When a woman appears on her doorstep bloodied and broken, Maude must decide how far she will go to protect her son’s estate. Will she follow the cultural rules, or will she find a strength she didn’t know she possessed?

“Improvements” is free on this website for one week only. If you would like an ebook copy of the story, you can get it at WMG Books or on any other ebook retail site. Enjoy!

Improvements

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

When the strange woman appeared, Maude was in the buttery, speaking with the clerk of the kitchen about his latest round of purchases. He went to market too often, she thought, and was too extravagant for the types of meals he produced. She would, if he did not modify his expenditures, have to fire him.

He would be the first servant she fired since her husband died.

The very idea filled her with dread. She had run the household since her marriage ten years before, but her husband had handled the money, the hiring and firing of servants, and the overall management of the large estate.

Now she managed it, in trust for their only child, a son who was still in swaddling. Still, some duties made her hands shake.

The clerk of the kitchen was a large florid man whom her husband had hired shortly before the baby was born. She had had misgivings about him then, but had been too tired to speak of them. Then her husband became ill, the baby had been born, and her husband had died, all within half a year’s time. She felt as if she woke up only recently to find herself in a life that only resembled the one she had once had.

The buttery was a small room off the kitchen. Beer and candles sat on the shelves. The stairs from the beer cellar descended down one side, and the main door of the buttery opened into the hall. She had sent the yeoman of the buttery—he was such a gossip—into the garden for a brief rest. Not that he needed one. His services were rarely used this early in the day.

The clerk of the kitchen was explaining, in his condescending voice, how some foods tasted poorly without the proper ingredients. She had her hands folded inside her sleeves, her wimple pinching her chin. She had been listening to him for too long, but she didn’t know how to make him stop.

And that was when they heard the screams, coming from the kitchen.

The clerk looked at her as if he had never heard such sounds before. She pushed past him into the Hall, through the Court, and into the kitchen.

It stank of grease and smoke and roasting meat. Even though no one was yet cooking the evening meal, the smell from last night’s lingered.

The kitchen staff was huddled near the outside door. One of the kitchen maids had her hands over her mouth. She was doubled over away from the door, as if she had seen something horrible.

Maude hurried past the worktable to the door itself. The servants parted as they saw her, all but the chief cook who blocked her way with his large body.

“Milady,” he said. “This is not for a lady to see.”

“Move aside,” she said.

He stared at her a moment, his blue eyes red-streaked from smoke, his lips thin and pursed as if he had tasted something bad. Then he stepped away from the door.

A woman lay on the flagstones leading into the garden. Her ragged clothes were blood-covered as was her face and hair. When she saw Maude, she raised a thin hand as if beseeching her.

“We shall take care of this, Milady,” the chief cook said. “It is nothing that should bother you.”

But they hadn’t taken care of it so far, had they? Besides, how could she leave a creature in such obvious distress?

“It is simply a beggar woman,” the chief cook said. “We see many of them at the kitchen. She was probably beset by thieves—“

“A beggar woman, beset by thieves? That does not seem likely.” Maude stepped outside. She knew why the staff was protecting her. The woman wore garments that Maude recognized from the town’s stew.

“She is a harlot, Milady,” the chief cook hissed. “Please. It is not right for you—“

“Enough!” Maude said. She crossed the flagstones and crouched beside the woman.

The woman smelled of sweat and fear. She was so thin that all the bones in her hand were visible. Her face was swollen and bruised, her teeth blackened and nearly gone. Yet Maude was certain the woman was younger than she.

Her surcoat had once been a rough wool, but time and use had worn it to nothing. There were several tears in it, recent tears, that rendered it nearly useless. She wore nothing underneath, and Maude could see scars beside the fresh bruises.

“Milady,” the woman murmured.

Maude put a hand on the woman’s forehead. No fever. She could not see where the blood came from. “Who did this to you?”

The woman touched her bloody garment. “Not mine.” She spoke so softly that Maude could barely hear her. “Anne’s.”

Maude felt a shiver run through her. “Where is Anne?”

The woman looked toward the forest beyond, and the road that led back into town. “I could not help her any longer…”

It was then that Maude looked at the woman’s feet. She wore no hose and no shoes. Her right leg, Maude suddenly realized, was twisted in an unnatural way.

“Help me get her inside,” Maude said to the chief cook.

“No, Mistress,” the woman said, but Maude ignored her.

The chief cook crossed his arms. “Milady, she is—“

“One of God’s children,” Maude said. “We shall take care of her.”

The chief cook sent out scullions and the indoor grooms. Apparently the cook was too good to help a woman in need.

The men slipped their arms beneath the woman and she moaned. Maude wondered how many other bones had been broken.

“Place her in the servants quarters and send for the wet nurse,” Maude said. Her wet nurse knew potions and herbs and healings. She had cursed the doctors when she saw what they had done to Maude’s husband, saying that if Maude had brought her in sooner, she could have saved him.

Considering that she saved the steward, who later fell to the same disease, Maude believed her.

The quarters where she had them take the woman were for the greater servants. They had rooms of their own, with cots stuffed with straw, instead of mattresses on the floor. This room had been empty since her husband died. She had lost a few servants and hadn’t had the energy to replace them.

The men laid the woman on the bed. She was paler than she had been before, and her eyes were glassy with pain.

“What are you called?” Maude asked.

“Mistress, your man, he is right about what I am.”

“Do not argue,” Maude said. “You are here now. What are you called?”

“Joan.”

“Joan,” Maude said. “Who did this?”

Joan closed her eyes. At that moment, the wet nurse appeared. She held a towel as if she had just left the young lord, and her surcoat was not properly fastened.

When she saw the woman on the bed, her gaze met Maude’s. “Milady, you know—“

“I know,” Maude said. “See what you can do. She’s been badly beaten and her arm is broken.”

The wet nurse nodded. She came inside, put a hand on Joan’s forehead, and then began to examine her. Maude stood.

The men were still crowded inside the room. It was as if they saw Joan as a curiosity and nothing more.

“Come,” Maude said. “We shall find this Anne.”

***

Halfway to town, they found what remained of Anne. She lay in a crumpled heap beside the road, her limbs bent at unnatural angles. Her face was bloodied, as if her nose had been broken, but that was not where all of the blood came from.

She had knife wounds on her hands and arms, and another through her belly. The dry road contained a black trail, as if she had lost blood the entire way.

Joan had carried her on a broken leg, until she could come no farther.

Maude turned to the head groom who had accompanied her. She took one of Anne’s cold, damaged hands, and held it out to him.

“What do you think of this?” she asked.

He shrugged. He could barely look at her. “This is not your concern, Milady.”

“Of course it is,” she snapped, startled at the tone that came out of her mouth. Had she ever spoken to anyone so harshly? “This is my land.”

He looked at her then, and it seemed as though there was pity in his eyes. It made her bristle.

“What becomes of these women,” he said, “is their choice.”

“I doubt anyone would choose to die like this,” Maude said. She ran her fingers over the deep wounds. The skin had parted so far that she could see muscle. “I believe she was trying to defend herself.”

“Be that as it may, Milady,” the groom said. “She knew what such a life would bring.”

Did she? Did anyone? Maude remembered the day after her marriage, as she rode in her husband’s carriage to her new home, the estate she now ran. Had she known that day how many miscarriages she would have? How the first babe born to them would die three days later in pain so bad that his little wails broke her heart? Had she known then that she would love her surviving son so much that it hurt?

Of course not. And the greatest surprise of all had been how badly she missed her husband, now that he was gone.

“You know something of these women then?” she asked her groom.

He flushed. “Only what I have overheard in taverns, Milady.”

She narrowed her eyes, not believing him. “They are from the stew, are they not?”

He nodded.

“Is such treatment common there?”

His flush grew deeper. “Milady, I am not—“

“I am a woman married and widowed,” she said. “I am not unfamiliar with such things.”

“There are perversions, Milady, that I cannot speak of to a gentleborn lady.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Perversions that would result in this?”

He looked away from her. His skin was the color of dark wine. “There are men who enjoy inflicting pain.”

She shuddered once, and decided that perhaps he was right; she was not ready to hear such things. Still, a woman had died on her land and another had come to her for help.

“What do you think they were doing here?” she asked. “Where do you think they were going?”

He shook his head. He knew, as well as she, that no one would have taken the women in.

The hand did not feel human. It was too cold, the flesh hard.

“We shall give her a Christian burial,” Maude said.

“Milady! She deserves no such treatment.”

“Did you know her then?” Maude asked.

He shook his head.

“Then you do not know who and what she was. Like me, you can only guess. And I choose to guess that she was a Godly woman. You shall send some men to bring her back to the house. We shall place her in the chapel, find her suitable clothes before the priest arrives, and have him say a few words over her.”

“He will not like this, Milady.”

“He will not know,” she said.

“How will he not learn of it?” the groom asked. “So many have seen her, so many already know.”

She raised her head, anger making her feel stronger than she had for almost a year. “If anyone speaks of this,” she said firmly, “he will be fired.”

