday at 3 am when nothing else is there. That’s not nothing. That’s actually the whole thing.

But there’s something more specific I keep coming back to. Writing is the only medium where the experience of receiving it is made of the same material as the experience of making it. A reader doesn’t watch words happen. They perform them, silently, in their own voice. The sentence I write and the sentence you read are the same sentence doing two different jobs at once. I don’t know what the equivalent of that is in any other form.

So that’s part of it. The medium itself is the reason.

Here’s the other part, which is more embarrassing to admit.

I don’t love writing. I love having written.

Writing is the part where I’m arguing with a sentence, deleting a paragraph I spent forty minutes on, convinced that whatever I’m trying to say is either obvious or unsayable and possibly both. It’s not pleasurable. It’s necessary in the way that other unpleasant necessary things are necessary.

Having written is different. Having written is the relief of translation. The stray thought I’ve been circling for three weeks, the feeling I couldn’t name, the thing that happened that I didn’t know what to do with — it’s outside my head now. Fixed. It exists somewhere other than the place I was trying to carry it.

It wasn’t just a passing moment anymore.

That’s what I’m doing when I write. I’m converting the perishable into something that keeps. Not forever. Nothing keeps forever. But longer than a feeling lasts on its own, which is long enough.

Someone once asked me if I was afraid of being misunderstood. I said yes, but not as afraid as I am of being unread. The misunderstanding at least means someone got there.

Why didn’t I paint a picture? I don’t know. Maybe I would have, if I’d been wired differently. Maybe the whole thing is just temperament, the way some people think in images and some people think in sentences, and most people don’t know which they are until they’ve already committed.

I think in sentences. Always have. They show up before I’ve decided to think about anything. That’s not a skill. That’s just how it works in here.

Writing them down is the only way to stop carrying them around.

A Fiction Break

The Snap Trap

By Liz Dubelman

The rainy season in Los Angeles had begun. Ellis found the droppings on a Tuesday morning, a scatter of pellets under the cabinet below the kitchen sink. She stood there in her socks for a long time.

She had been through this before. A little less than a year ago, the same thing. She’d called her landlord Isaac, an Iranian Jew who preferred to be called Persian, and he’d sent five exterminators in for estimates over three weeks. Each one had a story. A baby, half-eaten. A family of rats walking through an open front door like a gang. Ellis had eventually stopped eating and started sleeping with the lights on, and when she called Isaac to report the latest horror, she could hear him laughing on the other end of the phone.

She was not doing that again. She called Hanley Pest Control directly. Still under warranty. The girl on the phone said the rat guy would come between noon and four.

Ellis made coffee. She had been unemployed for almost four months. Her father’s estate wasn’t settled. It was December in Los Angeles, which meant grey sky and a specific indoor cold that the city’s houses weren’t built for. She sat on the counter in her coat and did the crossword.

Her father Lester used to do the Monday crossword only. Ellis hadn’t known why until college, when someone explained that Monday was the easiest and they got harder through the week. This had made her laugh for three days. Today it made her put the pen down.

The phone rang. Jenny.

“Hi, it’s Ellis.”

“Like I don’t know your voice.”

Jenny sounded terrible. Something about money she’d lent Joe, forty-three hundred fifty dollars, four thousand for the bills and three-fifty for Hebrew school, and now Joe was saying she made too many calls to her family, and the phone bill was her problem.

“My father just died. I need my family.”

Our father, Ellis thought.

“Joe’s an insensitive prick. He told me, in front of the kids, that he’d pay me back in pennies and shove each one up my ass.”

Ellis laughed. She couldn’t help it.

“Stop that. It’s not funny.”

“I’ll call you back,” Ellis said. “I’m dealing with a rodent situation.”

She hung up and sat with her coffee. The rat had made her want an older sister. She’d forgotten, briefly, that the older sister she had was the one she’d just hung up on.

The annulment letter had come three weeks earlier, from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. She’d opened it standing at the postal box on Ventura. Tristan. She hadn’t thought about Tristan in years.

She’d met him in Washington Square Park in 1986. He was playing speed chess against an old man, slapping the clock with one hand, sweeping his hair off his forehead with the other. She was twenty-three with a Betty Page haircut and a fuck-you veneer. They had sex within hours of meeting.

Six months later, on his twenty-first birthday, he proposed. Sapphire and diamond band. Three days after that, City Hall.

She took him to New Jersey to meet her parents. Lester answered the door bare-chested in his underwear. Ben was in the kitchen eating carrots and oranges. It was an orange day. He was on a color-coordinated diet of his own invention, based on the principle that light is a powerful force and one should pay homage to it. He called it the Prism Diet. Tristan sat down with Ben and tried, with real effort, to understand it.

Then Lester appeared behind Ellis like a change in air pressure.

He looked at Tristan. “Hey, Mick.”

“Excuse me, sir. The name’s Tristan. Tristan Delaney.”

Lester turned to Ellis. “He’s an idiot.” Then back to Tristan: “Who are you? What do you do? What do your parents do?”

Tristan led with the most impressive fact. “My father’s a doctor, sir. A brain surgeon.”

“I hate fucking doctors. Brain surgeon. He thinks he’s God.” Lester looked at Ellis. “Does he know you’re shtupping a Jew? Didn’t tell him that, did you? Don’t tell them much, do you?”

Ellis watched Tristan’s face. He had no idea what to do. She hadn’t either. They had inflated a lifeboat together with not much more than the kinetic energy of sex, and she could see the air going out of it.

“Stop it,” she said. “Come on, we’re leaving.” She grabbed Tristan by the arm. Lester’s voice followed them all the way to the bus stop.

They were divorced within a year.

Now Tristan was getting married again and wanted the Catholic Church to pretend the first marriage hadn’t happened. The grounds, according to a Sister Elizabeth at the Archdiocese, were lack of due discretion. One or both partners had lacked the maturity to give valid consent at the time of the wedding, or to fully accept the accompanying obligations of married life.

Ellis said she had no objections. She wished Dr. Delaney the best.

The rat had been in the walls at least a week, judging by the droppings. Ellis had a recurring nightmare about rats: one had latched onto some part of her, her fingers, her nose, sometimes her lips, and would not let go. In one version she beat it until it decomposed and it still held on. In another, she pulled its tail, and it peeled inside out like something from a Max Fleischer cartoon and kept its grip.

She’d had the dream three nights running.

At two-thirty, a knock.

The rat guy from Hanley crouched under the sink, under the cabinets, then stood up and brushed off his knees. Two entry points. One near the pipe fitting, one in the baseboard behind the trash can.

“What kind of trap do you want?” he said. “Sticky, snap, or poison.”

He explained the sticky. Safe if you had a kid or a pet. Ellis had neither.

He preferred the snap. He had a pocket full of little square plastic containers of grape jelly, the kind from a coffee shop. Bait. He said a rat couldn’t resist it.

Lester used to eat grape jelly and cream cheese on challah. Sunday mornings. He’d lick the jelly off his fingers one at a time.

“Or there’s the poison,” the rat guy said.

The active ingredient was Coumadin. A blood thinner. People took it when they were predisposed to strokes. Rats ate it, their lungs hemorrhaged, and they crawled off somewhere and died.

Ellis’s father had taken Coumadin. He’d been on it since his hernia operation, after a mini-stroke, and he’d been getting it refilled without a prescription because the pharmacist liked him and because Lester was terrified of dying. He left a dish of it on the counter, the way some people leave out a dish of mints.

A mouse had eaten it. Lester found the mouse dying and convinced himself the house was infested. He called the health department. He called three exterminators, none of whom could come until the end of the week. He called his doctor in full panic. On the third day, the day before the exterminator was due, he had a heart attack.

Ellis looked at the rat guy.

She thought about a concert in 1986. Elvis Costello. She and Tristan in the dark, and Tristan asking when she felt best. She’d said: right now, at this concert, because Elvis writes how I feel. Tristan had said she needed to string these moments together, until one day her whole life was Elvis moments and she was just gliding through time.

She still believed that. She just hadn’t expected it to take this long.

“The snap,” she said.

The rat guy smiled. He went back down under the cabinet. She heard him tearing open the little plastic containers. The smell of grape jelly moved through the kitchen.

She picked up the crossword.

The other day I was invited to a private club. Two things I noticed: butter yellow is the color of the summer, and the books had been chosen by someone with a very specific idea of who was coming.

The Virgin Suicides.
Just Kids.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
The Bell Jar.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

Just to name a few. But you already see it, don’t you. Every one of those is a woman coming apart, beautifully. Nobody said that out loud. Nobody had to. Somebody built that shelf the way you build a playlist, and what it says is: this is a place for people who feel things. Also: the drinks are expensive.

I don’t say that as a criticism. I say it as an observation about what books are being asked to do lately, which is not, primarily, to be read.

Which brings me to my bookstore.

I live in Santa Monica, and Zibby’s is the closest one to me. The books there aren’t shelved alphabetically. They’re shelved by emotion. You don’t walk in looking for an author. You walk in and answer a question: How do you want to feel? Do you need a laugh? A cry? A wank?

The first time, this struck me as a gimmick. Then I watched people use it, and I understood I had it backwards. Nobody browsing a bookstore on a Saturday afternoon knows what they want. They know how they feel, and they know how they’d like to feel instead, and the distance between those two things is the entire transaction. Alphabetical order serves people who already have the answer. Emotional order serves everyone else.

Then last week I went to a salon about a book — a real salon, with a discussion and spectacular food and every fashion girlie in the greater Los Angeles area. The book was Dress, Dreams, and Desire: A History of Fashion and Psychoanalysis, by Valerie Steele, who runs the museum at FIT and whom Suzy Menkes once called the Freud of fashion. She argues that clothing is a deep surface: we are all saying something with what we put on, and none of us fully knows what.

It was free. It was packed.

Steele would have had a field day with that shelf at the club.

Nobody was at the salon because they’d been advertised at. They were there because a book had been turned into a room you could stand in.

Here is what I think is happening, and I like it.

For about fifteen years, the industry’s answer to how do people find books was: the algorithm will handle it. Also read. Customers who bought this. A thumbnail the size of a postage stamp, ranked against nine hundred thousand other thumbnails. That system is very good at selling you the book adjacent to the book you already bought, and very bad at the thing that actually makes someone pick up a novel — which is a feeling arriving before a reason.

And now, quietly, the feeling is coming back. Bookstores organized by mood. Clubs curating shelves like they curate the lighting. Salons and supper clubs and reading parties. Book as invitation. Book as room. Book as this is what it’s like in here, come see.

I know why some of this makes writers itchy. It looks like books being used as props. Sometimes it is. That butter-yellow club is not, I suspect, hosting a close reading of Plath.

But I’d take it. Because the alternative — the one we just lived through — was books as content. Interchangeable units, sorted by metadata, competing on price and thumbnail contrast. At least a prop is a thing somebody wanted in the room.

And here’s the part that matters if you’re the one who wrote the book.

None of this is happening in a category. It’s happening in a feeling. Nobody at that club chose literary fiction, coming of age. They chose beautiful and slightly unwell. Nobody at Zibby’s is looking for contemporary romance. They’re looking for I would like to be delighted for four hours.

You have been trained to describe your book the way a database describes it. Genre, comp titles, word count, shelf placement. That’s the language of logistics, and logistics has never sold anyone anything.

The question the room is actually asking is the one on the shelf tags.

How do you want to feel?

Answer that one. In your book description, in your newsletter, in the thing you say when someone at a party asks what you write. That’s the answer that gets you into the room.

Something is going on with books.

For generations, artists were handed a false choice: Be pure or be visible. Be serious or be successful. Make art or sell out.

This binary thinking has done more damage to writers than any algorithm ever could.

A Whole Artist understands something simple and radical: creativity doesn’t end when you type “The End.” That’s just when it changes form. The instinct that knows how to build a scene also knows how to frame an invitation. Every newsletter, every caption, every event is a small act of storytelling. You already have the skill. You just haven’t been told that it counts.

Marketing is not the enemy of art. It’s the amplifier. Strategy is not a betrayal of creativity. It’s how creativity survives.

At its core, marketing is empathy.

The Two Versions of You Are Not Enemies

Let’s be honest about the split personality many writers live with.

One version of you writes luminous sentences, often at unreasonable hours. The other Googles “How to promote a book without losing dignity.” One has a vision. The other can’t even commit to a consistent coffee order, let alone a content calendar.

You are not broken. You are contemporary.

The beautiful truth is that art is collaboration disguised as solitude. You think you’re alone with your laptop at 3 a.m., but you’re actually in a quiet conversation with future readers who don’t know yet that they need your words. Both versions of you are working toward the same thing. They just need to be introduced.

On “Personal Branding” (And Why It Doesn’t Have to Make You Want to Lie Down)
Last year, a marketing article titled “10 Steps to Building Your Author Brand” made me immediately close my computer. Not because the advice was bad; it was perfectly fine, but because the phrase “author brand” can make a writer feel like they’re supposed to incorporate themselves as a small business.

Here is what the branding guides don’t mention: Your “brand” as a writer is just your voice. The way you see things. The particular combination of subjects that obsess you. The sentences you can’t help writing.

That’s already yours. You’ve been building it every time you’ve written.

What readers actually care about is not your color palette or your optimized LinkedIn headline. They care whether the thing you wrote made them feel something — whether it was funny or sad or true in a way that made them think, “Oh yes. That!” Your brand is the consistent thread of “That!” Nothing more complicated than that.

So, here is my practical permission. Do the minimum that lets you be findable, and spend the rest of your energy on the work. A website that doesn’t embarrass you. A bio that sounds like a human wrote it. One place online where you show up when you actually have something to say, rather than forcing content because it’s been a week and the algorithm demands a sacrifice.

Consistency beats complexity. You don’t need to be everywhere. You just need to be somewhere that makes sense. I said marketing is empathy. Let me show my work.

When you write a scene, you’re doing something almost unconscious: imagining how it lands. You feel the reader turning the page. You know where they’ll get bored, where they’ll get suspicious, where they’ll need a breath. You have never met this person, and you are building the entire thing around them.

That’s empathy. You do it constantly. You are extremely good at it.

Marketing is the same act, pointed at a different moment. Not the moment someone is reading your book — the moment before. The moment they’re standing in a store holding two things and deciding. Or scrolling at eleven at night, half-tired, one thumb. Or hearing your name for the first time from someone they trust.

Your job in that moment isn’t to be impressive. It’s to be recognizable to the right person.

Which is why the marketing that feels worst is almost always the marketing that’s secretly about you. I wrote a book. Please buy it. Here’s my launch day. Those are requests. They ask a stranger to care about your project on your behalf, and most strangers, reasonably, don’t.

The fix isn’t to get slicker. It’s to turn around. What is this person carrying? What are they looking for and not finding? What would make them think, oh — that one, that’s mine?

A book description isn’t a summary. It’s a hand raised in a crowded room, aimed at specific people.

There’s a version of this that curdles, and it’s worth naming. “Know your audience” can mean paying attention, or it can mean locating the pressure point and leaning on it — manufactured urgency, engineered outrage, a countdown timer on nothing. The difference is whether you’re serving the person or extracting from them. You’ll know which one you’re doing. You always know.

And here’s the part that matters most: if marketing is empathy, the skill it asks for isn’t confidence. It’s attention.

Which is good news, because most writers are dreadful at confidence and extraordinary at attention. You notice how people talk. You notice what they’re not saying. You have spent your whole life watching.

Nobody told you that counts as a qualification. It’s the only one that ever did.

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A Fiction Break

A Very Good Sign

By Liz Dubelman

In early March, Mary and Tom started hearing more about the virus. Bulletins flashed across her phone about masks and not touching your face. She tried to order hand sanitizer, failed, and timed what twenty seconds of handwashing felt like. It was longer than she expected.

Her anxiety was like a dandelion — growing, blossoming, going to seed, spreading, so that the whole process started over every hour or so, like a timelapse film. She had never expected her life to become so irreversible.

They had recently downsized. The kids were gone and they were going to travel, so now they lived in a one-bedroom in Los Angeles that ran the length of the building. Good light, hardwood floors. Mary had filled it with colors that reminded her of Aix-en-Provence, not that they had ever been there. That had been the dream when they were first married: a big house in Aix, gardens, walking out in the evening to hear the Musique dans la Rue. It was the kind of dream you could keep for thirty years precisely because you never went.

Tom had gamified his life. Everything was good guys and bad guys and he was always on the good team, and people loved him for it. It was restful to be near. It was also, Mary had come to understand, a way of never being asked a second question.

They had married right out of college because they needed a celebration and a wedding was good enough. He had been aloof since their son was born, or before — she couldn’t place it. The only love she was certain of was what she felt for the children, that willingness to go second. By that measure she did not love Tom, and had not for some time.

When the lockdown order came on March 15th, Mary understood that she had missed her chance to ask.

He was not a bad person to be locked down with. He planned the grocery trips carefully. He did the laundry — he had always done the laundry, since the first apartment, folding her things the way she liked without ever having been told, and in thirty years she had never once wondered where a man learns to be that careful with someone. She cooked. She kept up with the children and reported back. They were alone together, which is a concentration of loneliness, and she could feel the whole meadow intertwining with her insides.

Once, in April, she came out of the bedroom and found him sitting in the dark with the television off. He said he was listening to the neighbors. She let it go. It was April. Everyone was strange in April.

Mary instituted cocktail hour. At five she made a small pitcher and mini hors d’oeuvres, and Tom talked. One evening it was the forests — how they were federal land, therefore a federal responsibility, therefore not California’s fault. Mary looked at the window, which had been cloudless and too blue since Tuesday, all that traffic gone, and thought: the whole sky has changed and you’re telling me whose fault the trees are.

She didn’t say it. That was the marriage, more or less.

June second was their thirtieth anniversary. The plan had been to drive up the coast. Instead it was the day of the protest and then the riot, and the Mayor had issued a curfew.

Mary made a pitcher of peach iced tea and vodka and asked Tom to sit with her in the living room. The glasses were sweating. Condensation pooled on the table and she watched it spread and did not wipe it up.

Tom took a long pull on his glass.

“Tom, there’s no good way to say this, but it’s not working.”

He stared straight ahead at nothing, unblinking. Mary thought he had had a stroke.

“Honey?”

He nodded.

“I think we should figure out how to separate.” Nothing. She took a big inhale. “Divorce.”

Tears ran down Tom’s face. He covered it with his hands. Mary tried to remember the last time she had seen Tom cry. The first miscarriage. He had cried in the car, afterward, not in the room.

Tom got up and walked across the room, putting distance between them, just in case. “Is it because of the affair? Because that’s over. I know who I am now.”

The dandelions caught fire.

“Fuck you. Who is she?”

Tom tilted his head. He looked at her the way he looked at the crossword when the answer had been sitting there the whole time.

“Oh, Mary,” he said. “Not her. Him.”

She went through it. The only man Tom had ever been close to was Gerry, his business partner, and Gerry had been dead ten years. She remembered how inconsolable Tom had been through the long illness. How he spent nights at the house to give Gerry’s wife a break. She remembered thinking it was sweet, that her husband had that much in him.

“Gerry?”

“I never loved anyone but you and Gerry.”

“And the children?”

“Of course I love the children.”

“No. Do they know?”

“No. I wanted to tell them. I didn’t think it would win me father of the year.”

“Gerry’s wife knew.”

“Of course she knew.” He said it gently, which was worse. “I always thought you knew.”

Mary picked up the blue vase with the morning glories in it and threw it at his head.

He went down. She had never done anything like this before. She was heartbroken, and a little more sure of herself — at least there was a reason she had only ever felt half-loved.

She crossed the room. He looked peaceful, surrounded by flowers and small splashes of water. She lay down next to him on the black-and-white linoleum and held his hand. He was breathing. There was no blood, which she took as a very good sign.

I know who I am now. He had said it like it was good news. Like she would want to be glad for him.

Tom was starting to come around. Mary made a silent deal with god: if Tom wakes up, she’ll forget the affair. She’ll be satisfied that she’s not crazy, there were things to discuss, and if he doesn’t, c’est la vie.

Someone told me recently that they felt like they were “doing publishing wrong.”

They had written a book — a real one, a good one, years in the making. They had an agent. The book was on submission. And instead of feeling excited, they felt like they were standing in the middle of a crowded room where everyone else understood the rules, and they had somehow missed the orientation.

I know this feeling. Most writers know this feeling. And the reason it’s so disorienting isn’t because publishing is complicated — though it is — it’s because publishing is an ecosystem. A living, interconnected thing where every part responds to every other part. And most writers don’t find this out until they’re already inside it.

What the Ecosystem Actually Is

Let’s map it, briefly, without the jargon.

At the center is the work itself — the manuscript, the essay, the newsletter, the poem. Around it: the editors who shape it, the agents who represent it, the publishers who release it, the publicists who (sometimes) promote it, the critics who have opinions about it, the algorithms that decide who sees it, the readers who either find it or don’t.

But here’s the part nobody tells you at the beginning: all of these players are in constant conversation with each other, and very little of that conversation involves you.

Publishers follow what’s selling. Agents follow what publishers want. Editors greenlight what agents can sell. Readers find what the algorithm surfaces. Critics write about what’s visible. And underneath it all, trends cycle through like weather — autofiction, then memoir, then autofiction again; “elevated genre,” then “cozy,” then something else that doesn’t have a name yet but will in six months.

It can feel, from the inside, like an echo chamber. The same voices, the same aesthetics, the same books about the same experiences winning the same prizes and appearing on the same lists. And writers — especially newer ones — can start to wonder: Where do I fit in this?

The honest answer is: wherever you decide to stand.

The Part That’s Yours

Here’s what the ecosystem doesn’t control: the work itself.

I know that sounds obvious. But writers lose sight of it constantly, because publishing moves fast and it’s loud and there’s always someone online explaining what the market wants right now and why your last idea was fine but have you considered pivoting to something more like that?

Your job is not to chase the echo. Your job is to create the original sound.

This doesn’t mean you ignore the market entirely — that’s a different kind of naive. It means you understand the ecosystem without being consumed by it. You learn how it works the same way you learn the rules of a form you’re writing in: so you can break them intentionally, not accidentally.

Here’s the thing about ecosystems: they need biodiversity to stay healthy. They actually need things that aren’t like everything else. The publishing industry, for all its homogenizing tendencies, has always — eventually — made room for the thing that didn’t fit. Often reluctantly, sometimes too late, but it gets there. Because readers are tired of the echo too.

Navigating It Without Losing Yourself

A few things I’ve learned, having been inside this ecosystem in various capacities for a very long time:

The rules change, but people don’t. Publishing trends are genuinely unpredictable. What doesn’t change is that readers want to feel something. Curious, understood, delighted, gutted, seen. Write toward the feeling, not the trend.

The ecosystem rewards persistence in weird ways. A book that doesn’t find its readers today might find them in five years. An essay that goes unnoticed on its original platform sometimes finds its audience somewhere else entirely. Things circulate. The ecosystem has more patience than it appears to, as long as you do too.

Your platform is actually your insulation. A newsletter, a Substack, a small but loyal readership — these things matter not just for marketing (though they do matter for marketing), but because they give you a direct line to your readers that bypasses the ecosystem entirely. That’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.

You are allowed to opt out of parts you hate. You don’t have to be on every platform. You don’t have to play the game on every front simultaneously. The writers who last are the ones who found the version of this that they could sustain — not the ones who did everything and burned out trying.

The Echo You Actually Want to Create

There’s a version of the “echo system” that I find worth thinking about.

Every piece of writing creates an echo. It goes out, and if it lands, it bounces back — in the form of a reader who reaches out to say yes, that, a conversation it starts, an idea it unlocks in someone who passes it on. That echo is slower and quieter than the publishing industry’s version, but it lasts longer.

The writers who have shaped me most are not necessarily the ones who were loudest in the ecosystem when their books came out. They’re the ones whose words found me anyway — via a recommendation, a used bookstore, a friend who pressed a book into my hands and said I don’t know why but I think you need this.

That’s the echo I’m trying to make. Something that keeps traveling. Something with enough signal to cut through the noise.

You can be strategic about publishing and still want that. You can understand the ecosystem and still refuse to be defined by it. These things are not in conflict.

The ecosystem is the terrain. The work is the map. You decide where you’re going.

Tell me: where are you in the ecosystem right now? Just starting out, mid-journey, or somewhere you didn’t expect to land? I read every reply.

A Fiction Break

by Liz Dubelman

Of Course

Her mother had been dying for eleven months. The doctors said six weeks. They were bad at math.

When it finally happened—a Tuesday, three in the afternoon, while her brother was in the cafeteria getting a sandwich he didn’t eat—her aunt called to say she couldn’t believe it.

She couldn’t believe it either, which was the problem.

She had googled the stages of dying. She had read Being Mortal. She had sat with a hospice nurse who explained what the breathing would sound like at the end, and she had listened, and she had nodded, and she had written nothing down because she thought she would remember. She didn’t remember. She had to Google it again at 2 am when the breathing started.

And still. Still.

She had gone to the hospital every day for eleven months, and still it felt like something had gone wrong. Like a mistake had been made. Like someone was going to come in and say, actually, we’re very sorry, we made an error, here is your mother.

At the funeral, a man she didn’t recognize told her he was so sorry for her loss. He said it twice. He had the look of a person who had never considered that this could happen—that people could be there and then not there—and his surprise was so genuine she almost believed him. Almost believed it was surprising.

She thought about the conversation they were going to have. The trip they kept meaning to take to Greece. The thing her mother had wanted to tell her, waiting until she felt better to say it. She didn’t feel better. So she never said it.

She thought about the sandwich her brother didn’t eat. It was a BLT on sourdough with Mayo wrapped in cling film, now rotting in a garbage bin.

She stood at the edge of the grave in shoes that hurt her feet and thought: of course. Of course. I knew this. I have always known this.

And still.

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There’s a question people ask at parties, on first dates, and in the opening minutes of every networking event that has ever made me want to hide behind the cheese plate:

“So, what do you do?”

The honest answer — the real, full, complicated answer — is: so many things that I’m not sure where to start.

I’m a writer. I’m also an entrepreneur. A mother. A wife. An artist. A book coach. A marketer. A teacher. Depending on the day, I am also chief snack procurer, amateur therapist, and person who googles things at 11 p.m. that no single job title would explain.

And for a long time, I felt like I was supposed to pick one. To get my story straight. To sand down all the interesting edges and hand someone a clean, laminated version of myself.

I’m done with that. And I think you should be, too.

