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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...

Books are supposed to be pristine, right? Shiny covers, crisp pages, no evidence of human contact beyond the occasional coffee ring of shame. For decades, we’ve treated books like Fabergé eggs—look but don’t touch, read but don’t interact . And yet here comes a wave of TikTok and Instagram readers with their rainbow highlighters, gel pens, and sticker armies, turning those sacred pages into what look suspiciously like bullet journals in drag. The pearl-clutching from the “Books Must Remain Virgin” crowd has been audible from space. Deface a book? Barbaric! they cry, as though a margin note is somehow worse than, say, mold or those unholy mass-market covers from the 1990s. But here’s the rub: science is quietly giggling in the corner, because it turns out writing in your books is less vandalism and more brain Pilates. Let’s crack open the evidence—and, yes, the spine. 1. Marginalia Has a Pedigree Older Than Your “First Edition” Obsession Before the haters accuse modern annotators ...

Oh, the internet. That glorious black hole where productivity goes to die and attention spans are sacrificed like goats to the algorithmic gods. Every day, we doomscroll our way into existential despair while being served ads for weighted blankets and meditation apps we’ll never open. And then, amid the chaos, some brave souls dare to whisper the unspeakable: log off, read a book, connect IRL . Cue the collective gasp from TikTok zombies and Twitter warriors alike. Mark Armstrong, in his Nieman Storyboard piece, does what few dare to do anymore: he advocates for shutting the laptop, putting the phone on airplane mode (if you can remember how), and — wait for it — meeting actual human beings. In person. The horror! Let’s unpack this radical idea with the grace of a bull in a China shop. Step Away from the Glowstick of Doom We all know the drill. You open your phone to check one notification and — bam — it’s three hours later, you’re in a Reddit rabbit hole about how pigeons are go...

You know you’ve made it when an entire New York Times article reads like the world’s most erudite group chat—except instead of emojis and screenshots, it's literary lions flinging around phrases like “the Cole Porter of literature” and “cross-your-legs-on-the-subway sexy.” Edmund White is dead (or close enough to merit 2,000 obituaries in one), and by God, the literary establishment is swooning . Finally, someone wrote about sex, sadness, and Versailles in the same sentence without apologizing, and the world is better—and much hornier—for it. Welcome to a 3000-word snarky love letter to the man who made autofiction fabulous, intellectualism raunchy, and gossip a literary genre. Edmund White was the kind of man who could say “rimming” in a sentence about Marcel Proust and still win a Guggenheim. Let’s unpack why every gay writer, gay-adjacent writer, and deeply closeted editorial intern is currently weeping into their vintage leather-bound copy of A Boy’s Own Story . The Legend, ...

Congratulations, Roy Peter Clark. Your 21st book just arrived, and you're here to tell us that we, too, can birth literary babies if we just squeeze out 200 words a day like some kind of content womb. How inspiring. How... quaint. In his article “Get ready to write your book: 5 tips on becoming an author,” Clark offers advice so aggressively wholesome it practically smells like fresh library books and self-discipline. Unfortunately, the rest of us are out here drowning in crippling perfectionism, existential dread, and an internet that’s 95% distraction and 5% other people’s highlight reels. So let's dissect these five tips from America’s Most Well-Adjusted Writing Grandpa and give them the cynical, modern update they so desperately need. Tip 1: Write a Little Every Day (And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves) “A page a day equals a book a year,” he says, like a motivational calendar come to life. Wow. Groundbreaking. A whole page, Roy? You mean all I have to do is push out ...