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 book about living with creativity, I devoured it in print and audio.

That first read was a revelation. I admired the way Gilbert punctures the fallacy that living an artistic life means suffering. “If the art legitimates cruelty, the art may not be worth having,” she writes.

Her approach to creative living is decidedly anti-elitist. I’ve written about how Big Magic encouraged me to cast off my outdated, ignorant opinions about fan fiction. It also cemented my conviction that self-publishing was absolutely the right choice for me.

I read it again before I launched Chaos Calling, certain that I understood what Gilbert meant when she wrote, “The outcome does not and cannot matter.”

Spoiler alert: I had no fucking idea.

I’ve talked about how challenging it is to write a series, particularly as an indie. It’s time-consuming and expensive.

My newsletter subscribers also know that editing Chaos Armor’s fourth draft has taken longer than I’d planned. I wanted to publish it in 2025. That deadline has slipped. To be kinder to myself, I won’t name another date until I can meet that promise with certainty.

Immediately after sharing that delay, I received devastating news.

My book is among the millions of texts first pirated by LibGen and then stolen by Meta and other unethical tech companies to train their AI engines.

When pirates aren’t cool, just gross

I work in tech. Toronto is a well-regarded hotbed for AI research (e.g., Geoff Hinton). Tech investment is soft right now. Guess what’s still getting funding? AI projects.

Over the last five years, I’ve also listened to my peers and friends get increasingly enthusiastic about the various chatbot tools. As with environmentalism, DEI concerns, or flagrant violations of human rights, speaking up about the ethical quagmires AI presents may threaten your livelihood in tangible ways.

Many job descriptions in tech require fluency with AI skills, processes, and prompting. Recruiters want to know you can use it appropriately.

I’d been watching all of these trends with a mix of interest and skepticism.

But it’s one thing to suspect a technology billionaires are pirating books to feed their data-ravenous algorithms. It’s another to know that your work is among them.

When I read Alex Reisner’s article, “The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem” in The Atlantic and found Chaos Calling in the searchable database, my stomach lurched the same way it does in a fast-moving elevator.

Who do the other 121 results belong to? An academic who also publishes as E. M. Williams. Pirates have also stolen her published papers. The LibGen dataset includes millions of academic and non-fiction publications, along with novels, short stories and poetry collections.

Nearly every writer you can think of has likely had their works pirated by LibGen, a decentralized system that reminds me of the early days of Napster and KaZaA. LibGen includes original works, translations, and audiobooks recorded by equally talented voice artists.

Meta then scraped that pirated archive to train its engines because it didn’t want to pay market cost for acquiring data.

Elizabeth Gilbert (117 records) is also among the thousands of affected writers, academics and voice artists. Like her, many writers have lost the work of their entire careers.

What kills big magic? Despair

Without a publishing house or agent to commiserate with, I spent the next few weeks in a fog.

Writing felt impossible. What was the point? Why was I living my life on hard mode? Why should I bust my ass (and wallet) to write and publish another book when some combination of pirates and tech autocrats were going to steal my work the second I hit ‘upload’?

Worse, when I talked about what had happened, colleagues were sympathetic to a point, but it’s clear no one thinks the open exploitation of creative people means we should put AI back in the box.

Part of me understands. AI is the big trend. The hiring market is already precarious. No one wants to be left behind.

On another level, the whole thing made me want to lie down and never get up.

“Fear gets boring after a while”

In March, my book club picked Big Magic as our monthly read. I snagged the audiobook from Toronto Public Library. While I listened, I asked myself what Liz Gilbert would say about my piracy/theft situation.

No one was worried about AI when Big Magic was published. Gilbert does, however, write at length about, “me, creativity, and fear, advancing once more into the wide, terrifying terrain of UNKNOWN OUTCOME” [capitals mine]. After all, she says, “Uncertainty is what we sign up for.”

No kidding, Liz.

I kept coming back to these and other lines, which so accurately capture the hardest parts of pursuing a creative project. To write is to wrestle with uncertainty all the time.

But I’ve also experienced indescribable joy when an idea blooms in my mind like a flower, and bubbles of delight when a reader tells me how much my work means to them. Over the last three years, I’ve had so many of these moments. Am I prepared to never have those experiences again? That’s a far steeper price to pay.