The One-Sentence Trap

We’ve been conditioned to believe that a person who does many things is somehow less credible than a person who does one thing very loudly.

This is not true. It is, in fact, the opposite of true.

The most interesting people I know — the ones doing the most meaningful work — are always a combination. The therapist who is also a fiction writer. The chef who is also a community organizer. The teacher who is also a painter. The entrepreneur who is also a mother, which means she is also a project manager, a mediator, a nurse, and someone who can find literally anything in the house.

The multitudes aren’t a liability. They’re the whole point.

Your life’s experience — every role you play, every skill you’ve built, every hat you’ve worn until it was frayed — is what makes your perspective yours. It’s what makes your work irreplaceable. Nobody else has your exact combination. That’s not a mess. That’s a mosaic.

The False Choice We’ve Been Sold

For generations, we were handed a binary: be focused or be scattered. Be professional or be complicated. Pick your lane.

But identity doesn’t work in lanes. It works in layers.

You are not a writer instead of a mother. You are a writer who is also a mother, and those two things talk to each other constantly in ways that make your writing richer and your mothering stranger and more tender and more patient and occasionally more dramatic.

You are not a marketer instead of an artist. You are an artist who understands how stories move through the world — which means your marketing has a heartbeat that other people’s marketing doesn’t.

The roles don’t cancel each other out. They compound.

How to Present Yourself as All of It

Here’s the practical question I get asked constantly: But how do I explain all of this to people? How do I present myself without sounding scattered?

The answer is simpler than you think, and it has nothing to do with a tidy elevator pitch.

Find the thread.

Every combination of roles has a through-line — a single thing that all of your work is actually about, underneath the job titles. Not what you do, but what you care about. What you’re always, in every version of your life, trying to move toward.

For me, that thread is: helping creative people take themselves seriously.

That’s what I’m doing when I’m coaching a writer through their first draft, when I’m teaching a class on marketing, when I’m writing about what it means to build a creative life alongside a real life with real people in it, when I’m mothering someone who is also, I notice, becoming a creative person of their own.

All of it is the same conversation. The titles are just the different rooms it happens in.

Lead with the work, not the résumé.

When you introduce yourself, you don’t need to list everything. You need to show someone what it feels like to be in your orbit. That’s what people actually want to know — not your LinkedIn summary, but your essence.

“I write about the creative life — and I help writers actually finish things and get them into the world” is more useful than a seven-item list of everything you’ve ever done professionally. It’s not less true. It’s more you.

Stop apologizing for the complexity.

You know that thing you do where you say, “I’m just a mom who also writes a little,” or “I’m kind of a marketer, I guess, but I’m also doing coaching and some teaching”?

Stop it.

The hedging doesn’t make you sound humble. It makes you sound like you don’t believe your own story — and if you don’t believe it, no one else will either.

Own the compound noun. You’re a writer-entrepreneur-teacher-mother-artist. Say it like it’s a credential, because it is.

A Permission Slip

You are allowed to be many things. You are allowed to resist the flattening. You are allowed to answer the “what do you do?” question in a way that is true and a little complicated and takes more than five seconds.

You are allowed to introduce yourself as a whole person — not a job description.

The people who are meant to find you will find you. Not because you made yourself simple enough to fit inside a box, but because you were brave enough to let them see the whole mosaic.

That’s not a harder sell.

That’s a richer story.

And you, of all people, know what a good story can do.

What’s your through-line? I’d love to hear it — drop it in the comments.

A Fiction Break (WIP)

The Digital Daughter

By Liz Dubelman

Time keeps speeding up. More things are invented, and I can’t keep up.

My children hired me a digital daughter. She comes on Tuesdays. She has good posture and a kind face, and she never sighs, which I appreciate. She sets her phone on my kitchen table like a doctor setting down a bag, and we begin.

It’s not unlike home ec.

In 1955, I was fifteen and all the girls took home ec while the boys took shop. The boys built things with their hands. We learned to clean what they would eventually dirty. Mrs. Newell taught us the chemistry of cleaning solutions, which I have since forgotten except for one thing: do not mix chlorine bleach with acid or you will make chlorine gas, which is toxic. I don’t know how I held onto that and nothing else. I still think about it when I reach under the sink.

The digital daughter shows me how to swipe. How to double-tap. The difference between a push and a swipe, she explains, is subtle. My fingers don’t always register on the glass. I don’t mention this. She wouldn’t know what to do with it, and neither would I.

She asks if I have any questions.

I want to ask her if she knows what home ec was. I don’t ask.

Mrs. Newell wore her hair pinned so tightly it seemed to be holding her opinions in place. She believed in systems. She wrote on the blackboard in a hand so exact it looked typeset.

Home cleaning tasks can be separated into four categories.

We copied this down. All of us girls, in a row, copying. Through the wall, we could hear the boys in shop running something electric. A saw, maybe. Something that made a sound like purpose.

Mrs. Newell taught us that hard water deposits require acid solutions and grease requires alkaline solutions and that the two should never meet. She taught us that chlorine bleach mixed with strong acid produces chlorine gas, which is toxic. She said toxic the way other people said obviously. She taught us that even dishwater, under certain circumstances, required rubber gloves.

I sat in the third row next to Barbara Feinstein, who would go on to become a pharmacist and probably retained all of it. I retained the chlorine gas. I don’t know why that one stayed, and nothing else did. Some specific terror lodges itself, and everything around it slides away.

We were being prepared for our lives.

None of us knew yet what our lives would be.

The digital daughter’s name is Melissa. She’s thirty-two, she told me, which means she was born the year I got my first answering machine and thought that was already too much.

She’s teaching me to video call my grandchildren. She says it’s really very simple, the way Mrs. Newell said, obviously. Neither of them is wrong, exactly. That’s the problem.

Melissa shows me how to find the camera icon. I find it. I lose it. I find it again. My finger pushes the glass, and nothing happens, and then I push it again and something happens that I didn’t intend. Melissa says that’s okay without looking up from her own phone, where she is, I notice, also doing something. I don’t ask what.

I think about the boys in shop. Whatever they built, they could see it. A birdhouse. A bookshelf. Something with edges you could run your hand along and know you’d done it.

I push the glass again. A face appears. My granddaughter, eleven, looks at me from whatever room she’s in and says Hi Grandma and then looks back down at something I can’t see.

We have that in common, at least.

Melissa packs up on the hour. She’s very good about the hour. She puts her phone in her bag and tells me I did great today, which is what she always says, and I think she means it, which is its own kind of thing.

After she leaves, I sit at the kitchen table for a while.

I can video call my grandchildren now. I could not have done this two months ago. Whether this is progress depends on who you ask. My granddaughter looked at her phone the entire time.

I reach under the sink for the dish soap, and I automatically check the labels before I touch anything else. I have done this for sixty years. Mrs. Newell would be pleased, probably. One student retained one thing. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s all anyone gets.

I don’t know what Melissa thinks I’ll do with any of this. I don’t know what Mrs. Newell thought either. They’re both just women doing a job someone decided needed doing.

Time keeps speeding up.

I washed the dishes without rubber gloves. The water was hot, and it felt like something I still knew how to do.

Share The Write Kit Newsletter

I want to tell you something I almost didn’t write. Not because it’s autobiographical — it isn’t, not exactly — but because the question at the center of it felt too large and too embarrassing to put a character through honestly. The question is this: what happens to the part of yourself you set aside to make a marriage work, and then the marriage ends, and that part is still missing? The character is Abby. She’s fifty-eight, newly widowed, and living in a Palm Desert retirement community called Desert Oasis, which is exactly as bleak as it sounds. She’s not sure she’s grieving her husband so much as grieving the version of herself that never got to exist. She discovers a burlesque show at the casino down the road. She keeps going back. She makes friends she probably shouldn’t, by her neighbors’ definitions. She tries pole dancing. She tears her rotator cuff. Her bones, it turns out, have the density of an earthworm. This is not a story about triumph. It’s not a liberation narrative. Abby doesn’t perform in the showcase, doesn’t have a moment of redemption, doesn’t stick it to the women at the coffee social in any satisfying way. She just slowly, haltingly, begins to inhabit her own life — the way you get into cold water, slower than you need to, because there’s no reason not to. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be *free* versus what it means to *perform* freedom — and about the generation of women who were told they’d already been liberated, and spent the rest of their lives wondering why they still felt like supporting characters in someone else’s story. Abby is for them. And maybe for their daughters, who are still figuring it out too. The full story is below. It’s eleven chapters. There’s a burlesque performer with feather fans, a sixty-two-year-old doing a suicide drop from twenty feet up, a man who comes to the casino every night to avoid going home, and bougainvillea in a color that isn’t on the HOA’s approved palette. I hope you’ll read it. I hope it sits with you a little. — Liz *If this story found you at the right moment, forward it to someone who might need it. No sign-up required. No strings.*

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Stop Obsessing Over Which Tools to Use (The Platform Doesn’t Matter as Much as You Think)

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Pick Something Already

Let me guess what’s keeping you from actually marketing your book right now.

It’s not that you don’t know what to do. You’ve read the articles. You know you need an email list, a social media presence, maybe a website. You understand the concepts.

What’s paralyzing you is trying to figure out which tools to use.

Should you use Mailchimp or ConvertKit or Substack for your newsletter? Squarespace or WordPress or Wix for your website? Instagram or TikTok or Twitter for social media? Canva or Adobe for graphics? Calendly or Acuity for booking? Linktree or Beacons or just a simple website link?

You’ve spent three hours watching YouTube videos comparing features. You’ve read seventeen Reddit threads debating the merits of various platforms. You’ve bookmarked forty-seven “ultimate guide” articles. And you still haven’t actually started your newsletter because you’re not sure if you’ve chosen the “right” email platform.

Here’s what I need you to understand: You’re solving the wrong problem.

The Technology Doesn’t Matter (Mostly)

Let me be blunt: The difference between Mailchimp and ConvertKit is not the thing standing between you and a successful book launch.

Your readers don’t care which email platform you use. They care whether your emails are interesting, valuable, and show up consistently. They can’t tell if you built your website on Squarespace or WordPress, and they definitely don’t care. They care whether they can find your books and learn about you.

The platform is not the strategy. The tool is not the content. The technology is not the relationship.

You’re spending mental energy optimizing a variable that matters about 5% while ignoring the variables that matter 95%: what you’re saying, who you’re saying it to, and whether you’re showing up consistently.

The Real Cost of Tool Paralysis

While you’re researching the perfect tech stack, other authors are writing newsletters on “inferior” platforms and building actual audiences. While you’re comparing features, they’re posting imperfect social media content that’s connecting with real readers. While you’re optimizing, they’re iterating.

Here’s what tool paralysis actually costs you:

Time you could spend creating. Every hour spent researching platforms is an hour not spent writing, not connecting with readers, not actually marketing your book. The opportunity cost is massive.

Momentum you’ll never recover. The longer you delay starting because you haven’t found the “perfect” solution, the harder it becomes to start at all. Analysis paralysis breeds more analysis paralysis.

The learning that only comes from doing. You won’t actually know what features matter to you until you’ve been using a platform for months. All that research is theoretical. Real knowledge comes from practice.

The false sense of productivity. Research feels like work. It feels like progress. But it’s sophisticated procrastination. You’re not actually marketing your book—you’re preparing to prepare to market your book.

Why We Get Stuck on Tools (And Why It’s Bullshit)

Let’s be honest about what’s really happening when you obsess over choosing the “right” platform.

It feels safer than putting yourself out there. Researching tools doesn’t require vulnerability. You can’t fail at comparing features. You can’t be rejected by a spreadsheet. But actually sending your first newsletter? That’s scary.

It gives you an excuse not to start. “I can’t build my email list yet because I haven’t chosen the right platform” is more comfortable than “I’m scared nobody will subscribe.”

The marketing industrial complex profits from your confusion. Every platform wants you to believe theirs is essential. Every guru has an affiliate link to the “best” tool. Everyone’s got a strong opinion about why their choice is objectively superior. This creates artificial urgency around a decision that genuinely doesn’t matter that much.

We conflate tools with expertise. There’s a seductive idea that if you just had the right tools, marketing would be easy. It’s the same magical thinking that makes people buy expensive gym memberships instead of just doing pushups. The tools don’t make you good at marketing. Practice makes you good at marketing.

How to Actually Choose (In Five Minutes or Less)

You want to know the secret to choosing the right platform? Here it is:

Pick something that meets your basic needs and that you can afford.

That’s it. That’s the whole decision tree.

Does it do the thing you need it to do? Can you afford it (including the free options)? Great. Use that one. Move on with your life.

Here’s the actual decision-making process:

For email platforms: Pick one that integrates with your website, has a free tier or pricing you can afford, and doesn’t make you want to throw your laptop out a window when you use it. Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Substack, Buttondown—they all work. Literally all of them. Choose one and move on.

For websites: Can people find your books, read your bio, and contact you? Congratulations, your website works. Whether it’s Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, or a single-page HTML site doesn’t matter to anyone except you. Pick the one that’s easiest for you.

For social media: Go where your readers actually are, and where you don’t actively hate being. If you hate video, TikTok won’t magically become fun just because it’s “hot.” If you love writing, Twitter or Threads might work better. If you’re visual, Instagram. Pick one. Maybe two if you’re ambitious. That’s it.

For everything else: Start with the free or cheapest option. Upgrade when you’re actually bumping against its limitations, not because you think you might someday possibly need advanced features.

The Only Features That Actually Matter

If you’re going to spend time evaluating platforms, here are the only questions worth asking:

Can I actually use this without wanting to die? User experience matters. If the interface makes you irrationally angry, you won’t use it consistently. Choose the thing that feels least painful.

Does it do the one thing I need right now? Not the seventeen things you might need eventually. The one thing. Right now. For email, that’s sending emails to subscribers. Everything else is extra.

Can I afford it long-term? Factor in what happens when you grow. A free tier that limits you to 500 subscribers is fine if you’re starting from zero, but what’s the cost at 1,000? At 5,000? Don’t choose something you’ll definitely have to migrate away from later.

Can I get my data out if I need to leave? This is the one technical question that matters. Make sure you can export your email list, your content, your subscriber data. Platform lock-in is real and it sucks.

That’s it. Those four questions. Everything else is noise.

The Dirty Secret About Platform Features

You know all those advanced features you’re comparing? The automation workflows, the advanced segmentation, the A/B testing, the fancy analytics?

You won’t use them.

Not because you’re lazy or unsophisticated. Because you’re a writer trying to market your book, not a professional email marketer running campaigns for a Fortune 500 company.

Most authors need to:

• Collect email addresses

• Send regular emails

• Track basic open rates

• Maybe tag subscribers by which book they’re interested in

That’s it. That’s the whole list. Every email platform does these things. Even the free ones.

All those fancy features? They’re for people running complex marketing operations. You’re not running a complex marketing operation. You’re trying to stay in touch with readers who like your books.

What Actually Matters (It’s Not the Platform)

While you’re agonizing over Mailchimp versus ConvertKit, here’s what successful authors are focused on:

Consistency. They send their newsletter every week or every month, on schedule, regardless of which platform they use. The showing up matters infinitely more than the tool.

Value. They give readers something worth opening—stories, insights, behind-the-scenes content, genuine connection. The content matters infinitely more than the features.

Personality. They sound like themselves, not like a corporate marketing department. The voice matters infinitely more than the template design.

Persistence. They keep going when their open rates are terrible and they have twelve subscribers and nobody’s buying books. The persistence matters infinitely more than the analytics dashboard.

The platform is just the delivery mechanism. What you’re delivering is what matters.

The Permission You Need

Here’s your permission slip: Pick something this week. Doesn’t matter what. Just pick.

If you choose wrong (you won’t, but let’s pretend), you can change later. Migrating email lists is annoying but not impossible. Rebuilding websites happens. Switching social platforms is common.

Nothing you choose today is permanent. Nothing you choose today will ruin your career. Nothing you choose today matters as much as you think it does.

What will ruin your career is spending six months researching tools and never actually connecting with readers.

How to Stop the Research Spiral

If you catch yourself falling into tool research hell, here’s how to break the cycle:

Set a timer for 30 minutes. That’s how long you get to research. At the end of 30 minutes, you make a decision. Any decision. Then you move on.

Ask one author what they use. Not seventeen authors. One. Use what they use. It clearly works—they’re successfully marketing their books. You can optimize later.

Remember that switching is possible. You’re not tattooing this choice on your face. You’re signing up for a software platform. This is reversible.

Focus on the next step, not the whole journey. You don’t need to choose the tool that will serve you when you’re a bestselling author with 50,000 newsletter subscribers. You need to choose the tool that will let you send your first newsletter this week.

The Actually Useful Question

Instead of “Which platform should I choose?” ask this:

“What’s the simplest thing I can do this week to connect with readers?”

Maybe that’s setting up a basic email signup form on the free tier of whatever platform you pick first. Maybe it’s posting consistently on one social platform instead of trying to be everywhere. Maybe it’s just having a simple website with your contact info and book links.

Simple and done beats perfect and theoretical every single time.

The Real Work

You know what’s harder than choosing an email platform? Writing emails people want to read.

You know what’s harder than picking a social media platform? Posting interesting content consistently.

You know what’s harder than building a website? Having something worth saying on that website.

The tool is the easy part. The tool is the excuse. The real work is showing up, being interesting, and building genuine relationships with readers.

And that work is exactly the same regardless of whether you use Mailchimp or ConvertKit.

The Bottom Line

Every minute you spend comparing platforms is a minute you’re not connecting with readers. Every hour you spend optimizing your tool stack is an hour you’re not marketing your actual book.

The technology doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think. What matters is that you start, you show up, and you keep going.

So pick something. Anything. This week. Then actually use it.

The authors succeeding at marketing aren’t the ones with the perfect tech stack. They’re the ones who chose something functional and moved on to the work that actually matters: connecting with readers who will love their books.

Stop researching. Start doing.

Your readers are waiting. They don’t care what platform you’re using—they just want to hear from you.

The Best Thing I Ever Did Was Turn My Book Into Everything Else

By Liz Dubelman

How I Learned to Stop Writing New Things and Start Milking the Things I Already Wrote

I need to tell you about the moment I realized I’d been doing book marketing completely wrong.

It was 2 AM—because of course it was—and I was staring at my laptop trying to come up with content for my newsletter. I’d already written a book about marketing for authors. I’d already posted on social media about it. I’d already done podcast interviews. And now I was supposed to come up with more things to say?

I was exhausted. My brain felt like scrambled eggs. And I was pretty sure I’d already said everything I had to say about this topic seventeen different ways.

That’s when it hit me: I hadn’t said everything seventeen different ways. I’d said different things seventeen times. And that was the problem.

The Hamster Wheel of Constantly Creating New Stuff

Here’s what I was doing wrong, and I’m willing to bet you’re doing it too:

Every week, I was trying to create entirely new content. A new blog post about a new topic. A new social media campaign about a different angle. A new lead magnet with fresh ideas. A new workshop on something I hadn’t covered before.

I was treating my book like one finished thing that I needed to constantly supplement with additional, separate things. Like my book was a house and I kept building new sheds in the yard instead of, you know, just inviting people into the actual house I’d already built.

This was exhausting for obvious reasons. But it was also stupid for less obvious ones.

I’d spent a year writing a book full of ideas, frameworks, stories, and insights. And then I was acting like I needed to come up with new ideas, frameworks, stories, and insights every week to market it.

The book was already the content. I just needed to iterate on it.

What “Iterate on Your IP” Actually Means

Let’s talk about what I mean by “intellectual property” because it sounds very business-school and I promise this isn’t that kind of essay.

Your IP is the core creative idea at the center of your work. For me, it was “book marketing doesn’t have to feel like torture.” For you, it might be your novel’s world and characters, your self-help framework, your memoir’s central story, your cookbook’s culinary philosophy.

Whatever it is, it’s the thing you’ve already created. The thing you spent months or years developing. The thing that’s actually good and interesting and valuable.

Iterating on your IP means taking that core thing and expressing it in different formats, for different contexts, for different audiences. It means getting more mileage out of the work you’ve already done instead of constantly grinding out new work.

Think of it like this: Pixar doesn’t make Toy Story and then immediately start from scratch on a completely unrelated movie about... I don’t know, accountants. They make Toy Story, then Toy Story 2, then Toy Story 3, then Toy Story 4, plus shorts, plus theme park rides, plus merchandise, plus Halloween costumes. They iterate on the IP.

You can do this with your book too. And it will save your sanity.

How I Accidentally Discovered This (And Felt Like an Idiot)

So there I was at 2 AM, brain like scrambled eggs, trying to write newsletter content.

Out of desperation, I opened my book manuscript. I scrolled to a chapter I particularly liked—the one about why marketing plans don’t have to be complicated. I pulled out the core concept, rewrote it in a more casual voice, added a story I’d cut from the book, and turned it into a newsletter.

Took me twenty minutes. It was good. People loved it.

The next week, I did it again with a different chapter. Then I turned that chapter into a Twitter thread. Then I used the same core idea for a podcast interview talking point. Then I made it into a workshop. Then I wrote a guest article for another site expanding on one specific point from that chapter.

I got six pieces of content out of one chapter of my book. Six different formats, six different contexts, all from work I’d already done.

And here’s the thing that made me feel like an idiot: Each version was better than if I’d tried to write something entirely new. Because I’d already refined these ideas when writing the book. I’d already figured out the best stories, the clearest examples, the most compelling frameworks.

I wasn’t being lazy. I was being smart.

The Magic of Saying the Same Thing Different Ways

You know what I learned from this experiment? Most people need to hear something multiple times, in multiple formats, before it actually lands.

Some people will read your book. Some will listen to your podcast. Some will watch your videos. Some will read your newsletter. Some will follow you on social media. Very few will do all of these things.

So when you iterate on your IP—when you take the same core ideas and express them across different platforms—you’re not being repetitive. You’re being accessible.

That chapter from my book that became a newsletter? The people who read the newsletter hadn’t read my book yet. (That was kind of the point of the newsletter—to get them interested in the book.) They needed to hear these ideas in email form, in newsletter voice, in that specific context.

Then some of them bought the book and read the full chapter and thought, “Oh, this is even better with all the details.” They didn’t think, “Wait, I already saw this in the newsletter, what a ripoff.” They thought, “This makes so much more sense now.”

Different formats serve different purposes. A Twitter thread gives you the headline version. A newsletter gives you the thoughtful version. A podcast gives you the conversational version. A workshop gives you the interactive version. The book gives you the comprehensive version.

They’re not competing with each other. They’re working together.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let me get specific about how I’ve iterated on the IP from my book, because “iterate on your IP” sounds like consultant-speak and I want you to see how this actually works.

From Book Chapter to Newsletter Series: I took my chapter on email marketing and turned it into a four-week newsletter series. Each week covered one section of the chapter in more depth, with new examples relevant to what was happening in my readers’ lives right now. The chapter was the blueprint; the newsletters were the applications.

From Book Framework to Workshop: My book has a framework for creating marketing plans. I turned that into a 90-minute workshop where people could work through the framework with their own books. Same concept, totally different experience. The book is passive reading; the workshop is active doing.

From Book Stories to Social Media: Every story I told in my book? I pulled them out and told shorter versions on social media. A three-page anecdote in the book became a Twitter thread. A passing reference became an Instagram story. The book version had all the context; the social version had all the personality.

From Book Concepts to Podcast Talking Points: When I do podcast interviews, I’m not coming up with new ideas on the spot. I’m talking about the concepts from my book, but in conversation with the host, responding to their questions, making connections to their audience. Same ideas, new context.

From Book Advice to Coaching: The strategic frameworks in my book? Those became the basis for one-on-one coaching. The book tells you what to do; coaching helps you actually do it with your specific book and circumstances.

From Book Content to Lead Magnets: I turned one chapter into a downloadable PDF guide. Same information, different packaging. People who wanted a quick reference got the PDF. People who wanted the full system got the book.

None of this required me to come up with fundamentally new ideas. I just kept expressing the same ideas in different ways for different contexts.

Why This Works Better Than Constantly Creating New Stuff

You get better at your core ideas. Every time I explain my marketing framework in a different context, I understand it better. I find better examples. I refine the language. I discover which parts people struggle with and which parts click immediately. The iteration makes the idea stronger.

You build on existing work instead of starting from scratch. Writing a book is hard. You’ve already done that hard work. Why not use it? Turning a chapter into a newsletter takes 10% of the time that writing a newsletter from scratch would take. And it’s often better because you’ve already refined those ideas through the book-writing process.

You create a coherent body of work. When everything connects back to your core IP, your brand makes sense. People understand what you’re about. They see how the pieces fit together. You’re not just throwing random content at the wall; you’re building a cohesive platform around your central ideas.

You actually have time to do the work. When you’re not constantly grinding out new content, you have energy for the things that actually matter: writing your next book, connecting with readers, living your life. Marketing becomes sustainable instead of soul-crushing.

What You Can Do Right Now

Here’s your homework, and I promise it’s more fun than it sounds:

Open your book. Pick your favorite chapter. Now ask yourself:

• What’s the core idea here that I could explain in a five-minute video?

• What story from this chapter would work as a social media post?

• What framework from this chapter could become a workshop or masterclass?

• What advice from this chapter could I turn into a lead magnet?

• What concept from this chapter could I explore more deeply in a newsletter series?

• What question does this chapter answer that I could discuss on a podcast?

You don’t have to do all of these things. Pick one. The one that sounds least painful or most fun.

Then do that thing this week using content you’ve already created.

See how much easier it is than trying to come up with something entirely new.

The Permission You Didn’t Know You Needed

Here’s what you might be thinking: “But isn’t this just recycling content? Won’t people notice? Won’t they think I’m being lazy or repetitive?”

Let me tell you something: Nobody is paying as much attention to your content as you are.

You’re intimately familiar with every word you’ve written. You remember every blog post, every newsletter, every social media caption. To you, reusing ideas feels repetitive.

But your audience? They missed most of it. They skimmed that newsletter. They scrolled past that social post. They meant to listen to that podcast but never got around to it.

And even the people who did see it the first time? They probably forgot. Or they didn’t fully get it the first time and need to hear it again. Or they’re ready to hear it in a different context now.

You’re not being repetitive. You’re being thorough.

Also—and this is important—you’re allowed to get multiple uses out of your creative work. You spent months or years writing that book. You’re allowed to leverage it. You’re allowed to build a business around it. You’re allowed to express those ideas in multiple formats without feeling guilty about it.

