The Technology of Writing Hub
I spent 33 years in enterprise IT, 20 of them as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s. These articles cover the technology side of writing: the tools, the internet, and where technology helps and hurts.
No pitch. No pressure.
This hub is laid out in chapters, from AI and writing tools to internet history, technical writing, science fiction and the operations stories from inside IT. If you have a technical book in you, see my ghostwriting services or start smaller with the Book Discovery Intensive.
Chapters
- AI and writing technology (18)
- Digital writing tools and platforms (31)
- Internet history and digital culture (9)
- Technical and professional writing (4)
- Emerging technologies in writing (7)
- Science fiction and technology writing (15)
- Scams (5)
- The Operations Room (22)
- Technology, from the inside (19)
- More on technology and writing (5)
1. AI and writing technology
- ► Why Every Writer Should Embrace AI as a Digital Assistant
- ► Why AI Falls Short for Writers (and Where It Doesn't)
- ► 40 AI Writing Phrases to Avoid (and What to Use Instead)
- ► How to Make AI-Generated Content Feel Real
- ► AI and Writing: What It Actually Does Well and Where It Will Wreck Your Book
- ► AI Copyright for Writers: What You're Probably Getting Wrong
- ► Why AI Will Not Write the Book You Need
- ► AI Writing Prompts That Actually Work (and Why Yours Don't)
- ► AI Is Not Your Friend: When Digital Assistants Replace Human Life
- ► Build a Thriving Culture: AI-Powered Strategies for Today’s Leaders
- ► ChatGPT for Content Creation: What It Does Well and Badly
- ► Microsoft Copilot vs. ChatGPT: 5 Big Differences in Writing
- ► AI Personality Test: Which Chatbot Handles Stress Best?
- ► When Your AI Assistant Becomes Your Best Life Coach (And Threatens to Haunt You Back)
- ► Why Cursing at ChatGPT Actually Works (And What This Means for Your Business Writing)
- ► Why AI Writing is Soulless: Human Heart Builds Real Authority
- ► MIT Research Shows ChatGPT Weakens Your Brain: A Professional Writer's Guide to Using AI Without Losing Your Edge
- ► Best AI Assistants: Claude vs ChatGPT vs Grok – Real User Review
2. Digital writing tools and platforms
- ► Why Grammarly and ProWritingAid Are Making Your Writing Worse
- ► My Writing Setup: The Converted Dining Room Where 113+ Books Happened
- ► Writing Quality Control: From Draft to Publishable
- ► Phone Security for Writers: 8 Ways to Protect Your Work
- ► Self-Publishing Platforms: Where to Publish Your Book
- ► ACX Audiobooks: What I've Learned from the Process
- ► Formatting Guide: From Manuscript to Published
- ► Your Web Designer Wrote Your Website Copy and It Shows
- ► WordPress Reality: What Nobody Tells You About Building a Website with WordPress and Elementor
- ► Home Computer Security: A Complete Guide from 33 Years in Enterprise IT
- ► Website Backup Guide: Protect Your Site From Total Disaster
- ► Robots.txt: The Most Dangerous File on Your Website and How to Configure It Without Destroying Your Search Rankings
- ► QR Codes for Authors 2026: Marketing Guide + Security Tips
- ► Tools I Actually Use
- ► When Everything Goes Wrong: A Tech Disaster That Nearly Killed a Company
- ► How to Optimize Your Blog SEO: A Complete Guide for Authors
- ► Why Dictionaries Still Matter for Writers
- ► Eliminating Distractions | What Happened When I Unplugged My TV for a Decade
- ► 10 Critical Lessons on Grammar and Spelling from Word Crimes
- ► How to Get Real Value from LinkedIn Learning: A Practical Guide
- ► HARO for Authors: How to Get Media Coverage That Builds Your Authority
- ► How to Get Backlinks to Your Website: A Writer's Guide to Link Building
- ► How Blogging on Your Author Website Sells Books
- ► Learn the Rules of Punctuation. Stop Guessing
- ► Stop Listening to the Gurus About Your Writing
- ► Core Web Vitals: The Three Numbers That Measure How Your Website Feels
- ► Divorcing Your Page Builder: What It Cost Me to Leave
- ► Why So Many WordPress Themes Are Frankenstein Monsters
- ► The Plugin Diet: Trimming WordPress Without Losing Muscle
- ► Cloudflare’s Free Tier Got My Money, and I’d Pay Again
- ► I Was Getting 100 Spam Emails a Day. $4.50 a Month Fixed It.
3. Internet history and digital culture
- ► Discover Geocities: Internet’s Lost City!