The groom’s eyes widened. She had never been this cold before.

He nodded once. “As you wish,” he said.

***

Because of her duties to young Henry, the wet nurse enlisted the aid of two kitchen maids and a chambermaid, all of whom, the wet nurse said, also had knowledge of healing.

Maude was amazed that she knew so little of her staff. They bowed to her when she came into the room. It now smelled of wine and camphor. While Maude was gone, Joan’s sore feet had been cleaned and bound with cloth, her bruises rubbed with hot stones, and her broken leg set and splinted.

But she was awake, her eyes dark against her pale face.

“Leave us for a moment,” Maude said to the servants.

They bowed again, and slipped through the door. Maude took Joan’s hand. It was fragile as a bird’s wing, but at least it felt alive, warm and callused, the bones delicate against her palm.

“Anne is dead,” Maude said.

Joan closed her eyes for a moment, and nodded. It was as if Maude’s words made the death real.

“I am giving her a Christian funeral,” Maude said. “She is in the chapel. If you are well enough, you may attend.”

Joan bit her lower lip. “You do not want me there.”

“Of course I do,” she said.

“’Tis not a place for me.” Joan bowed her head.

“Our Lord did not think so,” Maude said. “Mary Magdalene was of your profession, yet she was at his side.”

Joan squeezed Maude’s hand. “You are a good woman. I did not mean to burden you.”

“It is no burden.” Maude put her other hand on top of Joan’s. “Who did this to you?”

“Milady, it is not for you to hear.”

“I am so tired of everyone telling me what I may and may not hear,” Maude said. “I have lived more than a score of years, and I know of the stew and the men who frequent it. Now, stop protecting my dainty ears and tell me who did this to you.”

“A man,” Joan whispered. “I do not know his name.”

“Is he the same one who killed Anne?”

A tear eased out of Joan’s right eye. “No.”

“Yet you left together.”

“She would not have been hurt if not for me.”

“Tell me,” Maude said, and so Joan did.

***

The story came out in fits and whispers, sometimes lost beneath the choking sound of Joan’s heavily drawn breath. A man—a customer—had ill used her, and Anne, seeing how badly Joan was hurt, went to William, the stewholder, asking him to send for a doctor. He refused, and demanded that Joan, who was popular, finish her night’s work.

Anne returned to Joan’s room, and bundled her up, taking bread from the kitchen, and rolled it and some clothing in two blankets. Anne had heard of nunneries that took in Daughters of Eve—the Order of Saint Mary Magdalene—and they would travel until they found such a place.

Anne was helping Joan out of the stew when William found them. He accused Anne of stealing and he drew a knife. He cut her and that brought him to a frenzy. He attacked her like a madman, and did not stop. Joan could not help her.

Blood spattered her face, and then his, and that seemed awaken him from his fit. He left them in the road outside the stew, left them, Joan believed, to die.

She managed to lift Anne over her shoulder, holding her in place with her good hand. Somehow she managed to make it to the middle of the forest before she fell, unable to go on. There she realized that Anne’s eyes were open and unseeing, that Anne was not drawing a breath.

She remembered no more.

“I do not even think I saw your manor,” she said. “I was just walking because I did not know what else to do.”

***

Maude did not know what to do either. She sat in her private chamber, head bowed. But she did not ask for God’s aid. Somehow she felt that God’s presence was in none of this.

The stewholder, she knew, had rights over his women. He could prevent them from leaving. He could punish them for an obvious theft. But Maude did not believe the theft of bread and blankets was sin enough for this. She did not believe that women, who sought to better themselves, deserved to die by the side of the road, to be left there like discarded clothes.

It took her an hour to come to her decision.

And then she sent for her steward.

***

He was a man of some years, thin after his illness, his hair gone except for graying tufts at the sides. Her husband had trusted him implicitly and Maude had trusted him as well. His advice had been sound, his care for the estate excellent.

He seemed uncomfortable to be in her private rooms. He waited, with the door open, for her instruction.

“Have the sheriff arrest the stewholder,” she said. “His name is William.”

“Milady,” the steward said. “Since your husband’s death, we have had no magistrate.”

She nodded. “I will sit in judgment,” she said.

He stared at her for a long moment, as if she were not someone he recognized.

“What would be the charge, then?” the steward asked.

“Murder,” she said.

***

She held the hearing the next day. She sat in her hall as the sheriff brought in William the Stewholder. He was a portly man whose scarlet tunic was made of an expensive serge and whose shoes were lined with fur.

He looked as if he could afford the loss of a blanket or two.

His hands were shackled, but his feet were not.

When he saw her, his face flushed the color of his tunic. “I’ll not sit before a woman!” he cried.

“You have no choice,” she said in her new voice, the voice that had been born of this experience. “I am the trustee of my husband’s lands, and until my son comes of age, I am the one who runs them.”

“That means she’s the magistrate,” the sheriff said, shaking William.

“Did you,” she asked, “stab a woman named Anne?”

“She stole from me.”

“Enough to warrant two dozen wounds?” Maude asked.

“The price of theft is death!” he shouted, spittle coming from his mouth. Apparently he felt that she would only understand him if he yelled.

“I determine the price of theft on these lands,” Maude said, amazed she could sound so calm. “Those women were injured. They wanted medical care.”

“Only one was injured,” he said.

“Yet you wanted her to work.”

He shrugged. “She done it before.”

Maude stared at him for a long moment. He stared back, unrepentant.

“I sentence you,” she said, “to a pilgrimage. You shall visit holy sites until you learn the meaning of humility.”

“How shall that be judged?” the sheriff asked.

“I believe it will take many years. Perhaps,” she said, “your pilgrimage shall be eternal. I shall think on it, and come to that decision by the morrow, when you shall be shipped out.”

“You cannot do this,” he said.

“We’ve already established that I can.”

“Those whores you’re so worried about will have no one to manage them.”

She felt cold. She hadn’t thought of that. She looked at the sheriff. “You shall bring them here. They shall learn useful work.”

“Milady, they may leave but that will not stop someone else from opening a stew,” the sheriff said.

“I am aware of that,” she said. “But at least it will not be William here.” She waved in dismissal. “Take him away.”

***

That evening, she sat alone in the chapel as the priest sent Anne’s soul on its way. Joan had been too ill to come. It would take many weeks for Joan to heal.

By then, Maude hoped the men she had sent to find the nearest Order of Saint Mary Magdalene would have returned with good news.

For it did not matter how a woman was born, as a daughter of Eve, or a daughter of Mary, she deserved to live a life free of brutality and pain.

Maude lived such a life, but she had not known it until now. And it had taken a sight that most would have shielded her from to teach her that she had strengths she had never expected.

She would hold these lands in trust for her son. And when he came of age, she would give them to him gladly, better than they had been when she came to them.

Better, because she had made them so.

Improvements

Copyright ©  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and Layout copyright © WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Alvaro Ennes/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

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The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post is from February of 2025, and is in the second section of  the book. 

DOING THE WORK AMID THE NOISE

From 2025

There are times in life when being a writer is hard. I don’t mean real-world hard. Real-world hard is when your job is so important that one small error means someone else dies. There are a lot of real-world hard jobs in the world, and they keep the rest of us safe and alive.

As I said in Chapter 11, entertainment is important as well. We have an obligation to help those who are doing real-world hard jobs by giving them some kind of respite at the end of their long days.

But that means we have to do the work, and the work comes out of our brains. When we’re panicked and distracted—checking the news every fifteen minutes, looking at our social media, worrying aloud with our friends about what is going to happen next—it’s difficult, if not near impossible to concentrate on our made-up worlds.

They feel so small and unimportant.

We don’t see readers enjoying our work. We have no idea that a reader will close a book and hug it, like I did a week ago when I finished Robert Crais’s latest, The Big Empty. I know that Bob is a slow writer, and I wish he wasn’t, because I would love another of his books right now.

He lives in L.A. Not only are people there dealing with the chaos that is America right now, they’re dealing with the devastating losses of many parts of their community. I suspect he’s distracted.

I know that Connie Willis is distracted because I’m following her Facebook page in which she aggregates all the news of the day. I have no idea how she finds the time to write fiction or if she even is. I hope she is.

I’m a former journalist. I love information, the more the better. But, after the election, I shut off all media. I canceled all of my major newspaper subscriptions, stopped watching everything but the weather on any news channel, and got a lot done. I needed to because of an ongoing business crisis.

But I also needed the rest.

And I knew if I didn’t figure out how to control the information that came to me, I would not write another sentence—at least in fiction.

Writing fiction, as unglamorous as it sounds, is my job. It’s what I do for a living. But it’s also what I would do if the world ended tomorrow (which has gotten closer, according to the Doomsday Clock run by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).

I make up stories. I always have. I write them down and have done that since I was in grade school.

Storytelling keeps me sane.

After the despair of the election (not shock, because I kept saying all summer [hell, all year] that this was possible, even if I wasn’t really listening to myself), I needed that quiet. I needed to accept that the world as I had known it for years would change dramatically.