The goal isn’t to constantly generate new ideas until you collapse from exhaustion. The goal is to take your best ideas and help as many people as possible benefit from them.

What This Really Means

The best thing I ever did for my book wasn’t writing more content to support it. It was realizing that the book was the content, and everything else was just translation.

Your book is not one finished thing that you market with separate, unrelated content. Your book is the concentrated form of your ideas that you then adapt, expand, and express in every other format available to you.

This is how you build a sustainable platform. This is how you market without burning out. This is how you make your creative work actually work for you instead of constantly scrambling to create more work to support your work.

Stop trying to come up with new things to say. Start saying what you’ve already said in new ways.

Your book is the IP. Now iterate on it.

Trust me on this one. It’ll save your sanity.

And maybe you’ll even get to bed before 2 AM.

Let’s just say it: content marketing sounds awful. It sounds like something that happens to you in a waiting room. It sounds like the reason you have seventeen browser tabs open about a blender you looked at once.

You’re a writer. You wrote a book. Now someone is telling you to “build your platform” and “create a content strategy,” and you want to lie down on the floor until the feeling passes.

Here’s the thing, though. You don’t have to do any of that.

There was a time when advertising worked. Don Draper could sell you a feeling in sixty seconds flat — nostalgia, aspiration, the vague sense that this cigarette understood you. Beautiful stuff. Completely gone now. The internet killed the long-form ad the way it killed everything else that required patience.

What replaced it? Display ads. The little rectangles that follow you around the internet like a golden retriever who just learned the word “retargeting.” Most authors, desperate to move copies, throw money at Facebook and Amazon. The ads get clicked approximately never. Zuckerberg and Bezos get paid. The book sits there.

Nobody buys a book from an ad. Think about the last book you bought. Did an ad sell it to you? No. Someone you trusted told you about it. You read something that made you want more. You showed up because you were already a fan.

Which brings me to Constance.

Last Sunday, we held a book event. Constance read from her book. Her brother Nick interviewed her about being a violinist, a teacher, and a writer, and how those three things manage to coexist in one person without anyone getting hurt. She sold out. And at the end, people weren’t just buying the book. They were asking when the next one was coming.

That’s not marketing. That’s an audience.

Constance has been writing her Substack consistently for readers who genuinely want to hear from her. She owns that relationship — not through an algorithm that can change its mind on a Tuesday, but through an email list. Her readers are there because they chose to be there. And now the next book? We’re going to build it from her Substack posts. The audience isn’t waiting to be found. They’re already waiting.

You’re a writer. The whole strategy, in its entirety, is this: keep writing.

Write for your readers. Feed them — not in a salesy, look-at-my-book way, but in the way you’d want to be fed. Give them something worth reading. Do it again next week. The readers who connect with your work will find you, stay with you, and show up when it matters.

That’s content marketing. It’s just writing. You already know how to do it.

And now a personal essay

The Characters Are Not Talking to Me

by Liz Dubelman

My day job is cheerleading. Authors finish their books and hand them to me, and I figure out how to make the world care. I read what they’ve written. I can usually see where another edit would have helped. I know which sentences are doing work and which ones are decorating. Then I build the campaign, make the noise, and send the book out into the world.

I’m good at it.

The problem is Abby.

Abby is fifty-eight, recently widowed, living in a retirement community that smells like ambition deferred. She’s discovered a casino bar and a pole dancer named Nicole and the particular freedom of lying to people who would prefer she stay home and attend water aerobics. She’s interesting. She has things to work out. She showed up in my head fully formed, the way the best characters do, and I started writing her down.

Then I got busy with someone else’s book.

Then another book. Then the newsletter. Then someone stole my identity and used it to solicit authors by email, which required its own kind of damage control.

Abby went quiet.

This is the part that’s hard to explain to people who don’t write fiction. The characters don’t wait patiently. They don’t leave a note. They just — stop. You come back to the page and the room is empty and a little cold, and you can feel that they were there recently but aren’t anymore, and you don’t know if they’re gone or just not speaking to you yet.

I think mine are not speaking to me yet. I’m choosing to believe that.

The other problem is that fiction has no guardrails. The newsletter has a job — warn people, explain the scam, be clear. The Feather Act has no job except to be true. No structure to hide behind. No client to serve. Just me, Abby, Nicole, and Bill at the casino bar, and whether I can make them feel like real people without explaining them to death.

I spend my days seeing exactly where fiction fails. I read the books after they’re written, and I can see the seams, the places where the author over-explained or under-trusted or patched something instead of fixing it. That’s not an asset when you sit down to write your own work. It’s a sniper in the room.

So I don’t write. I tell myself I’ll write when I have a longer stretch of time. When the current book wraps. When I’m less tired. Abby sits somewhere just out of reach, not angry exactly, but not warm either.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: the person who impersonated me built something that had all the surface features of care and none of the actual thing. It knew my biography. It used my name. It sounded like someone who’d read your book and thought: yes, this.

That’s what I’m afraid of doing to my own characters. Showing up with the right words and none of the attention.

The attention is the thing. It’s the only thing. You can’t fake it, and you can’t manufacture it between other people’s deadlines, and when you try, the characters know. They go quiet. They wait to see if you mean it.

I’m going back to Abby. Soon. Before she gives up entirely. You can be my witness.

Or: What happens when AI learns to impersonate the humans who care most about books

Last week, an author tracked me down through my website contact form to tell me something I had not expected: he had received an email from me. Not from someone pretending to be a generic book marketer. From me specifically — Liz Dubelman, with my name, my Reedsy profile URL, and a lovingly detailed recitation of my actual career history — pitching his book with what he correctly identified as an AI-generated message so polished and personalized it nearly fooled him.

It did not come from me. It came from a Gmail address that had been constructed to look like mine. Someone had read my profile, extracted my biography, fed it to a language model, pointed that model at a database of authors, and set the whole apparatus loose to solicit business in my name.

I want to say that upfront clearly: if you have received an email from any Gmail address claiming to be me, it is not me. I do not cold-solicit authors. I do not conduct outreach through Gmail. Any legitimate contact from me comes through Reedsy’s platform or from my actual business addresses.

But I also want to talk about what this actually is, because I think it deserves more than a fraud alert.

The flattery problem

Here is what is almost funny about this: the email was good. The author said so himself. It was impressively personalized, demonstrably researched, fluent in the language of book marketing. It knew things about his book. It knew things about me. If he had been slightly less savvy — or slightly more eager — he might have replied.

And that is where the dark comedy tips into something more troubling. The system works by being good enough. Not good enough to fool everyone. Good enough to fool some people some of the time. Run it at scale, against hundreds of authors, with hundreds of fabricated identities, and the math starts to work in the scammer’s favor, even with a low conversion rate.

The publishing world is a particularly ripe target for this kind of operation, because authors are accustomed to being ignored. When something shows up in their inbox that actually seems to have read their book, to care about their characters, to speak their language, the relief of being seen can override the skepticism that would otherwise kick in.

What is actually being stolen

The obvious answer is: my identity. My name, my reputation, the professional credibility I have spent years building.

But something else is being stolen too, and it belongs to the authors on the receiving end of these emails. It is the experience of being genuinely reached out to by a human being who read your work and thought: yes, this. That experience, rare enough in the attention economy under the best circumstances, is being counterfeited.

The entire philosophy behind what I actually do, what I call Whole Artist Marketing, is grounded in the belief that a book’s marketing should be as human and as thoughtful as the book itself. That readers can feel the difference between a lighthouse and a megaphone. That genuine attention is not a strategy but a practice.

What the impersonation email was doing, with impressive technical sophistication, was performing that attention while having none of it. A lighthouse made of cardboard. It had all the surface features of care, the specificity, the warmth, the apparent knowledge of the book, and none of the actual thing.

Where this is going

I don’t think this gets better soon. The tools that made this email possible are improving faster than our collective ability to detect their outputs. The cost of running this kind of operation is dropping toward zero. And the publishing world, with its long tradition of cold queries, unsolicited pitches, and authors conditioned to respond hopefully to anyone who claims to see their work, is structurally vulnerable to it.

So here is what I can offer, practically speaking.

If you receive any email claiming to be from me, verify it came through Reedsy or from a domain you can trace to my actual business before you respond. If something about a pitch feels too comprehensive, too perfectly calibrated, too fluent in exactly what you needed to hear, that feeling is information worth acting on. Genuine outreach from a human being has edges. It has a voice. It sometimes misspells things. It does not know everything about you on the first contact.

And if you are another professional whose identity has been harvested for this kind of operation, you are not alone, and you are not overreacting. Report it to the platforms involved. Document everything. Tell your authors.

The author who contacted me did exactly the right thing. He was skeptical of something that was trying very hard to seem trustworthy. However inconvenient it may be in a world that keeps asking us to move faster and trust more is worth protecting.

Liz Dubelman

VidLit Productions / The Write Kit · reedsy.com/liz-dubelman

Here is a thing that happens to almost every writer at some point, usually around month three of doing all the right things:

You post. You send the newsletter. You show up, as instructed, consistently and with something genuine to say. And then you watch the screen. And the screen watches back. And nothing moves.

No new subscribers. No spike in anything. No email from a stranger saying your words arrived at the right moment. Just the faint sound of your own content existing in the world, unwitnessed.

This is the part nobody puts in the marketing course. The part where you start to wonder if “showing up consistently” is just something people say, like “everything happens for a reason” or “the check is in the mail.”

You are not imagining it. The silence is real. What you’re probably getting wrong is what it means.

You Are Measuring the Wrong Things

The metrics that are easiest to see are almost never the metrics that matter. Amazon rankings change by the hour and tell you almost nothing useful. Follower counts measure how many people have pressed a button, not whether any of them care. Engagement rates on any given post are a function of the algorithm’s mood that day, which is to say, they are not a function of your writing at all.

The things that actually indicate a book is working are slower and harder to quantify. A reader who finishes your book and immediately buys a copy for someone else. A newsletter subscriber who has been opening every issue for eight months without ever clicking a thing, who then emails you one day to say something true. A conversation that starts because someone found a piece you wrote six months ago, shared it with no fanfare, and it reached exactly the right person at exactly the right moment.

These things do not show up in a dashboard. They happen in the long tail, which is not a consolation prize. It is the point.

The metric worth tracking is not how many people saw the thing. It is whether the thing is finding its people. Those are genuinely different questions.

On the Avoidance That Calls Itself Burnout

There is a version of “I need to step back from marketing for a while” that is legitimate creative rest. And there is a version that is avoidance wearing a wellness hat.

They feel identical from the inside. The difference is what you do with the break. Real rest restores something. The other kind just delays the same dread, with interest.

If you have stopped posting because the silence got demoralizing, that is not burnout. That is discouragement, which is a different problem with a different solution. Burnout is what happens when you have been doing too much for too long. Discouragement is what happens when you have been doing things without understanding what they are for.

The fix for discouragement is not rest. It is recalibration. It is going back to the actual reason you wrote the book, which had nothing to do with engagement rates, and letting that be the engine again.

The Silence Is Not Evidence of Failure

Most of what content marketing does, it does invisibly. Someone reads your newsletter and thinks about it for three days before telling a friend. A piece you wrote last spring gets shared in a group you have never heard of, by someone you will never meet, and it leads a stranger to your book. Your Substack sits quietly in someone’s inbox for four months, and then, during a bad week, they finally open it.

You will almost never see any of this happen. That is not a flaw in the system. It is just how trust builds, which is slowly, without announcing itself, and almost never on your timeline.

The lighthouse metaphor is real, not decorative. A lighthouse does not know who it is guiding. It does not get feedback. It keeps the light on anyway, because that is the job, and because the alternative is darkness.

What to Actually Do When Nothing Is Moving

Go back to one thing. Not the platform that feels most broken. The one that requires the least performance and the most honesty. For most writers, that is email. Write something true to the people who have already chosen to hear from you, without optimizing a single word of it.

Make the goal smaller. Not “build my platform” but “write one thing this week that I would actually want to read.” Not “grow my newsletter” but “send something to the people already on it.” Momentum does not come from trying harder at the large thing. It comes from doing the small thing well enough that you want to do it again.

And stop reading the dashboard for a while. Not forever. Just long enough to remember that you are writing for people, not for numbers, and that the people are out there, reading, even when the numbers say otherwise.

The needle is moving. It is just moving in a direction you cannot see yet.

Share

And now our continuing fiction:

The Feather Act

by Liz Dubelman

A Fiction Break (WIP) to read what you may have missed, click here

VII.

The sword act was performed by a woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, wearing nothing but strategically placed jewels and a confident smile that suggested she’d never doubted herself for a single second of her life.

She came out carrying two enormous curved swords that caught the stage lights and threw reflections across the ceiling like a disco ball made of knives. The music was something Middle Eastern and hypnotic, all drums and strings that made Abby’s pulse synchronize with the beat.

The performer balanced one sword on her head while she danced. Then on her shoulder. Then—and this was the part that made the entire audience gasp—on her tongue.

“How is that possible?” Abby whispered to Nicole.

“Physics and practice. The blade is balanced at its center of gravity. As long as she keeps it centered and doesn’t move her tongue laterally, it stays.” Nicole sipped her drink. “Also, the swords are dull. She’s not stupid.”

“She looks like she’s never been afraid of anything in her life.”

“She’s terrified of disappointing her mother, who thinks she should be in law school.”

Abby laughed. “Seriously?”

“Her mom’s a federal judge. Her dad’s a neurosurgeon. She makes more money doing this than either of them made their first five years out of school, and they still think she’s wasting her potential.” Nicole shrugged. “Different generation, different values.”

The performer did a backbend while balancing both swords—one on her head, one on her pelvis—and held it for what felt like minutes but was probably thirty seconds. Dollar bills rained onto the stage. She came up smiling, swords still perfectly balanced, and took her bow.

After the show, Abby stayed for another drink. Then another. Nicole had disappeared backstage to change, and Abby sat alone at the bar, watching people feed money into slot machines with the dedication of people in prayer.

“You look familiar.”

Abby turned. The man next to her was maybe seventy, wearing a golf shirt and expensive watch. He had the look of someone who’d retired with money and didn’t know what to do with all the time that came with it.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” Abby said.

“Desert Oasis?”

Her stomach dropped. “Sorry?”

“I live in Desert Oasis. I thought I’d seen you at the clubhouse.” He extended his hand. “Bill Henderson. Unit 47.”

Abby shook his hand because refusing would have been more suspicious. “Abby.”

“You here for the shows?”

“Sometimes.”

“Me too. Gets me out of the house.” He signaled the bartender for another beer. “My wife hates this place. Says it’s tacky. But I like the energy, you know? People actually doing things instead of sitting around waiting to die.”

Abby laughed despite herself. “That’s one way to put it.”

“You going to the HOA meeting tomorrow? They’re voting on those goddamn speed bumps.”

“I already went to one meeting about speed bumps. I can’t do another.”

“Smart woman.” He took a long drink. “This place is like high school, but everyone’s seventy and still hasn’t figured out that none of it matters.”

“That’s exactly what it’s like.”

They sat in comfortable silence for a moment, watching a woman at the slots win something and scream with joy.

“Can I give you some advice?” Bill said. “Old man to... how old are you?”

“Fifty-eight.”

“Old man to slightly less old woman.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “Stop trying to fit in over there. You’re not going to, and even if you do, who cares? Half those people are miserable. They’ve just gotten good at performing happy.”

“How do you know I’m trying to fit in?”

“Because everyone does at first. Then they realize Desert Oasis is just a place to live, not a place to belong.” He finished his beer. “The people you actually want to know? They’re not at the coffee socials. They’re here, or at the art museum, or driving to L.A. to see their grandkids. They’re the ones who figured out that retirement doesn’t mean retiring from having a life.”

Nicole appeared then, changed into jeans and a leather jacket, her stage makeup scrubbed off. She looked from Bill to Abby and raised an eyebrow.

“This is Bill,” Abby said. “He lives in Desert Oasis.”

Nicole’s expression shifted to something more guarded. “Cool.”

“And this is Nicole. She performs here.”

Bill’s eyes lit up with recognition. “KiKi! The feather fans. You’re incredible. I saw you last month—that split at the end, my knees hurt just watching it.”

Nicole relaxed slightly. “Thanks. Took me six months to get that one performance-ready.”

“Well, it’s worth every dollar I throw on that stage.” He stood up, leaving cash on the bar. “Ladies, it’s been a pleasure. Abby, I’ll see you around. Or not, if you’re smart.”

He walked away toward the poker tables, whistling.

“He seems cool,” Nicole said.

“He told me to stop trying to fit in at Desert Oasis.”

“Good advice.”

“Everyone keeps giving me advice. My daughter thinks I need therapy. The women at Desert Oasis think I need community. Bill thinks I need to stop caring what anyone thinks. You think I need to keep coming to pole class.” Abby finished her drink. “What I actually need is to figure out what I want, separate from what everyone else wants from me.”

Nicole sat down, signaled the bartender. “So what do you want?”

It was such a simple question. Abby realized she’d never been asked it before—not really. Roger had asked what she wanted for dinner, what she wanted to watch on TV, what she wanted for Christmas. But no one had ever asked what she wanted from her life.

“I don’t know,” Abby said finally. “I spent thirty-seven years wanting Roger to see me as a whole person instead of a supporting character in his life. Then he died, and I got my wish in the worst possible way. Now I’m fifty-eight and living in a community that feels like a waiting room for death, and the only time I feel alive is when I’m here watching women do impossible things or trying to climb a pole in a room full of strangers who don’t care that I’m a widow or that I’m too old for this or that I’m lying to everyone I’m supposed to know about where I spend my time.”

“So stay here.”

“What?”

“Stay here. Stop going back.” Nicole said it like it was obvious. “You’ve got Roger’s life insurance, right? Get a studio apartment in Palm Springs. Take pole classes five days a week if you want. Come to shows. Make friends who don’t give a shit about HOA meetings.”

“I can’t just abandon my whole life.”

“What life? The one where you pretend to like water aerobics and lie about yoga studios? That’s not a life, that’s witness protection.”

Abby laughed, but it came out shaky. “My daughter would think I’ve lost my mind.”

“Your daughter’s in Seattle. How often do you even see her?”

“She visits sometimes.”

“Does she like visiting you at Desert Oasis?”

Abby thought about her daughter’s last visit—three days of forced cheerfulness, her daughter sleeping in Roger’s old recliner because the guest room was full of boxes Abby hadn’t unpacked yet, both of them pretending that Abby was “adjusting” instead of slowly suffocating.

“Not really,” Abby admitted.

“So move. Find a place she’d actually want to visit. Somewhere that doesn’t smell like retirement and regret.” Nicole’s drink arrived and she took a sip. “I’m not saying run away to Portugal or whatever. I’m saying move twenty minutes up the highway to a place where you can be yourself without performing for an audience of judgmental old people who think fun is arguing about paint colors.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

Abby opened her mouth to list all the reasons—the lease, the community fees she’d already paid, the neighbors who would talk, the daughter who would worry, the general principle that fifty-eight-year-old widows don’t just pick up and move because they like burlesque shows and pole dancing.

But Nicole was looking at her with the same expression she’d had when teaching Abby to climb—expectant, patient, waiting for Abby to figure out that the only thing stopping her was herself.

“Sharon moved,” Nicole said quietly. “After her husband died. She left their house in Rancho Mirage, got a condo in Cathedral City, and started over. She said staying in that house was like living in a museum dedicated to someone else’s life.”

“Is that what my apartment is?”

“I don’t know. Is it?”

Abby thought about Roger’s recliner. His books. His reading glasses. The way she avoided the bedroom most nights and slept on the couch because the bed still felt like his territory.

“Yeah,” she said finally. “It is.”

Nicole didn’t say anything else, just sat with her while Abby worked through it. Around them, the casino hummed with life—people winning, losing, laughing, drinking, doing anything except sitting still and waiting for time to pass.

Abby’s phone buzzed. A text from Linda: Harriet says she saw you at Santo Caliente tonight. Just wanted to make sure everything is okay! We worry about you.

The subtext was clear: We’re watching you. We know you’re lying. Explain yourself.

Abby stared at the text for a long time. Then she typed: Everything is fine. Thanks for checking.

She didn’t elaborate. Didn’t explain. Didn’t apologize for being where she wanted to be instead of where they thought she should be.

Nicole read over her shoulder. “That’s progress.”

“Is it?”

“You didn’t say sorry. That’s huge.”

Abby put her phone away and ordered another drink. Tomorrow she’d deal with Linda and Harriet and the inevitable confrontation about where she’d been and why she’d lied. Tonight, she was exactly where she wanted to be, and that would have to be enough.

VIII.

Abby started showing up early on Fridays, before the crowd filled in, when the casino still smelled more like industrial cleaner than cigarettes and desperation.

She learned things, though not on purpose.

The sword performer—Jennifer, not Jasmine—was usually backstage doing homework. Actual homework, with a highlighter and everything. One night Abby caught a glimpse of her textbook: Principles of Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation.

“Physical therapy,” Jennifer said when she noticed Abby staring. “Loma Linda. I graduate in May.”

“Your parents must be proud.”

Jennifer laughed, closing the textbook. “My parents think I teach pilates to rich ladies in Riverside. Which I guess isn’t technically wrong if you count pole as pilates.”

She went back to highlighting something about rotator cuff injuries while wearing pasties shaped like stars. Abby ordered another drink.

Bill showed up around eight, same stool at the bar, same golf shirt in a slightly different shade of beige. He nodded at Abby, ordered his beer, and fed a twenty into the video poker machine embedded in the bar top with the efficiency of someone performing a well-practiced ritual.

“Carol doing okay?” Abby asked, because she’d seen Carol at water aerobics that morning looking like she wanted to drown someone.

“She’s fine. Mad at me for something. Can’t remember what.” He hit the deal button. “She’s always mad about something. Doctor says it’s the stroke—damages the part of the brain that regulates mood. I say it just gave her permission to be as mean as she always wanted to be.”

He lost the hand. Fed in another twenty.

“You come here every night?” Abby asked.

“Only the nights I want to stay married.”

Sharon showed up for their Tuesday coffee with her arm still in the brace, wearing a t-shirt that said “NASTY WOMAN” in sequins.

“Six weeks,” she said, waving the braced arm like it was an accessory she’d chosen. “Doctor says I’m healing well for my age, which is doctor-speak for ‘you’re old, stop doing stupid shit.’”

“Are you going to stop?”

“Absolutely not. I ordered aerial hammock silks on Amazon. They arrive Thursday.” She ordered a latte with extra espresso. “My daughter called last night. Wants me to move to San Diego, closer to her. Says I’m ‘isolated.’”

“Are you?”

“I have pole class three times a week and a burlesque showcase in six weeks where I’m performing to ‘Respect’ even if I have to do it one-armed. I’m the opposite of isolated. I’m just isolated from people who think isolation means not going to book club.”

The cocktail waitress—Rosa—brought Abby’s usual vodka soda without being asked. Abby had been coming here long enough that she’d become a “usual.” She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

“You want food?” Rosa asked. “Kitchen’s slow tonight.”

“I’m okay.”

“You should eat. You’re here four nights a week drinking on an empty stomach. That’s how people end up like Tom over there.”

She gestured at the man feeding twenties into a slot machine like he was personally financing the casino’s quarterly earnings.

“What’s wrong with Tom?”

“Nothing that winning six thousand dollars wouldn’t fix.” Rosa moved to the next table. “Everything else though—that’s not a slot machine problem.”

Abby watched Tom for a while. He had a system—play for exactly two hours, stop regardless of whether he was winning or losing, cash out, go home. She’d seen him do it every Friday for weeks now. He never looked happy when he won. He never looked sad when he lost. He just looked like someone going through the motions of something that used to mean more.

Nicole showed up late, still in street clothes, her stage makeup half-done.

“My dad called,” she said, sliding into the booth. “Wants to have dinner. ‘Talk about my future.’” She made air quotes with a bitterness that suggested this wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation.

“Are you going?”

“Probably. He’ll pay, which means I can save the money I would’ve spent on food. And he’ll spend two hours explaining why what I do isn’t real work, and I’ll spend two hours not saying what I’m actually thinking, and we’ll both pretend we had a nice time.”

“What are you actually thinking?”

“That I make in two nights what he makes in two weeks, and I don’t have to deal with teenagers who think The Great Gatsby is boring.” Nicole signaled Rosa for a drink. “But I can’t say that because then I’m the ungrateful daughter who thinks she’s better than her public school teacher father, and I’m not—I’m just better at capitalism than he ever was, which he should appreciate since he votes Republican.”

Rosa brought the drink. Nicole downed half of it.

“Everyone’s got a thing,” she said finally. “You know?”

Abby thought about Carol doing aggressive wading in the pool while pretending she wasn’t furious. About Bill feeding twenties into video poker to avoid going home. About Tom at the slots, about Rosa working four nights a week on her feet, about Jennifer highlighting anatomy textbooks between sword acts.

“Yeah,” Abby said. “I’m starting to notice.”

The next week, Harriet from three units down cornered Abby at the mailboxes. Harriet wore a visor even though they were inside and had the energy of someone who’d been waiting for this conversation.

“I saw you at Santo Caliente last Friday,” Harriet said. No preamble, no pretense. “At the bar. With that young girl.”

“Okay,” Abby said.

“I just think—well, Linda and I were talking, and we’re concerned.”

“About what?”

“About you spending so much time there. It’s not—” Harriet lowered her voice. “It’s not the kind of place for women like us.”

“What kind of women are we?”

Harriet blinked. “You know. Respectable.”

Abby thought about Jennifer doing splits while balancing swords. About Nicole holding her body weight on a pole in seven-inch heels. About Vanessa at forty-two still performing even though her knees were shot. About Sharon ordering aerial silks with a dislocated elbow.

“I’m not sure I am respectable,” Abby said. “I think I might just be good at pretending.”

She took her mail and walked away, leaving Harriet in the lobby looking like someone had just told her the earth was flat after all.

That night at Santo Caliente, Abby sat at the bar and watched people. Really watched them.

The couple at table three who came every week and sat in silence, not angry silence, just the silence of people who’d run out of things to say to each other twenty years ago. The woman at the slots who wore the same purple velour tracksuit every Friday and drank the same brand of light beer and played the same machine like she was punching a time clock. The bachelor party in the corner, drunk and loud, throwing money at performers who were working their way through grad school or supporting kids or just trying to make rent in a city that kept getting more expensive.

Nobody here had it figured out. But at least they’d stopped pretending they did.

Abby’s phone buzzed. Her daughter: Mom, are you eating enough? You sound different on the phone lately.