When I launched Chaos Calling, I also had no data to temper my wild, first-time novelist ambitions. In 2025, I know better.

Sure, I’ve had sales reports with weeks and weeks of nothing. I’ve got scores of TikTok videos and other social posts that flopped. It’s hard to psych yourself up to run through another wall when you’ve still got bruises on your face and a bum knee from your last attempt.

At the same time, writing Into the Fishpond showed me that you literally cannot see the shape of your story’s success or the following it may amass until you’re at least seventy-five percent of the way through.

Chaos Calling is only twenty percent of The Xenthian Cycle. Until I publish Book IV or V, I truly won’t know what I’ve got.

As Gilbert writes:

“How you manage yourself between those bright moments, when things aren’t going so great, is a measure of how devoted you are to your craft and how equipped you are for the challenges of creative living. [ . . .] “I am asking you to put aside your innocence for a moment, and to step into something far more bracing, and far more powerful:

There are no guarantees for anyone. Will you put forth your work anyhow?”

I know that I suffer when I’m not writing. Which means there’s only one viable answer.

The most bracing Big Magic

Every writer has an outside story we draw upon when asked to explain our inspiration. We also have an inside story—the personal motivations that drive our work.

When I’m outside my courage, it’s the inside story that keeps me going.

I remember sitting on a footstool in my kitchen at 1:30 a.m. one cold December night in 2015. Unbeknownst to me, I’d finished my second-last day of work on the first manuscript. I recall tipping my head back against the cabinets and staring at nothing, exhausted by and astounded at what I’d captured.

Later, I stood behind one of the swivel chairs in my living room, consumed by my story’s propulsive potential. This book has legs, I thought. This book can go the distance.

If I give up now, I’m turning my back on that younger and more courageous version of me.

If I give up now, the technocrats win.

And, as Liz Gilbert would no doubt remind me, nothing about writing has ever been certain.

Actions I’ve taken:

• I wrote an open letter to the Canadian Prime Minister asking for better policy to protect the work of Canadian artists. It’s posted on my work site.
• I finished a short story set in the world of The Xenthian Cycle. More details to come, but I hope to have it out soon.
• I’ve made Into the Fishpond visible only to registered AO3 members. Doing so adds another layer of protection from data scraping. The title page also includes a disclaimer stating my opposition to AI engines mining my work.
• Future editions of my book will explicitly call out AI scraping or training on the copyright page as something I do not consent to for any reason.
• I’m evaluating which digital platforms make sense for Book II’s release (I may also opt to sell it directly, who knows).
• I continue to work on Chaos Armor.

“Argue for your fears and you get to keep them,” Gilbert writes in Big Magic. “Fear gets boring after a while.”

Learning about the piracy and theft of my work definitely rekindled many of my writing fears.

It’s been true before and it will be true again—only way out is to keep moving.

The post Returning to Big Magic appeared first on E.M. Williams - Fantasy Author.

Live long enough, and you may overturn your past self’s Internet bullshit.

I’m a case in point.

Me circa 2015: “Fifty Shades of Grey is the hottest thing in publishing and I have formed negative opinions about fan fiction.”
Universe (grinning): “Hold my beer?”

Unpacking bullshit can be a long process

I’ve spent a lot of my middle adulthood digging out of elitism as a life choice. I’m also old enough that parts of that journey are visible in my Internet long-tail.

I grew up excelling in academics, and liked both school and learning. I won scholarships, awards, and medals. My family valued my achievements.

As I approached the end of my undergraduate degree, I had no idea what would make a viable career. What I wanted to do was write books. I didn’t believe that career would pay for my life, and neither did my family. At a loss, I leaned into earning a PhD in Science Fiction & Fantasy.

That way, I’d meet the writers I admired and study the books that I loved. Win-win, right?

Diligently, I earned a Master’s degree in Literary Theory. At some point on that journey, I realized I was more interested in writing books of my own than in talking about other people’s work for a living.

I started working, first in communications and then in marketing, and writing on the side.

Like many creatives, my ambitions and opinions about what makes a great book exceeded my ability to execute for a long, long time. It was frustrating. I despaired and felt envy for people I perceived as having what I wanted.

