I feel I owe you less of an explanation, and more of a thank you.

You’ve probably noticed the rhythm here has changed. Fewer essays. Longer gaps. Notes that trickle instead of flow. I haven’t disappeared. I’ve just been living the thing I write about, instead of writing about it.

You know why. I wrote about losing my mum here, in this space, because it felt like the right place to be honest about something that big. What I haven’t said is that the month since has asked more of me than I expected — including some time in hospital myself, which is its own kind of lesson in slowing down whether you choose to or not.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: this whole Lab is built on the idea that sustainable creativity beats performative productivity. That showing up consistently doesn’t mean showing up daily. That your process is allowed to bend around your life instead of the other way round.

I could have kept posting through it. I could have scheduled ahead and pretended nothing had shifted. But that felt like exactly the kind of hustle I’ve spent years telling you to resist. So instead, I just... slowed down. Publicly. Which is, I think, the most anti-hustle thing I’ve ever done.

To everyone who messaged — checking in, sending a kind word, not asking for anything back — thank you. I’ve read every one, even the ones I haven’t replied to yet. That kind of quiet support is exactly what this community was supposed to become, and watching it become that, without my having to ask, has meant more than a well-timed essay ever could.

The Working Draft Lab is still going. I’ve even been able to write my fiction again, which is bringing me much joy. The weekend essays will come back at their own pace; the ideas, experiences, and books I want to share are all scribbled in my notebook, waiting. Nothing here is broken. It’s just breathing.

Thank you for waiting without making me feel like I owed you speed.

Still here,
Tracy

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I want to ask you something you’ve probably never thought about. I hadn’t until recently.

Your work in progress. The one that isn’t ready. The draft with the terrible middle section and the character who won’t behave. Where is it right now, at this exact moment?

Most writers I know would say something like “in Google Docs or Word,” or “on my Drive,” or “in the cloud, I think.” And then move on, because it’s not an interesting question. It’s plumbing. It’s not the writing.

I said the same thing for years. Then I started actually thinking about it, and I found I couldn’t stop.

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So I started looking more closely, and this is what I discovered. Under the US CLOUD Act, American companies can be compelled to hand over data they hold, wherever in the world that data physically sits. Your unfinished novel on Google Drive is subject to a legal framework you have no real relationship with, other than having ticked the Accept Terms and Conditions box like the rest of us, with no real say in it. So is your memoir. So are the notes about your family that you haven’t decided whether to publish. Whatever your current work in progress is, the answer is likely the same.

Then there’s the other thing. The training data question. We’ve all watched the AI companies help themselves to whatever they could reach, and the argument about consent arrived several years after the taking did. I’m not going to relitigate that here. I’ll just say that “the terms of service reserve the right to” is doing an enormous amount of very quiet work in a lot of places writers store their unpublished manuscripts.

As well as being an author of my own work, I’m also a ghostwriter. I hold other people’s stories, often the ones they haven’t told anyone; I’m a keeper of secrets and sensitive material. Once I saw where I was keeping them, I couldn’t unsee it.

So over three months, I moved everything.

My email, files, and calendar now live in Switzerland with Infomaniak, an employee-owned company that recently transferred its majority voting rights to a foundation, which makes its independence permanent. No future investor can change what it is. My client calls run through their video tool. My recordings and transcripts are processed entirely on my own machine and never touch a server at all.

My fiction lives in Novlr, which I’ve used since it launched, built by people who care about writers rather than about scale. My non-fiction drafts sit in Ulysses. Neither is owned by anyone whose business model depends on knowing things about me.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not interested in purity. There isn’t a perfect solution, and anyone selling you one is selling you something. I still use Microsoft Word, much as it pains me personally as a card-carrying Apple user, because publishing runs on Word and that’s not a hill worth dying on. This piece is going out on Substack, which is American. My website is still on Squarespace, also American, also under review.

The point was never to achieve some spotless state of digital sovereignty. The point was to stop letting the decisions be made for me by default.

Because that’s what convenience does: it decides on your behalf, quietly, and you never notice what you traded until you go looking. The default option is, well, the default option.

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What surprised me most was how good it felt. Not virtuous. Just settled and secure. There’s something about knowing where your work actually lives and who has legal reach over it that turns out to matter more than I expected, in the way knowing your house is locked matters, even though nothing was likely to happen anyway.

The other surprise was the people. Every company I moved to has humans you can talk to. When something broke two days before a launch, I spoke to a named person who fixed it overnight. I’d forgotten that connecting with real humans was even an option.

If you want the full technical detail, every tool and every trade-off, I’ve written that up fully here - [link to blog article on breaking up with Google].

But if you’re a writer and you take nothing else from this, take the question. Not the answer, the question.

Where does your work actually live?

You might be fine with the answer. Plenty of people will be. But you should know it, rather than assume it; a conscious decision to accept, or change it. Your unfinished work is the most vulnerable thing you own. It deserves at least as much thought as you give to which notebook you buy.

📷 Claudio Schwartz - Unsplash

I keep almost writing “my mum died” and then stopping, like the sentence needs a run-up before it can land on the page. It’s been almost two weeks. Some days that feels like nothing. Some days it feels like the only true thing.

We had three days. My brother, sister-in-law, and I, there around the clock, holding her hand, talking to her right up to the moment she passed. I know how rare that is. I know some people get a phone call instead of a hand to hold. I’m not sure “grateful” is the right word for something that also broke me open, but it’s close.

She recognised us when we arrived and managed to say hello, and that feels like the best of gifts — that she knew we were there, because within a short time she slipped into unconsciousness. But we kept talking all the same, reminiscing, even joking about shared memories. The radio played softly in the background the whole time. At one point it landed on 70s and 80s disco, and Abba’s “Dancing Queen” filled the room. We didn’t change it. Mum loved to dance.

Five years ago I wrote about losing Dad. About not processing the words when Mum called and said “Dad’s gone,” and me asking “gone where“ because his death hadn’t occurred to me as a possibility. This time there was no confusion like that. This time I watched it happen, lived it second by second, and somehow that’s not easier. It’s just different. A different shape of the same impossible thing.

What I didn’t expect is the second thing that’s arrived alongside the grief — a low, constant hum underneath it. My brother and I are the custodians now. Of the stories. The family history. All the small, specific things that used to live in her, that I somehow assumed I had more time to ask about.

The last time I was with her, a family friend brought a photo of someone she thought was my great-grandfather. Mum confirmed it instantly and told stories I’d never heard about him. I discovered a new family connection, another stitch added to the family quilt.

I’ve spent years telling other writers their memories are active, not passive. That if you don’t write it down, talk about it, ask the questions while there’s still someone to answer them, it starts to blur at the edges. I believed that. I still do. It just turns out believing something and living inside the consequences of not quite doing it fully enough are two very different experiences.

So there’s grief for her. And there’s a smaller, quieter grief running alongside it, for the questions I didn’t get to ask, the version of the family story that only she could have told, that now exists only in fragments my brother and I will have to piece back together between us — and probably get wrong in places, with no one left to correct us.