She typed back: I’m fine. Just figuring some things out.

That’s what worries me.

Abby put the phone away. Ordered another drink. Around her, people were figuring things out too—with varying degrees of success, most of it questionable, none of it resembling the neat solutions Linda’s book club probably discussed over chardonnay.

Nicole slid into the booth, makeup done now, ready to perform.

“You good?” she asked.

“Define good.”

“Fair point.” Nicole stood up. “I’m on in five. Stay for the whole show?”

“Where else would I go?”

Nicole grinned. “That’s the spirit.”

A Whole Artist’s Guide to Traditional, Indie, Hybrid, and Everything In Between

Let’s talk about the question that keeps authors up at night, scrolling through Reddit threads at 2 AM, asking random people on Twitter for advice they probably shouldn’t take: How should I publish my book?

The answer you’ll get depends entirely on who you ask. Traditional publishing advocates will tell you anything else is “vanity publishing,” and you’re not a real author unless you have a New York publisher. Indie authors will tell you traditional publishing is a scam that steals your rights and pays you pennies. Hybrid publishers will promise you the “best of both worlds” while potentially running off with your money.

Everyone’s got an agenda. Everyone’s convinced their path is the only legitimate one. And you’re stuck in the middle, trying to figure out what’s actually right for your book, your goals, and your sanity.

Here’s what I’m going to tell you: There are multiple legitimate ways to publish a book. Each has real advantages and real drawbacks. Your job isn’t to find the “best” path—it’s to find the path that aligns with your specific goals, timeline, and tolerance for doing things yourself versus having others handle them.

Let’s break down every option, bust some myths, and help you make a decision you won’t regret.

Traditional Publishing: The Old Guard

What It Actually Is:

Traditional publishing means a publishing house pays you (via an advance against royalties) for the right to publish your book. You typically need a literary agent to access major publishers. The publisher handles editing, cover design, printing, distribution, and at least some marketing. You don’t pay them anything; they potentially pay you, and they take most of the financial risk.

The Players:

• Big Five Publishers (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Macmillan): The major leagues. Getting published by one of these is like getting into Harvard—prestigious, difficult, and not necessarily better for everyone.

• Small and Independent Presses: Smaller publishers with more focused lists, often specializing in specific genres or literary fiction. Less prestigious than the Big Five, but often more author-friendly and willing to take risks on unusual books.

• University Presses: Academic and literary publishers affiliated with universities. Excellent for scholarly works, poetry, and serious literary fiction. Don’t expect to make money, but do expect credibility.

The Real Advantages:

Traditional publishing offers legitimacy that still matters in certain contexts. Literary prizes, academic positions, some media coverage, and bookstore placement all favor traditionally published books. There’s also something psychologically validating about someone else believing in your book enough to invest money in it.

You get professional editing, design, and distribution without paying upfront. Your book automatically goes into the library system, gets reviewed by major publications, and has a shot at bookstore placement. The publisher handles production, which means you can focus on writing.

If your book succeeds, the publisher’s marketing machine can amplify it in ways indie authors struggle to match. That advance (if there is one) is money in your pocket regardless of sales.

The Real Drawbacks:

Getting traditionally published is brutally difficult and slow. You need an agent (which requires its own querying process), then your agent needs to sell your book, then there’s a 12-18 month production timeline. From finishing your manuscript to seeing your book in stores, you’re looking at 2-3 years minimum.

Advances for debut authors are often modest $0 -$15,000 is more common than the six-figure deals you hear about. You earn royalties only after “earning out” your advance, and royalty rates (typically 10-15% of cover price for print, 25% of net for ebooks) are lower than indie publishing. Another financial drawback: advances that used to be paid in three parts (signing contract, acceptance of manuscript, publication) are now dribbled out in four or five payments, and the final payment — for paperback publication — may not be paid if no paperback is published.

You lose creative control. The publisher decides your cover, your title, your release date, and how much marketing budget you get. They own the rights, sometimes for the life of the copyright. If your book doesn’t sell well initially, they may not publish your next one.

And here’s the hard truth: most traditionally published books get minimal marketing support. Unless you’re a big-name author or your book is chosen as a lead title, you’ll still be doing most of your own marketing.

When Traditional Publishing Makes Sense:

• You want the validation and prestige

• You write literary fiction or serious nonfiction that indie readers don’t typically buy

• You’re willing to wait 2-3 years

• You don’t want to handle production logistics

• You’re targeting awards or media coverage that favors traditional publishers

Self-Publishing: The Indie Revolution

What It Actually Is:

Self-publishing means you act as your own publisher. You hire (and pay) your own editors, designers, and other professionals. You upload your files to platforms like Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, or Draft2Digital. You keep all the rights and all the profits. You also take all the financial risk and handle all the logistics.

The Main Platforms:

• Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing): The 800-pound gorilla. Easy to use, massive reach, pays 70% royalties on ebooks priced $2.99-$9.99 (35% outside that range). Print-on-demand for paperbacks. Can go exclusive with KDP Select for additional promotional tools.

• IngramSpark: Professional-grade distribution to bookstores and libraries. More complex than KDP, charges setup fees, but gets your book into the systems that bookstores use. Essential if you want brick-and-mortar placement.

• Draft2Digital: User-friendly distribution to multiple retailers (Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc.). No setup fees, easy formatting tools, and good customer service. Great for going “wide” beyond Amazon.

The Real Advantages:

You keep complete creative control, your cover, your title, your content. You earn much higher royalties: 70% on Amazon ebooks versus 10-15% in traditional publishing. You can publish on your timeline: finish your book in March, it’s live in April.

There’s no gatekeeping. If you write in a niche genre or for an underserved audience, you don’t need permission from an agent or publisher who doesn’t understand your market. You can iterate quickly—update your cover, revise your blurb, adjust your pricing instantly.

You own your rights forever. No reversion clauses, no waiting to get your book back. If you build a successful series, that’s a valuable intellectual property asset that belongs to you.

The Real Drawbacks:

You pay all upfront costs: editing, cover design, formatting. Quality professional services for a novel run $2,000-$5,000 minimum. Cutting corners here is obvious and hurts sales.

You handle everything yourself or hire it out: production, distribution, marketing, bookkeeping, customer service. This is running a small business, not just being an author.

Bookstore placement is difficult. Libraries are possible but require specific distribution setups. Literary prizes and major media coverage mostly ignore self-published books. Some readers still associate self-publishing with poor quality (though this stigma is fading).

You earn nothing upfront. Every dollar comes from actual sales. If your book doesn’t sell, that’s $4,000 you spent on a book nobody bought.

When Self-Publishing Makes Sense:

• You write in a genre with a strong indie readership (romance, fantasy, thriller)

• You want creative control and don’t care about traditional prestige

• You can afford or have learned the production skills required

• You’re comfortable with marketing and business logistics

• You want to publish quickly or on your own schedule

• You’re building a series or backlist where you retain all rights

Hybrid Publishing: The Minefield

This is where things get complicated and potentially predatory, so pay attention.

What It Should Be:

Legitimate hybrid publishing sits between traditional and self-publishing. You pay some production costs, but you also get professional services, distribution, and some level of curation (they don’t publish everyone). You typically retain more rights than traditional publishing and earn higher royalties than either traditional or self-publishing.

What It Often Actually Is:

Vanity publishing in a nicer suit. Companies that will publish anyone who pays them, provide minimal actual value, charge inflated prices for basic services, and prey on authors’ dreams of being “published.”

The Red Flags:

• They charge thousands of dollars but offer no curation (publish anyone who pays)

• Their “distribution” is just listing your book on Amazon (which you could do for free)

• They require you to buy copies of your own book

• They own or share your ISBN, limiting your control

• Their contracts lock you in with unfavorable terms

• They charge for “marketing” that’s just social media posts

The Legitimate Options:

Some small presses operate as “author-subsidized” for specific situations—academic presses for scholarly work, poetry presses with limited funding, niche publishers for specific genres. These are transparent about costs and what you’re paying for.

If you’re considering hybrid publishing, get everything in writing, have a lawyer review the contract, and research the company thoroughly. Talk to their other authors. Check their track record. If it feels like they’re selling you on being published rather than investing in your book’s success, run.

When Hybrid Publishing Makes Sense:

• You have a niche academic or professional book where you need credibility, but traditional publishers won’t take the risk

• You’ve thoroughly vetted the publisher and understand exactly what you’re paying for

• You want some professional support, but can’t afford or don’t want to handle everything yourself

• The math actually works better than hiring services independently (rare)

Honestly? Most authors are better off either going traditional or going full indie rather than navigating the hybrid minefield.

The Hybrid Author Approach: Best of All Worlds?

Here’s where it gets interesting: You don’t have to choose just one path forever.

Many successful authors are “hybrid authors”—they traditionally publish some books and self-publish others. Maybe your literary novel goes traditional for prestige while you self-publish a genre series under a pen name. Maybe you traditionally publish with a small press, but self-publish your backlist when rights revert.

This approach lets you leverage the advantages of each path while mitigating the disadvantages. You get traditional publishing’s validation and infrastructure for books that need it, plus indie publishing’s control and higher royalties for books that don’t.

Strategic Combinations:

• Traditionally publish your main series, self-publish novellas and side stories

• Self-publish in your main genre, traditionally publish in a different genre

• Start indie to build an audience, then leverage that platform for a traditional deal

• Traditionally publish until you have a following, then go indie for higher royalties

• Self-publish backlist titles when traditional rights revert

The hybrid author approach requires understanding both systems well enough to navigate them strategically. But it’s becoming increasingly common and removes the pressure to choose one path and stick with it forever.

The Rebels: Alternative Publishing Models That Break All the Rules

And then there are the authors who looked at traditional publishing, indie publishing, and hybrid publishing and said, “Nah, I’m going to do something completely different.”

These alternative models don’t fit neatly into any category. Some are brilliant. Some are disasters. Some are both simultaneously. But they’re worth understanding because they might be exactly right for your book, your audience, or your goals.

Serial Publishing on Substack (or Similar Platforms)

Remember how Dickens published novels? Chapter by chapter in magazines. Readers waited eagerly for the next installment. That model is back, and it’s thriving on platforms like Substack, Patreon, and Medium.

The pitch is compelling: Build an audience while you write. Get reader feedback in real-time. Earn money immediately through subscriptions rather than waiting for your book to sell. Create a direct relationship with readers who are invested in your work from chapter one.

The Real Advantages:

You’re building an audience and earning money simultaneously. Readers who’ve followed your serial are primed to buy the finished book. The feedback loop can improve your writing. There’s no gatekeeping—just you and your readers.

You own the relationship with your audience completely. When you eventually publish the complete book (traditionally or indie), you have a ready-made fan base. Some authors make substantial income from serialization alone—enough to quit their day jobs before the book is even finished.

The Real Drawbacks:

Writing on deadline, publicly, with people commenting on your chapters before you can revise them, is not for everyone. It’s creatively constraining and psychologically intense. You can’t go back and fix chapter three when you realize in chapter thirty that you need to change something fundamental.

Most readers still prefer complete books. Your serial audience might be small. Converting serial readers into book buyers isn’t automatic—many feel they’ve already read it and won’t pay again.

You’re locked into your posting schedule and structure. Life happens, inspiration ebbs, but your readers are waiting for next Tuesday’s chapter. The pressure can be creatively paralyzing.

When Serial Publishing Makes Sense:

• You write fast and don’t need extensive revision

• You thrive under deadline pressure and reader engagement

• You’re building a platform from scratch and need audience development

• Your genre has a strong serial tradition (romance, fantasy, web fiction)

• You’re comfortable with public drafting and incorporating feedback

• You can commit to a consistent publishing schedule

The “Pay What You Want” Model

Some authors publish their complete book and let readers choose what to pay—from free to whatever they think it’s worth. Platforms like Gumroad, itch.io, and even direct website sales enable this.

The philosophy is beautiful: Trust your readers. Remove the barrier of fixed pricing. Make your work accessible to everyone while allowing those who can afford it to support you generously.

The Reality:

When done well, with the right audience, this can work. Loyal fans often pay more than the book’s retail price to support you. People who can’t afford books get access. You build goodwill and word-of-mouth.

But most people will choose free or very low prices. Your average earnings per reader will likely be much lower than traditional pricing. This model works best when you already have a dedicated audience who wants to support you personally, not for attracting new readers who don’t know you yet.

When “Pay What You Want” Makes Sense:

• You have an existing fanbase that wants to support your work

• You’re more interested in reach than revenue

• You’re building a backlist where subsequent books will be full price

• Your book serves a mission (activism, education, community service) beyond profit

• You’re experimenting and can afford potential low returns

Giving It Away (The Free Model)

Some authors just give their books away. Completely free. Forever.

This sounds insane from a business perspective, but it can be strategically brilliant depending on your goals.

Cory Doctorow has given away every novel he’s written while simultaneously selling physical copies. His reasoning: Free digital copies create readers who become buyers of physical books, recommend his work to others, and support him through speaking gigs and other opportunities.

The Strategic Logic:

Free builds audience faster than any other method. If your goal is maximizing readers (not revenue), free wins. For authors whose income comes from speaking, consulting, or other work related to their book’s topic, a widely-read free book is better marketing than a modestly-selling paid book.

Free books can be the top of a funnel. Give away book one, sell books two through five. Give away the ebook, sell the audiobook and special editions. Give away the book, sell consulting or courses based on it.

When Free Makes Sense:

• You’re an expert/speaker/consultant and the book is your calling card

• You’re building a series and want maximum audience for book one

• Your revenue model is elsewhere (courses, coaching, services)

• You prioritize impact over income

• You can genuinely afford to earn nothing from the book

Building Your Own Bookstore

Some authors skip Amazon entirely and sell directly from their own websites. They build their own “bookstore” using platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, or specialized tools like BookFunnel and Payhip.

The appeal: Keep 100% of the revenue (minus payment processing fees). Own the customer relationship completely. Collect email addresses. Build your own ecosystem without platform dependency.

The Reality Check:

Selling direct means you handle everything: payment processing, file delivery, customer service, tax collection (internationally!), fraud prevention, and refunds. You’re now running an e-commerce business, not just writing books.

You also lose discoverability. Amazon’s algorithm, however mysterious and frustrating, does help readers find books. Your website doesn’t have millions of browsers looking for their next read. You need to drive all your own traffic.

But here’s where it can work:

If you already have an audience—email list, social media following, podcast listeners—selling direct can be incredibly profitable. You’re not paying Amazon’s cut, and you’re building a customer database you own.

Some successful indie authors now sell 30-40% of their books direct, keeping Amazon for discoverability but moving their loyal readers to direct sales for better margins.

When Direct Selling Makes Sense:

• You have an existing audience you can drive to your site

• You’re comfortable with e-commerce logistics

• You want to offer special editions, bundles, or exclusive content

• You’re building a long-term business, not just publishing one book

• You can handle the technical setup or afford to hire it done

The Crowdfunding Model (Kickstarter, Patreon)

Fund your book before you publish it. Readers pre-order, you use that money to pay for editing and design, then deliver the finished book.

Kickstarter works for complete books you’ll publish once funded. Patreon works for ongoing creation where subscribers support your writing monthly.

The Power:

You know you have an audience before investing money in production. Readers are invested (literally) in your success. You can offer special editions, signed copies, and exclusive content that make your book special.

Successful campaigns can raise far more than traditional advances. Some authors fund their books and earn significant income before publication.

The Challenge:

Running a successful crowdfunding campaign is work—video creation, reward tier design, marketing push, constant updates. Failed campaigns are public and demoralizing.

You’re committing to deliver, publicly, to people who’ve paid you. The pressure is real and the timeline is fixed. And if you don’t reach your funding goal on Kickstarter, you get nothing.

When Crowdfunding Makes Sense:

• You have an engaged audience willing to pre-order

• Your book has special edition potential (art books, illustrated works, special formats)

• You can create compelling campaign materials

• You’re comfortable with public accountability and deadlines

• You want to test market demand before investing in production

The Remix: Combining Alternative Models

Here’s where it gets really interesting: You don’t have to choose just one alternative model any more than you have to choose just one traditional publishing path.

Serialize your novel on Substack while writing it, building an audience. When it’s complete, crowdfund a special edition on Kickstarter. Publish the ebook wide through traditional indie channels. Sell signed paperbacks direct from your website. Give away the first book in your series free on all platforms while charging for books two through five.

The authors making the most money in indie publishing right now aren’t following one model—they’re strategically combining multiple revenue streams to maximize both reach and income.

The Permission to Experiment

Here’s what matters about all these alternative models: They prove there’s no single “right” way to publish anymore.

You can serialize on Substack and still traditionally publish later. You can give away your first book free and sell the rest. You can sell direct from your website while also being on Amazon. You can crowdfund special editions while the regular edition sells everywhere.

The publishing landscape is more open, more experimental, and more author-friendly than ever before—if you’re willing to think creatively and potentially do more work yourself.

But here’s the critical thing: These alternative models usually require you to already have an audience or be willing to build one alongside your publishing efforts. They’re rarely good first-book strategies unless you’re bringing an audience from somewhere else (your podcast, your newsletter, your YouTube channel, your consulting business).

If you’re starting from zero, you probably need to build some readership through more traditional channels before alternative models make sense. But once you have even a modest audience, these approaches open up possibilities that didn’t exist a decade ago.

The future of publishing isn’t just traditional versus indie. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure of multiple models, revenue streams, and creative approaches.

The only wrong choice is not publishing at all because you’re paralyzed by too many options.

The Real Questions You Need to Answer

Forget what other people think you should do. Here are the questions that actually matter:

What are your goals?

If you want literary credibility, awards consideration, or a position in academia, traditional publishing matters. If you want to maximize income from a commercial genre, indie publishing usually wins. If you just want to see your book in the world and don’t care about the rest, choose whichever path gets you there happiest.

What’s your timeline?

Need your book out in six months? Indie publishing is your only option. Willing to wait 2-3 years for the right traditional deal? You have time to query agents.

What’s your tolerance for business logistics?

Self-publishing means running a small business: hiring contractors, managing finances, handling distribution. Some authors love this. Others find it soul-crushing. Be honest about which camp you’re in.

What’s your financial situation?

Can you afford $3,000-$5,000 upfront for professional indie publishing? If not, you’re either going traditional (where they may pay you) or you’re learning to do everything yourself. Both are valid, but your finances matter.

What genre are you writing?

Literary fiction and serious nonfiction still favor traditional publishing. Romance, fantasy, and thriller have thriving indie markets. Know your genre’s landscape before choosing.

How important is creative control?

If you’ll lose sleep over someone else choosing your cover, go indie. If you’d rather hand that off to professionals and trust them, traditional might work better.

How to Actually Decide

Here’s my recommendation: Try to get an agent and traditionally publish first, but set a deadline.

Spend 6-12 months querying agents seriously. Research agents who represent your genre, write professional queries, and get feedback on your manuscript. Give traditional publishing a real shot.

If you get agent interest, great—see where it goes. If you get an offer, evaluate it carefully: Is the advance reasonable? Are the rights terms fair? Does the publisher have a track record with books like yours?

But if you get 50-100 rejections with no interest, or if you hate the querying process so much you’re not writing, give yourself permission to go indie. Those rejections don’t mean your book is bad—they might just mean it’s not commercial enough for the traditional market, or you haven’t found the right agent yet.

Going indie after trying traditional isn’t settling. It’s choosing a different business model with different advantages.

Alternatively, if you know you want complete control, or you’re writing in a genre where indie publishing dominates, skip querying and go straight to indie. Don’t waste time on a path you don’t actually want just because other people think you should.

The Permission Slip You Need

Here’s what nobody tells you: Publishing is changing fast. The stigma against self-publishing is fading. Hybrid authors are becoming the norm. Readers care about good stories, not publishing logos.

You don’t need permission to publish your book. You don’t need validation from an agent or publisher to be a “real” author. You don’t need to follow someone else’s definition of success.

Traditional publishing is a legitimate choice with real advantages. Self-publishing is a legitimate choice with real advantages. Hybrid publishing is… well, usually a bad idea, but occasionally legitimate. Mixing approaches across different books is a smart strategy. And alternative models like serialization, crowdfunding, or direct sales might be perfect for your specific situation.

Choose the path that serves your book, your goals, and your mental health. Ignore everyone who tells you there’s only one right way. Those people are selling something or protecting their own choices.

Your book deserves to exist in the world. Whether it gets there through traditional publishing, indie publishing, Substack serialization, Kickstarter crowdfunding, or some combination doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think it does.

What matters is writing the best book you can, publishing it professionally (however you define that), and getting it into the hands of readers who will love it.

The rest is just logistics.

Now stop reading about publishing and go write your book. You can figure out how to publish it after you’ve written something worth publishing.

Fiction Break This Week is Delayed.

Listen Now

A near-future novel just taught me something about how books earn trust before anyone reads a word.

There’s a question floating over M.E. McMillan’s speculative fiction debut that stopped me cold: What happens when division is engineered?

It’s the tagline for The Vectorist: Book 1, Rise of the Tribe. It doesn’t read like science fiction. It reads like the news.

But I want to talk about something else for a moment. I want to talk about how this book showed up in the world, because it’s a near-perfect case study in what I think of as credibility architecture, the art of making readers trust a book before they’ve consumed a single page (or in this case, listened to a single word).

The badge problem

Here’s something authors get wrong all the time: they wait for validation, then bury it.

McMillan’s launch materials lead with the earned praise. Five stars from Reedsy Discovery. Five stars from Literary Titan. Both visible, prominent, laureled, the shorthand readers recognize from film festivals and award seasons. The instinct to be modest about your own reviews is understandable. It’s also a marketing mistake. Readers need permission to take a chance on an unknown author. Badges give it to them.

The question that does the work

“A sharply crafted near-future dystopian about weaponized digital tribes” is a good review. But what happens when division is engineered? is a great hook. It’s the difference between describing a book and activating a reader’s curiosity. The launch image leads with the question, not the description, and that sequencing matters. Curiosity opens the door. The review closes the sale.

Why multi-voice?

The audiobook is narrated by Stephen Dalton and produced as a multi-voice recording. For a story built around tribal fragmentation and competing loyalties, that’s not just a production choice; it’s a thematic one. Different voices, different perspectives, the sense that no single narrator holds the whole truth. When format serves the story, listeners feel it even if they can’t name it.

The 2 hours 20 minutes detail

This one is subtle but smart. Stating the runtime upfront removes a friction point for audiobook listeners who are time-managing their commute, their workout, or their insomnia. It also signals confidence — we’re not hiding how long this is, we want you to know. For a debut, that kind of transparency reads as professionalism.

My recommendation

I work with a lot of authors. I don’t recommend all of their books on this page, because that would be both dishonest and boring.

I’m recommending this one because the premise genuinely unsettled me, the execution is sharp, and because McMillan did something rare: he thought about how his book would meet readers as carefully as he thought about the book itself.

The Vectorist: Rise of the Tribes is on Audible now. Two hours and twenty minutes. Start it tonight.

Let’s start with the word “suck.” Because if you’re going to use it to talk yourself out of writing, the least you can do is define it properly.

What does “suck” actually mean? Clunky sentences? Sure. Thoughts that refuse to cooperate? Absolutely. A yawning gap between what you feel and what lands on the page? Welcome to the club. That gap is practically in the job description. Sucking is not a personality trait. It’s not a verdict. It’s a Tuesday.

Every writer you admire has a folder full of work that makes them want to enter witness protection.

The ones who kept going didn’t do it because they stopped sucking. They did it because they stopped treating sucking like it was news.

Breakthroughs Have Their Own Timeline (And It Is Rude)

I didn’t take writing seriously until my thirties. And then it took twenty-five more years before I actually felt good.

Twenty-five years.

I’m not telling you this to make you feel better. I’m telling you because no one told me, and I had to figure it out the hard way while everyone around me seemed to know things I didn’t. The breakthrough is not scheduled. It doesn’t arrive when you finish the draft, or when you finally figure out your “brand,” or when you get a compliment from someone you respect. It shows up quietly, mid-sentence, when you suddenly know exactly what you mean. And then it leaves. And then it comes back.

The writers who get there are not the most talented. They’re the most stubborn. This is good news, if you’re the type who can hold a grudge.

Writing Is How You Figure Out What Happened

There’s a reason people reach for journals in crisis. For letters they’ll never send, the backs of napkins at 2 am, the Notes app under circumstances they’d prefer not to explain.

Writing is how the brain processes what it can’t yet hold. It forces the chaos of being alive into the architecture of a sentence, which is honestly a miracle when you think about it.

You don’t have to publish it. You don’t have to show it to anyone. But writing something down, even badly, even just to yourself, does something that nothing else quite does. It makes the thing real. It makes the thing yours.

And sometimes it makes the unbearable just slightly less unbearable. Which is not nothing. That’s actually everything.

Someone Out There Is Waiting for Exactly This

The essay you’re too embarrassed to write is probably the one someone else desperately needs to read.

Not the polished one. Not the one where you have it figured out and look wise and use words like “liminal.” The messy one. The one where you’re still in the middle of it, still confused, still a little raw around the edges. That’s the one that lands. That’s the one someone reads at midnight and thinks: oh thank god, someone else knows this.

Your specific confusion. Your weird, particular grief. Your hard-won understanding of one small, strange corner of being alive. It doesn’t exist anywhere else. It only lives in you. And the only way to give it to someone who needs it is to write it down.

Even if it sucks. Especially if it sucks.

First drafts aren’t bad. They’re just shy. Write the shy one.

The Feather Act

by Liz Dubelman

A Fiction Break (WIP) to read what you may have missed, click here

V.

The lies got easier.

“Yoga class” covered Tuesday nights. “Book club” covered Fridays when she went to the burlesque shows. “Errands” covered basically everything else. The women at Desert Oasis nodded approvingly—Abby was finally settling in, making an effort, joining things.

What she was actually joining was a community of women who could hold their body weight on a vertical pole while wearing seven-inch heels.

By week three, Abby could do a basic fireman spin without looking like she was being attacked by the pole. By week five, she’d learned something called a chair spin that left her inner thighs bruised in shapes she’d never seen before. By week seven, Sharon taught her how to climb.

“It’s all legs,” Sharon said, demonstrating. She was wearing yoga pants and a sports bra that said “NEVERTHELESS SHE PERSISTED” across the chest. “You’re not pulling yourself up with your arms—that’s what beginners think. You’re pushing with your legs and the pole becomes leverage.”

