For Readers
I'm happy to report that I've finished uploading all the short stories I care to share to danielverastiqui.com/short-stories. These include selections from The Sum of Memory, Destination Okinawa, and later stories that never made it into a collection. While I'm happy to
For My Political Activists
Cool Daniel doesn't cotton to companies kowtowing, bending the knee, kissing the ring, or otherwise putting profits over morals to appease the human equivalent of a rotting Arby's roast beef sandwich.
For My Fitness Fanatics
Cool Daniel believes in physical fitness and has decided to return to the only fitness option that doesn't technically promise it works: Orange Theory Fitness. Granted, it's a decent, colorful theory: spend an hour lifting, running, and rowing three times a week and just see what
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.
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Cal Emerson was in bed, lightly treading the border between wake and sleep, when the call came in.
Who would have ever thought we'd be here, am I right? We are about to enter a period of unbridled chaos that will likely not end until 2029, assuming it ever ends. The summers are too hot, the job market too volatile, and social media too soul-sucking. The
Hello! It's time for another monthly newsletter, but instead of making it all about me, me, me... I'm giving you a few recommendations on what to read in 2025. Some of my friends have launched newsletters, some established tech nerds already have theirs running, and despite
"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?
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
