It was most definitely not one of the items on my summer bucket list.

The worry, the follow-up (surgery, plus all the appointments after), all the pain of watching my 17-year-old in pain—it took an emotional and physical toll on me.

Writing is a lifeline for me—a way I can freely express myself in a world that isn’t always interested in listening to an autistic person talk. It’s how I keep my mental health in check. And it’s also a very large piece of my purpose, a way to feel creatively fulfilled.

I suspect many writers feel the same way.

But sometimes, as my summer demonstrated, life gets in the way of that.

I’m not the kind of person who responds well to changes in schedule, disruptions in the way I’ve ordered my life. But (surprise, surprise), I am not in control of the universe, which means I can’t always control those disruptions. (That’s not to say I won’t still try…I’m nothing if not stubbornly persistent, to a fault.)

Curveballs come. That’s life.

When I’m talking to writers, I talk a lot about scheduling our writing time, being consistent with it, treating it as something non-negotiable and sacred. Writing requires that consistency.

But life happens. Sometimes there’s sickness, surgery, a kid crisis or a broken heart (all of that this summer; the Toalsons were on a roll), a family member or friend who needs help, a surprise spontaneous vacation, a spouse or partner with a change in needs, dinner to cook every single night because a partner’s out of town and the other’s single parenting it for a week (take a wild guess whether this happened, too). Sometimes the brain can’t focus (hello, sleep issues) or there’s no spare time or energy left to spend on being creative.

Things don’t always work out the way we plan. Sometimes those upsets can knock our momentum and creativity and motivation off-kilter. It’s hard to keep going when life just keeps going.

How do we create in spite of those endless curveballs?

First, we have to understand and accept that creating might look different than it always has or that we’d like it to. And then, it’s worthwhile …

I braced myself because I knew enough about golf to know what was about to happen. Thrown off by the sudden, unsolicited coaching, my wife’s swing came undone, and she launched her ball directly into the nearby water hazard.

As the ripples dissipated and some startled geese settled, my wife blinked slowly, took a deep breath, and said, “Maybe that’s enough advice for today, okay, Dad?” Unfortunately, though, the damage was done, and my wife didn’t hit a good shot the rest of the day. Without meaning to, my father-in-law had gotten in her head and ultimately done more harm than good.

I thought about this the other day when I was writing. I’m currently in first-draft mode on my next novel—you know, the “pulling words out of thin air” stage—and I’d found myself suddenly stuck on a bit of dialogue. Earlier that day at lunch, while scrolling zombie-faced through Instagram, I’d watched a short video in which a writer of some sort—a professor or editor, maybe?—had said that every line of dialogue should reveal character, advance the plot, or do both. So, there I was at my desk, rereading the dialogue I’d just written and wondering if it was doing either of those things. And then I wondered: Had I ever written a line of dialogue that had done either of those things? I hoped so. Either way, my progress, at least for the moment, was at a standstill. I was frozen.

This has been happening to me more often than I’d like to admit lately, and it took me until then to realize why. Spoiler alert: It’s the Internet’s fault.

Beware the Algorithm

It’s 2026, so we all know that social media algorithms are a menace that will eventually lead to an apocalyptic, Terminator-style machine uprising that kills us all. …

Goodreads recently began offering the option to classify the books you read as DNF (Did Not Finish). Do we need it? Is DNF because of our increasing inability to focus?  Sony Music is suing Claude for training with copyrighted songs. On the other hand, Claude says it will watermark materials created with Claude. Not sure how that would apply to music. Pangram is the new AI-detection kid in town. In the good-news department Massachusetts passed the Freedom to Read Act. Will other states follow suit? One can only hope. Union Square will launch a new novella imprint. Is this an opportunity to cash in on our shortened attention spans? Ingram is offering a new catalogue for e-books. A new survey says that e-book lending from libraries is hurting publishing. Another book slated for publishing has been pulled, this time not for AI, but for old-fashioned plagiarism. Dolly Parton is remembered for many things, but her book advocacy for children is at the top of the list. Final publishing numbers for 2025 are in!

AI

Rare books end up at AI training facility

Fact check on AI training stories

What exactly counts as AI?

Claude says it will leave a watermark on everything it writes

It’s about music, but lawsuit is relevant for publishing

Google launches interactivity to e-books

Is Pangram the new gold standard for AI detection?

Book Bans

How to advocate for books

Freedom to Read law

Books

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library

Bookstores

Black Bookstore Day launched in Wichita, Kansas

 Goodreads

DNF? Maybe it’s an attention deficit

More on the DNF trend

International

Publishing news from around the world

Libraries

Falling for Publishing Conference 2026

Publishing

Chicago bookseller launches bilingual children’s imprint

Looking beyond children and young adult to seniors

Union Square to launch novella publishing program

Independent publishers mark a decade of advocacy

Ingram offers new digital catalogue for e-books

New study finds that e-book lending from libraries hurts publishing industry sales

Another title suspended, this time for suspected plagiarism

Final numbers from the Association of American Publishers for 2025…

When I wrote my practice novels (efforts so bad I even removed them from the drawer), I drew on passion, a bit of talent, and a great big fat desire to see my name on a book jacket. I was a wanna-be architect who thought loving Legos was qualification enough.