How dramatically? I had—and have—no idea. This post is not about what’s going on out there in the real world. It’s changing too fast. I sat down at 1 p.m. on a Sunday, knowing that by the time I finish, more news will pour in.

It might be good; it might be bad; it might be hopeful; it might be devastating. It might be all those things at once.

It’s too much for the brain to cope with—and right now, it’s designed that way. Which is why I urge you to take care of yourself and your family first. Then take care of your community, whatever that might be, and then pick one or two or three issues to work on and be part of the solution for. If all of us do that, our differences will make sure that we will cover the entire spectrum of problems that are popping up like weeds.

Yes, I know. People are dying. I know. The situation is growing more dire by the day.

One step at a time. That’s all we can do. See above.

The problem is, then, how to corral the brain and give it enough space so that you can write.

That solution is different for each and every one of us. And it’s different each one of us as an individual at different points in our lives.

I can only give you examples from my own life.

Example #1: I got very sick when I was living on the Oregon Coast. I’m already allergic to half the world; there, we later discovered, I was living in mold and was allergic to that too. We moved to the dry desert here in Nevada just in time. I doubt I would have made it through the year otherwise.

But, I was and am a writer. I wrote through all of that, and even wrote a book about my methods for writing when I barely had enough strength to get out of bed. The book is called Writing With Chronic Illness, which will appear in a revised edition in mid-2026.

Some of the solutions in that book might work for some of you now. Doing the writing first, being happy with what you can accomplish, accepting your limits—all of those are important.

I did them as best I could there. Here, in Las Vegas, I’m healthier, although the chronic conditions do fell me more than I would like. I can get through them easier in this dry climate, so sometimes I forget what I had learned.

Example #2: Our close friend Bill Trojan died, and Dean had to handle Bill’s horribly messy estate. At the same time, my editor at one of the traditional publishing houses had a mental meltdown and spent a half an hour on the phone, screaming at me and telling me I was the worst writer on the planet.

No one treats me like that. No one. So I immediately divorced that publisher, offering to pay back the money they had invested in me and my work so that I could get the rights to my books back.

That was at least $250,000 that I would have had to pay—even though we were embroiled in the estate mess and Dean was not working on publishing and writing, due to that big problem.

My confidence was shaken, and we were in financial difficulties. I had to figure out how to write a funny novel that was still under contract.

I did, a page here and a page there. I remember sitting in my office and writing long paragraphs about how awful that editor was to get her out of my head so that I could actually finish a book that was under contract for someone else.

I did it, but shutting out the noise was almost impossible. It took concentration. It took will power. It took a daily reminder to myself that writing is supposed to be fun.

And you know what? Many days, it ended up being that way, just because of the determination.

Example #3: As many of you know, the last two or so years of my life have been filled with turmoil. Dean lost much of his eyesight, which meant we had to make some massive changes in our lives. Then, just as he was getting used to the changes, he fell on a 5K race and destroyed his right shoulder.

He couldn’t do much work. He was healing. I cared for him and, as I dug deeper into the business at our publishing company, I realized it was sick too.

We had to make drastic changes there, and I had to take over the company completely.

Which meant it got run the Kris way—lots of questions, lots of systems, lots of data, lots of procedures. The old staff buckled under the Kris method (which had not been in place since I got very ill in 2015), and within two months, they were gone…leaving problems so massive behind that those problems either had to be solved or the company had to be dissolved.

Dean and I chose solving those problems, and we had (and have) great help in doing so. These sorts of events teach you who your friends really are.

I knew, as we dug in, that I was not going to be focused on the writing. I needed to figure out how to harness that focus in a different way.

I had a novel to finish as well as short story deadlines from traditional short fiction editors. I was not going to miss those deadlines, and I needed to finish that novel.

The problem was that in this small condo, I did not have a second business office. I had to do the work on my laptop and my writing computer in my writing office.

I knew I needed help.

So I set up a challenge with other writers. I made it costly for me to lose (not just pride—which, pardon my French, fuck if I care about personal pride). I started the first challenge in December of 2023, and continued the challenges through most of 2024.

I lost a couple of times. But the challenge was the only thing that got me to the computer. Daily word count…that I had to report (and God, I hate reporting). I couldn’t fudge it for my own sake, and I didn’t.

I finished that novel, and a lot of short fiction, before September hit, and the business stuff combined with some legal matters that were all do-not-miss and I had to miss some writing days.

It irked me—and kept the writing as a focus.

Usually I don’t bring others into my writing process, but I knew I would need it in 2024. So I did it.

I continued the writing challenges into early 2025, because I knew that I needed to get back to massive novel production, and I didn’t want to lose my short story focus. I have to do both (which I have done throughout my career).

It’s not as draconian as the 2024 challenge, but my life is different now. The business has settled into a pattern. We’ve moved the main offices to Nevada, which means I have a business desk. (Yay!) And we’ve gotten through some of the mess left by the old staff, and what’s left we’re slowly wrapping our arms around.

One thing I noticed, though, in all of those crises, is that the world swirled around me, with its problems and its demands. In each of them, it felt like a massive storm pounding on the outside of my house—you know the kind: the rain is horizontal, the winds are devastating, and the view outside the windows is black and gray, with almost no visibility at all.

You just have to wait out those storms and know that when they’re over, everything will be different, but some things will still stand. There will be rebuilding. There will be heartbreak. But the sun will have come out to reveal what’s left.

In the middle of it, though, you just have to survive it and keep the important things safe.

Your writing is one of those important things. It will take effort to keep it safe. Effort on your part.

And you’ll have to figure out what it will take for you to do it. My methods might not work for you. Find what works. Realize that those things might not work in a different kind of crisis.

But you can find a way to be with yourself during these tough times.

Here are a few practical things you can do in most (not all) crises:

• Protect your safe space. For me, that’s my writing space. I couldn’t do it during this last crisis, but I managed somehow. It felt uncomfortable and reminded me yet again about the importance of having a dedicated writing computer.
• Shut off the internet. Dean uses a different computer for his internet research—one that’s just a foot or two away from his writing computer. I shut off my wi-fi, so that clicking over to the internet for research takes a conscious action, and often makes me realize that I was just heading over to distract myself. (Different strokes, y’know.)
• Set a daily writing time. Make sure your family knows what it is, and that you shouldn’t be disturbed. Try to pick a time when it’s not easy to disturb you (early mornings; late evenings)

There are so many other practical things you can do, but again, they become specific to you.

One other thing—a tough thing—is that sometimes the project you were working on when the crisis hit is not the project your creative voice needs right now. You might have to switch—something shorter, something longer, something that requires less research, something that requires a different kind of concentration.

It’s up to you.

But the key here is to remember that when you write, you’re inside and safe from the storm. It will rage around you unabated while you’re working. It’ll probably (sadly) still be there when you’re done with today’s writing session.

But you got that session done. It’s a victory.

Celebrate the tiny victories. Keep writing.

And remember, in almost every difficult time, the only way out is through.

“Doing The Work Amid The Noise” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

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But more and more people arrive, all wanting to go to Dunyon—creating a huge crisis for that little bar, the space station, and maybe the universe.

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Dunyon

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

It started in the far reaches of the sector—ships firing on each other, some destroyed. Keeping track became hard—communications turned sporadic, and who really followed which government was in charge of what anyway?

Rumors started, rumors impossible to confirm as communications throughout the system grew intermittent. Entire ships, destroyed. Cities, gone. A planet, blown up.

But most people saw no evidence of any of it. One would think, if a planet had been destroyed, there would be some kind of repercussion, but most people knew of none. Most people saw nothing.

Until one day the ships appeared overhead.

Most people barely had time to gather the family and the money, barely had time to get away, to find refugee ships.

But “refugee ships” make it sound organized, like an effort conducted by some charity organization or a benevolent and surviving government.

The ships weren’t organized or tied to each other or even very similar. Some were old-fashioned generation ships. Some were commandeered space yachts. Some were stolen trading vessels.

They made it only so far. Some refugees died in the blackness of space, the ships powerless, spinning slowly, the only thing surviving an emergency signal that would go forever unheeded.

Other refugees made it to the outer reaches of the sector. To supply stations and military outposts.

And the rest—well, the rest ended up here.

The new arrivals always ask me where here is, and I tell them one of three things, depending on my mood.

I say, I used to know but I don’t any more.

Or, It’s the end of the line.

Or, Here? This isn’t a place. It’s an emotion.

But too many asked me what that emotion was.

Desperation, I’d say. Desperation, pure and simple.

***

In truth, “here” was once an outpost, so far on the edge of the sector that we weren’t even sure which government claimed us. Mostly we claimed ourselves. Eventually, we became a destination space station, a haven for the rich. We built fantasy resorts spiraling off the main part of the station—all virtual reality and holographic technology like nothing else in the sector.

If you wanted to be pampered, you came here. If you wanted to redefine yourself, you came here. If you wanted to hide from the public, you came here.

