What’s New at The Writing King: Week of August 9, 2026

Aug 15 · Critical Thinking, Cybersecurity

Agent.btz: The USB Drive That Built US Cyber Command

This week, Agent.btz, the USB-borne worm that breached the Pentagon's classified networks and drove the creation of US Cyber Command.

Aug 14 · Book Marketing, Writing Craft

Bookends, Ybor City: Four Years, One Bungalow, and a Trailer Full of Books

This week, the Ybor City bookstore that took four years and a trailer full of books to open, and why the middle of that story is the useful part.

Aug 14 · Ghostwriting

What If My Ghostwriter Refuses to Write Something Halfway Through the Book?

This week, what to do when your ghostwriter refuses to write something halfway through your book.

Aug 14 · Book Marketing, Writing Craft

Where to Donate or Sell Books in Tampa Bay

This week, where a book collection should go in this county, in what order, and the three checks to run before any of it leaves the house.

Aug 14 · Ghostwriting, Memoirs

What Do I Do If I Cry During a Ghostwriting Session?

This week, what happens if you cry during a ghostwriting session, and why it's often where the book finds its heart.

Aug 14 · Ghostwriting

Can My Ghostwriter Write a Book About My Ex, My Boss or My Old Company?

This week, whether a ghostwriter can write a tell-all about your ex or your old boss, and what you signed that might stop you.

Aug 14 · Critical Thinking, Cybersecurity

Crypto AG: The Company That Sold Spying as Security for Fifty Years

This week, Crypto AG, the Swiss encryption company secretly owned by the CIA, and the oldest proof that a trusted supplier can be the adversary.

Aug 14 · Book Marketing, Writing Craft

John F. Germany Library: Twenty Thousand Photographs of a Vanished City

This week, the last stop in the series: the downtown Tampa library holding twenty thousand photographs of a city that no longer looks like that.

Aug 14 · Behind the Book, Writing

Behind the Book: Collision with Andromeda

This week, the eight-year story behind a novel told from the point of view of a galaxy.

Aug 13 · Critical Thinking, Cybersecurity

Going Low-Tech Didn’t Save Them: The Pager Attack as a Supply Chain Lesson

This week, why going low-tech didn't save Hezbollah, and what the supply chain lesson means for everyone who buys hardware or software.

Aug 13 · Critical Thinking, Fiction

Andromeda Might Miss Us After All

This week, why the Milky Way and Andromeda collision stopped being certain, and what a revised probability does to a novel built on it.

Aug 13 · Book Marketing, Writing Craft

Oxford Exchange, Tampa: A Bookstore With a Building Around It

This week, the Tampa building that started as a stable and became a bookstore with a restaurant around it, and the shelving idea behind it.

Aug 15 · Business, Personal Growth

Craig Leonard: Your LinkedIn Profile Is Not Your Resume

Craig Leonard is the founder of Craig Thoughts and works one-on-one with tech founders and entrepreneurs on their LinkedIn presence. He and Richard, who optimized 100+ profiles himself, compare notes on the interest-based algorithm, why most profiles read like resumes, and why AI should advise on a profile but never write it.

Aug 14 · Business, Leadership

Anthony Markey: Everybody Is Worth a Coffee

Anthony Markey is an independent insurance broker and the host of I Know A Guy Iowa who built nearly all of his business through referrals and conversations. He returns to the show to explain why everybody is worth a coffee, what paid networking groups get wrong, and why the person you let talk is the one who refers you.

Aug 13 · Fiction

Complications

Vivienne Holloway competes for a place at a Manhattan law firm while carrying a complication none of her rivals can see, and a mother who never stops arranging the room.

Aug 9 · Ghostwriting, People

The 100th Guest: Ghostwriting, Roman History, and the Follow-the-Money Doctrine | The Impossible Puzzles Show, Episode 167

On The Impossible Puzzles Show episode 167, Richard Lowe became host Mike Merkur's 100th guest and walked the whole arc: 113+ books and 54+ ghostwritten in 12 years, the Trader Joe's central office years, the first disk defragmenter's venture capital lesson, the 10-to-40-interview Socratic method, AEO explained on air, and the follow-the-money doctrine.

Aug 15 · Writing, Writing Craft

Character Naming Handbook

A name is the first sentence you write about a character. Readers form opinions before the first line of dialogue, so choose the signal instead of stumbling into it.

Aug 15 · Writing, Writing Craft

Christian Writer’s Handbook

Cardboard saints are built from doctrine. Real believers approach God through their attachment patterns, and faith on the page only convinces when the psychology underneath it is real.

Aug 15 · Writing, Writing Craft

Dynamic Backgrounds Handbook

Readers skip description because they have been trained to. Route every detail through a character's perception and it becomes story, and readers cannot skip story.

Aug 15 · Writing, Writing Craft

Theme and Meaning Handbook

Abstract concepts are labels you put on finished work. Practical themes are questions your story cannot stop asking, and they decide your scenes, your arcs, and your ending.