Abby tried. Failed. Tried again. On the fourth attempt, she made it three feet off the ground before her grip gave out and she slid down, leaving skin on the pole.

“That’s what we call pole burn,” Nicole said cheerfully. “Badge of honor. You’ll get calluses eventually.”

Abby looked at her hands. They were already different—tougher, marked with small scars and the beginnings of real calluses across her palms. Roger would have hated them. Roger had bought her hand cream every Christmas, the expensive kind that came in little glass jars. She’d thrown them all away the week after he died.

“Again,” Sharon said.

Abby climbed again.

That Saturday, Linda cornered her at the mailboxes.

“Abby! We haven’t seen you at water aerobics in weeks. Is everything okay?”

“I’ve been doing yoga,” Abby said, which was technically true if you considered pole dancing a form of aerial yoga, which some people did.

“Oh, yoga is wonderful. I’ve been thinking about trying that. Where do you go?”

Abby’s mind went blank. She didn’t know any yoga studios. She’d never done yoga in her life except for one disastrous attempt in the nineties when Roger said her stress was making her difficult to live with.

“It’s in Palm Springs,” she said finally. “You probably wouldn’t like it. Very advanced.”

Linda’s smile sharpened. “I’m quite flexible, actually.”

“It’s hot yoga. In a room heated to 105 degrees.”

“Oh.” Linda’s interest visibly cooled. She didn’t like to sweat. “Well, that sounds... intense.”

“It is.”

“And the book club on Fridays?”

“What about it?”

“You haven’t been. We’re reading ‘Where the Crawdads Sing.’”

“I read that already,” Abby lied. She’d never heard of it.

“What did you think?”

“Very... crawdaddy.”

Linda stared at her. Abby collected her mail—mostly credit card offers and a postcard from her daughter in Seattle reminding her that “self-care is important during grief”—and walked away before Linda could ask any more questions.

Back in her apartment, she found a text from Nicole: Sharon wants to know if you’re coming to the showcase next month. She needs a final count.

What showcase?

Student performance night. We do it quarterly. Very low-key, just friends and family. You should come watch even if you’re not performing.

I’m definitely not performing.

Never say never. You’ve been doing this two months. Sharon’s been doing it eighteen. You’ve got time.

Abby looked around her living room. Roger’s leather recliner still sat in the corner because she couldn’t figure out how to get it out of the apartment by herself. His collection of Presidential biographies still lined the bookshelf because she couldn’t bring herself to donate them yet. His reading glasses sat on the side table, waiting for eyes that would never need them again.

She texted back: I’ll come watch.

VI.

The HOA meeting was mandatory for all residents, which meant Abby spent Tuesday evening in the clubhouse instead of at pole class, listening to Marjorie argue passionately about whether the community should install speed bumps.

“We have children visiting,” Marjorie said, gesturing at the empty room as if invisible grandchildren were about to materialize. “Safety should be our primary concern.”

“We have a 15 mph speed limit,” someone argued. “If people would just follow it.”

“People don’t follow rules without enforcement,” Marjorie snapped.

Abby thought about Nicole, who made her own rules and followed exactly none that didn’t serve her. Who decided what her body did and when and for how much money, and answered to no one about any of it.

The speed bump debate raged for forty minutes. Abby checked her phone. Sharon had sent a video to the group chat—her practicing an aerial silk routine, climbing twenty feet up and wrapping herself in fabric before dropping into what looked like a controlled fall but was actually something called a “suicide drop.”

Abby watched it three times. The woman was 62 years old and falling from the ceiling on purpose. It was either insane or inspiring. Probably both.

“Abby?” Linda’s voice cut through her thoughts. “Do you have an opinion on the speed bumps?”

Every face in the room turned toward her. The golf couples. The pickleball crowd. The gardening committee. All of them waiting for her to pick a side, to slot herself into their hierarchy of opinions.

“I think people are going to drive however they want, regardless of what we install,” Abby said. “Speed bumps just make them angry.”

Marjorie looked personally offended. “So you’re saying we should do nothing?”

“I’m saying I don’t care about speed bumps.”

The room went quiet. Not caring was apparently more shocking than caring the wrong amount.

Linda recovered first. “Well, we can’t all be as zen as Abby with her yoga practice.” She said it lightly, but her eyes were calculating. “How is that going, by the way? You’ve been going quite a bit.”

“It’s fine.”

“Where did you say it was again?”

“Palm Springs.”

“Which studio?”

Abby’s mind raced. “Hot Yoga Palm Springs,” she said, hoping that was a real place.

“Hmm.” Linda pulled out her phone. Started typing. Abby felt her stomach drop. “I’m not seeing that one. There’s a Hot Desert Yoga and a Palm Springs Hot Yoga, but—”

“It might be under a different name,” Abby said. “It’s new.”

“What’s the address? I’ll look it up.”

The room felt smaller. Everyone was watching now, the speed bumps forgotten in favor of this much more interesting drama: the new widow who’d been acting suspicious for months finally getting caught in a lie.

Abby stood up. “I don’t actually remember the address. I just drive there.” She picked up her purse. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m not feeling well.”

She walked out before anyone could ask more questions, her heart pounding like she’d was on stage. Behind her, she could hear the immediate explosion of whispers.

Her phone buzzed. Nicole: You okay? You missed class.

HOA meeting. It was hell.

Worse than pole burn?

Different kind of pain.

Come Friday. New girl is doing an act with swords. You’ll love it.

Abby sat in her car in the parking lot, watching lights go on in windows all over Desert Oasis. Behind those windows, people were probably talking about her. The suspicious widow. The one who lied about yoga. The one who took the Santo Caliente shuttle and came home late, smelling like smoke and secrets.

Let them talk.

She started the car and drove, not back to her unit but out of Desert Oasis entirely, past the gates with their fake adobe and real surveillance cameras, onto the highway that led to Santo Caliente. It was Tuesday night. She’d missed pole class, but the casino was always open, always full of people who didn’t ask questions about where you’d been or what you were hiding.

She texted Nicole: Change of plans. Meet me at Santo Caliente in 20?

The response came immediately: See you at the bar.

Abby drove faster than the speed limit, and nobody installed a bump to stop her.

There’s a story people tell. You’ve probably heard it. Someone goes away for a week, maybe two. They ask a friend, a good friend, to check on the cat. Feed it. Just make sure it’s okay.

The friend says yes. Of course. It’s easy. It’s just a cat.

You know how this ends.

What makes the story stick isn’t the neglect — it’s the confidence of the neglect. The friend didn’t forget the cat because they were cruel. They forgot because they thought it would be fine. Because it seemed small. Because it was easy to keep meaning to get to it. Because today turned into tomorrow, and tomorrow turned into I’ll go first thing in the morning, and morning turned into a call no one wants to make.

The cat died of over-commitment and under-delivery. The friend said yes when they should have said I can’t, actually. Or: I’ll try, but don’t count on me.

Instead, they said yes and meant probably.

Writers do this to their books constantly.

Not in a single dramatic act of abandonment. There’s no moment where you announce you’re quitting, no ceremony, no door slamming. You just stop checking in. You keep meaning to get back to it. You over-promise yourself, this weekend, this month, when things calm down, and under-deliver in ways so quiet you barely notice until one day you open the document and something in you knows.

It’s been too long.

And here’s the part that makes the vacation cat story genuinely haunting: the friend usually meant to go. They thought about going. They felt bad that they hadn’t gone yet. Guilt is not the same as showing up.

Your book does not need your guilt. It needs your presence. Even five minutes of real presence. Even a bad paragraph on a Thursday that nobody will ever read. You showing up, imperfectly, reluctantly, on a day when you have nothing, is the whole job. The cat doesn’t care if you’re in a good mood. It just needs you to open the door.

Neglect isn’t neutral. It has a direction. It is lethal, and it moves fast, and it looks right until the very end like something I’m about to get back to.

Don’t be the friend who meant well.

Go feed the cat.

A version of the story:

The story goes like this: Someone goes away and leaves their house in the care of a neighbor or friend. They call to check in, and ask, “How is everything?”

The friend says, “Well... the cat got on the roof and fell off and died.”

The person is devastated. But more than that, they’re upset by how they were told. “You can’t just say it like that,” they say. “You have to break bad news gently. Next time, tell me slowly. First, say the cat was on the roof. Then say you were worried. Let me get used to the idea before you tell me the worst.”

The friend apologizes and agrees.

A few days later, the phone rings again.

“How is everything?”

“Well... your mother got up on the roof...”

A Fiction Break (WIP) - most of you can skip to section 3

The Feather Act

by Liz Dubelman

Abby discovered the burlesque show the way people discover most escapes—by accident and out of desperation.

She’d been in Desert Oasis for six weeks. Six weeks of mandatory coffee socials where women asked how she was “holding up” while obviously calculating whether she’d be competition for the limited supply of widowers. Six weeks of pool aerobics with the same Fleetwood Mac playlist. Six weeks of people telling her that Roger would want her to “get out there” and “live again,” which was hilarious because Roger had spent thirty-two years making sure she did neither.

Santo Caliente was three miles from Desert Oasis, close enough to walk if the heat didn’t kill you, which in Palm Desert in August it absolutely could. But Abby had discovered the shuttle—free, air-conditioned, and blessedly anonymous. Nobody on the shuttle asked how you were doing or whether you’d tried the new yogurt place or if you wanted to join their bunco group.

She’d gone for the free drinks. Two-dollar well vodka if you were playing slots, completely free if you looked sad enough and tipped the cocktail waitress. Abby had gotten very good at looking sad. It wasn’t hard. She was sad. Or she was relieved. Or she was both, which made her feel guilty, which made her sadder, which made the drinks taste better.

The burlesque show was advertised on a standing poster near the bathrooms: “BOMBSHELLS & BOURBON - Classic Burlesque Revue - Fridays & Saturdays 10 PM.” The poster featured a woman in a corset and impossibly high heels, one leg extended at an angle that suggested either incredible flexibility or Photoshop. Probably both.

Abby went on a Friday because it was free with a two-drink minimum, which she was going to hit anyway, and because she knew absolutely no one from Desert Oasis would be caught dead there. The golf wives went to Michael Bublé tributes. The pickleball crowd saw Fleetwood Mac cover bands. The book club women—Abby had been to exactly one meeting before realizing they spent more time discussing wine pairings than actual books—occasionally ventured out for Diana Ross.

But burlesque? That was for sad people and perverts. Abby qualified as at least one of those.

The showroom was smaller than she expected, darker, with round tables crowded too close together. She took a seat in the back corner where she could see the stage but remain mostly invisible. The crowd was mixed—some couples on dates, some men alone who were definitely the perverts, some women in groups who were drunk and laughing too loud.

The lights went down. A trumpet blared. The curtain opened on a woman in a white fur stole and nothing else visible, standing in a spotlight that made her skin glow like she’d been dipped in gold.

The music was something from the forties, brassy and confident. The woman moved and the stole moved with her, revealing and concealing in a rhythm that was mathematical in its precision. She knew exactly what she was showing and when.

Abby had expected to feel embarrassed. Instead, she felt something like awe.

The woman—the performer, because that’s what she was, not a stripper, not whatever crude word the men at the next table were probably thinking—was an athlete. The way she controlled every muscle, the way she made the stole seem like it was alive and cooperating with her rather than just fabric obeying physics. The heels alone would have killed Abby, and this woman was doing things that looked like they required a PhD in biomechanics.

The stole came off. Then the corset, one hook at a time, each reveal timed perfectly to the music. By the end she was wearing pasties shaped like stars and a thong that was mostly rhinestones, and she was spinning tassels in opposite directions while balancing on one leg.

The men at the next table were hooting. They saw tits. Abby saw someone who’d probably trained for years to make this look effortless.

The performer took her bow—still spinning one tassel, because why not—and the lights came up. The next act was announced: KiKi and the Feather Fans.

KiKi was younger than the first woman, maybe late twenties, with dark hair cut in a severe bob and the kind of bone structure that belonged in a Vogue editorial. She came out carrying two enormous pink feather fans that she manipulated like they weighed nothing.

Abby ordered another drink.

KiKi’s act was different—less about the reveal, more about the tease. She made you think you were going to see something, then the fans would shift and you’d see nothing, then maybe a flash of hip or the curve of a breast, then nothing again. It was maddening and mesmerizing.

At the end, KiKi did a split while holding both fans above her head, which seemed physically impossible but was happening right there on stage.

The applause was loud. Abby found herself clapping harder than she’d clapped for anything in years.

After the show, Abby stayed for another drink. She wasn’t ready to go back to Desert Oasis, to her little two-bedroom unit that still smelled like Roger’s aftershave even though she’d thrown out the bottle. To the messages from her daughter asking if she was “making friends” and “taking care of herself.” To the silence that was somehow louder than Roger had ever been.

She was finishing her vodka when someone slid into the chair across from her.

It was KiKi. She’d changed into jeans and a tank top, her stage makeup mostly wiped off but still visible around her eyes. She looked impossibly young up close.

“You come alone?” KiKi asked.

Abby nodded.

“Me too,” KiKi said. She signaled the waitress for two more drinks without asking if Abby wanted one. “I’m Nicole. KiKi’s just for the stage.”

“Abby.”

“You liked the show.”

It wasn’t a question. Abby nodded anyway. “You’re incredibly athletic.”

Nicole smiled. “Most people don’t say that part.”

“Most people are idiots.”

Nicole laughed. It was a good laugh, unguarded and genuine. “You live around here?”

“Desert Oasis. The 55-plus place.”

“Oh shit. You’re like, undercover.”

“Something like that.”

“They’d lose their minds if they knew you were here.”

“Probably.”

Nicole leaned back in her chair, appraising Abby with the same precision she’d used to manipulate those fans. “You gonna come back?”

Abby thought about her empty apartment. About the book club, women and the pool aerobics, and the man at the coffee social who’d told her she had “nice legs for her age.” About Roger’s life insurance money that wasn’t enough to stay in the house but was enough for Desert Oasis and twice-weekly vodka sodas.

“Yeah,” Abby said. “I think I will.”

II.

The coffee social was mandatory, which Abby found both insulting and perfectly in character for Desert Oasis. It was held every Tuesday morning in the clubhouse, a building designed to look like a hacienda but actually resembling a Taco Bell that had delusions of grandeur.

Abby arrived at 9:15, late enough to avoid helping set up but early enough not to be noticeably absent. The usual suspects were already there: Diane and Carol from the golf couples, holding court near the good pastries. Linda from the book club, wearing athleisure that cost more than Abby’s monthly HOA fees. Marjorie, who ran the gardening committee like a minor despot and had opinions about everything.

“Abby!” Linda waved her over with the enthusiasm of someone who’d been waiting to pounce. “We missed you at water aerobics yesterday.”

“Doctor’s appointment,” Abby lied. She’d actually been sleeping off Saturday night’s vodka sodas and the strange, pleasant exhaustion of having stayed out until 1 AM watching women do impossible things with their bodies.

“Oh, I hope everything’s okay?” The concern was performative. Linda wanted details, not reassurance.

“Just routine.”

Diane appeared with a coffee pot, refilling cups no one had asked her to refill. “You know, I saw the Santo Caliente shuttle pass by yesterday afternoon. Do you ever take that?”

Abby’s hand tightened on her cup. “Sometimes. They have decent restaurants.”

“Restaurants.” Carol said it like Abby had claimed they had fine art. “I heard the buffet gave someone food poisoning.”

“I usually stick to the bar,” Abby said, which was true.

Marjorie joined them, carrying a tiny pastry on a napkin like it was evidence in a crime. “My nephew manages security there. He says the crowd gets rougher after dark. Drug dealers, prostitutes.” She said this with the satisfaction of someone who’d lived in Palm Desert for thirty years without experiencing anything interesting.

“I’m usually home by eight,” Abby lied again.

Linda leaned in, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “Between us, I think the gambling is just sad. All those people feeding quarters into machines, hoping to win back their social security checks. And they smoke inside.”

“I don’t gamble,” Abby said. “Or smoke.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean,” Linda’s face performed regret while her eyes stayed calculating. “I just meant, you know, in general. Some people do.”

Diane refilled Abby’s cup even though it was still three-quarters full. “We’re planning a group outing to see Tom Jones next month at Santo Caliente. You should come! Safety in numbers.” She laughed like this was a joke, but it wasn’t.

“Maybe,” Abby said, even though she liked Tom Jones. Especially is version of Princes’ “Kiss.” She would rather stick needles in her eyes than go with the Desert Oasis social committee.

“It’s just, you’re new here,” Carol said, her voice taking on that syrupy tone people use when they’re about to say something cruel disguised as kindness. “We want to make sure you’re settling in okay. Roger’s passing must have been so difficult, and being alone in a new place.” She trailed off, letting the implication hang: we’re watching you.

Marjorie nodded gravely. “Community is so important at our age. You don’t want to isolate.”

Abby thought about Nicole sitting across from her at Santo Caliente, laughing her unguarded laugh, talking about the physics of pole tricks without a trace of self-consciousness. That had felt more like community than anything happening in this clubhouse.

“I’m doing fine,” Abby said.

“Of course you are!” Linda’s smile was bright and sharp. “It’s just, Harriet mentioned she saw you getting off the shuttle pretty late last Friday. She was worried.”

There it was. Harriet, who lived three units down, apparently kept watch like some kind of retirement community surveillance system.

“I went to a show,” Abby said. “Is that against the rules?”

“Of course not!” Linda looked delighted, like Abby had just confessed to something scandalous. “What show?”

Abby could feel all of them leaning in slightly, waiting. If she said Diana Ross or Michael Bublé, they’d relax, slot her into the acceptable category. If she said anything else, she’d become interesting, which in Desert Oasis was the same as becoming suspect.

“Jazz,” Abby said. Vague enough to be boring, specific enough to sound real.

“Oh.” Linda’s disappointment was visible. “How nice.”

The conversation shifted to the upcoming pickleball tournament, and Abby excused herself to refill her coffee even though Diane had just topped it off. She stood by the pastries, watching the social clusters form and re-form like some kind of senior citizen algorithm. The golf couples. The pickleball crowd. The book club women. The ones who’d been here for years, looking down on the ones who’d arrived recently. High school with arthritis and better real estate.

She thought about Roger saying, years ago, that they should move somewhere like this when they retired. “Somewhere with activities,” he’d said. “Keep us young.” What he’d meant was: somewhere with rules, structure, people watching to make sure nobody stepped out of line.

Abby had hated the idea then. She hated it more now, living in it.

Her phone buzzed. A text from a number she’d added on Saturday night.

You coming this Friday? New girl is doing an aerial chain act. It’s insane.

Nicole.

Abby typed back: I’ll be there.

She looked up to find Linda watching her, that calculating expression back on her face. Abby put her phone away and smiled the smile she’d perfected over thirty-seven years of marriage: pleasant, blank, revealing nothing.

“I should get going,” Abby said to no one in particular. “Errands.”

“Of course,” Linda said. “We’ll see you at water aerobics?”

“Probably.”

Abby walked out of the clubhouse into the morning heat, already counting the hours until Friday night.

III.

Water aerobics was at 10 AM on Wednesdays, which meant Abby had to be at the pool by 9:55, or Linda would ask loudly if everything was “okay” in a way that suggested she’d been keeping track of absences.

The instructor was a woman named Brandi who was probably forty but dressed like she was training for the Olympics. She wore a headset microphone and played the same Fleetwood Mac playlist every week while leading them through movements that were supposed to strengthen their core but mostly just made everyone’s knees hurt.

“And circle those arms! Feel the burn!” Brandi shouted over “Dreams.”

Abby circled her arms in the shallow end. The water was the temperature of lukewarm tea and smelled like chlorine and other people’s sunscreen. Around her, women in floral swim caps did the same movements at slightly different speeds, like some kind of aquatic interpretive dance company that had lost the beat.

Diane splashed past, doing what Brandi called “power walking” but which looked more like aggressive wading. “Great workout today!” she panted.

Abby thought about Friday night.

The new performer had come out to something industrial and bass-heavy that made Abby’s drink vibrate on the table. She wore fishnets and heels—the same impossibly high shoes all the performers wore—and nothing else except strategic pieces of black electrical tape.

Two thick chains descended from the ceiling, already wrapped around her thighs.

The music dropped. The chains lifted. The performer rose ten feet off the ground, her entire body weight supported by those chains wrapped around her legs, and extended into a perfect split in mid-air.

Abby had stopped breathing.

The performer held the split—just held it, muscles trembling with the effort of keeping herself horizontal while suspended in space—then slowly, impossibly, pulled herself upright using only her core strength. The chains stayed wrapped around her thighs the entire time. Abby didn’t understand the physics of how that was possible.

Then the performer did it again. And again. Different positions, different holds, her body moving through space like she’d somehow negotiated a personal exemption from gravity.

At one point, she hung upside down, wrapped in chains like some kind of beautiful, dangerous chrysalis, and slowly unwound herself one rotation at a time until she was upright again.

The men at the next table were throwing money. Bills scattered across the floor like confetti. They saw a show. Abby saw someone who could probably bench press most of them.

“Abby!” Brandi’s voice cut through the memory. “You’re supposed to be doing leg lifts!”

Abby lifted her leg in the chest-deep water. It moved slowly, meeting resistance. Very low impact. Very safe. Very unlike anything that required actual athletic ability.

After class, she dried off and checked her phone. A text from Nicole:

You should try it sometime. We have beginner pole classes Tuesday nights.

Abby had watched Nicole’s pole act three times now. The first time, she’d thought it was sexy because that’s what pole dancing was supposed to be. The second time, she’d started noticing the technique—the way Nicole gripped with the inside of her knee, the specific hand positions, how she made it look effortless when Abby could see the muscle definition in her shoulders suggesting it absolutely was not.

The third time, Nicole had explained some of it afterward. “That one’s called a butterfly. You’re basically holding your entire bodyweight with the inside of your knee and your grip. Most people can’t even hang on, let alone make it look graceful.”

“How do you not fall?”

“Physics. Friction. And a lot of upper body strength. Rock climbers have nothing on pole dancers pound-for-pound.”

Abby looked at the text. Looked at the pool where women were now drifting toward the shallow end, complaining cheerfully about their “workout.” Looked back at her phone.

I’m 58 years old, she typed.

So? We’ve got a 62-year-old in the Tuesday class. She started last year. She’s badass.

Abby stood there in her sensible one-piece and shower shoes, smelling like chlorine, thinking about a woman hanging upside down from chains, dollar bills scattered on the floor below her like she’d robbed a bank mid-performance.

“Abby!” Linda appeared with her enormous beach bag. “Are you coming to the HOA meeting tonight? They’re voting on whether to repaint the clubhouse.”

“I have plans,” Abby said.

“Oh?” Linda’s interest sharpened. “What kind of plans?”

Abby thought about saying “jazz” again, but she was tired of lying. Tired of making herself smaller and more boring to fit into a community she hadn’t even chosen.

“Exercise class,” she said, which was true.

“Well, that’s wonderful! Which one? I’ve been thinking about trying that new yoga.”

“It’s at Santo Caliente.”

“The casino?”

“They have a gym,” Abby said, which was probably true somewhere in that building.

“Oh. Well. That’s... different.”

Abby walked away before Linda could ask any more questions, her phone still in her hand, Nicole’s text still on the screen.

She didn’t respond until she was back in her apartment, the door closed, Roger’s ghost contained to the bedroom she mostly avoided. Then she typed:

What do I wear?

IV.

It was Nicole who suggested they get food after the Tuesday pole class.

Abby had survived exactly forty-five minutes of beginner pole, which consisted mostly of learning how to walk around the pole without looking like she was having a stroke and attempting one basic spin that had left bruises on the inside of her thigh that would take creative explanation if anyone at water aerobics noticed.

The 62-year-old woman Nicole had mentioned was named Sharon. She’d done a move called a fireman spin that involved gripping the pole with just her hands and swinging her entire body around it like some kind of middle-aged superhero. Abby had applauded. Sharon had grinned and said, “My daughter thinks I’m having a nervous breakdown. I told her this is what a breakthrough looks like.”

Now Abby sat across from Nicole at a diner three blocks from Santo Caliente, still smelling faintly of the grip aid they’d used on the poles—some kind of resin that made your hands sticky enough to hold your bodyweight.

“You did good for your first time,” Nicole said, dumping sugar into her coffee. “Most people can’t even hold themselves up on the first spin attempt. You’ve got upper body strength.”

“From thirty-seven years of carrying groceries while my husband sat in the car,” Abby said.

Nicole laughed, then stopped when she saw Abby wasn’t joking. “Seriously?”

“He had a bad back. Allegedly.”

“Jesus.”

The waitress brought their food—eggs for Nicole, just toast for Abby because her stomach was still adjusting to the concept of using muscles she’d forgotten existed.

“Can I ask you something?” Abby said. “And you can tell me if it’s none of my business.”

“Shoot.”

“The burlesque, the pole dancing—do you ever get shit from other women about it? Like, feminist shit?”

Nicole snorted. “All the time. Especially from women my mom’s age. They see the heels and the pasties and assume I’m being exploited by the patriarchy or whatever.” She said it with air quotes, but her eyes were sharp. “They don’t see the athletic training, the business side, the fact that I make my own schedule and answer to exactly no one about what I do with my body.”

“My daughter thinks I’m going through some kind of crisis,” Abby said. “She keeps texting me articles about grief counseling and asking if I’ve ‘talked to anyone.’”

“Have you?”

“I’m talking to you.”

Nicole grinned. “I meant like a therapist.”

“I had a therapist for fifteen years. She kept telling me to communicate my needs to Roger. I kept communicating. He kept not listening. Eventually, I stopped going because it was cheaper to just accept that I’d married someone who didn’t give a shit what I needed.”

“Why didn’t you leave?”

It was such a simple question. The kind only someone who’d never been married to a Roger would ask.

“Because women my age were raised to make it work,” Abby said. “My mother’s generation fought for the right to work outside the home, and my mother got a job at a bank and then came home and cooked dinner and did all the laundry because my father never learned how. She thought she was liberated because she had a paycheck.”

“That’s depressing.”

“It was. Is.” Abby buttered her toast even though she wasn’t hungry. “I remember when my daughter was in college, she came home for Thanksgiving with all these ideas about body autonomy and sex positivity, and Roger said she’d been brainwashed by feminists. And I thought, which feminists? Because the ones I knew just told me to lean in and try harder and communicate better, like the problem was that I wasn’t optimizing my oppression correctly.”