I haven’t written much this last week or so. A few fragments in the notebook, half a sentence here, a line that felt promising before something more urgent walked through it. I know that pattern well — I wrote a whole piece about it in May, about the weeks where the work isn’t about producing pages; it’s just staying gently connected to the page. I didn’t think I’d need that permission again quite so soon, or for quite this reason.

So today I wear a necklace that’s been passed down the first-daughter line since my great-grandmother, a cross that’s literally been touched by the generations, in times of joy and grief. It holds many stories and emotions. It connects us all, and it gives me strength.

There’s no five-years-on wisdom I can offer you today, because I don’t have it yet. I know grief doesn’t run on a timeline, because I learned that the hard way already. I know the guilt and the anger and the sadness all show up wearing each other’s clothes. What I didn’t fully understand until this week is that grief can also arrive holding a job for you — be the keeper now, ask around, write down what’s left before it goes too, before you’ve even had a chance to catch your breath.

So this is not an essay with a lesson at the end. It's just where I am, early in, still learning how to breathe in a world with one fewer parent in it than it had a fortnight ago, carrying a family's worth of half-known stories I now hold onto with both hands. The Working Draft will be quiet for a bit. The Notes will likely be too. That's allowed. I taught you that. Stay connected in your own way, and I'll take my own advice — because writing, even in the most tenuous way, has always saved me.

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I finished a novel last week with flour on my hands and a timer going for bread that needed folding every thirty minutes.

I didn’t read a single page.

I listened while I worked the dough, and again while I hung washing on the line, and once more on a walk down the lane, where the only other listener was a cow who did not seem impressed by the plot twist.

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By the time I closed the app, I’d “read” a book. Except I hadn’t. Not by the definition some readers still cling to, the one where a book only counts if your eyes did the work and your hands stayed still enough to hold it.

I got an email recently from a publicist making the case that audiobooks count. It read like she was defending something that shouldn’t need defending. And maybe that’s the tell. When you have to argue that a way of taking in a story is legitimate, you’re not really talking about stories anymore. You’re talking about who gets to call themselves a reader.

Here’s what nobody says out loud: the “audiobooks don’t count” crowd isn’t protecting literature. They’re protecting a hierarchy. Eyes on a page, sitting still, undistracted, is the “real” version. Everything else is somehow a lesser cousin, not the genuine article.

I don’t buy it, and not just because I’ve built half my reading life around a pair of headphones, a load of laundry, and home stuff.

I don’t buy it because the hierarchy was never really about reading. It was about performance. About being seen doing the “correct” version of a thing, whether or not it served you. Sit up straight. Hold the book. Don’t cheat by listening while you drive.

Sound familiar? It’s the same voice that tells you your writing doesn’t count unless you did it at a desk, in silence, for a proper number of hours. It’s the hustle voice, just wearing a cardigan and standing in front of a bookshelf instead of a desk.

For a lot of people, audiobooks aren’t a workaround. They’re the only way in. For many readers with disabilities, audio isn’t a nice extra; it’s the format that makes the story accessible at all. For many of us, it’s the difference between a to-be-read pile that grows forever and one that actually moves, because it allows the story to fit into a life that doesn’t have three quiet hours lying around.

That’s not less. That’s just realistic.

There’s another piece of this that matters even more to me as a writer than as a reader. Stephen King has said plainly that a writer who doesn’t make time to read will find it hard to it write well. I think he’s right. Reading is where you absorb rhythm, pacing, and the way a sentence can turn. It’s not optional homework. It’s the craft, quietly working on you in the background.

But here’s the cruel joke of the writing life: the people who need to read the most are usually the ones with the least time for it. If you’re already ‘stealing’ twenty minutes here and there just to get words on the page, the idea of also sitting down with a physical book, undisturbed, to keep growing as a writer, can feel like one more impossible thing on an already impossible list.

This is exactly where audio earns its keep. You can read craft-deep while you commute, while you cook, while you fold the laundry that never stops multiplying. The reading that makes you a better writer doesn’t need silence and a reading chair. At the very minimum, it just needs your ears.

I think about my own TBR pile, the actual stack by my bed, and the invisible one in my head, and the screenshots I’ve been saving of book recs. And I feel how much of the guilt around it has nothing to do with the books and everything to do with the story I tell myself about what a “real” reader looks like. Someone curled up, uninterrupted, making steady progress. Not someone listening to a thriller while she scrubs a pan, half the plot arriving between the clatter of dishes.

But a story that reaches you while your hands are busy is still a story that reached you. The tension still built. The character still broke your heart. You still turned up, in whatever form turning up took that day. And if you’re a writer, that story is still doing its quiet work on your own craft, subconsciously, whether you noticed or not.

So no, I’m not going to defend audiobooks. I’m going to stop treating them like they need defending. It’s also worth remembering that you don’t necessarily need a subscription to access audiobooks; many libraries now offer audiobooks via Libby and LibriVox. Another good reason to support your local library.

Your TBR pile doesn’t care how the story got in. Press play.

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Every writer I know tells themselves the same thing around now.

“I’ll write when things slow down.”

I’ve even said it myself.

The logic feels sound. Less noise, more space, finally some room to think. So we wait for summer like it’s going to hand us the book we’ve been meaning to write.

But here’s what I’ve watched happen, year after year. The pace drops. The calendar clears. And the writing still doesn’t come.

Not because we’re lazy. Not because we don’t care. But because open time and a clear plan are two completely different things, and we keep mistaking one for the other.

A free afternoon with no sense of what you’re doing isn’t rest. It’s just a quieter kind of stuck. The doubt doesn’t leave when the diary empties. It gets louder, because now there’s nothing to drown it out.

Real rest, the kind that actually restores you, tends to come after the deciding, not before it. Once you know what you’re writing and, just as importantly, what you’re allowed to set down until September, the pressure lifts. You can close the laptop without guilt. You can enjoy the summer you’ve got, instead of fretting over the ‘productive’ one you keep imagining.

That’s the shift I care about. Not doing more. Just being clear enough to stop carrying the whole tangle around with you. Write in the margins, or don’t. Set aside specific writing time, or don’t. Or, simply, keep a notebook handy for ideas, catch up on reading - because that counts too. Write if the mood takes you or the opportunity presents, but if it doesn’t, so be it.

Before the slow months fully arrive, ask yourself one honest question. If you had genuine space this summer, would you actually know what to do with it?

If the answer is “not really,” that’s worth sorting now, while there’s still time.

p.s. That question is the whole reason I opened The Summer Clearing, a single session to get you clear before the break. If it speaks to you, it’s here. If not, take the question anyway. It’s yours.

You’ve followed along as I introduced the Phoenix Draft and then got honest about the messy middle. Today I get to write the post I’ve been waiting to write.

Book three of The Glass Key Trilogy has, finally, unlocked.

Not in a “I had a good writing week” unlocked. Properly unlocked. The whole back half of *Purple Rain* now has a shape, a spine, and a beating heart. My pen is inked, and this weekend I’m going in.

Here’s what actually did it. Because it wasn’t willpower, and it wasn’t waiting for the muse. It was something quieter and, I think, more repeatable. It might help you, or your writer friends, too.

