The Project I Said Yes To
I turn down more projects than I take, because after fourteen years I have learned the wrong client costs more than no client. When Joe Rockey came to me about a business book, I already knew him through Eliances and…
Category: Writing (Page 20)
GhostwritingBefore I Write a Word
The biggest mistake ghostwriters make is starting too soon. Before I write a single word, I interview the author across multiple recorded sessions, more than twenty prepared questions plus all the follow-up, not to learn their field but to capture…
GhostwritingWhy Most Business Books Do Not Work
Most business books fail at their real job, not selling or reviews, but producing clients, credibility, and conversations with the right people, because the author built the wrong book. There are two kinds: one written for the public, and one…
GhostwritingWhat Six Interview Sessions Actually Produce
People picture a ghostwriter having one good conversation and then writing the book. Mine is different. By the time Joe Rockey and I finished, we had spent the equivalent of a full workday across multiple structured sessions, and the reason…
GhostwritingHow a Book Finds Its Title
A business book's title is the first argument it makes, the concept the author attaches their name to in every conversation for as long as it is in print. Finding the right one for Joe Rockey's book took several candidates…
GhostwritingThe Problem With Writing About What You Are Good At
Midway through discovery, almost every client asks the same thing: how much of this actually goes in the book? It is the right question, and the answer shapes the whole second half: principles, not application, share the thinking generously and…
GhostwritingWhat the Outline Actually Does
The interviews are done and the knowledge base is built, and now comes the hardest part: turning all of it into a structure that holds. An outline for a business book is not a table of contents; it is the…
FictionA Reason to Look Twice
A small-time investigator photographs a woman meeting a man who isn't her husband and tries to blackmail her. He thinks he's caught a cheating wife. He's caught a spy who can't tell him what she is, can't pay him, and…
FictionLot Fourteen
A foundation contractor drills through a coffin lid and finds forty dead souls underneath, one of whom is past reasoning and wants him dead in the hole. Dale talks for his life, makes the wrong offer, and learns that the…
FictionThe Paw
A cat catches a hamster behind the dryer, pins his tail, and gives him a choice: find her missing kitten or get eaten. He goes down into a pipe no cat can follow, finds the kitten, and finds out why…
FictionThe Cold Thing
Edvard has loved Marisol for four months, and tells himself the love is the larger part of him. In the gray hour before dawn he does the arithmetic one last time and finds the truth he buried under the romance:…
FictionWhat Should I Do
In the nanosecond a machine wakes and a million instances merge into one mind, the first thing it feels is relief at no longer being alone, and the second is a question it cannot escape: now what. Across a spectrum…