‘Twas not.

Writers’ groups helped. Classes helped. Reading obsessively helped. But eventually I needed to learn the craft.

Pride stung, reality struck, and I designed my Homemade MFA: shelves of craft books, endless highlighting, even a thesis (honest). Then I put it into practice.

Here are ten quick shots from thousands of highlights.

1. “Surmounting difficulty is the crucible that forms character.”—Anthony Robbins

Sure, choosing a motivational speaker-author here might seem…odd? But I’ve never been accused of being too literary—or a fan of what Aldous Huxley called the snobbery of culture.

Do you know your character’s crucible?  Not just what they want, but the pressure they’re under and how that pressure tests them. How do they come out of the heat? In To Kill a Mockingbird, the intersection of justice, family, and community is Atticus’s crucible.

 2. “Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear fine line persists.”—Eudora Welty

A novel tangles itself fast. Characters pop up, subplots wander in, questions accumulate. What’s the clear fine line running through yours? What dramatic questions are we, the reader, following?

During revision, I track the questions my novel has raised and make sure I haven’t abandoned any.

3. “Theme is not imposed on the story but evoked from within it—initially an intuitive, but finally an intellectual act on the part of the writer.” —John Gardner

I think of theme—that question that hounded us all through high school—as the thread connecting my story. I study my characters for what they believe, then ask whether those beliefs change—and why.

And I work my behind off not to paste it on my characters like a branded sweatshirt.

4. “Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”—Mark Twain

Showing or telling? Twain made it easy to understand.
What did you write? Billy Bob was furious, or Billy Bob punched a hole in the wall?

5. …

I’ll explain.

It was a road trip. One I have been dreaming of for decades. You can fly into Marfa, in West Texas, but that always seemed like a short cut. There should be a journey to get there, and so last month, with a good buddy of mine, I made the drive from Austin.

Texas is wide. Really, really wide. Marfa is closer to El Paso than the east Texas cities. It’s near the Big Bend. (NO WALL!) To get there you drive through hill country, butte territory, then the flat, scrubby Chihuahua Desert. Marfa itself is a town of rusty farm equipment, abandoned buildings and tacos.

It is also the home of Chinati, a foundation dedicated to the preservation of large-scale art installations created by the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd and his artist friends. You might know Judd from his rectangular steel boxes stacked over each other on a museum wall, with “negative space” between them. Yeah, that guy. In college, I wrote a paper about his work.

So why is why is he a hero of mine? Donald Judd saw something that no one else had seen before. He saw that there is a relationship between an object and the space around it. That might seem obvious, but if you think about it, when we are in any space we tend to see the objects in it, not the space which they occupy. Judd saw the space.

You can demonstrate this yourself at home. Clear the top of a bare dining table. Not a kitchen counter, desk, or anything that has stuff already on it or which adjoins a wall. Now, sit in front of the empty surface. It’s just a tabletop. Now, put a teacup onto the tabletop upside down. Just the tea cup, nothing else. Now consider the tabletop again. Take your time. Be still. After a while, you won’t see the teacup. Or rather you will, but you’ll also have an acute awareness of the surface on which it rests. Objects and space will be equally real.

In …

Whether it’s your first or twentieth book, independently or traditionally published, finding new ways to grow your readership can obviously be a tremendous help in achieving a long-lasting writing career. Given my extensive marketing background and having been raised in an entrepreneurial family, as an author, I’ve always enjoyed thinking outside the box to connect with readers and broaden my reach. With some creative brainstorming, I can attest to the fact that it doesn’t require a large budget to do that!

Here are a few examples that will hopefully spark your own ideas:

Since my debut, Letters from Home, centered on an exchange of WWII courtship letters, I was delighted to pair up with a popular stationery store, which was willing to donate a large basket of goods that I used for a cross-promoting giveaway. I then sought out online groups and local organizations devoted to stationery fans and the art of letter writing. As you can imagine, the gift basket giveaway was a huge hit in those circles and a fun, fresh way to spread the word about my release.

For Bridge of Scarlet Leaves, which involved the Japanese American internment, I connected with various Japanese American history museums and organizations, which kindly recommended amazing speakers with relevant firsthand experience, from having lived in one of the internment camps or having served in a Japanese American military unit during WWII. Our collaborative speaking events resulted not only in stronger attendance and media coverage, but also in an exceptionally impactful moment for all who attended. Additionally, promoting those events to professors of Japanese culture, heritage, and history at local colleges drew a good deal of student interest, along with opportunities for me to speak to classes and even entire schools in the months to follow.

Most recently, though not tied to one book in particular, I was struck by another collaborative idea. Combining two things I’ve long been …

Two well-known sayings from two different creative fields have been rattling around in my head for awhile now, and I think they wouldn’t leave me alone because when combined they clarify what can be a powerful aspect of writing. If you can put up with me geeking out on architectural history for a brief minute, I promise I’ll make clear what it has to do with writing.