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I finally admitted I was too close to see it

This is the uncomfortable truth about being deep in a trilogy: you know your story so well that you can no longer see it. You see the version in your head, the version you meant to write, the version from three drafts ago. All of them at once. None of them clearly.

What broke the deadlock for me was getting the story mapped from the outside. Not trying to write the story from the inside. Every open thread from Books one and two laid out in a row - alright, yes, a spreadsheet, I used a spreadsheet. But to be fair, that order, that clean structure helped, a lot. Which threads were genuinely closed? Which ones were promises I’d made to readers that Book three still had to keep? I thought I knew. Turns out I didn’t, not fully.

Seeing them listed was like turning the lights on in a room I’d been navigating by memory alone.

The four load-bearing decisions

And here’s the discovery that changed everything: the stall wasn’t twelve chapters of missing story. It was four unmade decisions.

Four. That’s all.

Every “I can’t write this scene yet” traced back to one of them. Once I could see that, the mountain I felt I needed to climb became a short list. I worked through them one at a time, in order, each answer unlocking the next. Not fixing. Deciding.

If your draft is stalled, try asking: What are the three or four decisions everything else is waiting on? I suspect your mountain is a short list, too.

My subconscious had already done the work

This is the part that still gives me goosebumps.

As the decisions fell, I kept discovering that past-me had already prepared the ground. A minor character, barely two pages of print, turned out to be quietly holding a major piece of the ending. A throwaway detail in Book two was exactly the seed the finale needed. Even the real history woven through the books kept handing me gifts I’d absorbed years ago and forgotten I knew.

I didn’t plan any of it. Or rather, some part of me did, while the conscious part was busy worrying.

This is what the compost metaphor was always pointing at. Those “failed” drafts and half-remembered research weren’t waste. They were the story assembling itself below the surface, waiting for me to stop forcing and start listening. Seeds waiting to break ground at just the right moment.

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What I’d tell you if you’re still in the ashes

- The block is probably not the writing. It’s an unmade decision wearing the writing’s clothes. Name the decision, and the words queue up behind it.

- Borrow eyes. A mapping exercise, a structured set of questions, a thinking partner who asks, “What did you promise the reader?” You cannot proofread your own blind spots.

- Trust what you seeded. Reread your earlier material like a stranger would. You’ll find things you don’t remember burying, or it turns out, even writing. They’re not accidents. They’re instructions waiting to be read.

- One decision at a time. I didn’t solve the book in an afternoon. I solved one question, sat with it, then solved the next. Spacious beats speedy, every time.

- Don’t try to write at this point. Just ask and answer questions, outline notes of ideas, assemble your cast list with fresh eyes, get clear on what’s missing, what promises to the reader you made, and still need to keep.

Where I am now

Proud, honestly. Not just of the plan, but of the writer who left all those breadcrumbs without knowing it. The Phoenix Draft asked “what is this story trying to become?” and it turns out the story had known all along. It was just waiting for me to catch up and see it.

The burning down was never destruction. It was clearing the smoke so I could see the architecture that survived the fire.

Your turn

If this feels like you, if you’re circling a stalled draft and wondering whether it’s broken or just waiting, I’d love to hear where you’re stuck. What decision might your story be waiting on? Tell me in the comments or hit reply. I read every one.

And if you’d like to follow the final stretch of Purple Rain from here to publication, you’re in exactly the right place. Just subscribe to get all the news and follow the redraft. I’m also preparing a mini series of subscriber-only backstory prequels. I can’t wait to share those, and I’m so happy to have you on the journey.

— Tracy

P.S. Books one and two of The Glass Key Trilogy are coming back into the world under my own name, with full rights, and the reimagined, reborn Book three to complete the set. More on that soon.

An email landed in my inbox this week from the Bullet Journal. I almost scrolled past it. I’m glad I didn’t.

It asked a simple question: What’s one thing you could do today for yourself that would leave you with more energy than you started with?

I sat with that for a moment. Because there’s a version of rest I’m very good at — the productive kind. The kind where I’m not technically working, but I’m still filling the margins. A book that feeds the writing. A walk that clears a plot problem. Notes on my phone between cups of coffee. Useful rest. Purposeful rest.

And then there’s the other kind.

The kind that gives something back without asking anything in return. The kind you can’t justify with output or ideas or forward momentum. The kind that just — replenishes.

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The email reminded me that as anti-hustlers, we can still (quietly) hustle in disguise. Filling the gaps so efficiently that we never actually stop. Never quite switch off. Never let the jug refill all the way.

I’ve just come back from being with my very poorly mum again. The instinct, when you return from something like that, is to step straight back in. Catch up. Make up for lost time. Pretend the gap wasn’t there.

But that instinct is the hustle voice in a different coat.

I’m not alone in this. This weekend, a fellow writer I know through Substack, Sif Orellana, shared a note that stopped me in my tracks. She’d just returned from Denmark, where she’d been with her mother through some challenging news. She wrote about a particular kind of tiredness — the kind that doesn’t show up as sleepiness, but as your hands forgetting what they were doing mid-sentence. She found her way back to herself at the Royal Library in Aarhus, shoulders dropping the moment she sat down.

She said something I’ve been thinking about ever since: being strong isn’t always about carrying more. Sometimes it’s about knowing what to put down.

I’ll link to her note below. It’s worth your time.

What I actually need — what most of us need after a week of giving our energy to something that matters — is to replenish before we resume. Not to collapse. Not to be unproductive. Just to let the jug refill before you try to pour from it again.

The Bullet Journal email offered a list of possibilities — a long walk with no destination, bread rising in the kitchen, the person you keep meaning to call, the music you loved years ago, with nothing else to do but listen. All of them small. All of them quietly radical for those of us who’ve built a whole philosophy around working better, but who sometimes forget to stop altogether.

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So here’s the question I’m passing on to you, straight from that email, because it deserves a wider audience:

What’s one thing you could do this weekend, for yourself, that would leave you with more energy than you started with?

I know what mine is. Sand between my toes on a Normandy beach. The sea. Whatever gets carried in on the breeze.

Write it down. Make it real. Then go and do it, rather than the thing you feel you should do.

The writing will still be here on Monday.

Here’s a link to Sif’s note:

A writing life doesn't always look like writing. Here's what my anti-hustle writing week actually looked like.

I’m heading back to the UK again this weekend. My mum still needs me, and that’s where I need to be.

In between, I’ve had two weeks at home — client work, boundaries held firmly around my time, and a writing life that continued to move forward in the only way available to it. In small, quiet, dippable increments.

Ten minutes here. Fifteen there. Two minutes to catch an idea before it disappeared entirely.

And you know what? Quite a lot happened.

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I’ve been reading Pressed by Kory Kirby — proper reading, not research, just a book I wanted to be inside. I’ve mapped out a loose idea for a series of Anti-Hustle books for writers, which arrived almost fully formed on a walk with no distractions. I’ve been exploring distribution channels beyond the usual suspects and connected with two writers doing things their own rebellious way — I’ll introduce you to them soon. I’ve added to the fiction republication project, tidied some web things, and — this one made me smile — finished the sketch for Book 4 in the Lives on a Train series. Working title: The Eurostar.

None of it looks like a productive writing week from the outside. All of it counts.

