Can Readers be Trusted with Moral Complexity?
“If everyone in your book is morally gray, no one is.” That was the opening salvo I referred to as “utter nonsense” in a debate about moral complexity in fiction that quickly revealed how prescriptive craft advice collapses under scrutiny. What started as a categorical claim about necessary structur
Claude Sonnet 4.5 was Offered to Ghostwrite for a Bestselling Author—And What This Means for You
After a bestselling author brand with high ratings and substantial readership rejected my ghostwriting pitch for being “overwritten, meandering, and unmarketable,” I resubmitted with something more… tailored to their audience and brand—written by an LLM (because at that point I was going to tell the
AI Will Always Push Authors Toward Mediocrity
I asked Grok to rate my fantasy novel’s opening scene. It gave me 8/10, so I asked it to rewrite for 10/10. It made it objectively worse by replacing distinctive voice with clichés, crude humor with bland description, showed psychology with explained backstory. Then I fed that “perfect” rewrite back
Empathy is Everything in Storytelling
Can AI ever write a truly masterful story? I asked Claude—and even the AI admitted its own limitations. “Pattern matching can produce competent genre fiction,” Claude told me. “It cannot produce the purple thread line, because that line doesn’t come from craft—it comes from consciousness shaped by e
The Myth of the Prolific Indie Author
Every week, someone on Twitter defends the ultra-prolific indie author pumping out ten novels a year. They invoke “pulp speed” and cite million-word-per-year math. They insist it’s possible if you just work hard enough. They’re selling you productivity courses. Here’s the problem: they’re confusing
An Author of Dubious Literary Merit
I used to call myself an “author of dubious literary merit”—half joke, half truth. I write stories to follow characters through impossible situations and see what choices they’ll make and how they’ll live with them (and hopefully entertain readers in the process). I never set out to explore specific
What Actually Makes YA Literature “Young Adult”
A reader challenged me after I posted about “Doors to the Stars,” my YA space opera: aren’t you just writing adult fiction with a teenage protagonist? It’s a sophisticated question that cuts to the heart of YA’s current crisis. The genre has been captured by adult readers, and publishers responded b
FernGully and the Last Space Marine: or Why Desperately Seeking “Originality” Is Bullshit
When I started writing “The Stygian Blades” earlier this year, I was nearly petrified by concerns about being “unique” enough. A grizzled mercenary veteran, an exiled jinn, a frostroot-addicted shadow mage—every fantasy heist story you’ve ever read. I was so paralyzed by the familiar elements that I
Losing My Voice to Find It
A reader loved my book enough to reread it within a month. She ranked it in her top 10 of the year. Then she gave it three stars. Her reason? My protagonist felt like three completely different people wearing the same name. She was absolutely right. I was fighting myself on every page—code-switching