It would cost you more money that most people ever saw, but you came here.

I came here without money twenty years ago. Most women, when they arrived, either dripped money or had unvarnished beauty. I had neither.

I was a former soldier looking for a respite, scarred inside and out. I started as a bartender, and built a reputation as the person who solved everyone else’s problems quickly, silently, and efficiently.

I did nothing but work and save and meddle (unemotionally) in other people’s lives. So as the station expanded, built its first exclusive wing, I had enough money to build my own bar with my own apartment attached.

I could run things the way that I wanted to, keep the hours that I wanted, let in the clients I wanted.

By being exclusive, I became popular.

And rich.

Nowadays, the bar is still exclusive. We are the only place that still charges a cover. We have entertainment in the back room—usually a band, sometimes a comedian, once in a while an acting troupe—all of them famous, all of them refugees. I pay well. People want to run their show in my place because they like my place.

I have human employees not because I can afford them (of course I can) but because I’m trying to create jobs so that fewer people remain stuck in the refugee areas, the places we called the pens. So far, I’ve created twenty-five jobs, and I’m thinking of expanding.

I’ve already expanded more than I initially planned. In addition to my entertainment room, I have a high stakes poker room. No one gets in without a fifty thousand minimum. I raised the stakes when I learned the truly desperate were taking the last of their savings and trying to double their money on my tables.

I didn’t want to get rich by making desperate people poor.

In the main room, we serve dinner at eight sharp. When the five courses are over, we clear the tables and serve drinks until four a.m.

At four, I shut down everything except the high stakes poker (some games can go on for days) and wander the halls, looking at the decay. The hotels that once catered to the dilettante are now filled to capacity with the rich and desperate. The restaurants serve food to the people who pay up front. But their doors are all closed when I wander. I see the signs for specials or warning the people from the pens to stay out. Sometimes I see evidence of a scuffle—broken chairs, smashed tables, a hastily made “closed for the week” sign.

The only places still open when I close the bar are the information kiosks. They have no employees, so people can use them at any time. Even at four in the morning, I will pass lines in front of the kiosks, lines that extend through dozens of corridors.

Information. That’s where the premium is. People want to know if their home is still there, if members of their family are still alive, when (if ever) they can return. Most never let go of the past, unable to accept they’re in a new future, one they don’t recognize.

I barely recognize it, and I have little to hang onto. But I see patterns. For example, you can always tell which part of the sector is closed or ruined or under attack because the information stops flowing from there. What replaces information is rumor.

Rumor. This place thrives on rumor. You can hear it as you walk through the corridors, going from the old resort section (now part of the pens) to the condo wing to my little neighborhood of exclusivity. You hear it in the lowered voices, see it in the furtive looks. You know that someone is lying to someone else, maybe not intentionally, but always harmfully.

For the rumors are almost always harmful. They give hope where there is none.

And I think that’s the most destructive of all.

***

Last month, I finally became a victim of rumors. The whispers, the looks, all came toward me, and I had no idea what was causing them.

My bartender brought me the first hint. He used the silent call built into the back bar to bring me down from my office on the second floor.

The bar in the main room is spectacular. I designed it for looks as well as ease for the bartender. I insist on a human bartender, not some robotic mixer or automated machine. There’s an art to mixing cocktails—the right amount of this touched with a splash of that—which machines can never get right.

The bar circles around a blue screen that shows flat images of anywhere in the sector. Usually I set the imagery, and I try to keep current: any place that’s considered safe shows up on the image screen, and any place that might have exploded out of existence gets removed from the rotation.

In front of the imagery stand bottles of real alcohol, most of them imported. The bulk of my real alcohol is stored in a safe room off-premise. Only I know where that safe room is because now, much of the real alcohol is more valuable than jewelry or credits or any other commodity except food. Some of those liquors aren’t ever going to be made any more, and the fifteen bottles in my storeroom are the fifteen last known bottles in the sector, maybe even the universe.

I price accordingly.

Between the bar and the back bar is a floor so springy that you can stand on it all day and your legs don’t ache. Customers sit on high stools that gradually tilt if the bartender decides the customer is sucking too much air. Obnoxious people leave quickly. Pleasant ones stay so long, they often fall asleep with their heads on my well-polished bar.

The bartender, Jack Kunitz, had moved to the very edge of the bar when he saw me. He was a burly man with a history as checkered as mine. He dreamed of opening his own bar one day—or he used to, before all of this.

He was polishing glasses with a special bar rag, even though we had a machine for that.

“See that woman?” he asked softly, nodding at the other side of the bar.

I could barely see her. The bar was shaped like a giant C, and she was in the middle of the opposite curve. Slender, older, rich. Rich was easy to tell because her clothes fit, she looked well nourished, and she still wore expensive rings on her long, thin fingers.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“She wants to know how much passage is,” he said.

“Passage?” I asked. “To where?”

“Dunyon,” he said.

“Dunyon?” I repeated. I had never heard of it. I thought I had heard of every damn place. “Where the hell is that?”

He shrugged. “I asked her. She said it was somewhere far from here. Somewhere safe.”

“Why is she asking us for passage?” I asked.

“Dunno,” he said. “I asked her. She said I should know. So I called you.”

Sometimes I had special information. Or a ticket someone lost at a high stakes game for an expensive berth on a ship leaving from here, usually somewhere far away. Maybe not somewhere safer, but somewhere different.

After you’ve been here for a while, after you’ve finally accepted that your home is gone, you have no family left, and nothing is ever going to be as it was, you go somewhere else, figuring you’ll start new, figuring you have at least a fighting chance of rebuilding some kind of life.

At least, that’s what these people tell me when they spend thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—for the chance to get the hell out of here.

“I don’t know a thing about Dunyon,” I said. “Apologize and tell her to check her source.”

He did, and she left, and I gave it no more thought until the next night when three more people—obviously wealthy people—offered a small fortune to buy their way to Dunyon. And the following night, six offered. By the next night, twenty-five.

The amount of money was staggering. The number of people willing to pay it was growing by the hour.

I needed to find out what Dunyon was, and I needed to find out fast.

***

Believe it or not, bartenders—bar owners—don’t always have the latest information. I don’t believe rumor and innuendo, and while I have a few trusted sources, I only trust them on matters pertaining to the station and my operator’s license. Anything else is suspect.

So at times like this, I have to use an information kiosk like everyone else. Before everything went to hell, I could access information from my apartment. But that avenue got shut off as the pens grew larger and larger. First people hacked into our personal systems, and then the information got corrupted. That made the kiosks the only safe place for news.

The kiosks were tapped into the station’s space monitoring system. Information from ships approaching and leaving, from other systems, and from various networks filtered through the monitoring system. If its information was wrong, the station would soon cease to exist.

The kiosks were designed so that no one could tap into that system, and anyone who tried to modify the kiosks’ security was arrested and often never heard from again.

I paid one of the cocktail waitresses to stand in line for me. Poor thing, she waited for eight hours before she contacted me. She was three people from the kiosk door. I still didn’t hurry down. Three people, at a minimum, would take twenty minutes to finish their business.

I made it to the kiosk in fifteen. Still two people away. The waitress looked exhausted.

“Next time,” she said. “Get someone else to stand for you. I’d rather be moving than standing still.”

I nodded, thanked her, and waited another fifteen minutes before getting into the kiosk myself.

The kiosks were ten feet tall and seven feet wide. They were oblong, with doors on two sides. The person accessing information went in one door while the person who had just finished with the kiosk went out the other.

As the doors slid, the kiosk wiped its memory, so that the newcomer would face a blank screen.

At least, that was the theory. More than once, I’d seen what the person before me had been searching for. Mostly, those searches didn’t concern me—a name I had never heard before, a place I was only vaguely conscious of—but the searches almost always ended with a red no-longer-viable notice.

My searches were few and far between. Mostly they pertained to specialized booze or a particular type of glassware. This was the first search I would ever make for a place.

The kiosk doors slid closed simultaneously and the side lighting came on, faint but illuminating. The flat screen in front of me had its own backlight. If I wanted a holographic avatar that would talk me through various programs, I had to turn around and deal with the other screen.

I interacted with people more than enough. I didn’t need a fake person to walk me through programming.

So I asked the screen in front of me about Dunyon and got this response back:

Which Dunyon?

Which Dunyon indeed? I had no idea. But I couldn’t tell an information kiosk that.

“Dunyon,” I repeated. “The one that’s far from here. And safe.”

You are the six hundredth person to enquire about that Dunyon on this station in the past week, the system informed me. I have no Dunyon that fits such parameters.

“How about a place called Dunyon within travel distance from this station?” I asked.

I have no Dunyon that fits those parameters either, the system informed me. You are asking questions in the same pattern as four-hundred-and-eighty other inquirers. Would you like the remaining questions and answers?

I didn’t like being told I was unoriginal, but I did appreciate the shortened workload. I told the system yes, and let it inform me that there was no place called Dunyon in the known universe, that there was no place with alternate spellings or pronunciations of Dunyon in the known universe, and no place called Dunyon on any shipping lanes.

