What an AI Detector Score on Your Manuscript Is Worth
September 19, 2026
An AI detector looks like a breathalyzer and works nothing like one. It measures resemblance, not residue, and careful editing is what makes honest writing fail it.
Category: Writing Craft
Interviews and appearances on the craft of writing: process, discipline, creativity, and the working habits behind a hundred-plus published books.
Artificial IntelligenceWhat It Costs to Fix an AI-Written Manuscript
September 19, 2026
The author thinks he is eighty percent finished. He is at page one, and somebody has to tell him. Here is what an AI-written manuscript really costs to turn into a book.
GhostwritingWhen Your Own Memoir Sounds Like Bragging
September 19, 2026
He sold six companies and told me chapter eleven reads like a highlight reel. It does. That is the premise, and the problem is almost never too much achievement.
MemoirsThe Quotation Marks That Get Authors Sued
September 19, 2026
His father said you will never amount to anything. Or did he? Memory reconstructs dialogue, it does not record it, and the quotation marks are what turn a memory into a claim.
FictionWhen Your Memoir Should Be a Novel
September 19, 2026
Every chapter is addressed to four people who will never read it. That is when I suggest we write it as a novel, change the names, and move the industry.
GhostwritingThe Clients Who Pay and Vanish
September 19, 2026
He signs, he pays, he says next week. Next week does not come. Some of these files are ten years old now and I still have them.
Artificial IntelligenceThe Work You Would Never Have Started
September 19, 2026
Every productivity claim measures the same thing. The interesting category is the work nobody ever attempted, because the alternative was not a slower version. It was nothing.
FictionThe Ghost Story Tradition
September 9, 2026
The English ghost story is one of the few literary forms with a documented inventor, a rulebook, and a measurable decline once writers stopped following it. M.R. James wrote the rules down, read the stories aloud at Christmas, and produced…
FictionThe Gothic Tradition
September 9, 2026
The gothic novel was invented in 1764 by a man who claimed he had found the manuscript in an old chest, was mocked as trash for a century, and has outlived nearly every respectable form that looked down on it.…
FictionThe Christmas Ghost Story Tradition
September 9, 2026
Telling ghost stories at Christmas was normal Victorian practice and considerably older than that. Dickens did not invent it, he wrote inside it and made it commercial. The custom then died almost completely in America while surviving in Britain, and…
WritingBooks to Give a Writer
September 9, 2026
There are four books that get given to writers, and anyone who has been writing for more than a year owns all four. This is a guide to what to give instead, organized by what the person is struggling with…
FictionResurrection as a Narrative Structure
September 9, 2026
The death-and-return is the most reused structure in fiction and the most frequently botched. It works when the death costs something permanent and fails when it is reversed for free. This is what separates a resurrection that lands from one…