When 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.
Tag: writing life
The writing life is mostly the unglamorous parts: the routine, the doubt, the finishing. These articles cover what the work is really like day to day and how writers keep going through the middle of a project.
AI and 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.
AI and WritingAI-Written LinkedIn Profiles Are Mediocre by Design
An AI writes the average of what everybody else wrote, which makes it structurally incapable of producing a profile that stands out. Use it as an advisor and never as the author.
HistoryWhere 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.
PhotographyWriting 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.
Book MarketingThe Tampa Bay Book Festival Calendar
Tampa Bay runs a real literary calendar: a free four-day international book fair in Ybor City, an antiquarian fair, a university festival, and three community events built around local authors.
Book MarketingGetting Your Book Into a Tampa Bay Bookstore
Tampa Bay still has a real independent bookstore scene, and each shop takes local books differently. The thing that decides whether any of them can stock you is how your book is printed.
Memoir WritingFinding a Writing Group Worth Sitting In
Pinellas County has more writing groups than most people realize, mostly meeting in library rooms. The useful skill is telling a group that will make you better from one that will correct your commas for two years.
HistoryThe Mound Under the Picnic Tables
There is a Tocobaga temple mound in a county park in Safety Harbor, and the park is named for the Frenchman who showed up in 1842. Which name ends up on the sign is the useful thing to think about.
Book MarketingFive Hundred Years of Selling the Same Water
Five mineral springs in Safety Harbor have been sold as a cure for five hundred years, starting when Hernando de Soto decided he had found the Fountain of Youth. There is a lesson in it for anyone writing a book.
Authority Through AuthorshipGetting Local Media to Cover Your Book
Tampa Bay has more working media than most metro areas its size. None of them want to hear that your book is out. All of them want a story, and your book is the credential instead of the subject.
Book MarketingThe Truth About Bookstore Signings
The store will usually say yes if your book is orderable through the standard channel. Then nobody comes unless you bring them. The signing is not the marketing; it is where the marketing gets photographed.