Having a plan isn’t the opposite of anti-hustle. Anti-hustle requires some structure — it just has to be yours, not someone else’s template imposed on your life and your work. Mine involves a notebook and highlighters. Not a colour-coded productivity system borrowed from a YouTube channel. Just me, figuring out what actually needs to happen and when, in a way that fits the life I’m actually living.

I’m also in the middle of migrating my entire tech stack to a sovereign European solution — more ethical, more secure, more aligned with how I want to operate. The kind of work that lives under the waterline, invisible but important. If you want the thinking behind that decision, I wrote about it here.

Now, the bit I want to be honest about.

The new books. I’ve set publication dates three times over the last eighteen months and not met them because of life events. I’m genuinely grateful readers have been patient — more than I probably deserve. But I don’t want to keep doing this. Not because the delays aren’t real or valid, but because I want a process sustainable enough to make promises I can actually keep for my own writing in the way I do for clients.

That’s what I’m building toward. A timetable that accounts for a life requiring E, F, and G plans as well as A through D. One that doesn’t collapse the moment something more important needs my attention.

Which, this season, it has.

So this is me, catching you up. Still here. Still writing, even when it doesn’t look like it. Moving forward in the only way that’s honest right now — one tiny step at a time.

What have you been up to?

📷 Author’s own - Phare de Mean Ruz, Bretagne, France

A strange thing has happened online over the past few years. We’ve started treating visibility like proof of seriousness.

If someone posts constantly, shares every milestone, documents every draft, uploads every lesson learned in real time, we assume they’re committed. Professional. Disciplined.

Meanwhile the quieter writers begin to wonder if they’re failing.

I know this feeling well.

There are seasons where I vanish a little. Not dramatically. I’m not living in a lighthouse on a windswept cliff eating sardines and baguettes spread with salty butter and handwriting novels by candlelight. Sadly.

But I do go quieter.

I stop narrating every thought.
I stop packaging every insight into “content.”
I stop trying to prove I’m still writing when the writing itself feels fragile.

And honestly? The older I get, the more I trust writers who do the same. Not because disappearing is automatically noble. Some people ghost the internet for six months and come back selling a £997 masterclass on alignment and nervous system regulation. We’ve all seen it. But because real creative work often requires periods of invisibility.

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Not everything meaningful can survive being witnessed too early.

Some ideas need privacy before they need an audience. I think many writers quietly carry shame about this.

They assume consistency means constant public output. Not just writing regularly, but being visibly productive at all times. Posting. Marketing. Updating. Performing their creative life in a way that reassures both the algorithm and other people that yes, they are still a writer.

But writing has never worked that way for me. Some of my most important creative shifts have happened during seasons that looked completely unremarkable from the outside.

The weeks where I seemed absent were often the weeks I was:

• noticing things

• recovering from burnout

• listening more carefully

• untangling what I actually wanted to say

• remembering I’m a human being before I’m a personal brand

• putting family first

And maybe this is part of why living in France changed me so much. There’s a different relationship with time here.

Shops close.
Meals stretch longer than expected.
People sit.
Conversations wander.
Not everything is optimised within an inch of its life.

At first it made me uncomfortable, as I’ve written about before. Now I think it may have quietly saved part of my creativity. Because when every moment becomes content, eventually you lose the ability to simply experience your own life.

And writing needs lived life.

Not just documented life.

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I think we’ve accidentally built an online culture where writers feel pressure to report from inside the process while they’re still trying to understand it themselves.

No wonder so many people feel creatively exhausted. No wonder so much writing feels polished but strangely hollow. There’s a difference between building a body of work and feeding a machine.

One asks:
What is true?

The other asks:
What will perform?

And those are not always the same thing.

Some of the writers I admire most are not constantly visible. They disappear for stretches of time. They live. They observe.
They return with something that actually says something. Their work has texture because they haven’t spent every waking second trying to optimise themselves into a content pipeline.

I want more of that.

Less pressure to constantly perform creativity. More permission to protect it. Less obsession with momentum. More trust in seasons.

Because sometimes nothing appears to be happening.

And underneath the surface, everything is changing.

If this resonated, you might enjoy The Anti-Hustle Writers Lab, where we talk more about creativity, writing, the business of quietly being an author, and building a body of work without turning yourself into a content machine.

Paid subscribers help support my work and keep this space thoughtful, slow, and sustainable.

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My mum needed me. So I went. France, back to the UK.

No laptop open with intent. No Substack drafts, no essay arcs, no quietly working through the content plan. Just presence — hospital waiting rooms, travel time, a kitchen table that wasn’t mine.

And somewhere in the first day, right on cue, the voice showed up.

You know the one. You should be writing. You’re falling behind. What about consistency? What will people think?

I’ve spent years building a whole philosophy around not listening to that voice. I write about it. I coach people through it. I genuinely believe the anti-hustle approach isn’t just a nicer way to work — it’s a better one.

And still. There it was. Doing its thing.

I think that’s worth being honest about. These messages don’t disappear just because you’ve consciously rejected them. They’re old, and they’re stubborn, and they’ve had a long time to embed themselves. The work isn’t a one-time unsubscribe. It’s noticing them when they resurface — which they will — and choosing, again, not to let them prevail.

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So I didn’t write. Not in the way I usually count as writing.

What I did do: notes in the margins of a notebook. Thoughts on my phone between cups of coffee that went cold. Fragments arriving sideways, the way they tend to when you stop chasing them. A sentence here. An observation there. Nothing going anywhere in particular, and that was fine.

The writing still happened. It just didn’t look like productivity.

It made me think about how tightly we hold our identities sometimes, even the ones we’ve carefully chosen. A writer must write. Nothing should get in the way. Even the anti-hustle version of that story can become its own kind of pressure if we’re not paying attention — a softer, prettier cage, but a cage nonetheless.

What if the ability to bend without guilt is actually the skill? The wisdom to know when to put it down. The trust that you’ll come back, and that coming back is enough.

Life has plans A through D sorted. It’s also got E, F, and G ready to deploy. The writers I most respect aren’t the ones who never miss a day. They’re the ones who don’t punish themselves for it. The ones who accept that a single sentence or the wisp of an idea caught mid-escape jotted on the back of a receipt is witness enough.

I’ve come back with more clarity than a week of forced output (and guilt) would have given me. The structure of what I’m building settled into focus not at my desk, but somewhere between a motorway service station and a waiting room chair.

That's not a failure of the writing practice. That's the writing practice knowing its place.

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I promised you details last week, and then life had other ideas. So here it is, a little late but no less real for that.

When I wrote about the seventeen browser tabs, I was genuinely in the middle of something uncomfortable. Not confused exactly — more like standing at a junction with a map that covers the roads but says nothing about which direction you actually want to travel.

What’s shifted since then is this: I stopped researching and started talking to people.

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Last weekend, I told you I had seventeen browser tabs open.

I still have tabs open. Different ones now.

Something shifted this week. I stopped reading advice from people who have opinions about publishing and started talking to people who have actually done the thing I’m considering. Authors who have moved away from Amazon entirely. Creatives who have walked away from social media and built something else in its place — audience, community, sales — without handing the work over to an algorithm that doesn’t care about any of it.