Nicole was quiet for a moment. “My mom says similar stuff. That her generation did all the heavy lifting so mine could just, what, take off our clothes for money?” She ate some eggs. “I tried to explain that reclaiming sexuality and physical strength is also feminism, but she just sees me doing splits in heels and thinks I’ve set the movement back fifty years.”

“The women at Desert Oasis would agree with your mom,” Abby said. “They run their little committees and judge everyone who doesn’t fit into their idea of respectable womanhood. They think they’re empowered because they can vote for which shade of beige to paint the clubhouse.”

“Do they know you’re taking pole classes?”

“God, no. They’d have me committed.”

“Why do you care what they think?”

Another simple question. Abby didn’t have a simple answer.

“Because I spent thirty-seven years caring what Roger thought, and before that caring what my parents thought, and before that caring what my teachers thought. I don’t know how to not care. It’s like a skill I never developed because I was too busy developing the skill of making everyone else comfortable.”

“That’s what they taught you feminism was? Making everyone comfortable?”

“They didn’t call it that. They called it being a good woman. Being kind. Being accommodating. Not making waves.” Abby looked at her toast. “I spent my whole life not making waves, and then Roger died, and I realized I’d drowned anyway.”

Nicole put down her fork. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s just true.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m eating toast at 11 PM after taking a pole dancing class at a casino.”

Nicole smiled. “Sharon says she started pole dancing after her husband told her she was too old to wear a bikini. She’s been doing it for eighteen months. Says it’s the most powerful she’s felt in her entire life.”

“How old is her husband?”

“Was. He died six months ago. Heart attack.”

“Jesus.”

“Sharon says the universe has a sense of humor.” Nicole finished her coffee. “She’s performing in next month’s showcase. Student showcase, but still. She’s doing an aerial silks routine to ‘Respect.’”

“Aretha Franklin?”

“Obviously.”

Abby imagined it—a 62-year-old woman climbing silk fabric in heels while Aretha demanded respect. It was either the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard or the most perfect. Probably both.

“The women at Desert Oasis think strength is knowing how to navigate the social hierarchy,” Abby said. “Who to have coffee with. How to dress for book club. When to join committees and when to politely decline. They’d look at you and Sharon and me and think we’re lost.”

“Are you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But I’d rather be lost doing something that makes my muscles hurt than found sitting in a clubhouse smelling like old coffee and judgment.”

Nicole flagged down the waitress for more coffee. “You know what’s funny? My mom’s generation fought so we could have choices. And now when we make choices they don’t like, they say we’re choosing wrong.” She looked at Abby. “What do you think your daughter would say if she knew you were here?”

Abby thought about her daughter, who worked in marketing, did yoga, and had opinions about corporate feminism, the wage gap, and glass ceilings. Who’d inherited Roger’s certainty about what was right and what was wrong, who saw the world in clear categories: empowering and disempowering, progressive and regressive, evolved and backwards.

“She’d say I’m being taken advantage of. That pole dancing studios prey on women going through midlife crises. That I’m trying to recapture my youth instead of accepting my age gracefully.”

“Are you?”

“Trying to recapture my youth?”

“Yeah.”

Abby looked at her hands. They were covered in small tears from gripping the pole, the beginning of calluses forming. She’d never had calluses. Roger had liked her hands soft.

“No,” she said finally. “I’m trying to figure out what my body can do when I’m not using it to make someone else comfortable. That’s not youth. That’s just... new.”

Nicole reached across the table and squeezed her hand, careful of the fresh blisters. “Then fuck what anyone else thinks. Including your daughter. Including my mom. Including every woman at Desert Oasis who thinks they know what liberation looks like.”

“Even if I fall on my ass trying?”

“Especially then. Falling means you tried something hard. The women at Desert Oasis haven’t tried anything hard in years.”

Abby thought about Diane with her coffee pot, Linda with her calculating eyes, Marjorie with her gardening committee tyranny. Women who’d carved out tiny kingdoms in a retirement community and called it power.

Then she thought about the performer hanging from chains, Sharon doing her fireman spin, Nicole manipulating those enormous feather fans like they weighed nothing.

Different versions of strength. Different versions of freedom. Different answers to the same question: what does it mean to own yourself?

“I’m coming back next Tuesday,” Abby said.

“Good. Sharon wants to teach you the chair spin next.”

“What’s a chair spin?”

“You’ll see.” Nicole grinned. “Bring ibuprofen.”

Let’s address the elephant in the room—or rather, the algorithm in your laptop.

You’re thinking about using AI for your writing. Maybe you already are, guiltily, in the dark, like someone sneaking cigarettes behind the gym. Or maybe you’re militantly against it, posting angry threads about how real writers would never stoop to such technological blasphemy. Or maybe—and this is where most of us actually live—you’re confused as hell about what’s okay, what’s cheating, and whether using AI to brainstorm book titles makes you a sellout.

Here’s what I’m going to tell you: AI is a tool. Like every other tool humans have ever invented, it can be used brilliantly or badly, ethically or exploitatively, in service of your art or as a replacement for it.

The question isn’t whether to use AI. The question is how to use it without turning into a content-generating robot yourself.

The Panic Is Real (And Mostly Justified)

Let’s not pretend the concerns aren’t valid. AI is trained on stolen work—scraped from the internet without permission or compensation to the writers, artists, and creators whose labor built the dataset. That’s not a conspiracy theory; that’s just how it works. When you use AI, you’re benefiting from this theft, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.

There’s also the very real fear that AI will devalue human creativity, flood the market with mediocre content, and make it even harder for real writers to make a living. These aren’t hypothetical concerns—they’re already happening.

So if you’re feeling icky about AI, good. You should. That discomfort is your conscience working properly.

But here’s the thing about tools built on problematic foundations: we still have to live in the world they’ve created. You can’t opt out of the internet because it was built with exploited labor. You can’t stop using your smartphone because the minerals in it came from conflict zones. You make choices about how you use these tools while pushing for better systems.

The same goes for AI. Use it thoughtfully, use it ethically, and use it in ways that enhance rather than replace your human creativity.

What AI Is Actually Good For (And What It Absolutely Isn’t)

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: AI is really good at some things. Annoyingly good. Infuriatingly good.

AI excels at:

• Generating options when you’re stuck

• Identifying patterns you might have missed

• Doing repetitive tasks that make you want to throw your laptop out a window

• Summarizing research or long documents

• Creating first-draft outlines or structures

• Brainstorming ideas you’ll completely transform

• Editing for grammar and clarity (though not for voice)

• Analyzing data about your marketing performance

AI is absolutely terrible at:

• Original creative vision

• Authentic voice and personality

• Emotional truth and lived experience

• Cultural nuance and context

• Understanding what makes your story uniquely yours

• Knowing when to break the rules

• Caring about anything at all

The moment you try to use AI for the things it’s bad at, you get that distinctive smell of AI writing—that smooth, generic, weirdly formal tone that sounds like every corporate LinkedIn post ever written. You know it when you see it. Readers definitely know it when they read it.

The Golden Rule: AI Should Make You More You, Not Less

Here’s how you know if you’re using AI ethically and effectively: Does it make your work more distinctively yours, or more generic?

If you’re using AI to help you research Victorian mourning customs so you can write a more authentic historical romance, that’s brilliant. If you’re having AI write your entire sex scene because you’re embarrassed to do it yourself, that’s a problem.

If you’re using AI to analyze which of your newsletter subject lines get better open rates, that’s smart marketing. If you’re having AI write your entire newsletter, your readers will notice and they will unsubscribe.

If you’re using AI to generate twenty potential titles so you can pick the one that resonates with your book’s themes, that’s using a tool. If you’re using AI to write your book description and posting it verbatim, you’re letting the robot do your job.

The difference is always the same: Are you using AI to amplify your voice and vision, or are you outsourcing the parts of your work that make it distinctively yours?

Practical Uses That Won’t Make You Sound Like a Bot

Let’s get specific about how to use AI without losing your artistic soul:

For Writing:

• Generate writing prompts when you’re stuck (then write your own version)

• Create character background details you’ll refine with your own perspective

• Outline possible plot structures (then choose the weird one AI didn’t emphasize)

• Identify plot holes or inconsistencies in your draft

• Suggest alternative phrasings for that one sentence you’ve rewritten forty times (but pick the option that sounds like you)

For Marketing:

• Analyze your newsletter data to identify patterns

• Generate social media post ideas (that you completely rewrite in your voice)

• Create first-draft book descriptions (that you then make actually compelling)

• Brainstorm blog post topics related to your book’s themes

• Summarize long articles or research for reference

For Research:

• Compile information from multiple sources

• Identify relevant historical facts for fact-checking

• Generate lists of comparable books in your genre

• Create reading lists for research

The Critical Step: Whatever AI generates, you completely transform it with your own voice, perspective, and creative vision. AI gives you raw material. You turn it into art.

The Voice Problem (And How to Fix It)

The biggest issue with AI-generated content is that it all sounds the same. There’s a distinctive AI voice—slightly formal, overly enthusiastic, weirdly explanatory, with a tendency toward lists and breaking things into “key points.”

Sound familiar? That’s because half the internet now sounds like this.

If you’re going to use AI, you need to develop a strong enough sense of your own voice that you can recognize when AI is overwriting it. Here’s how:

Read your work out loud. If it sounds like you’re giving a TED talk when you meant to sound like you’re talking to a friend, AI probably smoothed out your personality.

Look for AI tells: Excessive optimism, corporate-speak, phrases like “it’s important to note” or “let’s explore” or “in today’s world.” These are AI comfort phrases that signal you’ve let the robot take over.

Check for personality. Does your writing have opinions, humor, edge, vulnerability? Or does it sound like it was written by someone trying very hard not to offend anyone ever?

Trust your gut. If it doesn’t sound like you, it isn’t you. Rewrite it until it is.

The Ethics of It All

Using AI doesn’t make you a bad person, but using it thoughtlessly might make you a lazy artist.

Here are the ethical lines I think matter:

Never pass off AI-generated work as entirely your own creative effort. If AI wrote significant portions of your book, that’s plagiarism with extra steps. You’re stealing from every writer whose work trained that model.

Don’t use AI to flood the market with garbage. Publishing fifty AI-generated romance novels a month isn’t entrepreneurship; it’s pollution. You’re making it harder for real writers to be discovered and devaluing creative work for everyone.

Be transparent when it matters. You don’t need to footnote every time you asked ChatGPT for synonym suggestions, but if AI played a significant role in your work, readers deserve to know.

Support better systems. Push for AI tools that compensate creators, advocate for copyright protection for human-created work, and refuse to participate in the most exploitative uses of the technology.

Prioritize human creativity—yours and others’. Hire human editors, support human writers, buy books from humans who actually wrote them. Don’t let AI replace the people whose work you value.

What AI Can’t Do (And Why That Matters)

Here’s what AI will never be able to do, no matter how sophisticated it gets:

It can’t care about your characters the way you do. It can’t draw on your lived experience. It can’t channel your rage, joy, heartbreak, or hope. It can’t make the weird creative leaps that come from your unique brain. It can’t know which rules to break to make your work sing. It can’t write the sentence that only you could write.

AI can pattern-match. It can predict likely next words. It can generate statistically probable text based on its training data.

But it can’t create something that matters to it, because nothing matters to it. It has no stake in whether your book is good or bad, whether your readers connect with your work, whether you’re telling the truth or lying.

You do. That’s the difference that matters.

The Defiant Middle Path

So here’s where we end up: Use AI tools when they genuinely help you do better work. Use them to handle the tedious parts that drain your creative energy. Use them to get unstuck, explore options, or automate the repetitive tasks that make you want to quit writing entirely.

But never—never—let them do the work that makes your art yours.

Because here’s what I know about the future: there will be infinite AI-generated content. Oceans of it. Mountains of smooth, competent, utterly forgettable text that technically functions as writing but doesn’t actually say anything.

And in that ocean of mediocrity, the work that stands out will be unmistakably human. Flawed, weird, opinionated, vulnerable, alive. The stuff that could only come from someone who cared enough to make it personal.

That’s your competitive advantage. Not that you can generate content faster than AI—you can’t and you shouldn’t try. Your advantage is that you’re human, and you can create work that actually means something because it means something to you.

So use the tools. Use them smartly, use them ethically, use them in service of your vision rather than as a replacement for it.

But never forget: The robot can do a lot of things, but it can’t be you.

And you, weird and imperfect and distinctly human, are exactly what your readers need.

A Fiction Break (WIP)

The Feather Act

by Liz Dubelman

Abby discovered the burlesque show the way people discover most escapes—by accident and out of desperation.

She’d been in Desert Oasis for six weeks. Six weeks of mandatory coffee socials where women asked how she was “holding up” while obviously calculating whether she’d be competition for the limited supply of widowers. Six weeks of pool aerobics with the same Fleetwood Mac playlist. Six weeks of people telling her that Roger would want her to “get out there” and “live again,” which was hilarious because Roger had spent thirty-two years making sure she did neither.

Santo Caliente was three miles from Desert Oasis, close enough to walk if the heat didn’t kill you, which in Palm Desert in August it absolutely could. But Abby had discovered the shuttle—free, air-conditioned, and blessedly anonymous. Nobody on the shuttle asked how you were doing or whether you’d tried the new yogurt place or if you wanted to join their bunco group.

She’d gone for the free drinks. Two-dollar well vodka if you were playing slots, completely free if you looked sad enough and tipped the cocktail waitress. Abby had gotten very good at looking sad. It wasn’t hard. She was sad. Or she was relieved. Or she was both, which made her feel guilty, which made her sadder, which made the drinks taste better.

The burlesque show was advertised on a standing poster near the bathrooms: “BOMBSHELLS & BOURBON - Classic Burlesque Revue - Fridays & Saturdays 10 PM.” The poster featured a woman in a corset and impossibly high heels, one leg extended at an angle that suggested either incredible flexibility or Photoshop. Probably both.

Abby went on a Friday because it was free with a two-drink minimum, which she was going to hit anyway, and because she knew absolutely no one from Desert Oasis would be caught dead there. The golf wives went to Michael Bublé tributes. The pickleball crowd saw Fleetwood Mac cover bands. The book club women—Abby had been to exactly one meeting before realizing they spent more time discussing wine pairings than actual books—occasionally ventured out for Diana Ross.

But burlesque? That was for sad people and perverts. Abby qualified as at least one of those.

The showroom was smaller than she expected, darker, with round tables crowded too close together. She took a seat in the back corner where she could see the stage but remain mostly invisible. The crowd was mixed—some couples on dates, some men alone who were definitely the perverts, some women in groups who were drunk and laughing too loud.

The lights went down. A trumpet blared. The curtain opened on a woman in a white fur stole and nothing else visible, standing in a spotlight that made her skin glow like she’d been dipped in gold.

The music was something from the forties, brassy and confident. The woman moved and the stole moved with her, revealing and concealing in a rhythm that was mathematical in its precision. She knew exactly what she was showing and when.

Abby had expected to feel embarrassed. Instead, she felt something like awe.

The woman—the performer, because that’s what she was, not a stripper, not whatever crude word the men at the next table were probably thinking—was an athlete. The way she controlled every muscle, the way she made the stole seem like it was alive and cooperating with her rather than just fabric obeying physics. The heels alone would have killed Abby, and this woman was doing things that looked like they required a PhD in biomechanics.

The stole came off. Then the corset, one hook at a time, each reveal timed perfectly to the music. By the end she was wearing pasties shaped like stars and a thong that was mostly rhinestones, and she was spinning tassels in opposite directions while balancing on one leg.

The men at the next table were hooting. They saw tits. Abby saw someone who’d probably trained for years to make this look effortless.

The performer took her bow—still spinning one tassel, because why not—and the lights came up. The next act was announced: KiKi and the Feather Fans.

KiKi was younger than the first woman, maybe late twenties, with dark hair cut in a severe bob and the kind of bone structure that belonged in a Vogue editorial. She came out carrying two enormous pink feather fans that she manipulated like they weighed nothing.

Abby ordered another drink.

KiKi’s act was different—less about the reveal, more about the tease. She made you think you were going to see something, then the fans would shift and you’d see nothing, then maybe a flash of hip or the curve of a breast, then nothing again. It was maddening and mesmerizing.

At the end, KiKi did a split while holding both fans above her head, which seemed physically impossible but was happening right there on stage.

The applause was loud. Abby found herself clapping harder than she’d clapped for anything in years.

After the show, Abby stayed for another drink. She wasn’t ready to go back to Desert Oasis, to her little two-bedroom unit that still smelled like Roger’s aftershave even though she’d thrown out the bottle. To the messages from her daughter asking if she was “making friends” and “taking care of herself.” To the silence that was somehow louder than Roger had ever been.

She was finishing her vodka when someone slid into the chair across from her.

It was KiKi. She’d changed into jeans and a tank top, her stage makeup mostly wiped off but still visible around her eyes. She looked impossibly young up close.

“You come alone?” KiKi asked.

Abby nodded.

“Me too,” KiKi said. She signaled the waitress for two more drinks without asking if Abby wanted one. “I’m Nicole. KiKi’s just for the stage.”

“Abby.”

“You liked the show.”

It wasn’t a question. Abby nodded anyway. “You’re incredibly athletic.”

Nicole smiled. “Most people don’t say that part.”

“Most people are idiots.”

Nicole laughed. It was a good laugh, unguarded and genuine. “You live around here?”

“Desert Oasis. The 55-plus place.”

“Oh shit. You’re like, undercover.”

“Something like that.”

“They’d lose their minds if they knew you were here.”

“Probably.”

Nicole leaned back in her chair, appraising Abby with the same precision she’d used to manipulate those fans. “You gonna come back?”

Abby thought about her empty apartment. About the book club women and the pool aerobics and the man at the coffee social who’d told her she had “nice legs for her age.” About Roger’s life insurance money that wasn’t enough to stay in the house but was enough for Desert Oasis and twice-weekly vodka sodas.

“Yeah,” Abby said. “I think I will.”

II.

The coffee social was mandatory, which Abby found both insulting and perfectly in character for Desert Oasis. It was held every Tuesday morning in the clubhouse, a building designed to look like a hacienda but actually resembling a Taco Bell that had delusions of grandeur.

Abby arrived at 9:15, late enough to avoid helping set up but early enough to not be noticeably absent. The usual suspects were already there: Diane and Carol from the golf couples, holding court near the good pastries. Linda from the book club, wearing athleisure that cost more than Abby’s monthly HOA fees. Marjorie, who ran the gardening committee like a minor despot and had opinions about everything.

“Abby!” Linda waved her over with the enthusiasm of someone who’d been waiting to pounce. “We missed you at water aerobics yesterday.”

“Doctor’s appointment,” Abby lied. She’d actually been sleeping off Saturday night’s vodka sodas and the strange, pleasant exhaustion of having stayed out until 1 AM watching women do impossible things with their bodies.

“Oh, I hope everything’s okay?” The concern was performative. Linda wanted details, not reassurance.

“Just routine.”

Diane appeared with a coffee pot, refilling cups no one had asked her to refill. “You know, I saw the Santo Caliente shuttle pass by yesterday afternoon. Do you ever take that?”

Abby’s hand tightened on her cup. “Sometimes. They have decent restaurants.”

“Restaurants.” Carol said it like Abby had claimed they had fine art. “I heard the buffet gave someone food poisoning.”

“I usually stick to the bar,” Abby said, which was true.

Marjorie joined them, carrying a tiny pastry on a napkin like it was evidence in a crime. “My nephew manages security there. He says the crowd gets rougher after dark. Drug dealers, prostitutes.” She said this with the satisfaction of someone who’d lived in Palm Desert for thirty years without experiencing anything interesting.

“I’m usually home by eight,” Abby lied again.

Linda leaned in, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “Between us, I think the gambling is just sad. All those people feeding quarters into machines, hoping to win back their social security checks. And they smoke inside.”

“I don’t gamble,” Abby said. “Or smoke.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean,” Linda’s face performed regret while her eyes stayed calculating. “I just meant, you know, in general. Some people do.”

Diane refilled Abby’s cup even though it was still three-quarters full. “We’re planning a group outing to see Tom Jones next month at Santo Caliente. You should come! Safety in numbers.” She laughed like this was a joke, but it wasn’t.

“Maybe,” Abby said, even though she liked Tom Jones. Especially is version of Princes’ “Kiss.” She would rather stick needles in her eyes than go with the Desert Oasis social committee.

“It’s just, you’re new here,” Carol said, her voice taking on that syrupy tone people use when they’re about to say something cruel disguised as kindness. “We want to make sure you’re settling in okay. Roger’s passing must have been so difficult, and being alone in a new place.” She trailed off, letting the implication hang: we’re watching you.

Marjorie nodded gravely. “Community is so important at our age. You don’t want to isolate.”

Abby thought about Nicole sitting across from her at Santo Caliente, laughing her unguarded laugh, talking about the physics of pole tricks without a trace of self-consciousness. That had felt more like community than anything happening in this clubhouse.

“I’m doing fine,” Abby said.

“Of course you are!” Linda’s smile was bright and sharp. “It’s just, Harriet mentioned she saw you getting off the shuttle pretty late last Friday. She was worried.”

There it was. Harriet, who lived three units down and apparently kept watch like some kind of retirement community surveillance system.

“I went to a show,” Abby said. “Is that against the rules?”

“Of course not!” Linda looked delighted, like Abby had just confessed to something scandalous. “What show?”

Abby could feel all of them leaning in slightly, waiting. If she said Diana Ross or Michael Bublé, they’d relax, slot her into the acceptable category. If she said anything else, she’d become interesting, which in Desert Oasis was the same as becoming suspect.

“Jazz,” Abby said. Vague enough to be boring, specific enough to sound real.

“Oh.” Linda’s disappointment was visible. “How nice.”

The conversation shifted to the upcoming pickleball tournament, and Abby excused herself to refill her coffee even though Diane had just topped it off. She stood by the pastries, watching the social clusters form and re-form like some kind of senior citizen algorithm. The golf couples. The pickleball crowd. The book club women. The ones who’d been here for years looking down on the ones who’d arrived recently. High school with arthritis and better real estate.

She thought about Roger saying, years ago, that they should move somewhere like this when they retired. “Somewhere with activities,” he’d said. “Keep us young.” What he’d meant was: somewhere with rules, structure, people watching to make sure nobody stepped out of line.

Abby had hated the idea then. She hated it more now, living in it.

Her phone buzzed. A text from a number she’d added on Saturday night.

You coming this Friday? New girl is doing an aerial chain act. It’s insane.

Nicole.

Abby typed back: I’ll be there.

She looked up to find Linda watching her, that calculating expression back on her face. Abby put her phone away and smiled the smile she’d perfected over thirty-seven years of marriage: pleasant, blank, revealing nothing.

“I should get going,” Abby said to no one in particular. “Errands.”

“Of course,” Linda said. “We’ll see you at water aerobics?”

“Probably.”

Abby walked out of the clubhouse into the morning heat, already counting the hours until Friday night.

(More Soon)

You already know you’re a writer. That’s the thing nobody tells you at the beginning — the question isn’t whether you are one. You are. You’ve been one since you started rearranging sentences in your head before you fell asleep, since you drafted the perfect response to something three days after the conversation ended, since you read a book and thought: I could do this. Maybe I already am.

The real question — the one that keeps you up, that lives at the bottom of a third cup of coffee, that you’ve been circling for months or years — is: why haven’t I started?

Or more precisely: where, exactly, do I begin?

The gap between wanting to write and actually writing is one of the most human experiences there is. It is not a character flaw. It is not proof you don’t have what it takes.

It is, in fact, the very material you’ll eventually write from.

THE MYTH OF THE PERFECT BEGINNING

Here’s what we’ve all been sold: somewhere out there is a pristine moment — the right desk, the right season, the right life circumstances — when writing will finally feel possible. The kids will be older. The job will be less consuming. The apartment will be quieter. The idea will be clearer. You’ll have more time, more confidence, more certainty about what you’re doing and why.

This is a beautiful fantasy and a complete lie.

I don’t say that to be harsh. I say it because I’ve watched hundreds of writers wait for that moment, and I’ve watched it not come, and I’ve watched the waiting cost them something real — not just time, but the growing, compounding belief that maybe they’re not actually a writer after all. That the gap between wanting to write and actually writing is evidence of something broken.

It is not evidence of anything broken. It is just the gap. Every writer has it.

The writers who cross it aren’t the ones who finally got the conditions right. They’re the ones who started writing in the wrong conditions and kept going anyway — on their lunch breaks and in their car and at 5am before anyone else was awake and in notebooks they never intended to show anyone. They began badly, messily, without knowing where it was going. They began before they were ready.

Which is to say: they began.

WHAT ‘BEGINNING’ ACTUALLY MEANS

When Write Kit readers ask me where to begin, I always want to ask them a clarifying question: begin what, exactly?

Because ‘beginning as a writer’ isn’t one thing. It might mean:

Starting a daily writing practice for the first time. Or restarting one that fell apart. Committing to a project you’ve been orbiting for years. Writing something and actually finishing it. Writing something and letting another person read it. Claiming the word ‘writer’ out loud, in public, without immediately adding ‘— well, I’m trying to be.’

These are all beginnings. They’re not the same beginning. And the answer to ‘where do I start’ depends entirely on which one you’re actually asking about.

So let me ask you: which beginning is this?

Because here’s what I’ve noticed working with writers at every stage: most of the time, when someone says they don’t know where to begin, what they mean is that they don’t know how to do all of it at once. They’re trying to start writing and figure out their genre and decide on a platform and understand the publishing industry and build an audience — simultaneously, before they’ve written a word.

That’s not a beginning problem. That’s a scope problem. And the solution to a scope problem is radical simplification.

START SMALLER THAN YOU THINK

The Whole Artist framework we use at The Write Kit is built on a counterintuitive premise: you don’t need to have it all figured out to begin. You need to have the next ten minutes figured out.

Not the book. Not the platform. Not the query letter or the agent or the launch strategy or the algorithm. Just the next ten minutes.

What could you write in ten minutes, right now, without it needing to be good?

This is not a trick question. It’s a real one. Because writers who are stuck are almost always stuck on the wrong horizon — they’re staring at the finished, published, reviewed, successful book, and then looking at where they currently are, and doing the math on the distance between those two points, and finding it overwhelming. Correctly. It is overwhelming. From here, the distance to that horizon is enormous.

But you don’t write from here to there. You write ten minutes at a time.

A page a day is a book in a year. Most writers don’t believe that until they’re holding the manuscript.