During this time, I wrote some unfortunate, judgemental things about fan fiction. The original essay isn’t worth your time.

My karmic turn in the river

In 2016, I read Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic. In it, she brings a non-elitist approach to creativity’s importance in our lives, while pointing out the elitism that exists in how we’re taught to think about how art and how it gets made.

During this period, I was also active on Twitter, which expanded my creative horizons. I listened to a lot of conversations about how widely people read, what participating in a fandom can mean, and why folks like what they like.

Reflecting on both experiences and my first essay after finishing Gilbert’s book, I realized I was doing nothing more profound than letting my fears about my writing prospects grab the mic while crapping on other people.

So I wrote “Death of a Fan Fiction Snob” to take myself to task.

For years, I thought that was it—lesson learned.

The muse had other plans.

The Switch game that changed everything

In 2019 and 2021, I played Fire Emblem: Three Houses (FE3H) for the Nintendo Switch.

It’s a strategy game set in a fantasy world with great characters, some heartbreaking choices, and a high degree of re-playability. I was quickly hooked. As I played the first of four possible routes, my passion for the game prompted me to read fan fiction for the first time.

Last February, I started rewriting the game as a romantasy action story on an Archive of Our Own, one of the biggest non-profit sites for fan fiction.

It’s called Into the Fishpond: A Three Houses Alliance. And it’s finished.

While Fishpond has a small yet kind following (~7,000+ hits), I’ve had some wonderful interactions with its readers (~170+ comments). Since it’s over 215,000 words, Fishpond is the longest story I’ve ever written. It taught me lots about writing faster, structuring scenes, and building sexual tension.

Like Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, which loosely inspired the title, Fishpond is a portal story about someone from our world who ends up in the portal world.

It’s also got:

• A romance between two people dealing with grief (if you know FE3H well, Fishpond is loosely a Setleth ship)
• Found family
• Dragons
• Intense battle scenes (surprise!!)
• Magical twins (again!?) whose sibling bond low-key powers the whole thing (picturing your shocked face)
• My first non-binary character
• A lot of non-canon lore that I made up as I went along

Want to know more? Here’s the plot teaser from Fishpond’s intro on AO3:

Zara has just finished playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses for the fourth time when she’s struck by the injustice of watching her favourite characters die time and again. Why can’t she save all of them?

Fortunately, the Goddess Sothis agrees that this is a problem worth solving.

Into the Fishpond by E. M. Williams

Getting over your Internet Bullshit

My Internet bullshit almost stopped me from writing Fishpond. I was embarrassed to have once held negative opinions about an activity to which I was now devoting so much time. At first, I spent a lot of time minimizing this new novel and what it meant to me.

Some kind friends pointed out how deeply sad I got writing Chaos Armor, and how much joy came into my face when I talked about Fishpond. I’m glad I listened to them.

Besides great joy, this creative side quest proved I can build an audience entirely separate from my social circles and professional network.

I don’t expect the crossover audience for Fishpond to be high. Without game context, I’m not sure how much sense the story makes to Xenthian Cycle readers, although I did get comments from some people who’ve never played the game and enjoyed it.

Either way, I’m proud of the work and wanted to share that it exists.

Here’s to living long enough to set your Internet bullshit on fire.

Other posts in this series:

• What Writing on AO3 Taught Me: Golden Route = Powerful Premise
• My AO3 stats model

The post Overturning my Internet bullshit appeared first on E.M. Williams - Fantasy Author.

Since this show involves both work me and writing me, the interview is attributed to my full name. We will pretend it’s E. M. Williams as usual. My pseudonym is more about being intentional regarding which part of my life I’m speaking to than an attempt to conceal my gender or create iron-clad anonymity, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The episode originally aired on August 14 and runs for about 40 minutes. Here’s where you can listen:

• Apple
• Spotify
• Amazon Music

On Learning with Lerner, Lindsey interviews unconventional leaders who have blazed trails in a variety of ways. Her goal is to challenge norms, explore unique journeys, and ignite personal growth for the show’s audience.

Lindsey and I connected on email after I heard Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale on her podcast earlier in the year. I enjoyed Lindsey’s interviewing style so much that pitching my own story was the next logical step.