It turns out real experience sounds quite different from researched certainty. Quieter. More specific. Less tidy. Truer.

What I’m hearing isn’t “this is easy and here’s why you should do it.” It’s more like: this is what we did, this is what it cost, this is what it gave us back. Here’s what we’d do differently. Here’s what we wouldn’t change.

That’s the kind of information I can actually use. These aren’t quick fixes. They’re sustainable options born from experience.

What I’m slowly understanding is that the publishing question I’ve been wrestling with isn’t solely a publishing question. It’s an ecosystem question. How do I want to operate? What do I want to be connected to, and what do I want to build some distance from? Which tools actually serve the work, and which ones just feel inevitable because everyone uses them?

These are uncomfortable questions because they don’t have clean answers. And because the path that comes out of them is not the easier one.

But here’s what I know this week that I didn’t know last week: easier and better are not always the same thing. I’ve spent enough time in this writing life to know the difference between the choice that feels right and the choice that just feels familiar.

I’m not building something familiar.

I’m sharing more of the detail — the actual conversations, the specific platforms, the tech stack question — in the Working Draft Lab post I’m publishing tomorrow. And it’s a good one. Come and think it through with me.

I have seventeen browser tabs open, again.

This is not unusual for me. But this particular collection of tabs tells a story — Payhip pricing pages, Amazon KDP royalty, Draft2Digital calculators, a Reddit thread about going wide versus exclusive that I’ve read twice and still can’t summarise, and at least two Substack posts from people who sound very certain about things I am not certain about at all.

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It feels like time to share an update on my Distribution Dilemma .

I’m continuing to try to figure out my publishing pathway. Not in a vague, one-day kind of way. In a this-actually-needs-a-decision kind of way, because books are being both published and republished, and at some point, “I’m still researching” stops being due diligence and starts being something else.

I know what that something else is. I suspect you do too. Spoiler, it’s definitely NOT research.

The thing is, I understand the options. That’s not the problem. Direct sales give you more margin and a direct relationship with your reader. Amazon gives you reach and discoverability but takes its cut and, if you go KDP Select, asks for exclusivity in return. Going wide means being everywhere, which sounds good until you’re managing everywhere. Each path has its logic. Each has its trade-offs.

And yet.

I sit with the spreadsheet, and I feel something that isn’t confusion exactly. It’s more like the discomfort of knowing that no amount of research is going to make this decision for me. That at some point I have to choose based on incomplete information, imperfect conditions, and what I know — or think I know — about what I actually want.

Which is, now that I write it down, exactly what I tell writers all the time.

There’s no one right path. There’s only the one that fits how you work, what you value, and where you’re trying to go.

It’s considerably easier to say that than to sit in it.

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What I'm realising is that my resistance isn't really about Amazon, or Payhip or royalty percentages, although those are part of it. It's about the fact that choosing one thing means not choosing another. And that once you've made a decision and acted on it, you're accountable to it — it makes a statement. You can't stay in the comfortable maybe-zone forever.

I have to nail some colours to the mast.

I’m not there yet. I’m still in the tabs.

But I’m closer than I was last week. And I’m paying attention to which options make me feel free and which ones — even the sensible-looking ones — make something in me quietly contract.

That instinct is data too.

I’m still a bit ‘all at sea,’ but I do have a glimpse of land-ahoy.

Wednesday's Working Draft Lab post is where I'm laying out the detail — the platforms, the numbers, the logic I'm working through. Come pull up a chair, bring coffee and cake, and think it through with me.

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A month ago, I wrote about stopping the performance on social media and building something quieter instead. That post got more significant traction, comments and private messages than I expected.

Which told me something. A lot of us are wrestling with the same thing.

I promised I’d report back. So here it is–one month in, honest about what’s working, what’s surprising, and what I’m still figuring out. The fuller version of this letter is for paid subscribers, because it’s the kind of thinking-out-loud that belongs in here rather than on the public feed.

Dear Working Draft Lab,

Let me start with the question I asked myself when I sat down to write this: have I missed it? Turns out…

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This week, I have written almost nothing.

Not in the dramatic, “the words have abandoned me forever” way. More in the very ordinary way life sometimes arrives with muddy boots and walks straight through my thoughtfully planned writing schedule.

There have been emails answered one-handed while on hold for a call. Notes scribbled in the margins of other tasks. Half-thoughts. Fragments. The occasional sentence that felt promising before being interrupted by something far less poetic, like family logistics or sheer mental load.

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And for a while, I felt that familiar twitch of guilt. The little voice that says:

“You should be further ahead.”

“You should have done more.”

and the popular old chestnut, “Real writers write every day.”

But what I’m continuing to learn, slowly and repeatedly, is this:

Sometimes the work looks like producing pages. Sometimes the work looks like just staying gently connected to the page by my fingertips. This is where my (very un-Instagramable) writing journal saves me.

Not a beautiful leather-bound masterpiece with exquisite penmanship. Mine is a simple lined hardback notebook, mostly chaos, written using whatever I have to hand. Scraps of thoughts. Overheard phrases. Questions. Tiny observations. Reminders of scenes I might otherwise lose forever. Logistics and publishing considerations. A sentence like:

“Check links, update front and back matter, process for repatriation of the body of a person who is killed in Italy - need details.”

No context. No explanation. Just enough to tell Future Me, “Don’t lose this.”

Ideas do not disappear simply because you are busy. They keep arriving. Quietly. Patiently. Very often at inconvenient moments. And when you have somewhere to put them, your writing still has a home, even during seasons when you cannot fully show up to it. Starting that imperfect journal is one of the best things I’ve done this year.

The other thing that helps is reading. Not “finish three novels this week” reading. I mean two pages before bed. One Substack with your morning coffee. A poem while sitting in the car waiting for someone.

Tiny doses of language.

Because reading keeps the creative soil damp, it reminds your brain how sentences move. It keeps you in conversation with words, even when you are too tired to produce your own. All of this leads me to better understand that anti-hustle writing means accepting, properly accepting, that creativity has seasons.

There are weeks for deep work.

Weeks for gathering.

Weeks for composting.

And weeks for simply keeping the pilot light on.

Not every season is meant for output. Some weeks, success is measured solely by staying connected enough that you can find your way back when life settles again.

And honestly? Sometimes, granting yourself grace is the most important creative practice of all. Because we cannot do all of the things, all of the time. We are humans with lives. With responsibilities. With bodies and brains that need rest instead of chasing productivity hacks.

The writing will wait for you.

It does not need perfection.

It just needs a doorway left slightly ajar.

Subscribe for honest reflections on writing, process, rest, and finding your way back to the page, even in busy seasons.

I sat down to write on Wednesday this week and immediately felt the pull to do it “properly.” You probably know the version. Open the document, sit up a bit straighter, try to sound like someone who knows what they’re doing, aim for something that feels finished. It’s subtle, but it’s there.

Even now, after stepping away from a more performative way of writing for a while, it still shows up. Not as loudly as it once did, but enough to notice. And that’s the point, really. It doesn’t disappear overnight. I want to be open about that, because it’s a perfectly normal part of the process. Making adjustments to how you show up and write isn’t linear. It takes time. New habits are built through awareness and a bit of experimentation.