- ► Learning About the Internet: A Step-by-Step Beginner's Guide
- ► What 40 Years Online Taught Me About Staying Safe
- ► How Not to Make Money Online (I Learned the Hard Way)
- ► The Truth About “Free Stuff” on the Internet: Exploring the Hidden Costs
- ► Obsolete Technology in Fiction: Period Details That Ground Your Story
- ► Tales from the Digital Trenches: War Stories from the Early Days of Computing
- ► What Zork, SimCity, and Oregon Trail Taught Me About Writing
- ► The Enshittification of Writing
4. Technical and professional writing
- ► Technical Ghostwriting: When Your Book Needs a Writer Who Understands the Technology
- ► How to Document Security Policies and Procedures: A Strategic Approach Beyond Compliance Checklists
- ► Security Policy Regulatory Documents: How to Identify, Organize, and Interpret the Standards That Apply to Your Business
- ► Software Testing: 10 Things Most Teams Get Wrong
5. Emerging technologies in writing
- ► Ghostwriting About Blockchain: 5 Practical Tips
- ► Cybersecurity Ghostwriting Beyond the Book: Articles, LinkedIn and Policies
- ► How a $3,000 Scam Became My Best Storytelling Lesson
- ► The Mars Mission: A Fascination that Could Change Everything
- ► Will Publishing a Cybersecurity Book Help Attackers?
- ► The Single Maintainer Problem: Who Keeps Your Software Alive?
- ► The First Trillionaire Is Trying to Make Us Multiplanetary. Almost Nobody Is Writing It Down.
6. Science fiction and technology writing
- ► Writing Science Fiction: World-Building, Characters, and Getting Published
- ► Ghostwriting Science Fiction: Why It's Different from Every Other Genre
- ► The Multiverse in Fiction: Why It Works, Why It Fails, and How to Write It
- ► Why The Expanse Is the Best Science Fiction Series Ever Made
- ► I Watched the Moon Landing at Eight Years Old. It Changed Everything I Read and Wrote.
- ► Star Trek Day: What the Original Series Taught Me About Storytelling
- ► Zork Chronicles: 9 Highlights from the Game That Started It All
- ► How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
- ► Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy
- ► The Craft of Writing Science Fiction that Sells
- ► Science Fiction Handbook
- ► Science Fiction Writers' Phrase Book
- ► Aliens and Alien Societies
- ► Space Travel
- ► How to Write Realistic Zombies and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
7. Scams
- ► The Freelancer's Scam Playbook: Three Cons Every Writer Should Recognize
- ► The Caribbean Connection: When a $90K Book Deal Became a $4K Overpayment Scam
- ► The Old Friend Who Suddenly Needed Money: A Scam I Spotted on Message One
- ► Your Email Is Not an Archive
- ► The Coach and the Webinar That Sold Me Nothing
8. The Operations Room
- ► The Water Kept Flowing When Nobody Was Watching
- ► The Client Sent Us the Wrong Source Code
- ► They Hired Us to Settle an Argument, Not to Answer a Question
- ► We Bought the Platform and Shipped the Workaround
- ► You Will Never Get Everyone to Agree
- ► We Lifted a Running Computer Off the Floor
- ► A Client I Kept Running Got Me a Twenty-Year Job
- ► We Did Not Fix the System, We Moved It
- ► Nobody Chooses to Modernize
- ► They Found It in Three Hours and Sent No Invoice
- ► My Team Never Got the Skill Back
- ► One Program, Any Number of Customers
- ► We Built a Disaster Recovery Site Without a Budget
- ► Every Call Came to Me Because No Rule Existed
- ► The Most Competent Person I Ever Hired
- ► Nobody Applied
- ► They Hated the Rotation Until They Could Put the Phone Down
- ► I Hired Someone Who Had Never Written a Line of the Language
- ► We Built Fraud Detection Before Anyone Called It AI
- ► I Spent Weeks Debugging Code That Should Have Been Deleted
- ► Our Best Product Came From Work Nobody Approved
- ► What Years of Buying From IT Vendors Taught Me
9. Technology, from the inside
- ► Ghostwriting Extended Reality Books: What the Field Looks Like Now
- ► Ghostwriting a Cloud Services Book in the Multicloud Age
- ► Ghostwriting Metaverse Books After the Hype Collapsed
- ► Do IT Certifications Still Move Your Career in 2026?
- ► The Four Pillars of a Technical Writer
- ► The People Getting Attacked Are the Ones Nobody Writes For
- ► Ghostwriting a Cloud Security Book in the Zero Trust Era
- ► Ghostwriting in the Digital Age: The Tools Changed, the Craft Did Not
- ► How Writing Builds Growth and Emotional Intelligence
- ► Cell Phones vs. The Real World
- ► Failure Is Success: What a Lifetime of Failing Taught Me
- ► Introvert or Extrovert: How a Camera Changed My Life
- ► Ghostwriting About IoT: Turning Invisible Expertise Into a Book
- ► Writing to Get Found by AI Instead of Just Ranked
- ► Most of Your Website Traffic Was Never Human. I Checked.
- ► Content Decay: Why Your Best Posts Quietly Stop Working
- ► Training Crawls and Live Queries Are Not the Same Thing
- ► Bottom-Up, Top-Down: Why I Build Both Ways at Once
- ► Six Months in Las Vegas and I Never Placed a Bet
Thinking about a book of your own? Start with the Ghostwriting Hub. Related: AI & Writing Hub, Cybersecurity Hub, Digital Transformation Hub.
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Whether your book is about AI, cybersecurity or any other technical subject, 33 years of enterprise IT experience means complex topics get explained without being dumbed down.
No pitch. No pressure.