“No place nicknamed Dunyon?” I asked.

No, the system told me, and then informed me that I was starting down a line of questioning that 365 people had followed. I got their results as well.

So far as we could tell—all of us who inquired on this system—Dunyon did not exist.

Then I remembered the system’s initial response to my very first question.

“When I inquired about Dunyon,” I said, “you asked me to clarify. You said, which Dunyon? Which implies that there are several Dunyons. What are they?”

Dunyon, the system responded. An ancient family of hereditary rulers on Uteelly. The family was assassinated several thousand years ago. Uteelly was destroyed in the latest wars, along with all cities and landmarks named after the family Dunyon.

I wondered if that was the source of my rumor and was about to ask when the system continued.

Dunyon, it said. A mythological city in the Koppae Sector. A place that may or may not have existed. Thought to be the perfect city. The hereditary family Dunyon of Uteelly claimed to be the only survivors of Dunyon, although this is unproven. There is no evidence that this Dunyon ever existed.

But it sounded like my Dunyon, the place far from here, the place that was safe. In these troubled times, “safe” was better than perfect or idyllically beautiful.

I frowned. There was a long silence, and I realized that the system had finished its recitation.

“When did you get your first query about Dunyon?” I asked.

Seven days ago.

“Did that query fit into any of the patterns of inquiry you mentioned before?”

No.

“What did that questioner want to know?” I asked.

Personal inquiries are protected information, the system said, rather primly it seemed to me.

“Did I ask any of the same questions as the original inquirer?” I asked.

No, the system said.

I felt frustrated. I couldn’t find out where this information had originated, but it had clearly originated here on this station one week before.

“Did I receive any of the same answers as the other questioner?” I asked.

No, the system said.

I thought for a moment. Then I tried one last question. “Has anyone thought they’ve found the lost city of Dunyon?”

Time parameters?

Time parameters? It took me a moment to understand that. “When did that Dunyon disappear?”

Sixteen centuries ago.

“Has anyone thought they’ve found the lost city of Dunyon in the past three hundred years?”

I chose the number 300 randomly. I could have chosen 500 or even the full sixteen hundred. But I wanted some inkling of what was happening recently.

Seventy-five explorers believed they found Dunyon. But they could not find it a second time.

I recognized this myth. It had existed throughout human history. The vanishing city. The perfect city that you could only visit once.

“Has anyone found the lost city of Dunyon in the past fifty years?”

Lucas Ennelly found the lost city of Dunyon fifteen years ago.

“Where is Lucas Ennelly now?” I asked.

I got the red screen. Lucas Ennelly was no longer viable. Even though I expected something like that, I still felt discouraged. I could understand why most people fled the kiosk upon getting such news.

“When did Lucas Ennelly die?” I asked.

Eight days ago, the system told me.

My stomach clenched. I was on to something.

“Where?” I asked, even though I had a hunch I knew.

In a bar on this station, the system told me.

“Which bar?” I asked. I knew what the system would tell me. I really didn’t have to wait for the words, although I did.

My bar. Lucas Ennelly died in my bar, eight days ago.

The day before the woman arrived, asking about Dunyon.

***

People die in my bar all the time. That’s part of the new reality. No one has the money to do simple things, like eat properly or see doctors when they get ill. The pens are breeding grounds for all kinds of viruses, and no one is allowed to leave if they’re sick.

But that doesn’t always stop people. Nor do they benefit from the constant stress and worry. Heart attacks, once thought to be eradicated, are common now, along with strokes. Experts are saying that it is the stress which kills, but I think it’s a broken heart.

Lucas Ennelly passed out at the bar, not far from where that woman sat. By the time we realized he wasn’t a passed-out drunk, it was too late. He had stopped breathing an hour before.

I’m not held liable for such things, just like I’m not held liable for the attacks and the attempted murders that go on just outside. People have become hostile. They drink too much and get too angry.

I’m always happy when they pass out. I prefer to let them rest there, since God knows, they probably don’t get rest anywhere else.

Jake contacted authorities when we realized Ennelly was dead. One of the station’s six coroners eventually removed the body, and—I’m sorry to say—that was the last thought we had given him, if we had given him one before that.

I was giving him a lot of thought now. I had the system tell me all it could about Lucas Ennelly. Turned out he was taking funds from people—the money the woman had quoted to us—for safe passage to Dunyon. He had already made a down payment on a retrofitted generation ship. He was going to take everyone to a place he had only seen once.

And they were willing to believe him. I left the kiosk, and reported his scheme to the authorities. If things went well, they might find some of Ennelly’s funds and return them to the poor unsuspecting souls who had invested so much for escape to a mythical realm.

If things went the way they normally did, some low-grade bureaucrat would find the money, pocket it, and claim that Ennelly had spent it all.

I couldn’t worry about it.

I had to figure out how to keep Ennelly’s clients from coming to my bar.

I walked back. I didn’t usually have time off during the day and it was an odd treat to see people in the corridors, to see the full restaurants, and the back-and-forth of commerce, even if it was conducted furtively and with great desperation.

By the time I got back to my exclusive neighborhood, I was relieved. I was tired of the crowds, the grasping, the clawing, the questioning looks from faces shoved against mine. I had gotten used to the late night silence as well as the order I kept inside my own bar.

I preferred it.

I wasn’t going to get it, however.

Because as I got close, I heard shouting. Then I saw dozens and dozens of people, pressing against the bar’s entrance. A mob, screaming, pulling, punching. The windows looking into the corridor were already broken and people were pouring inside.

I had never seen such chaos at my place—or even in this neighborhood. I grabbed one man and pulled him back.

“What’s going on?”

“Free tickets to Dunyon to the first five hundred people!” he yelled back, then pulled away from me.

I stood there, breathless, as more and more people hurried toward my bar. None were well dressed. They all smelled like sweat and unwashed clothes.

People from the pens, running toward free tickets.

I scrambled away, heading to the side of the bar. The employee entrance was hidden. Only an employee’s DNA made it visible, and no one else’s. I made sure I wasn’t followed before I touched the wall, which opened for me, and let me slide inside.

Inside wasn’t much better. People crowded the main room. The images behind the bar were shut off, and it took me a moment to realize why. Someone had broken the screen. Bright light shone from it onto the floor above.

Jake was standing behind the bar, protecting the expensive liquors with some kind of unauthorized weapon. The cocktail waitress who had helped me was keeping people back with the broken edge of a bottle.

I didn’t see any other employees, but I glanced up. The doors to the back rooms were closed and locked. Someone had the presence of mind to seal off the entertainment area and the high stakes poker room.

The noise was deafening. I pressed the emergency call button beside the employee entrance and got a green light, which meant help was on the way.

Although I wasn’t sure what the authorities could do, except stun the rioters and maybe hurt regular patrons inside my bar.

I pushed my way to the bar proper, then climbed on top of it. I waved my hands, but nothing happened.

So I shouted, “I’m the owner of this bar!”

The people in front of me stopped yelling and pushing.

I shouted the same thing again, and again, until the entire room was quiet.

Now I had to tell them something. I could have said the authorities were coming and they would all be arrested, but that probably wouldn’t counteract the concept of a free ticket.

I had to be creative.

I had to let them think they were getting what they wanted.

“Thank you all for coming,” I said, hoping I sounded sincere. “It’s been a great promotion. Lucas Ennelly gave us tickets to Dunyon and I’m proud to tell you that we have just given the last one away. Congratulations to all the winners!”

I clapped my hands, as if I were congratulating someone. Jack watched me for a minute as if I had lost my mind, then he started clapping too. The cocktail waitress slapped one hand against the neck of the broken bottle.

A few confused people up front peered at me, but people behind them started to clap. And so did everyone else.

They were so used to losing, so used to being the ones who did not get the special treatment, that they weren’t angry when they realized the tickets they had come for were gone. They accepted the loss as one more in a series of losses. They pretended joy for my so-called winners, and then they slowly, calmly, filed out.

No one remained except Jake, the cocktail waitress, and one of our regulars, who had clung to his seat at the bar through it all.

“What the hell was that?” Jake asked.

“I know how the rumor started,” I said, and told him about Lucas Ennelly. “He really was selling tickets to Dunyon from this bar for a lot of money.”

“A scam,” the waitress said.

“Most likely,” I said. Then I shrugged. “But people who claimed they found the lost city of Dunyon always tried to go back. I think he was using these poor people to fund his trip.”

“I don’t get it,” Jake said. He set his weapon in a drawer behind the bar that I had forgotten about. “Why come in greater numbers after he died?”

“Two reasons I think,” I said. “First, people had bought tickets here. And second, deaths don’t get publicized on the station. No one knew he was dead.”

“So they thought he was holding out on them,” the cocktail waitress said.

I nodded. “Which only made them more desperate.”

I didn’t have to explain the rest to them. Because they live here and they know: Desperation leads to rumors and rumors become wild stories, and wild stories ignite belief. People are taking action on the smallest things, the most unlikely things, because they need something—anything—to cling to.

