Practical guidance drawn from decades of professional experience in ghostwriting, IT leadership, and fiction writing. These articles address real challenges writers and professionals face, with specific strategies rather than generic tips.
The U.S. government switched off Anthropic’s most powerful AI models overnight, proving in a single stroke that nobody who uses AI actually owns it. If your business runs on a rented tool, whoever controls it can change the deal or pull the plug without asking. The fix is old and reliable: own your platform, keep your own copies, depend on nothing you cannot control. Here is the lesson for writers.
Six real questions clients ask me about AI, and exactly how I answer each, not hot takes, but the answers I have refined across hundreds of conversations with people about to spend a year and real money on a book. If you are weighing a ghostwriter, or weighing AI on your own book, this is the straight version of what I actually tell them.
How can you write my book if you don’t know my field? Because writing a book and knowing a subject are two different jobs, and almost nobody is good at both. You bring the expertise through interviews; I bring the structure, the voice, and the readability. A ghostwriter who has interviewed experts across dozens of fields does not need to arrive an expert in yours.
A revenge memoir is a bad idea for the writer and a worse one for the ghostwriter. I once turned down a former mob informant who wanted to name names and settle scores, then promised to keep my role secret, and I asked how he expected me to trust that while he wrote a book to expose everyone else. Here is who should not write a revenge memoir, and the better book hiding inside it.
I have forty-six translations of my books across six languages, and never paid a dollar up front, they cost only a slice of royalties. For most authors the honest answer is yes, translate, because the barrier to trying is almost nothing. But two things can quietly sink it, and nobody warns you. Here is when translating your book is worth it, and the catch to watch for.
A free consult and a paid Book Discovery Intensive do two different jobs. The free call tells you whether you might want to work together; the Intensive proves whether the book will actually happen, because you leave with a real chapter and outline in hand before you commit to anything. Here is why, for most authors, the paid intensive is the smarter first step.
I have spent months cleaning up my own website, deleting some articles entirely and rewriting the rest, fabricated quotes, keyword-stuffed paragraphs, emojis in headers, rules between every section. Every one traces to the same mistake: I trusted someone who called themselves an authority and never verified what they said. Here is why to stop listening to the gurus about your writing and start doing your own research.
Inspiration does not improve your writing; practice does, and practice needs a system that holds up against deadlines, fatigue, and real life. Most advice treats output as a willpower problem, which is why most advice fails. Consistency is structural. Here are the practical changes, energy management, micro-habits, first-draft psychology, that build a writing practice that lasts.
When a point-of-sale system fails across a retail chain, stores stop taking money and the calls start before you have even found the problem. I ran those systems at Trader Joe’s for 20 years. In that world, mistakes are okay is not a real philosophy. Here is what leaders actually get wrong about mistakes, and what the best ones do instead.
I was raised never to burn bridges, so for 33 years I stayed in jobs long past the point I should have left, enduring toxic bosses to protect contacts I would never use. When I finally walked, almost no one cared. Here is what those decades taught me about when burning a bridge is the right call.
I spent 33 years in technology, twenty of them at Trader Joe’s, building a career that looked successful from the outside. Then at 53 I walked away from all of it. That decision taught me more about happiness than three decades of climbing ever did. Here is what I learned rebuilding my life from scratch.
People assume that writing 10,000 words a day means I never procrastinate. They are wrong. I have stalled on chapters and dodged manuscripts I knew would be hard. The difference is not that I avoid the pull; it is what I do when I feel it. Here is why writers procrastinate and how to break it.
I put my television in a closet and left it there for ten years. Friends thought I had lost my mind. What I gained was a decade of focus that produced more than 50 books and a business. Here is what happens when you remove your single biggest distraction and do not look back.
Bad habits start small and turn automatic, but because they are learned, they can be unlearned. The trick is not willpower; it is replacing each one with something better. Here are 32 habits worth breaking and a nine-step process for swapping them out, built on cues and rewards rather than guilt.
September 2017: the forecast confirmed Irma was coming straight for my corner of Florida, and we had days to get ready. I had ridden out storms before, but this one’s numbers were ugly. Here are seven hard-earned lessons from preparing for, surviving, and cleaning up after Hurricane Irma, from someone who writes about disaster preparedness.
Life hands out no instruction manual, so I learned these the way most people do, the hard way, often face-down. Approaching another birthday, I have collected a few things worth passing on, equal parts wisdom, humor, and the occasional well-earned curse word. Here are 100 life lessons about staying prepared, adaptable, and resilient when life gets messy.
The internet is full of free stuff, and none of it is actually free. Heinlein gave us the shorthand in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Things may look free, but someone always pays. Here are the hidden costs behind the internet’s most generous-looking offers.
A single post can now reach thousands of people, and that reach cuts both ways: what you say online follows you and shapes how people see you. These ten rules are not complicated. Here is how to handle yourself on social media so your reach works in your favor instead of against it.
If this sparked something, let's talk about turning your expertise into a finished book.
On writing, publishing, and selling your book. Free, straight to your inbox.
