On April 14, I received a mass email from Draft2Digital’s CEO Kris Austen. His message informed me that they are: Why would they do that? Well, as the email states, legit indies are being punished because of AI slop: Like many platforms, we’ve seen a significant increase in automated and low-quality account creation in recent […]
I’d be lying through my teeth if I told you that my decision to re-write Nintendo’s Fire Emblem: Three Houses (FE3H) as a novel-length, golden route, romantasy action story was fully intentional. Back in 2024, I hit a challenging roadblock in my work on The Xenthian Cycle and needed a break. Enter Into the Fishpond, […]
Jess Joyce, one of the co-hosts for the New Growth Show podcast, invited me on to talk about indie author marketing and my creative journey. The episode aired on December 17, 2025, but I was in a holiday crunch mode so I’m late posting about it. You can also listen to the episode on Spotify. […]
While writing Into the Fishpond, a novel-length fan fiction story set in the “Fire Emblem: Three Houses” universe (FE3H), I built a growth model for tracking my readers’ engagement. The story is long: forty-seven chapters, and over 200,000 words. When I finished the initial story in August 2024, I copied my model and populated it with a […]
Meeting your writing heroes can be a fraught exercise. It’s easy to put people on a pedestal and meet your idea of the presence rather than the person. Luckily, by the time I crossed paths with the late Ursula K. Le Guin in 2005, she was adroit at managing her public persona. I suspect she […]
The first time I read Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic, I was finishing Chaos Calling’s first draft (which turned out to be a skeletal draft of the whole Xenthian Cycle). I’d seen Gilbert’s Tedx talks about creativity and working through her phenomenal writing success after Eat, Pray, Love. When I learned she was publishing a non-fiction […]
Chaotic loss gets baked into the bones of many creative projects. My writing projects are no exception. From the outset of a new manuscript, I begin with a vision for what I want to achieve. Inevitably, as the draft gets longer, my ideas about what I’m doing shift. Sometimes, it’s because: That’s part of the […]
How did I end up with a rare ARC of Elantris, Brandon Sanderson’s first book in the Cosmere universe? Sanderson is a juggernaut in science fiction and fantasy. His work is so popular that when he announced four secret book projects in February 2022, he raised over $41 million from over 185,000 people. I’ve done […]
Conny Lee, host of the How Did I Not Know That? podcast, invited me on her show to talk about being a self-published author, why people choose to self publish and the process of getting a book released. Her episode aired on November 4, 2024. Here’s where you can listen: On the How Did I […]
Once upon a time, I thought fan fiction was terrible. In 2024, I wrote a whole novel based on Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Live long enough, and you may outlive your past self’s Internet bullshit.