Behind the Book: A Treachery of Legions
The general who won 69 AD for Vespasian and then disappeared from history. Here is the story behind my Roman novel about Marcus Antonius Primus.
Tag: Writing Craft (Page 22)
Critical ThinkingBehind the Book: Ridiculous Things People Actually Believe
An episode of Ancient Aliens started it. Here is the story behind my unsparing field guide to conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and the machinery that sells them.
EmergencyHurricane Season: Do It Now, Because You Cannot Do It Later
Everything you need for a hurricane is on a shelf right now. The day it lands on the news, the water aisle is empty and the gas lines are around the block. Decide now whether you are leaving or staying,…
Character DevelopmentTen Thousand Hours of Beads
Deliberate human burial goes back at least a hundred thousand years. At Sungir, two children were buried with ten thousand ivory beads, each about an hour of work, by people living at the edge of their food supply.
PhilosophyBehind the Book: Grim
Grim began with one scene at the crucifixion and grew into a novel about a reaper who attends death across all of history. Here is the story behind it.
Psychological SuspenseBehind the Book: The Woman Who Walked Through Walls
I started at the execution scene and wrote backward. Here is the story behind three women, a device that removes consequences, and what people do when they cannot be caught.
Character DevelopmentThe Beach at the End of Time
H. G. Wells sent a traveller thirty million years forward to a beach under a swollen red sun where the last living thing flopped in the surf. That ending was not invention. It was the settled physics of 1895.
AIThe Claude Watermark: What It Does and Why the Panic Is Wrong
Anthropic started watermarking Claude's text output on August 2, 2026, and almost every piece of coverage got the mechanism wrong. Nothing was added to your writing. What the mark does, what it proves, and why the SEO panic collapses on…
AI WritingAI Is a Function, Not a Ghostwriter
Four guests from unrelated fields arrived at the same conclusion within weeks: AI works when it removes drudgery and fails when it removes the person. Applied to books, that line is easy to draw.
Decision MakingWhen Every Option Is Bad
Most decisions are easy and get all the attention. The ones that define a career look like no-win scenarios, and the answer is to change the rules of the game instead of picking the least bad option.
Book MarketingWhere to Write in Tampa
Tampa has better rooms to work in than Pinellas does, distributed differently: a bookstore in an 1891 stable, a university library, a 1926 movie palace, and the historic district. The trade is that Tampa costs you a drive.
Book MarketingWriting at the Beach Mostly Does Not Work
Writing at the beach mostly does not work, and the failures are predictable. What the coast is good for is the other half of the job: the thinking and the deciding.