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I wrote a book with A.I. There, I said it. No PR team, no apology video filmed in front of a bookshelf I haven’t read, no carefully curated “journey” thread about how I found my voice after six months of journaling and herbal tea. I sat down, opened a machine that doesn’t sleep, and said, “Help me write something people might actually finish.” And it did. Now, apparently, this makes me either a visionary or a literary criminal. The internet—judge, jury, and permanently outraged neighbor—has decided that using A.I. to write a book is either the future of storytelling or the creative equivalent of showing up to a marathon on a Segway. And since I am now both the runner and the guy on wheels, I feel uniquely qualified to say something deeply inconvenient: Everyone arguing about this is missing the point. The Fantasy of the Sacred Author Let’s start with the mythology we’re all pretending is real. Writers, we’re told, are these fragile, tortured vessels of originality. They sit al...

There’s something deeply inconvenient about people like Kim Heacox . Not inconvenient for them, obviously—they’re out there living full, purpose-driven lives, stacking decades of meaningful work like cordwood. No, the inconvenience is for the rest of us. Because every time someone like Heacox quietly marks another milestone—35 years writing, 15 books deep—it raises a question we’d all rather not answer: What exactly have you been doing? I don’t mean that in the motivational poster sense, with a sunrise and a quote about chasing dreams. I mean it in the uncomfortable, stare-at-your-own-browser-history sense. Because while most of us have spent the past three decades toggling between distraction and mild existential dread, Heacox has been out here building a body of work that actually holds together. And the worst part? He’s not loud about it. No viral gimmicks. No personal brand engineered for algorithmic affection. No desperate pivots into whatever the internet is currently rewardi...

There is a special kind of exhaustion reserved for writers who are halfway through a book they do not actually want to write. You know the one. It sounded smart. It sounded marketable. It sounded like something a “serious author” would produce while wearing glasses they do not need and drinking tea that tastes like bark. It may even have a tidy outline and a compelling subtitle with a colon in it. And yet. You open the document and feel like you’re clocking in for a shift. That is not inspiration. That is literary customer service. Meanwhile, in the back of your mind, there’s another book. The inconvenient one. The weird one. The one that blends investing with existential dread, or neuroscience with sarcasm, or mystical folklore with Midwestern budgeting strategies. The one that feels slightly dangerous to admit you’re writing. That book will not let you sleep. This blog is about that book. The Myth of the “Correct” Book Writers absorb invisible rules early: Write what se...

There is a particular kind of seasonal fantasy that descends every December, right around the time the days go dark at 4:47 p.m. and your brain starts operating exclusively on soup, caffeine, and vibes. It’s the fantasy that this will be the winter you finally read properly. You know the one. The winter of capital-R Reading. The winter of Big Books and Serious Authors. The winter where you become the kind of person who casually mentions Faulkner at brunch and means it. You picture yourself under a blanket, snow tapping politely at the window, a mug of something warm in hand, slowly and reverently turning pages that matter . The sort of pages that come with blurbs by Nobel laureates and forewords that begin, “This work resists easy categorization.” And then you get sick for a weekend, down a fistful of ibuprofen, and absolutely demolish a science-fiction-horror-metafiction novel with a title that sounds like a Reddit thread written by an AI having a panic attack. And it rules. ...

Picture this: five authors — Jade Chang, Angela Flournoy, Aja Gabel, Xuan Juliana Wang and Jean Chen Ho — regularly schlepping to a cozy Italian-American restaurant on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Felix’s, laptops in tow, meatballs marinara, fried potatoes with garlic and lemon, Italian tuna butter-lettuce salad. They’re there ostensibly to write novels. Actually they’re there for the company. For the community . For that rare thing: other people who are also trying to write the “second book” and know what a hilariously painful slog it is. Because: oh yes, writing a novel is lonely. But it doesn’t have to be that lonely if you pick your booth wisely. 1. The myth of solitary genius We all love the image: writer in a garret, quill in hand, storm raging outside, the muse whispers. But here’s the truth: that trope is inefficient, oversold, and exhausting. The group at Little Dom’s essentially flipped the narrative. As Flournoy put it: “It’s very hard to write a second book. So it helped t...