For My Technical Leaders
"We gave everything to the machines. Our calendars. Our email. We let them listen in on our conversations with customers and take notes. They wrote marketing posts that other machines summarized for us. We all believed the lie. Nobody wanted to be left behind. The ROI was too attractive.
They built a new HEB on the edge of our neighborhood and we’ve been going every few days just for funsies. They’ve got these tiny indoctrinating shopping carts to help teach Rainbow how to be a good consumer. It was fun watching her push the cart until she
Ain’t that Santa over there? That old man with the red coat on? Yeah, that’s that fool. Roll up on side of him, man. Roll your window down. Hand me my Glock give me another clip. ‘cause I’m gonna smoke this fool. There he go. You Santa?
In no particular order except for Replay, which is my favorite all-time. * Replay, Ken Grimwood * Neuromancer, William Gibson * Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan * House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski * The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger * A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick * Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov * The Martian Chronicles, Ray
The independent publishing world has changed so much since I joined it in 2004, but one thing that has remained constant is the immeasurable value of support from friends and family. Year after year, decade after decade, my work has been sustained by the efforts of others, from purchasing and
Oh boy, I've been holding onto this one for a long time. Almost 20 years. I'd always hoped to turn it into a full-length novel someday, but I ran into two problems. First, it's a tight novella. Making it longer wouldn't have
What a busy month! We're doing all sorts of things to move some books in July, so hopefully, one resonates with you. Whether you're struggling to be more productive, need help losing weight, or are gripped by a general malaise, these books will absolutely cure every
With the rise of ChatGPT and other pseudo-AIs that scrape the freely available content on the web to sell back to us, some authors have started moving their short stories and scratch writing behind a free paywall, which I guess is just a wall. 🧱 Anyway, I'm one of
One of the best things about Stephen King’s On Writing is the way he breaks down scenes and tells you how they were constructed. Being told not to use adverbs is great and all, but really getting into the mind of a good writer and seeing the process behind the art can be an invaluable experience.
Get access to exclusive content!
House of Nepenthe (2025)When Kenneth Barnes takes a business trip to his old hometown, he finds himself on the wrong end of a gun. Now in the hospital in a coma, Kenneth’s life begins to flash before his eyes in the form of the House of Nepenthe, an
Wellity, wellity, wellity… if it isn’t the bridge I said I’d cross when I came to it. Admittedly not my joke, but it is one of the three funniest things I read on the World Wide Web this year. The other two were: 🤣 “I can count on one
I always thought the BlueSky usernames were a little strange, and recently, I've thought about running my own instance just so I can have a more custom username. But then I tagged Novlr in a post and noticed they had novlr.org as their username! What was this?
The year was 2004, and the book was Xronixle. Fresh out of the gate as a hopeful cyberpunk novelist, I reached out to Dalton Publishing, a local Austin publisher, with a query for my cyberpunk thriller about a boy who copies his girlfriend's mind in virtual reality. To
Social media has been a double-edged sword for self-published authors for a while now. On one hand, it’s a place where writers can connect, share tips, and support each other. On the other, it often devolves into a noisy marketplace where everyone is shouting about their latest book, hoping
I've always struggled with pitching my books, whether to literary agents or my mom, mostly because my stories are multi-POV. From Por Vida on, my novels have always had four main points of view. I won't get into why I prefer that structure here, but it
Many real people often inquire whether I think about writing while running. Is that where I come up with all this insane tech? Is mile 2 reserved for working out a diatribe against the advancement of artificial intelligence? Is my cooldown dedicated to figuring out how and where I can
In a time when everything is a service (including this website!), it's rare to come across a piece of software that is A) free and B) so valuable that you actually want to pay for it. This year, two apps have met that criteria for me. The first
"The old man is dying." Banks says this to me when I walk into his office in lieu of a greeting. No time for them, he once told me. As overseer of the second largest feed on the west coast, I couldn't blame him for being
Sometimes, when you're between jobs, paralyzed by anxiety, and staring down the barrel of yet another election season, you just need a distraction. Something productive. Something that keeps your mind off existential dread and the growing certainty that your career prospects might have better luck running as an
Howdy, Carl! Have I ever told you that sometimes, when I'm writing and a little stuck, I like to imagine writing directly to one of my readers sitting in their easy chair at home with a cute little pug in their lap? It's true! And since
Last month, as I was tending the grounds (walking in my yard), I noticed a shiny cylinder standing upright on the stylish concrete block that holds my air conditioning unit. Upon further inspection, I realized it came from a small valve on the AC itself. When I tried to replace