We ended up having a great conversation about leadership, mentorship, learning how to do hard things by doing them before you feel ready, crowdfunding, launching a consultancy, cracking my own creative productivity code to write Chaos Calling, and why I don’t think you have to suffer to make art.

Who is this conversation for?

Anyone pursuing an unconventional path who wants to hear more from people with similar ambitions in adjacent fields.

Topics we covered on the Learning with Lerner Podcast

• 1:55 — Living in Toronto and a bit about my family history, along with my childhood desire to write
• 3:00 — Integrating creativity without bankrupting your existence; the myth of artistic suffering; Big Magic
• 9:50 — How I cracked the secret to figuring out my creative productivity process; the ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ story; Chaos Calling’s origins in movement and Wattpad
• 16:40 — Being a woman in a field dominated by men; working in tech and academia; how those experiences informed Dave Montcalm’s and Jason Lin’s storylines; using commuting and consulting to make art
• 24:00 — What my typical day looks like now
• 25:20 — Changes in technology and research across my working life
• 26:50 — Mentorship’s role in my career and why I believe in giving back; working with Growclass
• 28:00 — How crowdfunding helped me develop the skills to launch a self-published book
• 32:00 — I pitch Chaos Calling to Lindsey’s listeners
• 33:35 — My career advice on how to go rogue and work for yourself
• 35:45 — Telling people what you do when you have multiple career pursuits; being comfortable with self promotion
• 37:00 — Best and worst career advice I ever got; inspiration is super weird

For more, you can follow Lindsey and the Learning with Lerner podcast:

• Instagram: @lindseylerner
• LinkedIn: Lindsey Lerner

The post I’m on Learning with Lerner! appeared first on E.M. Williams - Fantasy Author.

It was originally published on Medium, and it’s been in my head ever since I finished the first draft of Chaos Calling.

Time does funny things to your worst days.

From where I sit now in my 40s, that moment in the car no longer feels as visceral as it did in my early 30s. I’d like to think I’m less binary in my thinking about life, creativity and achievement than I was then.

I also have more concepts with which to think about creativity now. Books like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic widened the lens through which I think about and understand creative work.

What I needed someone to tell me was yes, that particular book was dying. Given the time and energy I invested in it, that loss was real and deserved to be mourned.

But it wasn’t the end. Not by a long shot.

Transitions and creative renewal can go hand-in-hand

Sometimes as writers, we have to turn over the field and let the earth go fallow for a while. I don’t mean to imply that it’s easy. It’s not. This particular experience felt like the worst of failures.

Yet, in reality, my subconscious was already planting new seeds and preparing me for what was coming.

For instance, one big difference between my old project and Chaos Calling was the commanding urgency that came with it. The new idea seized me by the throat. The story and its characters were, quite literally, all I could think about.

Writing on the subway became one of the highlights of my day. I looked forward to those short blocks with a feverish intensity, and brought more joy and fulfillment to me in all areas of my life.

Letting the old story go was painful, but my new project was so much more exciting—for me and my readers.

The post Behind the Post: ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ appeared first on E.M. Williams - Fantasy Author.

Editor’s note about “Don’t Stop Believing”: I originally published this essay on Medium. But their analytics are getting increasingly weird, so I’m giving it a permanent home here.

* * *

It was raining that night. The kind of chilly, damp rain you get in North Toronto in late November or early March.

Transition weather.

I was coming home from the gym. Rain was pounding on the car roof as I pulled into the driveway. The radio was on. Steve Perry was belting out the chorus to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” as I turned off the engine.

I sat and watched the rain fall on the windshield. And in that moment, I realized that I had stopped believing I was capable of writing and publishing a book.

I realized that the story I’d been telling myself about what my life would be was a complete and utter lie.

And I burst into tears.

From childhood, I always wanted to write

Writing is the only dream I’ve ever had, and it caught me young.

I used to sit at an old-fashioned desk (the kind with a steel beam connecting the wooden chair to the table) in my Scarborough bedroom and copy out stories I was reading in little notebooks. I was five at the time. Maybe six.