Start smaller than your ambition. Start messier than your vision. Start before the conditions are right, before the idea is fully formed, before you feel like you know what you’re doing.

Start in a notebook you’ll never show anyone. Start with the memory you’ve been avoiding. Start with the character you can’t stop thinking about even though you have no idea what happens to them. Start with the sentence that keeps arriving in your head on the drive home.

Start with that.

THE IDENTITY QUESTION

There’s another reason people can’t find their beginning, and it’s quieter and harder to name. It’s not really about craft or time or the right notebook. It’s about identity.

Saying ‘I’m a writer’ — and meaning it, without the apologetic qualifier — requires a shift in how you see yourself. It requires absorbing the possibility that this thing you do privately, in your head, in stolen moments, might actually be real. That it might be worth protecting. That you might be worth protecting as someone who does it.

That can feel presumptuous. Especially if no one has told you it’s okay. Especially if the people around you have different ideas about what constitutes a real job, a real creative practice, a real use of your time. Especially if you have a complicated relationship with the word ‘artist,’ which most of us do, because we were all told at some point — usually before we were old enough to argue back — that artists are other people.

They’re not other people. You are one of them.

The Whole Artist framework starts here — not with the book, not with the platform, not with the market. It starts with the recognition that you are the creative entity from which everything else flows. The book doesn’t exist without you. The platform doesn’t exist without you. The marketing, the strategy, the audience — none of it exists without you first deciding that you and your work matter enough to take seriously.

That is the first beginning. And for some writers, it’s the hardest one.

WHAT WHOLE ARTISTS DO DIFFERENTLY

Writers who are functioning as Whole Artists — fully integrated creative people who treat their writing as both a practice and a project — don’t have a secret that you lack. They have a set of habits and permissions that you can adopt right now.

They write before they’re ready. They start before the idea is fully formed and trust that writing is the act that forms it.

They give themselves permission to be bad at it. First drafts are supposed to be bad. That’s what first drafts are for. The Whole Artist doesn’t waste energy managing the quality of the first draft; they save that energy for revision, where quality actually lives.

They protect the time. They don’t wait for a spare hour to magically appear. They make a small, ridiculous, completely manageable appointment with themselves — fifteen minutes, twice a week — and they honor it the same way they’d honor a meeting with someone else.

They separate the writing from the worrying. The writing is done at the desk. The worrying about whether it’s good enough, whether it’ll ever be published, whether anyone will care — that’s a different conversation, for a different time, and it is not allowed in the room where the actual writing happens.

They claim the identity. They say ‘I’m a writer’ without the apology. They stop waiting for external permission — an agent, a deal, a review, a reader — to make it official. They make it official themselves.

YOUR ACTUAL FIRST STEP

I want to leave you with something concrete, because I know that ‘start before you’re ready’ sounds good in theory and is genuinely hard in practice when you’re sitting in front of a blank document at 10pm with twenty minutes before you have to be asleep.

Here is your actual first step:

Write one true sentence.

Not a chapter. Not an outline. Not a platform strategy or a Substack bio or a pitch. One sentence, about anything — a moment you remember, a question you can’t stop asking, a character who showed up in your mind and refuses to leave. Write it down, by hand or on a screen, right now or first thing tomorrow morning.

That sentence is not nothing. That sentence is the beginning.

Everything else — the craft, the structure, the audience, the strategy, the platform, the market — is learnable. The Write Kit exists precisely because those things are learnable and you don’t have to figure them out alone.

But none of it matters until you decide that you’re a writer who writes. Not a writer who thinks about writing, or plans to write, or used to write, or is going to write when the time is right.

A writer who writes.

Start there. That’s where you begin.

Liz Dubelman is the founder of The Write Kit and creator of the Whole Artist framework for authors. This essay is part of an ongoing series on the creative, strategic, and emotional work of building a life as a writer.

A Fiction Break

Fixed and Dilated

A short story by Liz Dubelman

My father died chasing a mouse with a hammer. I’m not being metaphorical. There was an actual mouse, an actual hammer, a slippery floor, and a head wound he went to bed with and didn’t wake up from. The words his eyes are fixed and dilated reached me at five in the morning at the tail end of a vacation I very much needed.

What follows is a piece of a longer story I’ve been working on. The character’s name is Ellis. The father’s name is Lester. Make of that what you will.

— ✦ —

Fixed and Dilated

“Fixed and dilated.” The words echoed in Ellis’s mind as she rushed to the airport gate, weighed down by her hodgepodge of carry-on bags. Her mostly black clothes spilled out of a reusable Trader Joe’s bag. Assorted toiletries, her good shoes, and her journal were in a green nylon bag that, when empty, folded into itself. Her laptop and a few magazines were stuffed into the backpack her friend Cecil had given her when she got the job at Pyxl. She was so sweaty from the run to catch the plane that her hair stuck to her face and her make-up ran, giving her raccoon eyes — and not in a good way.

Ben, Ellis’s younger brother, had been her five o’clock wake-up call.

“Dad’s had an accident.”

“Wait, what?”

“He’s in Englewood Hospital, and his eyes are fixed and dilated.”

“What kind of accident? What happened?”

“There was a mouse in the house, and he’d been chasing it with a hammer. He slipped and hit his head. He went to bed with a headache and didn’t wake up.”

None of it made any sense to Ellis. Her father was chasing a mouse with a hammer? It was the kind of thing she could imagine in a sitcom or a cartoon. A pratfall. Lester was a man who bought his clothes at a big and tall shop. He drove an Escalade. His deep voice made Ellis’s own heart creep up to her throat and strangle her. Could such a formidable man really be felled by such an absurd accident?

He’s dead, she thought.

Ellis sat in the middle seat, sandwiched between a middle-aged woman with earbuds and a very young man with sleeve tattoos wearing Beats headphones. She felt around in her carry-ons for her own earbuds but couldn’t find them. Her rummaging was a clear annoyance to her seatmates. She hated being in the middle but it was all she could get last-minute. Her mind was going in fits and starts. Had she turned off the heat at the beach house? The water? Had she packed her allergy pills? Where was her cell phone charger? Damn — she’d left it on the kitchen table with her earbuds. She knew she should have put all of it by the door.

Her father’s eyes were fixed and dilated, and nothing witty came to her.

#

When the flight attendant came by, Ellis asked for a bottle of Dewar’s, no ice, then called him back and asked him to bring two. “My father died, I think,” she said, immediately regretting it even though no one heard her. When he brought them, the guy in the window seat gave her a thumbs-up.

She gulped down the first one and almost instantly felt a warm comfort. She picked up The New Yorker and flipped through it for a distraction that would last more than a few seconds. There was a quiz about politicians and recent history. She opened the second bottle of scotch.

While defending her use of the non-word “refudiate,” who did Sarah Palin compare herself to?

a) Ronald Reagan

b) William Shakespeare

c) Norm Crosby

d) Jesus Christ

Ellis had no idea what the answer was — and was none too sure who Norm Crosby was — but she was rooting for Christ. She checked the bottom of the page: B. She read on.

Ellis drifted off to sleep, the usual result of mixing reading with scotch.

In Dreamland, she was sitting behind a large desk. A huge clock was ticking behind her, and before her on the desk was a quiz and a No. 2 pencil as tall as a broom handle.

I thought my father would

a) never die.

b) never leave me alone.

c) be proud of me.

d) leave me a fortune.

As her pencil touched the paper, the sharp point snapped and red ink spilled out of the hole. She read on.

Mice are

a) weird.

b) diseased.

c) cute.

d) impervious to hammers.

The blood was

a) Adam’s.

b) the mouse’s.

c) Lester’s.

d) Mother’s.

Lester was killed by

a) a mouse.

b) an accident.

c) himself.

d) Phoebe.

The New Yorker slipped from Ellis’s hand, startling her awake.

Her father’s eyes were fixed and dilated, and nothing witty came to her.

TWK

Let me guess where you are right now. You’re sitting at your desk, staring at your manuscript or your marketing plan or your blank social media scheduler, and you’re thinking: “What’s the point?”

The news is a relentless horror show. Democracy feels like it’s held together with duct tape and wishful thinking. The climate is doing things that make scientists use phrases like “faster than predicted.” Book bans are spreading like a contagion. Rights we thought were settled law are suddenly up for debate again. And someone on Twitter (or “X”- yuk) just told you that promoting your cozy mystery during all of this makes you complicit in... something. They weren’t entirely clear, but they were very angry.

So yeah. What’s the point of writing about your characters’ problems when real people are suffering? What’s the point of posting about your book launch when the world is literally on fire?

Here’s what I’m going to tell you, and I need you to hear me: Keep going anyway.

The Tyranny of “Now Is Not the Time”

There’s always a reason why now is not the time to create, to share your work, to ask people to pay attention to your art. Always. If you wait for the perfect moment when nothing bad is happening, and everyone has the emotional bandwidth to care about your book, you will never publish anything.

2020 taught us this lesson the hard way, remember? “Not the time” stretched into months, then a year, then two years. Authors who paused everything thinking they’d resume “when things got back to normal” are still waiting. Because here’s the secret nobody tells you: things don’t go back to normal. They just become a different kind of hard.

The world has always been falling apart somewhere. Right now, it just feels closer, more visible, more relentless. But writers have always created through catastrophe. They wrote during wars, plagues, depressions, revolutions, and every conceivable human disaster. Not because they didn’t care about the suffering around them, but because they understood something crucial:

Stories matter most when everything else is falling apart.

Why Your Work Matters More Now, Not Less

When the world is terrifying and exhausting and feels like it’s spinning out of control, people need escape. They need hope. They need laughter. They need to remember what it feels like to care about something smaller than the end of democracy or the planet burning.

Your romance novel isn’t trivial—it’s a reminder that love still exists and matters.

Your cozy mystery isn’t frivolous—it’s a world where justice prevails, and problems get solved.

Your self-help book isn’t tone-deaf—it’s giving people tools to survive the chaos.

Your thriller isn’t adding to the darkness—it’s helping people process fear in a controlled environment.

Every book you write, every story you share, every piece of art you create is an act of defiance against despair. It says: “The world may be falling apart, but I still believe human experience matters enough to document it. I still believe in tomorrow enough to create something for it.”

The Practical Reality of Creating During Crisis

Let’s be honest about something: creating right now is hard. Some days you’ll sit down to work on your book and spend three hours doom-scrolling instead. Some days, your marketing plan will feel like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Some days, you’ll wonder if anyone gives a damn about your protagonist’s journey when real people are struggling to survive.

Those days are normal. You’re not weak or selfish or insufficiently committed to justice. You’re a human being trying to do creative work during a legitimately traumatic time.

So let’s talk about what actually helps:

Lower the bar. If you usually write 2,000 words a day, aim for 500. If you normally post on social media daily, shoot for twice a week. If your marketing plan feels overwhelming, pick one thing. The goal isn’t maintaining your pre-crisis productivity—it’s maintaining forward momentum at all.

Protect your creative time like it’s sacred. Because it is. The world will always need you to be outraged, to take action, to bear witness to suffering. And yes, you should do those things. But you also need to protect time where you’re just a writer working on your book. That’s not selfishness—that’s survival.

Give yourself permission to care about “small” things. Your book launch matters. Your protagonist’s character arc matters. Your newsletter open rate matters. Not more than human rights or climate change, but alongside them. You’re allowed to contain multitudes—to care about both justice and your art, both the collective struggle and your individual creative work.

Remember that your audience needs this too. Every reader who escapes into your book is someone who gets a brief respite from the weight of everything. That’s not avoidance—that’s necessary rest before they re-engage with the fight. You’re not distracting people from important work; you’re giving them the energy to continue doing it.

Creating Is Not the Same as Ignoring

Here’s where people get confused: they think creating means you don’t care about what’s happening in the world. They think promoting your book means you’re not paying attention to suffering.

That’s bullshit.

You can write your novel and donate to mutual aid funds. You can market your book and show up at protests. You can care about your protagonist’s journey and call your representatives. You can promote your cozy mystery and volunteer at your local library fighting book bans.

Creating art doesn’t mean ignoring injustice. It means refusing to let injustice steal everything from you, including your ability to contribute beauty and meaning to the world.

Some of the most powerful political art has been created during the darkest times. Not despite the darkness, but because of it. Because artists understood that imagination itself is a form of resistance—that envisioning different worlds, better worlds, more just worlds is the first step toward building them.

Your book might not solve climate change or stop fascism. But it might help someone remember why those fights matter. It might give someone the hope they need to keep going. It might be the thing that makes someone’s unbearable week slightly more bearable.

That’s not nothing.

The Long Game

Here’s what I know about creating during crisis: you’re playing a longer game than the news cycle. Your book will outlast this week’s fresh hell. It will outlast this month’s disaster. It might even outlast the empire.

Think about the books that have survived centuries of human catastrophe. The ones written during wars and plagues and the fall of civilizations. They survived not because the authors waited for things to calm down, but because they kept creating anyway.

Your job isn’t to solve everything. Your job is to write your book, share your work, and trust that it matters even when you can’t see how.

Some days that will feel impossible. On those days, you have permission to lower the bar even further. Write one sentence. Send one email. Post one thing on social media. Or don’t. Take the day off. Rest. Doom-scroll if you need to. Then come back tomorrow and try again.

The bar is on the floor, and that’s exactly where it should be.

What To Do Right Now

If you’re reading this and thinking “okay, but seriously, HOW do I actually keep going?”—here’s your permission slip:

Do less, not nothing. Cut your goals in half, then cut them in half again. One page a day adds up to a book. One newsletter a month keeps you connected to readers. One social media post a week maintains your presence. You don’t have to do everything. You just have to not quit entirely.

Create small refuges. Protect your writing time like you’d protect a friend who needed sanctuary. Turn off the news for one hour. Close Twitter. Sit with your work and let yourself care about it without guilt.

Connect with your people. Other writers understand this struggle. Your readers understand this struggle. You’re not alone in feeling like creating is both essential and impossible right now. Find your people and hold onto each other.

Remember why you started. You became a writer because you had something to say, because stories mattered to you, because you believed words could change something—even if that something was just one person’s day. That’s still true. That will always be true.

The Defiant Act of Hoping

Here’s the most radical thing you can do right now: keep creating as if the future exists. As if your book will matter to someone. As if the world will still be here for people to read it.

That’s not naivety. That’s defiance.

Every word you write says: I believe in tomorrow. Every book you publish says: Human stories still matter. Every reader you reach says: Connection is still possible.

The people who want you to stop creating, to give up, to surrender to despair—they win when you quit. Your silence doesn’t make the world better. Your absence doesn’t reduce suffering. Your abandoned manuscript doesn’t advance justice.

But your book? Your book might be the thing that helps someone survive. It might be the thing that reminds someone why survival matters. It might be the thing that gives someone enough hope to keep fighting for a better world.

So write your book. Market your work. Share your stories. Not because everything is fine—it’s not. But because everything being terrible is exactly when we need artists most.

The world is falling apart. It has always been falling apart. It will probably continue falling apart for the foreseeable future.

Write your book anyway.

Not despite the chaos, but in defiance of it. Not because it will fix everything, but because it might help someone—including you—remember what we’re fighting for.

Your work matters. Your voice matters. Your stories matter.

Even now. Especially now.

Keep going.

And now a fiction break:

When the World Ends

By Liz Dubelman

Sarah stares at the blinking cursor. Chapter twelve. Her protagonist is about to confess her feelings to the small-town veterinarian, and Sarah cannot make herself care.

Outside her window, March 2025 looks like every other apocalypse: gray sky, bare trees, the usual end of everything. Her phone buzzes with another breaking news alert. She doesn’t look. She already knows it’s bad.

“Why does this matter?” she types in her notes app, then deletes it. Then types it again.

Her editor wants the manuscript in six weeks. Her readers are waiting. But what’s the point of happily-ever-afters when—

New York, 1989

Michael’s typewriter ribbon is almost dead, leaving ghost letters on the page. His heroine just met the architect at a gallery opening, and he’s supposed to make them fall in love.

The memorial service is in three hours. That’s four this month. Seven since New Year’s.

His agent called yesterday. “Romance is selling. People need escape. Can you deliver?”

Michael looks at the obituary section, growing longer every week, then back at his page. Chapter twelve.

Sarah scrolls Twitter. Someone’s posted: “Imagine promoting your romance novel right now. Read the room.”

She closes her laptop. Opens it again. Types one sentence: “I love you,” Claire said, and meant it.

Deletes it.

Types it again.

Michael’s friend David died last Tuesday. Monday he’d been fine—well, not fine, nobody was fine, but alive. Laughing at Michael’s description of a sex scene gone wrong. Tuesday, gone.

Michael’s publisher wants to know if he can write faster. Romances are flying off shelves. People are buying anything that promises a happy ending.

“It feels obscene,” he tells his typewriter. “Writing about love while everyone’s—”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. Hasn’t finished that sentence in three years.

Sarah’s phone rings. Her mother. “Are you watching the news?”

“No.”

“You should. It’s important.”

“Everything’s important, Mom. That’s the problem.”

After they hang up, Sarah looks at her manuscript. Sixty thousand words about a woman who moves to Vermont and falls for the guy who runs the maple syrup farm. Cozy. Wholesome. Pointless.

She opens a new document and starts writing her resignation letter to her editor.

Gets three sentences in before she stops.

Someone left a note on Michael’s door: “While people are dying, you’re writing trash.”

He keeps it. Puts it next to his typewriter. Proof that he’s as selfish as he feels.

That night, at the meeting—they don’t call it a support group, just “the meeting”—he mentions it. Tries to make it funny. Fails.

Thomas, who has three months left, maybe four, interrupts him. “Are you going to stop?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t. I’m reading your last one in the hospital. Third time through.” Thomas’s hands shake when he lights his cigarette. “It’s the only hour a day I’m not terrified.”

Michael goes home. Sits at his typewriter. Stares at chapter twelve.

Types: “I love you,” Marcus said, and meant it.

Sarah finds the letter in her research folder. She’s been collecting primary sources about small-town Vermont, but somehow this got mixed in: a 1989 interview with a romance novelist she’s never heard of. Michael something.

The interviewer asks him how he can write love stories during the AIDS crisis.

His answer: “Because love stories are exactly what the crisis is about. Every day, people are choosing each other anyway. They’re caring for each other anyway. They’re fighting for more time together anyway. If that’s not romance, I don’t know what is.”

The interviewer pushes: “But isn’t it frivolous?”

“Frivolous? My readers tell me my books are the only place they remember what hope feels like. That’s not frivolous. That’s the whole point.”

Sarah reads it three times.

Closes the document.

Opens her manuscript.

Michael finishes chapter twelve at 3 AM. His heroine and her architect are in love. It won’t fix anything. It won’t stop the dying. It won’t make the government care or the drugs work faster or bring David back.

But someone will read it in a hospital room. Someone will read it after a funeral. Someone will read it and remember, for just a moment, that love is real and worth fighting for.

He types: THE END.

Allows himself to believe it matters.

Sarah types: “I love you,” Claire said, and meant it.

Keeps typing.

Outside, the world is still ending. It’s been ending for years. It will probably keep ending.

She writes about love anyway.

Not because it fixes anything. Not because it’s more important than the crisis. But because people falling in love despite everything—that’s not escape from the darkness. That’s proof that the darkness hasn’t won.

Chapter twelve. Then thirteen. Then however many it takes.

Her readers are waiting.

Someone, somewhere, needs to remember what hope feels like.

She writes.

THE END

Share The Write Kit Newsletter

Publication day is significant, but pub day is really pub month — or pub season. The goal of a launch is not to create a single spike of attention and then disappear. It’s to sustain momentum long enough for word-of-mouth to take over.

A few things that reliably move books:

Reviews, early and often. Online reviews — on Amazon, Goodreads, and anywhere readers gather — are the social proof that converts curious browsers into buyers. Getting advance copies into readers’ hands before publication, and then following up to encourage reviews, is one of the highest-leverage things you can do.

Email. Your email list is your most reliable channel because it’s the one you own. An email to people who already care about your work converts far better than any social media post. If you’ve been building a list before launch, this is when it pays off. If you haven’t, start building it now for the next book.

Podcast appearances. Being a guest on podcasts that serve your target readers is one of the most effective forms of book marketing available — listeners are already in a long-form, attentive mode. A good podcast appearance can reach thousands of exactly the right people. Pitch generously and early.

Word of mouth. Still, the most powerful force in book sales, and the hardest to manufacture directly. The best thing you can do to generate it is write a book that gives readers something worth sharing — something they want to press into someone’s hands and say, you need to read this.

And talk about it. Tell people what you’ve been doing and why!

Throw a Book Party

One of the most underrated items in the launch toolkit is also one of the oldest: throw a party. Not a stuffy literary salon with name cards and careful conversation. A real party — cocktails, laughter, the controlled chaos of people who are happy to be somewhere.

The practical mathematics: invite fifty people to get twenty. Invite seventy to get forty. Social anxiety is a powerful force, and life intervenes; plan accordingly. Set an end time to reassure the introverts (“it’s only two hours, you can do this”) and partner with a friend to double your guest list.

Your invitation should lead with the fun, not the ask. Phrases that work: “Cocktails and conversation with [your name].” “No reading required. Just show up.” The structure almost runs itself — the first hour is mingling, the second is a reading or conversation. Twenty minutes, loose and warm, more stand-up than lecture. Food is optional. The point is the gathering.

And here’s the thing no one tells you: you don’t have to wait for publication day. Every day is pub day. You can throw a book party whenever you want — before the book comes out to build anticipation, after to celebrate, months later in a new city. It scales in both directions.

The ROI is harder to measure and considerably more meaningful.

And now a fiction break

A Rat in the House

by Liz Dubelman

There was a rat in April’s house. There was a splash of flour on the floor in the kitchen under the cabinet that she noticed in the morning as she sleepily made coffee. She tentatively opened the cabinet to find rat droppings. April hated rodents. Apart from the obvious—a mouse had killed her father—she found them creepy because of their ability to flatten themselves and fit into the smallest space, like a bad memory. Her first thought was not of her father or calling the Rat Man from pest control. Her first thought was of Aunt Stella and Uncle Sid. Didn’t they live in Boca Raton—the mouth of the rat? April’s eccentric thoughts always helped her through a crisis. Besides, she had no control over them anyway, and sometimes they could be connected like a mosaic. She made a mental note to call Aunt Stella and Uncle Sid, then dialed Stanley Pest Control.

April had been through this before. She’d had a rat or mouse—they never did determine which—in her house a little less than a year back, before Lester was killed by a rodent. Even back then, the rat thing threw her into crisis. April has always had this recurring dream that a rat is biting her, holding on, and no matter what she does, it won’t let go. Sometimes the rat is holding on to her mouth or her fingers. Often she beats it so badly it decomposes, but still holds on.

Last time she found evidence of a rat, she called the landlord. He’s an Iranian Jew, although he prefers to be called Persian. He sent five companies in for estimates. It took almost a month—well, three weeks. April was a wreck. She couldn’t stand to use her kitchen, and cooking is what she usually does to relax. Each rat guy who came told one horror story after another.

“I once saw a little baby almost half eaten by a rat. It wanted the baby’s milk bottle. It was almost too late by the time I got there. But we got them all, every last disease-carrying bad boy.”

Each story was designed to intimidate and illustrate how great each rat guy was.

“You got to get into their heads. Think like a rat. They want food, and they’re bold. I once saw a family of them walk through the front door. It was open to get a little air, and they just walked in like a gang or something. But we found them—all of them.”

After each rat guy left, April would call her landlord with the estimate and tell him the stories. He would just laugh and tell her what time the next one would come. April’s landlord was a horrible combination of stupid and mean. Finally, she had a breakdown. She was screaming and crying. The landlord sent Stanley Pest Control just to shut her up. April wasn’t really crazy. Sometimes she was just provoked enough to act that way.

Stanley would come this afternoon between noon and four, and she was still under warranty, so she didn’t need to deal with the landlord. April would include a letter with her rent check detailing her horror, “just so he would know,” and the landlord would laugh.

April sat down with her coffee. She didn’t want to be alone, but she didn’t want to be with anybody either. She decided to return some phone calls. She owed practically everyone in her family a call. The rat made April feel vulnerable, and vulnerability made her long for an older sister. Her defenses were down, and she had momentarily forgotten that her big sister was a jerk. She phoned Jenny in Connecticut.

“Hi, it’s April.”

“I know who it is. I’m so down. Did Mom tell you?”

“No, I haven’t talked to Mom. I’m kind of upset too.”

“Joe and I had a huge fight.”

By the time she realized it, she was in too deep. Jenny wanted to talk. Just talk. She didn’t want advice or a conversation. She didn’t want to hear about April’s rat or her shitty landlord. This wasn’t what April had in mind when she dialed, but there was no way out now. If she made some excuse and hung up, it would travel through the family grapevine that April was an insensitive bitch, and she was feeling too fragile and full of self-doubt to even hear those answering machine messages.

“You know how Joe and I keep our money separate?”

April knew it but never understood it. Why get married if you aren’t going to be a team and pool your resources? But April was more than willing to accept that she didn’t understand marriage. She was willing to accept that anyone with the slightest bit of conviction understood everything better than her.

“Yeah.”

“Well, a while back I lent him $4,350—$4,000 for the bills and $350 for Sophie’s Hebrew school. So he comes to me today and says I owe him for the phone bill. He says I make too many calls to my family, and it adds up. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ! My father just died. I need my family. Joe’s an insensitive prick.”

April wanted to interrupt and say, our father, he was my father too. And can’t you see you married an angry, mean, and vindictive man who doesn’t love you because he has no idea what love is? But she didn’t, because Jenny speaks a different language. She thinks Joe loves her “in his own way.” And Lester was a quirky Don Quixote type that no one understood, and they had a special relationship. In Jenny’s mind, Lester loved her best. But Jenny has a faulty memory.

She doesn’t remember the day that Lester pulled the phone off the kitchen wall. Jenny was fourteen and had gotten one too many phone calls. Lester never liked any of The Family to have friends. He was absolutely out of his head that day, spoiling for a fight. He was like a tea kettle ready to force out a steam-driven whistle. Robin called for Jenny just at that moment. Lester answered. When he heard it was for Jenny—and not him—he pulled the phone off the wall with a loud guttural scream. As April thinks back on it now, that may have been the start of Jenny’s teenage anorexia. Maybe Jenny just needed to control something, or maybe she just couldn’t face going into the kitchen anymore.

“So, I say to Joe, ‘When are you going to pay me back the $4,350?’ And he says, in front of the kids, ‘I’ll pay you back. I’ll pay you back in pennies and shove each one up your ass.’”