I’ve seen it countless times.

I just hadn’t experienced it myself.

Until then.

The authorities arrived too late to do anything. We were already sweeping up the mess, replacing the broken tables with others from our back rooms, and scrambling to find more chairs.

I didn’t even file a complaint because who was there to complain against? God? The universe? The random unfairness of the conflicts we all found ourselves in?

So I had some damage and I lost some money. I consider myself one of the lucky ones.

 I have a place. I am here on purpose, not because I have nowhere else to go.

Unlike most of the people outside my doors, I am not desperate.

Not yet.

Although I feel the press of humanity with the arrival of each new ship filled with refugees, as the pens grow bigger and the crowds more unruly.

At some point, there won’t be incidents any more, sparked by rumors, fed by hopelessness.

At some point, it really will be us against them.

And we will lose.

Because there are too many of them, desperate and terrified. And there are too few of us, pretending that civilization will go on.

Even when there is no real civilization left.

Anyway, with school ending and a bunch of other things closing down, it feels like summer has started. The end of the school year has always felt like a beginning to me anyway, as the daughter of a professor. I love school (which is why I take the occasional class at UNLV) and I love having school end.

Oh! And basketball season has started just this weekend, even though my Aces allowed themselves to suffer a tragic defeat yesterday.

My summer includes a lot of book design, some learning on a video program, and several writing-adjacent projects. I looked at that, then looked at myself, and realized, Uh,oh. Distract-o Girl will not get much writing done unless she plans really well.

I have learned over the last few years that without firm deadlines from the outside, I need something to get me in the chair first thing. Challenges work, especially when I have a lot of other distractions. (In the past three years, they were mostly bad distractions; now they’re mostly good ones.)

So, I’m in need of a challenge. When I’m in need of an exterior challenge, I set one up. I talked to Dean about it, and it seems that he needs one too. Plus we need to focus on the writing first again, which means we need to do some motivational things. When we get like this, we want to share.

Rather than have me explain it all, I’m going to copy Dean’s blog from Thursday night. (Note that the “I” in the italicized section below is actually Dean.)

Everything in this Storybundle is exclusive, including The Write Attitude. So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. The bundle will end in 9 days, so hurry on over. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites starting next month. The new edition will release in July.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post appeared on my Patreon page in November of 2025, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

SOUNDING LIKE YOURSELF

From 2025

In a Billboard article about Addison Rae, I came across a useful Miles Davis quote. (Billboard, August 13, 2025.) She cited the quote this way:

Sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.

Wow. That hit home. But before I used it to base a blog post on, I looked it up. I was worried that it really wasn’t a Miles Davis quote or that it was a misquote (although it didn’t sound like one). What I found was that there are two versions of this quote, which leads me to believe that the jazz great remarked on this a lot.

The other version of the quote says:

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

And I think I like that one better, although both quotes are useful. For those of you who don’t know who Miles Davis was, he was one of the most influential musicians of the mid-twentieth century. He is definitely one of the most influential jazz musicians of all time.

If you are not familiar with him or his work, start at his website, milesdavis.com, and scan outward. You are probably familiar with a lot of his music, particularly if you’re a jazz fan.

The reason I like both quotes is that they have at least two different meanings, three if you think of them from the point of view of a prose writer.

The first quote: It takes a long time to sound like yourself.

That’s all about voice. Yes, Miles Davis, Addison Rae, and vocal coach Eric Vetro (who first showed Rae the quote) were talking about a musical voice—about sounding like no one else by channeling your own inner vision.

Which is what the best writers do. (That’s why the worst copy editors aren’t the ones who introduce mistakes; they’re the ones who put some writer’s manuscript into “perfect” grammar, ruining their voice.) If you listen to Stephen King reading his own work, his inflections and pauses are not surprising because he knows how to write them into the prose. (His accent or the tone of his voice might surprise you, but nothing more than that.)

Stephen King, former English teacher, found his own voice as a young boy and then learned how to transmit that voice, via the tool of a manuscript, into the brain of a reader. What he does is an extremely difficult skill, and one I aspire to. That’s why I typed Mick Herron’s work into my computer a while back (see the previous chapter), so that I could learn how someone else did things.

The more tools you have in the toolbox, the better writer you will be.

If you don’t read much fiction or you don’t read much fiction anymore, as so many writers say, then you’ve stopped accumulating tools. As long as I breathe, I will be reading. And the fascinating part to me is that I see writers do things that I thought were impossible or things I’ve never thought of. Or, Mick Herron’s case, he does things that someone, somewhere, decades ago, had warned me away from. (The opening to each Slough House book is an astonishing exercise in setting the stage as well as the characters and the themes of each book.)

Here’s the tough part. Once you sound like yourself, your writing will seem bland to you. Because you live with that voice in your head each and every day.

So that’s the voice part.

That’s the first part of sounding like yourself.

The second part is this: You must defend your voice, your “sound.” Sure, it might be “wrong” to use a dozen semi-colons in a single paragraph, but Herron does it to such great effect (sometimes in a single sentence) that the reader doesn’t notice them.

I didn’t realize the man uses a million semi-colons until I typed in his work. I’m semi-colon lite, dash heavy, which, I thought, made me a much more breathless writer than he is, but his work continually proves me wrong.

I’m sure some silly copy editor somewhere tried, once upon a time, to edit out all of his semi-colons and to make his honkin’ long single-sentence paragraphs into many sentences, and from what I can tell, the man slapped them down.

There’s another component to voice, though, and it has nothing to do with words and grammar and punctuation. It’s subject matter. It’s characterization. It’s something I discussed after the Herron piece. It’s the ability to “go there,” wherever there is. (See chapter 10.) To write the stuff that frightens us, that makes us original, that might get us in trouble with the readers or in some cases, the government.

It’s the stuff that doesn’t fall into genre lines.

I was having a discussion a few weeks back with someone I was considering working with on a future project. That person insisted we use trope charts, like so many writers have started to do in Kickstarters.

Tropes are well and good, if used sparingly. As a romance reader, I want to see—either from the sales copy or from a trope listing—that the book in my hand uses the enemies-to-lovers trope or is a small-town romance. I want to avoid a guardian-ward historical trope because…yucky!

So a one-line description or acknowledgement of the trope is a good thing, especially in books where the ending is prescribed, like a romance (happily ever after) or a cozy mystery (amateur solves a stakes-free murder).

But other than that—a tropes chart? You might as well put two gigantic signs on your work. The first sign says, Read something else because this book is on rails. The second sign says, This book is mediocre. There are no surprises here. There’s a third sign, but only if someone dares to crack open a book based on a tropes chart. And that sign says This writer has no idea what tropes are. The ones listed here are not in the book.

Whoops.

Writers who sound like themselves can’t write books that can be boiled down into a tropes chart. Sure, the overall trope might work because that might form the heart of the book. (I’m thinking of enemies to lovers here in a romance trope.) But going beyond that would harm the reading experience if the writer is writing from their heart.

That’s why writers who are really good at sounding like themselves often have trouble selling their fiction to set markets, particularly traditional markets. Those markets want something they can sell, and a book that’s on rails is easier to market to a consumer than a book that is, at its core, like nothing a reader has ever seen before.

That’s why this quote comes from Miles Davis. His website has this sentence on the home page:

Miles Davis made music that grew from an uncanny talent to hear the future and a headstrong desire to play it.

Note the phrases here. “Uncanny talent.” In other words, he did things no one else dared. “Hear the future.” I might disagree with that one on some level, because on that level, Davis invented the future that his website claimed he heard. And, the most important phrase, “a headstrong desire to play it.”

Later this little biographical snippet points out that Davis never stopped fighting for his art. That’s my memory of him. He wasn’t as respected in his lifetime as he became later, even though no one dared argue with the impact he was having. I worked in listener-sponsored radio in Wisconsin and was immersed in jazz. We could play all kinds of jazz for our listeners and they supported the programming with their dollars.

The other local jazz station was much more conservative. They played traditional melodic jazz, things we call standards now, and would go to modern jazz after 10 p.m. when most Midwesterners went to bed. Even then, you wouldn’t find a lot of Miles Davis on that station. The powers that be loathed his work.

I think that’s the other side of this. You have to become good enough to force people to have opinions about your work. “Having opinions” means they’ll love it or they’ll hate it. What is most important, though, is that they won’t forget it.

These mediocre, “properly written” works? The ones with the voice edited out of them, with the vision troped to death? Those will be forgotten the moment that the reader closes the book.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever want to be accused of being mediocre. Love or hate my work, that’s up to the reader. But finding it dull or predictable…well, then, I’ve done something wrong.

The second quote from Miles Davis is my favorite. I think it might more accurately reflect what he’s getting at, especially if you’re familiar with his music.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Yeah, I know. He’s talking about playing music, often onstage. He was the master of improvisation, but even in the improvisation, the listener knew they were listening to Miles Davis. His perspective was that original.