I was eight when my dad brought a desktop computer home in the mid ’80s. I used it to write a short story about Megan and Sundance from My Little Pony. I remember liking the yellow letters on the black screen.

At 12, I caught another flash of inspiration during a bus ride to school. It prompted me to write a science fiction novella for my Grade 8 independent study project, this time using the world’s heaviest laptop that my dad no longer needed for work.

The story kept growing. I kept writing. When I was 18 and in OAC (Ontario’s former Grade 13) I finally finished a full, novel-length draft for my English class. Mr. Whelan encouraged me to “do something with it.”

I didn’t. An alternate historical fantasy series had already put its claws into me as I was finishing that draft. It didn’t let go until I was in my early 30s.

Life didn’t wait for me

I sought more feedback on my work. I took a writing class with the great Nalo Hopkinson via the University of Toronto’s School for Continuing Studies. I met a wonderful writing group through that class and made a couple of lifelong friends.

Our kids were born. My career became busier than it had ever been. And as Elizabeth Gilbert notes in Big Magic, sometimes if you wait too long to see a creative idea through, that fiery nugget of inspiration dies on you.

That’s what was happening in the car.

My novel had died, and I had finally noticed.

Don’t Stop Believing: What happens if you do?

When I say that I cried, I don’t mean I shed a few artful tears. I was devastated. I turned off the radio, put my head in my hands, and sobbed like my heart was breaking. Because it was.

After 15 minutes or so, I dried my face, took the key out of the ignition and went on with my life.

I told myself that it would be okay — I had changed careers, if not disciplines. I was still a writer.

Our children were at that joyful age between tantrums and curiosity. I was working for a non-profit in Toronto’s startup space. The work was interesting. My colleagues were fascinating. I made more lifelong friends. And I regularly wrote web copy and other collateral.

But it wasn’t the same. And I knew it.

As I’ve written before:

“Thinking about writing during that time was like touching an empty tooth socket with my tongue. I knew what was supposed to be there but was surprised and disappointed and sad when it wasn’t.”

The longing never let go.

Inspiration is a funny fish

In March 2014, we sold our townhouse in North York. At the time, my husband and I were both working downtown. The long commutes were brutal. We wanted to be closer to work. We got lucky with a house listing, and things fell into place.

Complications with the sale meant that, from April to early June, we moved in with my parents. They still live in the house where I was a teenager in Greater Toronto. While we stayed with them, my commuting time doubled from two hours each day to four.

During those long hours in the car, something strange happened to me.

I’d seen Edge of Tomorrow and Captain America: Winter Soldier that spring. Parts of both stories kept echoing in my head while simultaneously mixing with other bits and pieces to ricochet off in an entirely new direction.

I couldn’t leave it alone. While driving, I found myself acting out bits of dialogue. Sometimes I made myself laugh. Sometimes I cried, blinking furiously to keep clear eyes on the road.

Honestly, the whole thing was embarrassing. I’ve always had a rich interior life, but I hadn’t daydreamed this intensely since I was a teenager. I told no one, but I thought about my secret world constantly.

The move came. We settled the children into our new house. That fall, Caitlin Moran gave a talk at the Toronto Public Library that I attended. And she said something that made me sit upright in my seat.

I’m paraphrasing, but it was essentially:

“Whatever you feel most taboo about, whatever feels too strange or bizarre to share with anyone else, that’s the universe’s special content gift to you.”

What if what was happening during those commutes wasn’t just a diversion to keep me from losing my mind out of sheer boredom?

What if it was another book?

How do you recognize inspiration?

The next night, I had a dinner date with my friend K-Town. She’s a writer, too, and had generously been one of my beta readers for that dead-in-its tracks fantasy epic.

Giddy with the question of whether I’d latched onto a viable idea, I told her this new story as though vomiting up my very guts. It took a long time. My cheeks grew hot and my voice grew thin, the way it gets when I’m trying to talk but I’m too excited to do it properly.

When I’d finished, K-Town looked at me for a long minute. Then she said, “That’s the most commercial thing you’ve ever come up with. GO. WRITE IT.”

So I did.

Without endless evenings and weekends to spend at a desktop computer, I had to get crafty. Eventually, I realized that I could use Wattpad to write during my subway commute. By standing in the doors that never opened until I reached my stop, I could put my headphones in, pull out my phone, and get in 25 to 40 minutes of writing each way.