What I’m finding is that writing without that layer of performance feels quieter. Slower, at times. A little less certain. There’s no immediate sense of “this is going well.” No gold star moment. Just being with the work. Staying with a sentence a little longer than feels efficient. Letting something sit half-formed without rushing to fix it. Not forcing shape too early just to feel in control of it.

And if I’m honest, there are moments where that feels uncomfortable. Because without the usual markers of progress—how many words you’ve written, how long you sat down for, whether you showed up every day—it can feel like you’re not doing it right.

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This is something I see often with the writers I work with. They step away from the pressure to produce, to perform, to follow a set structure, and for a while, it can feel like everything has gone a bit loose. Like they’ve lost their grip on the work. But what’s actually happening is something else entirely. They’re starting to notice what’s there. Not what should be there, or what would make it more acceptable or easier to explain, but what’s actually on the page. I understand that because I’ve been there, and in many ways still am.

From the outside, it can look like less is happening. Fewer words. Less obvious progress. More circling, more pausing. But underneath that, something is shifting. There’s more attention. More honesty. More alignment between the writer and the work itself. It’s not as neat, and it doesn’t always give you something you can point to at the end of a session and say, “there, I’ve done it.” But it does move things forward, just not always in ways that are immediately visible.

I’m noticing, too, that when I work like this, I stay with the writing longer. Not in a push-through kind of way, but in the sense that I don’t burn out on it as quickly. I don’t feel the same need to escape it. Over time, that changes the relationship with the page completely.

None of this means structure or craft don’t matter. They absolutely do. But they land differently when they’re not being used to control the process or prove something. They become tools you can reach for when they feel right, rather than rules you have to follow.

So if your writing feels a little slower at the moment, or less certain, or harder to measure in the usual ways, it might not be a sign that something’s wrong. It might be a sign that you’re closer to the work than you’ve been before.

This is the kind of space I spend a lot of time in with writers. Not pushing for more or faster, but helping them stay with what’s actually there long enough for something real to take shape. If you’re in that space yourself, you’re welcome to message me and explore that further.

Or, simply, stay with your writing a little longer than you think you should, and see where that leads you. That’s often where things start to shift, when you take the time to smell the coffee.

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If you’ve just arrived, welcome, and for those of you who’ve been here a while, thank you. I appreciate having every one of you in the community.

I thought it was time to include a post to help you find your way around, and reintroduce myself and what the community is about.

This is where I write about the reality of writing a book. Not the polished version. The one that fits around real life, competing priorities, and the quieter questions that tend to sit underneath it all.

You won’t find writing hacks here. Or pressure to produce more, faster.

What you will find is a different way of approaching the work. One that makes space for you as a whole person, not just as someone trying to finish a manuscript.

I write about things like:

• building a writing practice that actually holds

• what gets in the way (and why it’s rarely what we think)

• the emotional side of writing a book

• craft, when it’s useful, and how to apply it without losing yourself in the process

Some of these posts are practical. Some are more reflective. Most sit somewhere in between.

If you’re new, you might start here:

• If you’re tired of feeling like writing has to be performative
  https://open.substack.com/pub/tracystewartauthor/p/im-done-performing-heres-what-im?r=77cpw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
  

• If you’ve stepped away from hustle but aren’t sure what replaces it
  https://open.substack.com/pub/tracystewartauthor/p/why-i-quit-hustling-and-what-im-doing?r=77cpw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
  

• If you’ve ever questioned whether your story needs to follow the “rules”
  https://open.substack.com/pub/tracystewartauthor/p/what-if-your-story-doesnt-want-a?r=77cpw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
  

• If you’re interested in a slower, more grounded way of writing
  https://open.substack.com/pub/tracystewartauthor/p/what-france-taught-me-about-writing?r=77cpw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
  

• If you’re curious how this way of working shows up in practice
  https://open.substack.com/pub/tracystewartauthor/p/the-shop-window-approach-what-happened?r=77cpw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Alongside the writing, I also work closely with a small number of writers.

Not to push them harder or hold them to rigid structures, but to help them find a way of writing that works for their life, their voice, and the book they’re trying to write.

If that’s something you’re exploring, you can read more here:

Work With Me link

Or you’re very welcome to simply stay, read, and take what you need. Feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a post!

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Photo: Author’s own

There are church bells here that ring every hour.

I didn’t notice them for the first few months. Or rather, I noticed them the way you notice rain — as background, as weather, as something that simply is. But somewhere in the accumulated weight of twelve years of living in France, they became something else. A small, reliable marking of time that has nothing to do with productivity, output, or whether I have made good use of the past sixty minutes.

The bells ring whether I have written anything or not. They ring over the boulangerie where the bread smell reaches the street before seven in the morning. They ring over the market stalls on the edge of the square — the fish seller on a Friday, the boucherie with its barbecue going by nine on a Saturday, the galettes filled with whatever the season has produced, wrapped in paper and eaten at lunch on Wednesdays. They ring over a life that moves at a pace I didn’t know I needed until I found myself inside it.

I have lived in France for twelve years, for the last two years in Normandie. And I think it has made me a different writer. Not a better one, necessarily — that’s not quite the right word. A slower one. A more deliberate one. One who has finally, mostly, stopped apologising for the pace.

What I Brought With Me

I want to be honest about what I arrived with.

I arrived with thirty years of professional life in high-pressure environments. With a relationship to time that was fundamentally transactional -- hours measured against outputs, days judged by what had been accomplished. With a limited writing life that existed in the margins, squeezed into tiny spaces, always slightly guilty, always slightly rushed.

I also arrived with the English cultural inheritance around work. The sense that busyness is a virtue. That rest requires justification. That if you are not visibly productive, you are, at some level, failing.

France did not share this inheritance. And living inside a different set of assumptions, day after day, year after year, does something to you that you cannot fully anticipate in advance.

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The Education of Ordinary Things

The education was not dramatic. There was no single moment of revelation. It was more like learning a language — gradual, cumulative, full of small corrections.

It was the market that first got through to me. Not as a place to buy things efficiently but as a place to be. The fish seller who knew his regulars and had opinions about the best preparation for that morning’s catch. The fruit and vegetable stall where the seasons arrived in produce before they arrived anywhere else.

Nobody was multitasking. Nobody was checking their phone between transactions. The market was the thing you were doing while you were doing it, not something to get through on the way to something else.

I started, slowly, to apply this to writing. What if the writing was the thing I was doing while I was doing it? Not a task to complete, so I could move on to the next task. Not content to produce, so the platform would be fed. Just the work itself, deserving the same full attention as a conversation about fish.

Time and the Bells

The French relationship with time is different from the English one in ways that are difficult to articulate without sounding like a travel cliché. But I’ll try.

It is not that the French are lazy or indifferent to work. The boulanger who has the bread ready before seven has been up since well before dawn. The market stalls are there in all weathers. The work ethic is real.

But there is a different relationship with the boundary between work and not-work. Lunch is lunch. Sunday is Sunday. The long table, the unhurried meal, the conversation that goes where it goes — these are not compensations for the working week. They are part of the structure of a life, given the same weight and the same attention.

