I woke up to an inbox full of self-publishing delights that dropped overnight. Back in the Smashwords days, if you didn’t want your furry erotica pseudonym publicly linked to your middle-grade adventure pseudonym (for example), you had to have separate accounts. This was their own policy, not a shady workaround some scammer came up with.
UPDATE: Now on YouTube, only 5 months later! (I’m not embedding video here because it spoils my “no tracking, no cookies” policy.) This text is the script for that video, so you’re missing nothing if you stick to one medium. On winter solstice, the birds disappeared, and the mist arrived. The inhabitants of Nebulah quickly
I’ve been using StoryGraph for a full year, so I have book-nerd stats. Books Read I read 74 books and 28,075 pages in 2025. One book was a paperback; the rest were ebooks. Did Not Finish DNFs aren’t included in the “books read” count, but pages read before quitting are included in pages read. I
A book was recommended to me. The premise was fun, but the author exhibited a writing tic that had me screaming and casting the book aside by Chapter 4. The prose was littered with somehow, somewhere, sometime, someone, and something. Someone tidied my study while I was at the museum. Is it really a mystery
I was searching my mother’s bookshelves for a particular ancient paperback. Her books are mostly romance or romance-adjacent, so the cover reveals led to reminiscing about the eras of fabulous painted covers and boring floral covers that didn’t even give us fabulous painted stepbacks. One anomaly, however, prompted a very different reaction. Obviously, there was
TL; DR: Amazon just expanded the pipeline dumping bot-voice audiobooks into Audible. Let me start by saying I have ethical objections to bot-voice audiobooks. A) Labor solidarity with actors, musicians, visual artists, and everybody else ripped off and told they’re obsolete because now Johnny NoSkills can push a button and “do” their job. B) Where
Most of my income for 2024 came from ghostwriting memoirs for the niche-famous—people significant enough to have a Wikipedia page, but unless you’re into the thing they do, you’ve never heard of them. These books have relatively few but devoted buyers, subjects humble enough to care that those readers aren’t disappointed by a half-assed book,
I refer to Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark as “the sentence-writing book,” though the scope does expand after the first section, ending with general career advice. I’ve gifted dozens of copies and recommended it to every writer I know, whether they’re writing school papers, blog posts, business emails,
I want to thank the person who recommended Building Great Sentences: How to write the kind of sentences you love to read by Brooks Landon, not because I have much positive to say about it but because now I know who to blame for a lot of copy editors’ bald spots where they’ve ripped out
I worked in healthcare for 20 years. Half of that was in inpatient rehab and a prison clinic. I have always had a core belief that if someone is hurt, I should help them. If they called me a bitch or threw a chair at me or acquired their injury committing an act that would