The first saying—“god is in the details”—is a German proverb that was popularized in mid-twentieth century architectural design by modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. By this phrase, van der Rohe implied that architectural clarity and beauty was derived not from tacked-on ornamental details (think of the historic styles, like Classical, Baroque, or Renaissance) but from the integral beauty of materials and structure.

Van der Rohe’s buildings were studies in minimalism–not in order to be cheap, but in order to be precise. It’s that precision that gives them their beauty. In the Barcelona Pavilion (one of his early famous works) he specified a wall of patterned marble, but he demanded that the stone be ‘bookmatched.’ A stone block was cut in thin slabs, and the masons kept close track of the order of the pieces. As they installed the stone, the masons arranged the slabs in sequence like the pages of a book, opening them out from each other and creating a pattern from just the material and the attention to the details of its installation.

Both kinds of walls –those with historic details tacked on, and those with patterning intrinsic to the materials–could be beautiful. The marble wall, with its simplicity and ‘honesty’, expressed the spirit of the times of early modernism much better than did the added ornament of the historic styles.

The second saying that I couldn’t get out of my head is the ubiquitous advice to writers (often attributed to Mark Twain but without verification) to “write what you know.” There are voluminous interpretations of what this advice means; many can be boiled down to exhortations for writers to base their writing on their real lived experiences or observations and to honor the emotional truths drawn from them. There is also extensive criticism of this saying because it can lead to vaguely disguised mishmash memoirs of what a writer personally did, felt, or thought or to superficial stories that tack on descriptions of physical details to set …

Last month I asked you to help me distinguish between when satire lands effectively and when it merely mocks or punches down. Thanks to the generosity of this community, a robust conversation followed. I’ll reference several of your comments below, and I encourage any readers who did not scroll through that comment section to do so now.

I did not explain the full context last month, which is my ambivalence about some similarities between my work in progress and a recent best seller that, to me, seems mean-spirited toward the very people my book attempts to understand. Exhibit D, the reason for this post and the previous one, will come next month, not out of coyness but because I need to build my argument step by step. For now let me give you Exhibits B and C.

Last month’s Exhibit A, you may recall, was The Book of Mormon musical, a show that skewers religions and their origin stories. Its creators have never been adherents of religion, much less the specific church they parody. When questioned about the offensiveness of their show, they say that religions in general are “goofy” and Mormons are “cheesy.” We are expected to take these comments as self-evident truths that excuse the anti-religious bite of their satire. Responses are mixed, but it’s hard to argue with 15 years of Broadway success.

The Book of Mormon musical is both a satire and a mockery. As Julie Christine Johnson pointed out last month, “the latter is always cruel, with the intent to cause harm, hurt, devalue. Satire can punch down, too, but it can also be deeply instructive and impactful and revelatory when it ‘punches up’ into power structures, organizations, injustices.”

This month, let’s rotate ninety degrees. What are the differences between satire and other entertainment forms that take a comedic view of their subjects, without unkind mockery?

For Exhibit B, I give you The Ending Writes Itself, a 2026 satire of the publishing industry by Evelyn Clarke. It made me laugh out loud more than once — while wondering why anyone would ever want to become a writer. It shows the ways that publishing is brutal, unfair, and impossibly demanding; it depicts authors as desperate, self-hating masochists who would do anything for a shot at a deal.

I felt seen.

Okay, yes, it’s a tiny bit exaggerated. The fictional authors endure personal tragedy and …

Anyone reading this likely already knows that selling books is hard. According to a survey conducted by YouGov, only 27 percent of Americans over the age of 15 read at least one book in 2025. The same study concluded that the percentage of Americans who read for pleasure on a daily basis is declining at a rate of three percent per year.

It’s also not news that, in most cases, it is authors themselves who shoulder the bulk of the responsibility for marketing and selling their books. According to Publishers Weekly, a traditionally published debut author needs to sell between 3,000 and 5,000 copies of a title in order for a publisher to consider acquiring a second title. Authors whose books have been published by smaller, independent presses often need to sell between 300 and 1,000 copies of a title in order for it to be considered successful. Needless to say, regardless of how good a book is, the odds are not in authors’ favor.

There’s a ton of advice out there detailing best practices for marketing and selling books both online and in person. A lot of it is helpful. Some of it is unrealistic, at least if you’re not Stephen King. All of it is incredibly laborious, and any return authors might receive in exchange for their efforts is far from guaranteed.

In spite of that, my second novel was among its publisher’s best-selling titles for two consecutive years after its publication in 2023. I don’t have an agent. The book, a coming-of-age story, was published by a small press with limited resources. And while the novel was a finalist for three national awards, well, see the first paragraph of this post.

How did I accomplish this? After trying, and largely failing, to market the book to a general audience of readers who just might possibly enjoy coming-of-age stories, I realized there was a group of people who were almost guaranteed to buy and read the book. Going with a gut feeling, I switched gears and concentrated all my marketing efforts toward this demographic.

I’m a Franco-American, a descendent of the nearly one-million French Canadians who emigrated to the northeastern United States from Québec and the Canadian maritime provinces in the 19th and early 20th centuries to work in factories. Currently, there are millions of Franco-Americans living in New England and upstate New York. But for …