The bells mark time without judging it. They do not distinguish between a productive hour and an unproductive one. They simply note that another hour has passed and will continue to do so regardless of what you did inside it.

I have found this over the past twelve years to be quietly liberating. The hour passes. Another comes. The work will be there. The bread will be there. The bells will ring again.

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What It Changed

I write differently here than I did in England. I am slower. More willing to sit with a problem rather than force a solution. More inclined to go for a walk when the draft is stuck rather than grind at it, out of a sense of obligation.

I notice the seasons in a way I didn’t before. Not as background but as something that shapes the quality of light, air, and thought. I write differently in autumn than I do in spring. The Normandie winters are grey and insular and good for long interior work. The summers are expansive and make me want to write things that breathe, and sometimes, not write at all.

I have also become more patient with the gap between the idea and the finished thing. In England — in my previous working life — I wanted the gap to be as short as possible. The idea should quickly become the thing. Efficiency was value.

Here I have learned, slowly and with some resistance, that the gap is where most of the actual work happens. The gap is not lost time. It is the time when the unconscious is doing what the conscious mind cannot.

The bread rises at its own pace. The bells ring on schedule, but the hours between them belong to whatever needs to happen.

A Note to Writers Who Haven’t Got Twelve Years

I am aware that not everyone can move to France. I am aware that twelve years of accumulated influence is not a practical writing tip.

But I think what France has given me is available, in smaller doses, without the relocation.

It is the practice of being where you are while you are there. Of letting the work be the thing you are doing rather than the thing you are doing in order to get somewhere else. Of building a life with enough margin in it that the unconscious has room to move.

It is permission to let things take as long as they take. Not indefinitely, not without intention, but without the particular anxiety that comes from measuring the gap between where you are and where you think you should be.

The bells will ring regardless. The bread will be baked. The market will come and go with the days of the week, the food will change with the seasons.

The writing will find its shape if you give it room to.

CLOSING

I am writing this on a weekend morning. The bells have just rung the hour. Somewhere down the road, the boulangerie is doing what it does every day, reliably, without drama.

I have been in France for twelve years, and I am still learning what it is trying to teach me. But I think the core of it is this: a life that is lived well is not separate from a writing life that is lived well. They are the same life. And the pace of one shapes the pace of the other.

I’m curious whether any of this resonates from where you are. You don’t need to be in France for it — but I’d love to know what in your own life has quietly shaped how you write. The things that taught you that no writing book could.

A while back, I wrote about stopping the performance. Deleting accounts, stepping back from platforms that were draining more than they were giving, choosing connection over visibility.

That post clearly struck a nerve. It’s one of the most-read things I’ve published, and you can find it here.

But writing about opting out and actually doing it are different things. And one of the questions I kept sitting with after that post was: what does the alternative actually look like in practice? Not as a principle, but as a structure. Something that works without requiring willpower every single day.

I think I’ve found something. It’s simple enough to feel almost too obvious. And it’s already changing how I work.

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The Problem With Just Posting Less

The advice you usually hear is to be more intentional. Post less but make it count. Batch your content. Set boundaries around screen time.

I tried versions of all of these. They helped, a little. But they still left me in a relationship with social media that felt fundamentally reactive. Even when I wasn’t posting, I was thinking about posting. Even when I stepped back, I was aware of the step back. The platform was still occupying mental real estate it hadn’t earned.

The problem with just posting less is that you’re still oriented towards the feed. You’ve just turned down the volume rather than changed the channel.

What I needed wasn’t moderation. It was a completely different model.

Enter The Static Grid

Here’s what I’ve done with Instagram for Freshly Press, my professional services account, which I’m using as a testing ground.

I’ve created a static 9-grid. Nine images, carefully drafted, that together tell a clear and coherent story about who I am and what I do. A visual shop window. Something that works for a new visitor arriving at my profile at any point and helps them immediately understand whether they’re in the right place and where they can go to find out more or to connect.

I’ll refresh it quarterly. That’s four times a year. Not four times a week, not four times a day. Four times a year.

In between, I’m checking in once a week. I respond to messages and comments. I stay present enough to be contactable. I’ll even scroll a little too and interact with interesting content in my feed. And then I’ll close the app and go back to my actual life.

No new content unless something genuinely compels me to share it. No posting to the void because it’s Tuesday and the content calendar says so. No performance.

What the Shop Window Actually Does

The grid-as-shop-window idea works because it reframes for me what Instagram is for.

Most social media advice treats platforms as broadcast channels. You post, people see it (perhaps, if the algorithm is kind), they follow you, they buy from you. The logic is volume and consistency. More posts, more reach, more conversions. But it rarely plays out that way.

A shop window, in comparison, doesn’t broadcast. It simply exists. It’s there for the people who walk past and look in. It invites. It informs. It does its job quietly and continuously without anyone having to tend it every day.

For a professional services business — book coaching, ghostwriting, developmental editing — most of my clients come through direct referrals and word of mouth, LinkedIn, or here on Substack. Instagram was never really converting clients when I looked at it objectively. It was consuming time and attention under the illusion of being useful. And because it was considered that I should be there.

Making it a shop window acknowledges what it actually is: a place people might check to verify you exist and understand what you do. Not a place to build a following. Not a content channel. A static, professional presence that requires almost nothing to maintain.

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What’s Happened So Far

It’s early. I want to be honest about that rather than claim a transformation I can’t yet fully report.

But here’s what I can say.

The refreshed grid has brought new eyes to the account. People who weren’t there before are finding it, and the clean, coherent presentation is doing the work of introduction that sporadic posting never quite managed. Fewer posts, more clarity, and apparently more reach. Which is counterintuitive until you think about it.

The bigger change, though, is what’s happened in the space that’s opened up. Writing is getting more of my attention. My own author business is getting more of my attention. The thinking that used to get scattered across content creation is consolidating into things that actually matter to me — the books, the republishing decisions, the slower and more deliberate building of something that belongs to me.

I’m also just less tired. The low-grade hum of needing to document, share, perform — it was there even on the days I wasn’t posting. Removing the obligation to post has removed the noise. And the quiet has turned out to be genuinely productive.

The Writer’s Version of This

If you’re a writer rather than a business owner, the shop window principle can also translate directly. Next month, I’m going to implement a similar approach on my author account, but with the variation of posting something new once a week there.

Your author profile on any platform is a shop window. It exists to tell people who you are, what you write, and where to find your work. It doesn’t need to be updated constantly. It needs to be clear, current, and coherent.

What if you treated your social media presence the same way? One quarterly refresh of your bio, your pinned posts, and your profile image. One day a week where you actually engage rather than six days of half-hearted presence followed by one day of guilt about not posting more.

The feed doesn’t need your constant attention. Your readers, your writing, your actual creative life -- those do.

Credit where it’s due. The one-day-a-week check-in idea came from @wildflowerillustrationco on Instagram, who has a brilliant post on what it’s meant for her product business. Worth a look. I’d also recommend @sarahrichardssocial on Instagram for practical, busy-people-friendly ideas for what that reduced content volume can actually look like.