But what I love here is the word “play.” I love watching jazz musicians in particular improvise. Somewhere in the middle of what they’re doing, they’ll grin at each other. They’re having fun. They’re creating something new, something unexpected, and it gives them joy.

This type of musicianship is why I don’t miss a Keith Urban residency when he’s in Las Vegas. He performs intensely and playfully, goofing around much more than other residency performers I’ve seen. I wasn’t a big fan (or much of a fan at all) when I first saw him perform, and now I go to watch the playful musicianship.

Writers need to play as well. We need to experiment. We need to risk failure. We need to jangle some chords, try a different instrument, and go far, far, far off the beaten path.

That means we’ll miss sometimes, but it also means that when we hit, the work will be powerful.

When I talk about play, I’m not saying that writers should only write something light and “fun.” Instead, I’m talking about experimentation, about risking everything, about free-floating ideas from our own subconscious even if those ideas make us feel uncomfortable.

We should also go for different formats and different genres, different lengths and different ideas than we’ve explored before. We might not be onstage riffing with our friends, but we should write in that same spirit of improvisational play.

We need to be uniquely ourselves as writers. And as Miles Davis said (and yes, he wrote his own stuff), it takes a long time to achieve that.

But finding yourself as a writer? That’s worth the time spent.

“Sounding Like Yourself” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

If you like what you see here, head over to the campaign. You’ll find it here.

You know what? Even if you don’t like the video, head over to the campaign. There’s lots to love in it.

Enjoy!

Got introduced to some marvelous playwrights and some fascinating theater history as well. Also had to wrestle with more bad writer behavior from some of them. I’m going to include two, one amazing woman and a man with a difficult history. 

Fewer articles than usual. Maybe I just wasn’t in an article-recommending mood.

So here’s April’s reading. It’s quite a cornucopia.

April, 2026

Canfield, David, “Love The Sinner,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 11, 2026. This is an interview with Ryan Coogler, written before the Oscar ceremony. It’s worthwhile to see how one of the most creative artists in film approaches story, imposter syndrome, and business negotiations. He got an amazing deal from Warner Bros. last year. About it, The Hollywood Reporter says:

Driven by both the movie’s themes (Sinners) and the evolution of his own career, Coogler negotiated to have Warner Bros. return the rights to him 25 years after release — an uncommon, if hardly unprecedented, arrangement that nonetheless sparked endless debate about its merits both for him, despite his strong track record, and for an embattled Warner Bros.

And yet, he pulled it off. Ask and see what will happen. That’s the art of negotiation. Now, read the article.

Carter, Ally, Only The Good Spy Young, Little, Brown and Company, 2010. I continue to work my way through Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girls series, which takes place at a boarding house for spies. Things are getting real by this, Book 4. I found it a bit distressing, because no one trusted a character that had been set up as a good person earlier in the series. I truly did not know if the earlier impressions were correct. (Not giving spoilers here.) So the book is effective, and even though I read these late in the day, hoping not to stay up late, I ended up staying up late to finish. It’s a good series, but start with the first book.

Carter, Stephen L., The Emperor of Ocean Park, Vintage Contemporaries, 2002. I’ve been planning to read this novel for nearly 25 years. But the cover put me off—or something did. I’ve read other books of Carter’s and liked them. Then I picked up a later work, and saw a mention that it was tied to this one, and thought, “Okay, time to read this book first.”

I’m glad I did. It was a deliberately slow read. (John Grisham’s blurb calls it a legal thriller. Um, no. It’s a legal meanderer.) Mostly it’s a family saga, beautifully written, with characters so vivid they leap off the page. My favorite is our protagonist, Talbot Garland’s son, Bentley, who is only three. I’m guessing that Carter’s son was three at the time the book got written, because this three-year-old sings off the page–all the good and bad things about three-year-olds are here, delightfully so. The love that Talbot has for his son is the best thing about the book, which also shows that no matter how much you love your children, the way you live your life can have an unforeseen impact on them. Bentley makes it to the end, but that charming three-year-old eventually turns four in a different circumstance.

Circling around all of this is the ghost of Talbot’s father, a judge who was nominated to serve on (it seems) Reagan’s Supreme Court, until a scandal that happened in the middle of his hearings brought him down. Rather like Robert Bork, only if Bork had been Black, adding an entire racial component. The judge dies under what some believe to be mysterious circumstances and there’s quite a bit of drama around fake FBI agents and detectives and a university that seems…well…familiar.

The only problem I had with this book is that it felt normal. At the time it was published, it must have been shocking. A corrupt judge that close to the court? Murder? People being uncivil in government, lying about who they are? The book almost seems prescient.

I really, really enjoyed the time I spent with the book and miss visiting it now that I finished.

Grynbaum, Michael M., Empire of the Elite, Simon & Schuster, 2025. Well, I have two ugly covers on this list, and this is, by far, the ugliest. However, the book is fascinating. Empire of the Elite is the history of Condé Nast, from its start 100 years ago or so to now. If you’re a writer who has been at this for more than two decades, back when the New Yorker and Vanity Fair were actually important magazines, you might want to read this. Not just for the dishy (but sourced) gossip, but for the reason that you—a member of the Great Unwashed who did not hang out in rarified circles—could never succeed over the transom. Just the amount of money spent to maintain the illusion of taste and power is breathtaking, even in 2026 terms.

Dunno about the rest of you, but I’m thrilled that we do not live in this curated world any longer. Still, the book itself is quite the publishing education.

Johnson, Georgia Douglas, A Sunday Morning in The South, University of Illinois Press, 2024. Play written in 1924/25. Sadly, while I had heard of a number of writers from the Harlem Renaissance, like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, I had never heard of Georgia Douglas Johnson. She was exceedingly influential, holding salons and working with younger writers. This play, which is one of her anti-lynching plays, is a gut-punching read. I’d love to see it performed. The book, which is not where I read the play (we got an excerpt from a different book), contains two states—a Black church version and a white church version. I do hope you read this, and when you do, realize that it was a contemporary play, not a historical one. She was dealing with a very real issue 100 years ago, and doing so powerfully.

The play is set in a family kitchen near a church. The music filters in as the grandmother cooks breakfast and talks with her grandchildren. The action is startling and much-too-true. The play’s characters are rich and her writing is amazing, so that you can visualize the show easily while reading the script.

Odets, Clifford, Waiting for Lefty, 1935. I couldn’t find an ebook version, so I linked to a Grove/Atlantic version from 1994. Another political play. Like A Sunday Morning in the South, this feels too on point for where we are in 2026. (Sigh) This is a play of a union meeting—written before Waiting for Godot. Lefty is a union leader who might authorize a strike vote against a taxi-cab company. While everyone waits, they talk about the reasons they need to be paid more.

The structure of the play caught me. Little vignettes in the middle have just as much power as the play overall. I’m still thinking about the format.

Odets himself is a controversial figure. He, along with Elia Kazan, named names in the 1950s blacklist era. There were reasons they did so in the way that they did, but it didn’t play well with the blacklisted authors. (Or others, for that matter.) As we were studying this, I kept thinking, Why do I know his name? so I looked him up after class and realized why I did. It’s fascinating to have the hindsight on a lot of these writers. We also dealt with Bertold Brecht this month, and wowza, was he a piece of work. Still thinking on all of this…

Schmitt, Preston, “How To Win A Nobel Prize,” specifically “Mr. & Mrs. Lederberg,” On Wisconsin, Winter, 2025. When the idiots in the Trump administration started cutting funding for universities (and continue to cut funding for science. Bastards.), most universities have found ways to fight back.The University of Wisconsin is using its alumni magazine to point out how significant the research is, was, and can be. On the was side of the equation is this article, about all the Nobels the university has won. Normally, I wouldn’t point this out, but there is a very sad middle to the entire thing. The only woman on the list, Esther Lederberg, did not win a Nobel. Her husband did in 1958 for work they did together. In fact, she’s the one who made the breakthrough discovery, not him. Take a look at this, please, and do what you can to make sure that things like this never happen again.

Score, Lucy, Mistakes Were Made, Bloom Books, 2026. I forgot that, when I preordered this, I ordered the Amazon special edition, planning to get the regular paperback later. I ended up with, bar none, one of the ugliest books I’ve ever seen. Click over and take a look. Whoever designed it apparently loved yellow. The book screams at you from across the room. I also forgot, until just now, that Lucy Score is an Amazon-exclusive ebook writer, and was picked up by Bloom Books for her paperbacks only. So I’m linking to Amazon so that you can get the ebook. Frustrating as hell.

The book arrived this month, just as I was thinking I needed something light. This is light and funny. Score can write situations that are completely unbelievable, but work. And her dialogue sparkles. There was one too many iterations of will-they-won’t-they, but I was committed. This, in theory, is about an agent who moves to a small town to deal with her one and only client. Yeah, that happens. So suspend your disbelief.

Some good stuff here about living with ADHD, about forgiveness, and about the way lives can be destroyed in a single moment. So behind the humor is some good, if tough, stuff.