Getting out of my own way

Using this method, I wrote a first draft of 135,000 words in 15 months.

In the beginning, I thought the story was a standalone book. As it turns out, that draft was the highlight reel for a five-book contemporary fantasy action series.

I wrote five more drafts between 2014 and 2022, refining my world-building, characters, and villains, while interlacing the plot as I went. I got feedback from 26 beta readers, a structural/line editor who works for a major publishing house, two sensitivity readers, a copyeditor, and a proofreader.

It’s been a labour of love, but Chaos Calling: Book 1 of The Xenthian Cycle is now available for pre-order as an ebook.

Don’t Stop Believing: What I wish I’d known

Why tell you this story?

In part to share my book’s origin story and perhaps inspire you to read it, sure.

But there’s something deeper at play.

When I got out of that car carrying a dead dream, I was between 33 and 35 years old. I thought I’d missed my shot. I thought I was a failure. I thought I’d lied to my family and myself about what my life would be.

I’ve never been so wrong.

And the kicker?

I built Chaos Calling in the wreckage of that earlier novel. Wrestling with my slow-paced, ridiculously flawed fantasy epic taught me more about craft and persistence than any class ever could. I just needed time, both to finish becoming the adult I needed to be, and for this new idea to emerge.

And so, as I think about that distraught young parent sobbing out her heart in that car, I want to ask you one small question:

What might you be wrong about?

* * *

Chaos Calling: Book 1 of The Xenthian Cycle is available as an ebook and paperback. It’s about three childhood friends who don’t know they’re on standby for the end of the world. Slowly, they realize that their unusual adolescence was training for what to do should an ancient enemy appear in their lifetime.

The post “Don’t Stop Believing” appeared first on E.M. Williams - Fantasy Author.

I originally wrote this post on Medium in 2015. I remember being excited that some ‘important’ Twitter accounts engaged with it. I’ve left the references to the manuscript that would eventually become Chaos Calling as-is.

Once upon a time, I wrote a post assessing the pros and cons of the Wattpad platform for aspiring writers on my blog [2026 me: I’m referring to The Analytic Eye, which is now offline]. I wrote 3,000 words and took a fence-sitting position on its value.

Instead of getting into the thing to really understand what it could do, I responded like a critic. All these months later with with 100,000 words of a novel draft in hand thanks in large part to the existence of Wattpad, I’m struck by how wrong I was.

What changed?

Talking to an Angel

The first thing that helped open my eyes to Wattpad’s platform was a discussion with one of the company’s early angel investors.

I know him through my work in Toronto’s startup land; I expressed curiosity in his Wattpad involvement one afternoon and he told me about his decision to invest. During that discussion, I posed my analytical concerns about the platform, which essentially boiled down to this:

Why do the Wattpaders who generate content make nothing when the platform is valued in the millions? Doesn’t that devalue content, writing and writers?

“I didn’t really consider that,” he said [I’m paraphrasing because I didn’t make detailed notes]. “Wattpad’s power is that they’ve built something extraordinary for the Internet: a respectful, friendly community that welcomes writers and lets them thrive. A lot of them are young women. They go on there and find an audience for their work. Maybe they get better. They might do it for fun. Or, they could make friends and connect with others like them all over the world. But that community is what I thought was exceptional.”

This conversation, which took place in late September 2014, coincided with five or six other events that I now realize were pivotal in reigniting my creative writing life.

“Hmm,” I remember thinking. “All I did when I was researching that blog post was upload some existing content to Wattpad that I had already written. I didn’t try composing on it.

“Maybe Wattpad could work for me, too.”

And so when inspiration coalesced in my brain barely 72 hours after that conversation, I decided to give writing on the platform a serious shot.

On Passions, Day Jobs and Parenting

Like most adults in North America, my day-to-day life is demanding. I’m married and we have two fantastic kids in grade school. I have an intense career, love my family and wish I saw my friends more. My chore list is a perpetual motion machine. I’m disciplined about my gym membership.

But I’ve written since I was a child. It’s how I make sense of the world and the activity that most consistently allows me to experience flow.