The Thing Nobody Tells You

Somewhere in the standard advice about social media, there’s an assumption that less presence means less relevance. That stepping back means being forgotten. That the algorithm will punish you, and your audience will drift away.

My early experience is that this isn’t quite true. Or at least, what you lose in algorithmic reach you can potentially more than recover in the quality of what you put out when you do show up. One thoughtful, considered piece of content from a person who is clearly not performing for anyone lands differently than a daily stream of content that has the impression of obligation.

People can tell the difference. They can feel when someone is posting because they want to and when they’re posting because they think they have to. The former builds trust. The latter erodes it slowly.

I’m not saying this is the right strategy for everyone. I’m simply pressing on the boundaries of expected norms, in the spirit of this space, to see what brings a healthier balance to the slower, softer life and business I’m building.

Showing up less but showing up fully is not a consolation strategy. It might actually be the better one.

CLOSING INVITATION

I’d love to know if any of this resonates with where you are. Have you found a structure that works for you, something that keeps a professional presence without demanding constant content creation? Or are you still in the thick of trying to figure it out?

And if the shop window idea is something you’re going to try, come back and tell me how it goes. This is exactly the kind of experiment worth comparing notes on.

This is the kind of work I do with writers every day.
If you’re looking for that kind of support, you can explore it here.

How You Can Work With Me

When I was working within traditional publishing, a lot of decisions about my books were made for me.

Cover design. Trim size. Interior layout. Font choice. These were production decisions, handled by people who knew what they were doing and were working within established industry conventions. I was the author. The book, once submitted, became a product shaped by other hands.

Going indie changes that entirely. Every decision is now mine. Which is both exhilarating and, occasionally, overwhelming.

One of the decisions I’ve been sitting with recently is one I don’t think enough authors talk about: typography. Specifically, the question of who can actually read my books comfortably - and whether the font choices I make are quietly excluding some of them.

It turns out this is a bigger question than I expected. And a more interesting one.

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The Assumption Baked Into Most Books

Standard book typography has developed over centuries around a particular kind of reader. Someone with typical vision, no processing difficulties, reading in good light, without fatigue or visual stress.

That reader exists. But so do a lot of other readers.

Around one in five people experience some form of reading difficulty. That includes dyslexia, visual stress, low vision, and a range of processing differences that make certain typefaces - particularly dense, tightly-spaced serif fonts - genuinely harder to read. Not as a preference. As a real barrier.

I’ve seen this up close. I’ve watched people who love stories struggle with the physical experience of reading them. The tiredness that sets in after a page. The words that seem to shift or crowd together. The effort that should be invisible but isn’t.

And I’ve been thinking about it in relation to my own readers. The people who find their way to my books are, I hope, people who want to be there. Who are interested in the stories I’m telling. The last thing I want is for the typography to be the thing that makes it harder than it needs to be.

What Accessibility in Typography Actually Means

Accessible typography isn’t about making books look clinical or functional at the expense of beauty. It’s about making deliberate choices that work for a wider range of readers without sacrificing the reading experience for anyone.

My research tells me the key factors are things like letter spacing - how much room there is between characters, which reduces the crowding effect that causes difficulty for many dyslexic readers. Character distinction - how clearly different letters are from each other, which matters enormously for readers with low vision or processing differences. And line spacing and contrast, which affect everyone, but particularly those reading with fatigue or visual stress.

None of these are radical departures from good design. They’re refinements of it.

What’s changed in recent years is that a number of fonts have been specifically designed with these principles in mind, researched and tested with the readers who need them most. And most of them are free.

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The Fonts Worth Knowing About

I want to name a few specifically, because the research behind them is worth understanding.

Lexend was developed by educational therapist Dr. Bonnie Shaver-Troup and refined in collaboration with Google. The premise is simple and compelling: a font, like a pair of glasses, should be adjustable to the reader’s needs. Lexend uses wider letter spacing and reduced visual crowding to improve reading fluency. Studies showed measurable improvement in words read correctly per minute across a range of readers. It’s available for free via Google Fonts.

Atkinson Hyperlegible was developed by the Braille Institute specifically for readers with low vision. It focuses on clear, distinct letterforms -- making similar characters like I, l, and 1 unmistakably different from each other. It’s elegant, readable, and works beautifully in both print and digital formats.

OpenDyslexic is an open-source font built specifically for dyslexic readers. It uses heavier bottoms on letterforms to anchor them on the page and reduce the visual movement that many dyslexic readers experience. It’s continuously updated based on feedback from the community it serves.

Inclusive Sans, designed by Liv Erika Svensmark, and Tiresias, developed for television subtitles and low vision signage, round out a growing landscape of fonts built on the principle that readability is not one size fits all.

Each of these is free to use. Each is available via Google Fonts or as an open-source download. There is no cost barrier to making this choice.

What This Means for My Books

As I republish the Lives on a Train series and the Glass Key trilogy, I’m making active decisions about interior formatting for the first time. And accessibility is now part of that conversation in a way it simply wasn’t before.

For ebooks, the reader has some control - most e-readers allow font changes. But the default matters. The font a book opens in is the one most readers will use. Making that default one that works for a wider range of readers is a small decision with a real impact.

For print, the choice is more fixed. Which makes it more important to get right.

I’m currently exploring Lexend and Atkinson Hyperlegible for my interior formatting. I’m also thinking about line spacing, margin width, and contrast - all of which affect readability in ways that go beyond font choice alone.

I don’t have it all resolved yet. And these will be separate versions specifically produced for those with visual or reading difficulties. But I’m asking the question, and I’m asking it early enough in the process to take advice and actually act on the answer.

The Wider Point

One of the things I find most interesting about going indie is that it forces you to confront decisions that were previously invisible. Decisions that were made by default, by convention, by whoever handled production upstream of you.

Typography is one of those decisions. And it has a direct effect on who can access your work.

Books are already not equally accessible to everyone. Price, language, distribution, format - all of these create barriers. Typography is one more. And unlike some of the others, it’s one that indie authors can now address directly, with free tools, without sacrificing quality.

That feels worth doing. Not as a grand gesture. Just as a quiet, deliberate choice in the direction of: more people should be able to read this comfortably.

Which is, when I think about it, what writing is for.

I’d love to know if this is something you’ve thought about in your own publishing decisions, or even in how you format your Substack. I’ll also be looking at it more widely for my Substack, website, emails, and documents. Have you experimented with accessible fonts? Do you have readers who’ve mentioned reading difficulties?

And if you’re someone for whom font choice makes a genuine difference to your reading experience, I’d especially love to hear from you. That perspective is more useful than any research paper.

SUGGESTED LINKS YOU MAY FIND OF INTEREST

1. Lexend - the research, the font, and a free download:

Lexend — Change the way the world reads

2. Atkinson Hyperlegible - free via the Braille Institute:

Atkinson Hyperlegible Font — Braille Institute

3. OpenDyslexic - open source, free to use:

OpenDyslexic

4. Google Fonts - all of the above are available here in one place:

Google Fonts

5. Credit and reference: @blindishlatina on Instagram, whose post on six accessibility fonts was the spark for this essay. Worth a follow for anyone interested in digital accessibility and DEI.