Aug 15 · Writing, Writing Craft

Steampunk Writer’s Handbook

The goggles and brass were never the point. Steampunk has been asking one question since Verne: what does it cost to build a world with this technology, and who pays?

Aug 15 · Writing, Writing Craft

Western Writer’s Handbook

If your western feels fake, your characters are thinking like modern people in period clothing. Frontier psychology is the fix, and everything else follows from it.

Aug 15 · Writing, Writing Craft

Protagonist Handbook

Passive protagonists watch events unfold. Constrained protagonists make choices under impossible pressure, and constraint is where agency shows itself most clearly.

Aug 14 · Writing, Writing Craft

Beta Reader Handbook

Beta readers aren't editors, they're your test audience who report where the reading experience breaks, not how to fix it. Learn how to send a ready manuscript, ask the right questions, and filter feedback by pattern so you actually improve your book instead of diluting it.

Aug 14 · Writing, Writing Craft

Dialogue Handbook

Real dialogue works because people rarely say what they mean. Learn why your brain hides the truth during every conversation, and write speech that carries what characters cannot say aloud.

Aug 14 · Writing, Writing Craft

Pacing Handbook

Pacing isn't magic: it's attention control. Learn how readers' brains predict what comes next, then use cognitive load and sentence rhythm to steer their focus exactly where you want it.

Aug 14 · Writing, Writing Craft

Conflict and Tension Handbook

Build your faith-based fiction from spiritual conflict, not plot beats, so redemption feels earned instead of announced. This course shows you how to make internal struggle the real story.

Aug 14 · Writing, Writing Craft

World Builder’s Handbook

Build worlds from survival outward, not from striking images backward. Start with how a society solves food, water, and shelter, and the culture writes itself, solid all the way down.

Aug 9

What the Dead Leave

Three books about death and what lingers after it: a 40,000-year-old record-keeper, a man who fixes the false beliefs that haunt us, and a cat who knew when to let go.

Aug 9

Peacekeeper

A machine wakes up in a crater and decides to let millions die to save thousands, then spends eight hundred thousand years writing the history she shaped, leaving us wondering if she's hero or monster.

Aug 9

Doors to Elsewhere

Three characters slip through impossible doors and discover that escape is harder than entry, a trilogy about the price of crossing into places you were never meant to find.

Aug 9

The Deep Past

Two historical fiction books place real survival crises, a supervolcano winter 74,000 years ago and Rome's brutal civil war in 69 AD, around invented characters and follow what actually happens when ordinary people face impossible odds.

Aug 9

Under Pressure

Four books trace how intelligent people reason themselves into catastrophe, from a career criminal on a desert highway to a salon owner solving problems nobody else sees.

Aug 9

Far From Earth

A library of science fiction that takes time seriously: four books where solutions take longer than civilizations last, distances stay vast, and the real cost of the cosmos shows on every page.

Aug 9

Victorian Reimagined

Four classic Victorian novels get retold from the perspective of characters who barely got a voice in the originals, bringing depth and agency to the people the great authors left in the shadows.

Aug 9

Young Adult

The Library's Young Adult section has stories that treat kids' real problems as real: viral videos, impulsive mouths, broken tools. No talking down, no easy answers, just kids working through what matters.

Aug 9

Wanting

The Library Wanting explores what happens when five people finally stop performing: a man with rules that keep him invisible, a receptionist watching strangers kiss, a cam performer in Bucharest, two women in therapy remembering past lives, and four friends at a Greek restaurant. These books are explicit because bodies tell the truth about desire.

Aug 9

Collections

A writer explores short story collections across forty genres, from detective dogs to vampires in therapy, and explains why the form demands every sentence earn its weight.

Aug 15

Adventures of a Bellydance Photographer

After his wife died, a photographer picked up a camera and found healing in the belly dance community, capturing eight years of dancers, desert hikes, and unexpected friendships that brought him back to life.

Aug 15

Refund Policy

Every digital product from The Writing King comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If it doesn't work for you, just ask for a refund, no questions asked.

Aug 14

Fiction Books

A writer's library of 34 novels across ten series, from space opera spanning millennia to retellings of Verne that give voice to forgotten characters, each built around its own obsession.

Aug 14

Nonfiction Books

The Writing King has published 39 nonfiction books across eleven series, from ghostwriting and self-publishing to surviving toxic jobs and building side income. No inspirational fluff, just practical advice grounded in decades of real-world experience.

Aug 9

Books that I Contributed to

Here are books where I contributed a chapter, foreword, or interview, work that shaped other people's projects without my name on the spine.

Aug 14 · Personal Growth

How I Stopped Fighting My Brain: A Late AuDHD Diagnosis

A late AuDHD diagnosis explained fifty years of boom-and-bust creative cycles, and taught me to build the conditions for hyperfocus instead of fighting my own brain.