FictionMy first short story was a wizard tournament from a tabletop game, written in junior high and mailed to a gaming magazine, which returned it buried in an editor's notes. I never sold it, but that envelope taught me more…
FictionThe girl boss has no flaws, no arc, and never earns a thing, and she is everywhere, and she is boring. Rey earns nothing; Ripley, Sarah Connor, and Lisbeth Salander are unforgettable. The difference is consequences, flaws, and craft. The…
Book MarketingI run two sites, one with 500+ articles and another with 45-plus handbooks and courses, and both quietly generate leads and sell books year-round. None of it was luck. It was blogging, the version that works instead of the version…
SEE » The Elephant in the Room: Marketing Your Books and Services series
TechnologyYou installed WordPress and Elementor expecting simple, and walked straight into an advanced engineering course. Every tutorial promised easy; none mentioned the plugin conflicts, the mobile layouts that explode, the update that takes the site down. WordPress is a house…
GhostwritingMichele paid a ghostwriting agency for a bestseller package and got back something unrecognizable, wrong voice, full of errors, clearly produced by someone who never read her draft. An assembly line, not a ghostwriter. Cheap quotes, stolen bios, and bestseller…
FictionSome books drag you forward by sheer what-happens-next; others hold you because the characters feel like people you know. Plot-driven and character-driven are the two basic engines, and which you pick shapes the whole reading experience. Here are the real…
CybersecurityOne Facebook comment, and within hours hundreds of strangers were piling on, screenshotting, sharing, hostility for its own sake from people who had never met me. Deleting the thread changed nothing. Here is what online mobs across Facebook, YouTube, and…
Critical ThinkingThe toughest echo chamber to leave is the one you were born into, because when your beliefs are stitched into your traditions, holidays, and family group chat, questioning them does not feel like curiosity, it feels like betrayal. Saying what…
Critical ThinkingYou inherit beliefs from your parents and your feed, sure, but also from your ZIP code. Small-town Iowa, downtown Brooklyn, a Silicon Valley condo with kombucha on tap, each quietly installs a different sense of what is obvious and normal.…
Writing CraftA professor once told me to quit, that I was a crappy writer, and I believed him for thirty years before writing professionally at all. Since then: 54+ ghostwritten books, 113+ published. His judgment aged badly, but the cost was…
Critical ThinkingIf social media is an echo chamber, online forums are echo tunnels, narrower, deeper, more intense. Where TikTok feeds you what you like, a niche forum wraps your whole identity in the belief that only these people get it. You…
Critical ThinkingOpen YouTube and there it is, the echo chamber at its most charismatic: someone in ring-lit 4K talking to you like a best friend, therapist, and prophet at once, handing you certainty instead of facts, plus merch and a Patreon…
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