Yet after our kids were born, my writing life died.

During an interview I did with Guy Gavriel Kay while working at the University of Toronto in my late 20s, he surmised I was an aspiring writer and kindly asked me about my ambitions. He warned me that writing while parenting is tricky, particularly for women. And he suggested, wisely, that I get a manuscript done before I reproduced.

Didn’t happen.

After my first child arrived, my writing slowed to a trickle. I stopped submitting work to my writing group. I also gained some perspective and shelved my research-heavy, ambitious, alternate-history/fantasy novel that I’d been trying to complete for the better part of a decade.

As Elizabeth Gilbert aptly describes in her recent book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, I’d taken too long to develop that idea and its fiery core was stone dead.

I no longer had endless evening and weekend hours to reanimate that dream or catch a new one. So I thought I’d missed my shot.

And here’s the thing:

However rewarding it is to be a parent (and it is), it’s devastating to feel your creative dream has died.

Thinking about writing during that time was like touching an empty tooth socket with my tongue. I knew what was supposed to be there, but was surprised and disappointed and sad when it wasn’t.

Enter Wattpad: 100,000 Words in 13 Months

Thirteen months after opening myself to the idea of using Wattpad as a mobile composition tool, I’ve written an entirely new novel.

I hit 100,000 words last week.

[2026 me: I finished the first draft of what was The Xenthian Cycle in full about six weeks after writing this post, completely unaware it was a series and not a standalone novel. Oh, 2015 me, you have no idea what you’ve done.]

I haven’t published as I went like many Wattpaders do, though I was tempted. While writing and work-shopping that earlier novel draft, I learned that feedback while writing derails my ability to finish. I’m more productive in a vacuum.

If you’re a numbers person, my fictional output over the last six years averages between 3,000 and 5,000 words a year (my day job also involves writing). Using Wattpad increased my productivity by a factor of 20.

By any measure, that’s a blistering shift. How’s it possible?

With Wattpad’s iOS app, I discovered I love writing on my phone while standing on the subway.

I sometimes edit with the desktop interface, but the bulk of my draft was composed by phone in the doors of TTC subway cars during my daily round-trip commute. I put my earphones on, find a spot and make out with my imagination for 25 minutes each way.

Did I know writing on the subway was possible?

Before you ask, I remember reading articles like this 2010 Telegraph story about Peter Brett writing a novel on his phone and thinking, “Yeah, right.” I’m skeptical I could have written a book this way before contemporary smartphones. Bigger mobile screen sizes coupled with better digital keyboards and the solid Wattpad interface made it feasible.

Writing with Wattpad means I don’t have to worry about how crowded the car is or about getting a seat. I’m right handed, so when I was trying to write in a paper notebook I had to have a left-sided seat on the end of a row. Ask anyone from Toronto who takes transit and they’ll tell you that’s next to impossible during peak travel times.

I also didn’t have to shoehorn writing into the time I need to work or see my family, exercise, sleep or whatever, though I’ll sometimes take my phone out and keep writing after my kids have gone to bed.

Before this change, I thought of myself as someone with no time. Wattpad found me slack I didn’t know I had, provided I was willing to upend my old writing process, Lewis Carroll-styles.

Better still, I didn’t have to quit my job, ignore my family, move to Tibet, plow through my savings or disown my social commitments to gain this freedom.

What it all means for my creativity

While it’s early to say if the novel will resonate with others, my days of siting at a desk and staring blankly at the blinking cursor on the barren white space of an empty Word document are over. Writing on my phone with Wattpad feels like play.

I don’t feel anxious about beginning a new chapter or finding the next word or scene. I just open the app and trust that flow is waiting for me.

And, like self-fulfilling magic, it usually is.

So believe me when I say Wattpad has completely changed the way I write fiction. I don’t have words for how much joy this change has brought back into my day-to-day life.

What about my earlier criticism? What if I never make a dime from the book?

It doesn’t really matter (though of course I’d be open to it).

Using Wattpad brought back my creative satisfaction. The joys of this past year have been just that: a string of pearl-like delights for me alone.

So thanks, Wattpad, for facilitating this experience (with bonus mad props to the Zen Desk support team).

Here’s to the last five chapters.

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