April couldn’t help herself. She burst out laughing and couldn’t stop.

Jenny said, “What? Stop that, it’s not funny.”

April managed to get out between guffaws, “I’ll call you back.”

Time was passing. Soon, the Rat Man would come. This is what April’s life was—a collection of small moments that strung together was a reasonable facsimile of a life. She didn’t think other people lived this way. Their lives must be more integrated. She remembered trying to explain how she felt to Tristan. They were at an Elvis Costello concert. April loved and still loves Elvis Costello, despite the Sophie von Otter stuff. It was back in 1986, and April’s life had even bigger gaps. Often, she felt like she was watching her life. Tristan asked her when she felt the best. She said when she was at an Elvis Costello concert, because he wrote how she felt. Tristan said that she needed to string Elvis moments together and move through time. He said that one day she would find her life was all Elvis moments and she would feel like she was just moving through time. April still believed and practiced this life theory. She just didn’t think it was going to take so long.

The Rat Guy came. He asked April what kind of trap she wanted—sticky, snap, poison. He said the sticky was the safest if she had a kid or a pet around. She didn’t. The snap trap was the Rat Guy’s favorite. He liked the sport of it. He said, with some pride, he uses grape jelly to bait the snap traps. He said that rats love grape jelly. He had a pocket full of those little square plastic containers of jelly you get with your take-out order from a diner. Lester used to love grape jelly and cream cheese sandwiches on challah. If she decided on the snap or the sticky, he would come back in a week to empty them. Or she could choose the poison.

He said the poison was mostly Coumadin, a blood thinner they give to people who are predisposed to strokes. The rats eat it, and their lungs hemorrhage. He said they crawl off and die. April stopped dead. Lester was taking Coumadin.

Coumadin was the reason Lester had died. Lester was self-medicating, but unlike normal people, Lester didn’t medicate with fun drugs. Lester was desperately afraid of having a stroke. He had been prescribed the drug originally after his hernia operation. He had suffered a TIA, a mini stroke, a slight dysfunction in the brain that lasted less than an hour, but it scared him. Coumadin is a powerful drug that inhibits the body’s ability to clot blood. The recipe of Coumadin, Lester, and the mouse proved to be fatal.

April let the Rat Guy set the traps.

Share

There’s a specific flavor of shame reserved for writers, and it goes something like this:

Your friend — a lovely, talented person you genuinely like — texts you that they got an agent. Or a book deal. Or that their newsletter hit 10,000 subscribers overnight because some podcast mentioned it while you were asleep, living your life, bothering no one.

And your first thought, before the congratulations, before the exclamation points, before you even reach for your phone — is a small, hot, horrible ugh.

You know the feeling. (You do. Don’t leave. We’re in this together.)

For years, I thought this made me a bad person. A competitive gremlin in a creative field that didn’t have room for competition. A fraud who preached community while mentally tallying everyone else’s word counts against my own.

Then I realized: I wasn’t broken. I was just confused about what other writers were for.

The Scarcity Myth (And Why It’s Lying to You)

Here’s the story I used to tell myself: there are only so many readers, only so many publishing slots, only so much attention in the world — and every successful writer was, in some microscopic way, eating my lunch.

This is, to put it gently, complete nonsense.

Readers are not a finite resource that gets divided up at the start of each year like a pie chart. They are ravenous, multiplying creatures who read one good book and immediately want seventeen more. When a friend of mine released her debut novel last spring, she didn’t siphon away my potential audience. She made readers. She sent people down a rabbit hole that ended, more than once, with someone discovering my work too.

I know this because she told me. Because we’re friends now. Because I stopped treating her career like a weather event happening to me and started treating it like something I could actually be part of.

Turns out, that’s a much better way to live.

What Changed (A Brief, Embarrassing Personal History)

The turning point was mortifyingly small.

A writer I followed online — someone whose essays I’d read for years with equal parts admiration and envy — reached out to say she liked something I’d written. Not in a networking way. In a hey, this made me laugh on a Tuesday way.

I almost didn’t respond.

I had told myself some story about how acknowledging her existence would mean acknowledging that she was better than me, which would mean acknowledging that I was afraid, which was a whole thing I didn’t have time for. Very mature. Very functional.

Instead, I wrote back. We talked. We kept talking. She introduced me to two other writers. One of them blurbed my book. Another talked about my newsletter on hers. I showed up for their launches. They showed up for mine.

None of this was a transaction. It was just — people who cared about words, caring about each other.

I had been so busy being intimidated that I missed, for years, that what I wanted was friends who got it. Friends who understood the 11 pm spiral before a submission deadline. Friends who wouldn’t glaze over when I explained the difference between my two drafts. Friends who celebrated the small wins because they knew exactly how hard those small wins were.

I wanted a community. I’d just been too competitive to let myself have one.

The Part Where I Give You Actual Advice (You’re Welcome)

Here’s what building real author friendships looks like, in practice:

Read their work. Actually read it. Not to assess the competition. Not to find weaknesses. Read it the way you want people to read yours — with generosity, with attention, with a willingness to be moved. If something lands, tell them. Specifically. Writers can smell a hollow compliment from three continents away, but a real one? It stays with them for years.

Show up when it’s not convenient. The launch week reshare is easy. The “hey, I saw this and thought of you” three months later, for no reason, with no ask attached — that’s what builds something real. Friendship, like writing, is mostly unglamorous maintenance work.

Stop keeping score. You will have seasons where everything clicks, and your friends are struggling. They will have seasons where everything clicks, and you are in your pajamas at 2 pm, wondering if you ever had a good idea. This is not a referendum on your talent. It’s just time being weird, as time tends to be.

Be the first to say the uncomfortable thing. “I’m struggling.” “I’m scared this isn’t good.” “Can I send you something?” Vulnerability in creative friendship is not weakness — it’s the whole point. Your writer friends are the people who are allowed to see the mess.

Celebrate loudly. When someone you love gets the thing — the deal, the review, the moment — make it a thing. Not because it reflects well on you. Because joy, shared, doubles.

The Unexpected Upside

Here is what no one tells you about building real creative friendships: they make you better.

Not because of the connections, though those matter. Because being around people who are genuinely trying — who are struggling and revising and risking and celebrating — reminds you that the work is worth doing. That it matters. That you are not alone in a weird, isolated room, making things no one will care about.

(You are in a weird, isolated room. But so is everyone.)

My writing got better when I stopped watching other writers like a hawk and started watching them like a fan. My own voice got clearer when I wasn’t so busy measuring it against theirs. The ugh got quieter. The exclamation points became more genuine.

I still feel a flash of competitive weirdness sometimes. I’m human, and apparently, this is what humans do. But now I know what to do with it: text the person I’m envious of, say something true about their work, and let that little green feeling remind me that I care, that I’m still hungry, that I have more to do.

Then I close the app and go write.

If this resonated, share it with a writer friend — specifically the one whose success you’ve been privately rooting against. Consider it a peace offering. Consider it a beginning.

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A Creative Break

Free Floating: Six Vignettes from One Morning

by Liz Dubelman

I. The Travel Agent

Seth MacFarlane was on the phone yelling at his travel agent when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower.

This was not a coincidence. This was, in fact, the direct result of his travel agent telling him his flight departed at 8:15 when it actually departed at 7:45. Seth had arrived at Logan Airport red-faced and righteous, just in time to watch the gate doors close in his face. He’d thrown the kind of fit that only people who are absolutely certain they’re right can throw—which he was, technically, about the time, if not about the larger geometry of the universe conspiring to save his life.

He was still on the phone, still yelling, when someone tapped him on the shoulder and pointed at the airport television.

The travel agent, who had been on the receiving end of considerable abuse for the past twenty minutes, was still on the line. Neither of them spoke for a very long time.

“I’m sorry,” Seth finally said.

The travel agent started crying.

Seth never publicly said whether he believed in God before that morning. But he’d been scheduled to board American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, and his travel agent had been incompetent, and sometimes the universe makes itself very hard to argue with.

II. The Husband

His cell phone rang eleven times before he answered it.

He was in a meeting—the kind where you’re supposed to have your phone off, or at least silenced, and he’d forgotten. The ringtone was embarrassing. His wife had changed it to a song their daughter liked, something from a Disney movie he’d seen too many times. He answered mostly to make it stop.

“Where are you?” Carol said. Her voice was strange.

“I’m at work.” He pressed a finger to his ear to hear better. Someone in the conference room was coughing. “I told you I had the Merrill Lynch meeting this morning. Carol, I can’t really—”

“Which office?” she said. “Which building?”

He told her. He watched his colleague make a face at him—wrap it up—and held up one finger. One minute.

“That building is gone,” Carol said.

He laughed. It came out wrong, more like a cough. “What?”

“I’m watching it on television. Both towers. Two planes.” Her voice broke in a way he’d never heard before. Carol didn’t break. Carol had managed his mother’s funeral, and their son’s appendectomy, and a miscarriage they never talked about. “Both towers are gone.”

He walked to the window. Lower Manhattan was a different city than the one he’d left that morning. The sky was doing something the sky wasn’t supposed to do.

His phone was still in his hand. Carol was still talking. He could hear her, but he couldn’t quite connect her voice to the thing happening outside the window, the way you can’t connect a word to its meaning if you say it too many times.

Gone, she’d said.

He looked at his phone. Looked at the window. Looked at his phone.

“I’m not there,” he said finally. He’d moved offices three weeks ago, a fact he’d mentioned to Carol once, and she’d apparently filed under things that didn’t matter yet. “I’m not in that building anymore.”

Carol made a sound he’d never heard her make before. He didn’t have a word for it.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m completely fine.”

But the sky outside the window was still doing that thing it wasn’t supposed to do, and he stood there for a very long time, not quite able to hang up the phone.

III. The Cat

Donna had a key because she watered the plants when Rachel went to Aruba. Now Rachel wasn’t coming back from anywhere, and someone had to feed the cat.

The cat’s name was Mr. Bojangles, which told you everything you needed to know about Rachel’s sense of humor. He was an enormous orange tabby with the personality of a disappointed landlord. He regarded Donna from the kitchen counter with profound skepticism while she found the food and filled the bowl and tried not to look at Rachel’s things—the coffee mug in the dish rack, the library book with the bookmark still in it, the reading glasses on the counter that Rachel was always losing.

The credit card was in the junk drawer. Donna found it while looking for the can opener. It was just sitting there—a Visa with Rachel’s name on it, limit probably five thousand dollars, unused.

Later, Donna would not be able to explain what happened next in any way that made rational sense. She wasn’t religious. She’d been to temple maybe four times in her adult life, all of them under familial duress. She didn’t believe in signs or symbols or the intercession of the divine in human affairs.

But she took the credit card.

She bought a mezuzah for Rachel’s door. Then a menorah. Then a Torah portion framed in Jerusalem gold. Then a rosary, because Rachel hadn’t been Jewish anyway, she’d been nothing in particular, and maybe nothing in particular needed covering from multiple angles. Then a small Buddha. Then a crystal that was supposed to protect the home from negative energy, which seemed like the least it could do under the circumstances.

She maxed out the card at $4,847.

Donna nailed the framed Torah portion to the wall, hung the mezuzah on the door, arranged the Buddha on the windowsill, and sat down on Rachel’s kitchen floor and cried until she couldn’t anymore.

The cat, after a moment’s consideration, stepped off the counter and sat in her lap.

IV. The Runner

He ran because what else do you do when the world is ending?

Michael had been in the lobby when the second plane hit. He didn’t know it was a second plane at the time—he didn’t know anything at the time except that the building was doing something buildings weren’t supposed to do, and everyone around him had the same expression, a look he’d never seen on human faces before and hoped never to see again.

He ran north. Everyone was running north. The cloud behind them was the color of something that shouldn’t exist.

He was almost at Fulton Street when the body fell.

He didn’t process it as a body at first. His mind reframed it as something else—a piece of debris, an object, a thing. It landed close enough that he felt the air move. He kept running.

He didn’t stop until he reached his gym on 54th Street. The New York Athletic Club, which had seen two world wars and a Depression and any number of human catastrophes, was open. The man at the front desk looked at Michael—covered in ash, shoes destroyed, still wearing his work badge—and said nothing, just buzzed him through.

Michael went to the locker room. He showered for a long time. Then he went to the steam room.

He stayed at the club for three days.

He went from the steam to the cold pool and back again, as though he could sweat out what he’d seen and freeze it out and sweat it out again until there was nothing left of it inside him. The staff brought him food. Nobody asked questions. A few other men were doing the same thing—men who’d run from the same place, who’d seen the same sky doing the same impossible things.

They didn’t talk to each other. There was nothing to say.

On the fourth day, Michael went home. His wife asked if he was all right. He said yes. He never told her about the body at Fulton Street. He never told anyone.

Some things you sweat out as best you can, and then you just carry them.

V. The Woman Who Left

She’d been meaning to leave for years.

Not the city—she loved the city. Her marriage. Her job. Her entire carefully constructed life, which had begun to feel like a coat she’d bought for someone else’s weather.

When she came out of the tunnel and finally got a signal and her phone exploded with messages—her mother, her husband, her sister, her colleague who’d been trying to reach her—she stood on the sidewalk and watched the smoke rising from where the skyline used to be complete.

She called her mother first. “I’m fine,” she said. “I got out.”

She called her husband. “I’m fine,” she said. “I got out.”

She did not call her office.

Instead, she stood on the sidewalk with her phone in her hand and her shoes that weren’t made for running and ash in her hair, and she thought: I could just not go back.

Not to the building—that was already decided for her. But to everything else. The marriage had become a series of polite negotiations. The job that paid well and meant nothing. The life she’d agreed to when she was twenty-six and thought that safety was the same thing as happiness.

She had $340 in her checking account and a Visa with room on it. Her sister lived in Portland. She’d always wanted to learn to paint.

She bought a train ticket that afternoon. She called her husband from Penn Station and told him she was fine, she was safe, she just needed some time, she was sorry, she loved him, but not in the right way, she was so sorry.

He didn’t understand at first. Then he did.

She watched Manhattan disappear as the train went underground, then she was through the tunnel and into New Jersey, and then New Jersey was gone too.

She never went back.

Years later, when people asked what made her finally leave, she would say: " A window opened. She would leave it at that. Some explanations are true but insufficient. The actual answer was too large and too strange and too tangled up with things she couldn’t explain to anyone who hadn’t been standing on that sidewalk, watching that smoke, holding a phone full of messages from a life that no longer quite fit.

A window opened.

She went through it.

VI. Free Floating

There is a study conducted in the weeks after September 11th, in the particular way that academics respond to catastrophe, which is to measure it, that found something almost impossible to explain.

People who had suffered from free-floating anxiety before the attacks—the kind of anxiety that has no specific object, that just lives in the body like weather, waiting for something terrible to happen—reported feeling oddly better in the days that followed.

Not happy. Not unaffected. But strangely, specifically calmer.

Because the thing they’d been afraid of had finally happened. The other shoe had dropped. The anxiety, which had always been a kind of low-grade preparation for disaster, had finally found its disaster. It could rest now. It had been right all along.

Meanwhile, people who had felt well and adjusted and basically okay about the world, people who’d assumed, on some foundational level, that things would probably be fine, found themselves suddenly adrift in a new and permanent unease. An omnipresent anxious feeling that settled in like a new tenant with no intention of leaving.

The world had rearranged itself overnight, and now the worried people were calm, and the calm people were worried, and everyone was trying to figure out how to live in a city that was still standing but had a different skyline, and a country that had been interrupted mid-sentence and couldn’t quite find its way back to whatever it had been trying to say.

Seth MacFarlane went back to Los Angeles and made more television. The husband stood at his window for a long time and then went back to the meeting. The woman put a Buddha on the windowsill and closed the door. The runner went from steam to cold and back again. The wife bought a train ticket and didn’t use her return.

Everyone was fine.

Everyone carries something now.

Some people were just more prepared for the weight.

Here’s what nobody tells you about book marketing: the algorithm doesn’t buy books. Readers do.

I know, revolutionary concept. But somehow we’ve all collectively lost our minds, obsessing over posting schedules and engagement metrics and whatever the hell “optimizing for discoverability” means. We’re out here treating book marketing like it’s a heist—trying to crack the code, game the system, find the secret backdoor into readers’ wallets.

Meanwhile, the actual solution is sitting right there, almost offensively simple: just be a person talking to other people.

Marketing Is Just More Writing

You know what marketing actually is? It’s writing. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

You write social media posts. You write newsletters. You write blog posts. You write responses to reader emails. It’s all just... writing. The thing you already do. The thing you’re supposedly good at.

But somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that “marketing writing” is this separate, scary skill set that requires courses and coaches and complex strategies. It doesn’t. It requires you to write stuff and share it with people. Congratulations, you already know how to do that.

The Power of Voice

Think about how you recommend books to friends. You don’t say, “This book has strong SEO and excellent Amazon category placement.” You say, “This author gets me,” or “This voice is incredible,” or “This writer makes me feel less alone.”

That’s what readers want from you, too. They want your actual voice, not your carefully optimized, algorithm-friendly, hashtag-stuffed performance of what you think marketing should sound like.

Here’s the thing about voice: it’s instantly recognizable and completely unfakeable. When I tell you I’m going to a Quentin Tarantino movie, you know what I mean—excessive violence, sharp dialogue, killer soundtrack, probably some feet. If I told you Tarantino wrote a book of poetry, you’d have expectations about what that poetry might feel like, even though he’s never written a poem in his life. That’s the power of voice.

Build that kind of relationship with readers, and the algorithm becomes irrelevant.

Social Media Sucks (But You Still Need to Show Up)

Look, I’m not going to lie to you—social media is exhausting. It’s noisy and performative, and half the time it feels like screaming into a void while the void occasionally screams back about your grammar.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: it’s also where readers are. Not because they love algorithms, but because they love people. They’re looking for writers who feel real. Who share weird research rabbit holes. Who admit when writing is hard. Who have personalities beyond “buy my book.”

You don’t need to post seventeen times a day. You don’t need to dance on TikTok (unless you want to, which honestly would be amazing). You just need to show up like yourself, consistently, and let people get to know you.

The Actual Strategy

Stop trying to hack anything. Start befriending people. Share what you’re learning. Talk about what fascinates you. Be honest about your process. Respond to comments like you’re talking to humans, because you are.

Marketing isn’t a separate job. It’s just more writing. And you’re already a writer.

So write.

And now a fiction break

Pillows in the Bathtub

by Liz Dubelman

The idea came to me on a Tuesday, between clients. Not a bath—a nest. Pillows in the tub, the paperback I’d been trying to finish since October, maybe that Joni Mitchell playlist. No water. Just stillness.

I mentioned it to my sister that night, expecting her to laugh. Instead, she got quiet. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all week,” she said. “And I teach middle school.”

But she didn’t understand. It wasn’t sad. It was practical. You work with what you have. Four hundred square feet in Santa Monica doesn’t leave room for a reading nook, and my bedroom feels like an extension of my office—laptop on the nightstand, client files I tell myself I won’t look at but always do. The bathroom was the only space without ghosts of other people’s grief.

That night, I dragged two throw pillows into the tub, arranged them, and sat down. Stood up. Rearranged them. Gave up. The porcelain was too hard, the angle wrong. I ended up sitting on the closed toilet lid, scrolling through vacation rentals I couldn’t afford, pressing my thumb against pictures of Mexican beaches until the pixels blurred.

The cold started the following Monday. Nothing dramatic—scratchy throat, that underwater feeling in my ears. I took Emergen-C, doubled up on tea, and told myself it would pass.

By Wednesday, I sounded like I’d been gargling gravel. Mrs. Chen kept asking me to repeat myself. I considered canceling Thursday’s appointments, but Jake was scheduled for ten a.m., and he’d already rescheduled twice. Three months in, we were just starting to get somewhere. His mother’s suicide had been in May—pills, no note—and he’d spent the summer oscillating between rage and numbness. Last week, he’d finally cried. You don’t interrupt that kind of momentum.

Thursday morning, I woke up with no voice at all. Not raspy. Not hoarse. Gone.

I tried everything—hot water with honey, steam from the shower, those ridiculous vocal exercises I’d learned in a workshop twenty years ago. Nothing. I stood in my kitchen and opened my mouth, and nothing came out but air.

I should have canceled. Obviously, I should have canceled.

Instead, I texted Jake: Laryngitis. Can still meet if you’re okay with me mostly listening. Your call.

He replied immediately: lol yeah that’s fine

He showed up in a Dodgers hoodie and the same Vans he’d worn to every session, holding an iced coffee the size of a small child. Twenty-one years old, unemployed, living in his dead mother’s apartment in Mar Vista because he couldn’t afford to move and couldn’t bear to stay.

“You sound like shit,” he said, dropping into the chair.

I smiled, nodded, gestured at my throat apologetically.

“This is kind of perfect, actually,” he said. “You can’t interrupt me.”

I raised an eyebrow—my attempt at I never interrupt you—but he just grinned.

“You do, though. Not in a bad way. But like, you’re always trying to... I don’t know, guide the conversation? Ask the right questions? Today you just have to sit there.”

I pulled out my phone, typed: Fair enough. I’m listening.

For the next forty minutes, Jake talked. Really talked. About his mother’s boyfriend, who kept texting him, wanting to “process” together. About his aunt, who called every Sunday to ask if he was “okay yet,” as if grief had a finish line. About the guilt of feeling relieved some days—relieved not to worry about her anymore, not to screen her calls, not to wonder if this would be the time she actually did it.

I nodded. Handed him tissues. Typed occasional questions.

At the end, he stood, stretched, looked at me with something I couldn’t quite read.

“This was good,” he said. “Like, really good. You should lose your voice more often.”

I must have looked stricken, because he laughed.

“I’m kidding. Kind of. It’s just... I don’t know. It felt more even, I guess? Like I wasn’t performing for you. You weren’t performing for me.”

I typed: Were we performing before?

He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe I was trying to show you I was making progress so you’d feel good about your job. And maybe you were trying to show me you had all the answers so I’d feel safe.” He paused at the door. “Anyway. Feel better. Take the day off or whatever.”

I didn’t take the day off. I had three more clients scheduled. But I did cancel Friday, and when I sent the emails, I waited for the dread. The certainty that I was letting people down. That they’d spiral without me. That they’d find someone better.

Instead, I felt nothing. Just tired.

Mrs. Chen wrote back immediately: Please rest! I’ll be fine. See you next week.

My two p.m. responded: No problem! Hope you feel better!

My four p.m. didn’t respond at all, which I decided to interpret as mature self-sufficiency rather than abandonment.

Saturday, I slept until noon. Sunday, I made a spreadsheet of my finances—something I’d been avoiding for months—and realized that if I skipped two dinners out per month and stopped buying books I wouldn’t read, I could afford a long weekend somewhere by spring.

Monday, my voice came back, raspy but present.

Tuesday, Jake’s regular slot, I met him with tea and working vocal cords.

“You sound better,” he said.

“I am better. Thank you for last week. For what you said.”

He looked uncomfortable. “I wasn’t trying to be deep or whatever.”

“I know. That’s why it landed.”

We worked for a while in our usual rhythm—me asking questions, him answering, both of us circling the enormous fact of his mother’s absence. Near the end of the session, I did something I’d never done before.

“I’m thinking of taking a few days off next month,” I said. “A real break. I wanted to tell you in advance, so you could prepare, and also because... I realized I’ve been holding on too tight. To you, to all my clients. Like if I let go, even a little, everything will fall apart.”

Jake nodded slowly. “That sounds exhausting.”

“It is.”

“Good,” he said. “I mean, not good that it’s exhausting. Good that you’re taking a break. You should.”

“You’ll be okay?”

He gave me a look—patient, slightly amused, way older than twenty-one.

“Regina. My mom killed herself. I’ll never be okay, okay. But yeah. I’ll be fine for a week.”

That night, I didn’t try the bathtub nest again. Instead, I sat on my balcony—barely big enough for a chair, but mine—and looked at the ocean I could almost see between buildings. The Pacific, just out of reach, exactly where it had always been.

I opened my laptop and booked four days in Ojai. Nothing extravagant. A small casita, a hiking trail, a town with no grief counseling practice.

When I closed the computer, I felt something unfamiliar. Not happiness, exactly. Not relief.

Just space. The kind you don’t have to create from pillows and porcelain. The kind that exists when you finally stop filling every silence with your own necessity.

My sister called. I told her about Ojai.

“Good,” she said. “What changed?”

I thought about Jake, about my lost voice, about all the years I’d spent believing my presence was the only thing keeping other people whole.

“I guess I realized that the world doesn’t stop when I do,” I said.

“Took you long enough,” she said, but her voice was warm.

“I’m sixty-three,” I said. “Better late than never.”

“Sixty-three isn’t old.”

“I know. But some days it feels too late to learn new tricks.”

“Regina,” my sister said. “You literally teach people how to rebuild their lives after loss. You’re the queen of starting over.”

“For other people.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the trick, isn’t it? Believing your own advice.”

On my last day before the trip, Jake showed up early, holding two iced coffees.

“One’s for you,” he said. “Since you’re going away and everything. Figured I should be nice.”

I took it, smiled. “Thank you.”

“So where are you going?”

“Ojai. Up in the mountains.”

“Cool. My mom and I went there once. Before everything got bad.” He said it easily, like a fact rather than a wound. “There’s this bookstore. Bart’s Books? It’s all outside. You’d probably like it.”

“I’ll check it out.”

We sat. He fiddled with his cup.

“So, I’ve been thinking,” he said. “About what you said. About holding on too tight.”

“Yeah?”

“I think I do that too. With her stuff. Her apartment. Like, if I change anything, I’m erasing her. But that’s not really fair to either of us, right? She’s dead. I’m not. At some point, I have to live like I believe that.”

I felt my throat tighten—the good kind, the therapist kind, the kind that means someone just figured something out for themselves.

“That sounds like wisdom,” I said.

“Or just exhaustion.” He grinned. “Either way. Have fun in Ojai. Don’t feel guilty. We’ll all still be fucked up when you get back.”

“Jake.”

“What? It’s true.” He stood, headed for the door, then turned back. “Oh, and Regina?”

“Yeah?”

“The bathtub thing? If you still want to try it, you’ll need a lot of pillows. All different kinds.

He left before I could ask how he knew about the bathtub.

I sat in my office, in the quiet, and laughed until I cried.

Then I went online and ordered pillows for the bath.

And a plane ticket to Mexico for June.

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