When 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.
Tag: Memoir
Articles on writing and publishing a memoir: where to start, structure, what to include, the legal and family risks, and why your life story is worth getting down.
GhostwritingThe 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.
Book ProposalHow to Organize Decades of Memories Into a Memoir
September 15, 2026
Decades of experience only become a readable memoir with structure. How to choose an organizing principle, decide what stays, and shape raw memory into a book someone wants to read.
Authority Through AuthorshipWhat Happens When You Disagree With a Chapter
September 1, 2026
A draft arrives and something is structurally wrong with it. That moment decides more about the project than anything before it.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Behind the Wire
September 1, 2026
My grandfather survived the camps and wrote it down after the war. I was seventeen, hiding from the family, when he asked whether I wanted to know about it. The book then waited decades.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Jake and the Bullies
September 1, 2026
A realistic novel about a kid harassed online has been written a thousand times and no seven-year-old finishes one. So Jake goes inside the internet, where trolls have caves and algorithms have addresses, and the villain is a machine that…
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Forty Worlds
September 1, 2026
This collection is reconnaissance. I intend to write a novel in every genre, and forty short stories across forty genres was a way of dipping a toe in each one before committing a year to any of them.
Character DevelopmentBehind the Book: The Dead Don’t Need Stuff
September 1, 2026
My father died with a one-bedroom apartment filled floor to ceiling and two full storage units, while being broke. I was three thousand miles away, so I told the apartment manager to donate all of it. Nobody objected, and nobody…
Career StoryThe IT Director Who Wrote 113+ Books
September 1, 2026
For 33 years I worked in enterprise technology, twenty of them running IT at Trader Joe's. Then I wrote 113+ books. Nobody predicts that line, and the pivot is the story. A crooked career is the book.
Authority Through AuthorshipThe Parts of Writing a Book Nobody Warns You About
September 1, 2026
You will hate one chapter for no good reason. Somebody else will know your career better than you do. The hardest week is the one after the manuscript is finished.