The book is exclusive to the Storybundle—meaning that at the moment, you can’t get it anywhere else. So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites in a few weeks. The new edition will release on July 14.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post, which first appeared on this site in slightly different form, is from January of 2015, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

Churning It Out

Toward the end of a pretty good Entertainment Weekly article about the romance side of the publishing industry, this sentence appears:

[Bella Andre]’s a naturally fast writer—on average she churns out four to six books a year—and she released the first one in June 2011.

Before we get to the reason I’m telling you about that sentence, let me say one thing that might or might not be related: There’s a slight snobby tone to EW’s romance article. What’s that all about? The magazine’s called Entertainment Weekly. It’s not The New York Times Book Review. EW sings the praises of The Walking Dead and video games, and everything in between, for heaven’s sake, but somehow romance fiction doesn’t meet the high standards of entertainment?

Sorry. I had to get that off my chest.

As I said, the article, “A Billion-Dollar Affair,” by Karen Valby, appeared in the October 24, 2014 issue, and did cover the romance industry (of the time) pretty well. (And is still available online.)

So why am I objecting to that single sentence?

I’m not, really. It’s a common sentence from any media that covers books. And I’m not even objecting to the entire sentence. Bella Andre does write fast by most writers’ standards, and she does so comfortably.

What I’m objecting to is the phrase “churned out.”

It’s become a cliché. Any writer who writes fast “churns out” material. Or she “cranks out” or “pounds out” whatever it is that she writes. Because clearly, no writer who writes fast can think about what she writes.

There are other implications in that phrase. The material “churned out” isn’t very good. Anything “churned out” is an exact copy of what has come before. It has no real value, primarily because of the speed with which the writer “churns out” the material.

In the olden days of traditional publishing, those of us who “churned out” a lot of books did so under a lot of pen names. Here’s how it worked in my case: Kristine Kathryn Rusch might, at best, put out two books per year; Kris Nelscott one every two years; and Kristine Grayson one every six months.

Most reviewers never noticed all the short stories or blog posts or nonfiction. Only a handful of people (including my agents back when I was stupid enough to hire them) knew that I wrote under other pen names as well.

While reading a midlist thriller novel in bed one night several years ago, I laughed so hard that I woke Dean up. What made me laugh? The author’s bio, which stated that the byline of the novel I was reading was a pen name for a “well-known #1 New York Times bestselling author.” Ballsy and hysterical. That writer wrote so many books that his publisher refused to publish them all under the author’s bestselling name.

Or maybe the publisher never got a chance. Because I later discovered who the author in question was (and that’s why I’m not naming the book here), and discovered that the author had nearly a dozen pen names, and kept them all quiet—except for that coy little bio for at least one of them.

In the opening to Bag of Bones (first published in 1998), Stephen King writes that his main character, a bestselling novelist, kept one novel in the drawer for every novel he published, since his publisher was demanding that he publish no more than one book per year.

Think about this, people: How many other industries that have mega-selling products demand that the producer of popular, high-quality material slow down? What happened to providing the consumers with what they wanted?

When Nora Roberts started out, she was fortunate to begin with Harlequin, which could publish as many books as she produced. She stayed with Harlequin even after she moved to a bigger publisher (Bantam) for a once-per-year hardcover, which then became a once-per-year hardcover and twice-a-year mass market paper, and then became twice-a-year hardcovers and three-times-a-year mass market paper, and finally, she had a big fight with Harlequin, and started up the J.D. Robb pen name (twice per year) and her publisher (by then, Putnam) threw in the towel. The publisher finally agreed that Nora could put out a lot of books. But the publisher’s other writers couldn’t.

Nora Roberts’ speed didn’t matter to that publisher because the publisher had no expectation of quality based on the genre. As we all know, and Entertainment Weekly’s snobby tone confirms, romance is trash anyway. No one expects quality fiction from writers who crank out cookie-cutter books for women.

You think I’m kidding, right? I’m not. I’m old enough to have read the trade journals as romance got its start as a genre, as the Romance Writers of America (founded in 1980) fought for recognition from publishers, as romance readers slowly realized that they were marketing force that had a lot of clout.

Romance has a lot of respect now compared to the 1980s—and still writers see phrases like “churned out” and that slightly school-boyish tone that every Literary Critic uses when discussing romance.

It’s about love and mushy stuff. It can’t be good. It might include kissing and touching and actual irony-free emotion. Anyone can churn out that crap if they put their minds to it. But most people are sensible enough to want respectability instead of…whatever it is that these romance people have.

Oh, yeah. Money.

And readers.

Who actually like the books.

I have taken exception to that snobbish attitude for my entire career. I’ve written essay after essay about it in all kinds of journals and magazines. I’ve written some business blogs on it too.

Back when I was writing those essays, the attitude was merely annoying. Savvy writers could get past it with the judicious use of pen names, and make not just a living, but a substantial living. As in earning mid-six figures or more, simply by hiding the fact that the fast writers wrote more than one book per year.

That snobbish attitude has always been harmful to writers who wanted to make a living. But in my mind, that snobbery always went hand-in-hand with a desire to be recognized over a desire to have a full-time writing career. The writers who wanted to make a living figured out how to handle the respectability argument while “churning out” a lot of books. The writers who wanted respectability and labored over each word never left their day jobs.

Now, however, that snobbish attitude has become actively harmful to writers. Most of the ways that books sell to readers have broken down. The traditional publishing systems have lost their impact. The old-fashioned way that publishers advertised books—that one-size-fits-all method—no longer works. Bookstores don’t window titles much anymore, if a reader can find a brick-and-mortar bookstore that sells new titles within driving distance of home.

Because books are available all the time rather than for only a few months, readers pay less attention to release dates than ever before. Readers have always read a book when they felt like it, and not a moment sooner. But in the past, readers had to buy the book when they saw it, because they might never find a copy again.

So, even if readers didn’t read the book for a year or more, readers still had to buy it in that limited time window.

Not any longer. Readers can make a note of the title, realize it’s been published, and buy it days or hours or minutes before reading it. That really changes the way that the publishing industry markets books—or it should.

It hasn’t yet, entirely, anyway. But the industry is starting to get a clue.

Event books, the ones that publishers convinced the media to promote, are no longer events. The numbers to become a bestseller are much, much lower than they were in 2007.

Lists matter, but less and less as readers discover their books in other ways.

And one of the major ways that readers discover a book? E-mail alerts or notifications that scroll across the reader’s favorite online retailing site—alerts and notifications tailored to that reader.

No longer do we all get notification of the top five books on The New York Times bestseller list. Now, we get science fiction (if that’s what we read) or romance or mystery. We get notifications about our favorite author’s latest book, not the latest release from some author whose work we would never, ever, ever read.

The notifications come from bots designed by the retailers. What provokes those bots to let a reader know about an author? Publication of her latest work. The bots always send readers a note that an author they have bought before (through that retailer) has released a new book.

The reader might not buy that book immediately, but the book might go on a wish list. It might be put in reserve until the reader has the cash to order or the time to read.

Another change in the way people buy books also has to do with unlimited availability. All readers indulged in binge reading of a new-to-them author, but in the past, that binge reading was combined with treasure hunting.

Whenever I discovered a new writer whose work I liked, I’d read what was easily available, then I’d go to the library to see what it had. Libraries never had the complete oeuvre because, like bookstores, they have limited shelf space. So I’d dig through every used bookstore in every town I visited until I got each and every book by that author.

Or as close to each and every book as I could get.

Other readers did the same.

Now, readers can order every book that a favorite author has written, whether that author has written five books or hundreds. That fear writers have, the fear that readers won’t respect the work if it doesn’t take years to complete, is silly when looked at from a reader’s perspective.

Readers want to escape from their lives for a few hours. They might want to read a beautiful well-written slow-moving literary novel or they might want to read a fast-paced hard-to-believe thriller. But readers want the book when they’re ready to relax. If they liked that book, they want another by the same author. The author becomes a known quantity, and the reader wants more.

Binge-reading has become an all-consuming activity, just like binge-watching. And the best way to get noticed as a writer is to publish enough to enable your readers to binge for a weekend.

But the idea of writing a lot is the opposite of the way that most writers are trained. Writers are told to slow down, think about every word, consider every sentence. Writers are taught to forget story because story is something that hack writers do.

Hack writers can “churn” out words because words are unimportant to them.

Real writers write so slowly that they might only compose a paragraph per day.

Real writers who have day jobs and who still believe myths spouted in the 19^th century.

Real 19^th-century writers who are still read today, like Charles Dickens or Louisa May Alcott, got paid by the word, so they wrote a lot of words, for a lot of publications. These writers wrote fast long hand, and they “churned out” a lot of stories we no longer read.

But they also “churned out” stories that all of us still read.

That little phrase, “churned out,” holds so much disrespect. Deadly disrespect, because writers who hear that phrase—and use it themselves—won’t be able to survive in this new world.

The 21^st century is not leisurely, although we have more leisure time than ever. Can you remember the name of the “important” literary novel of five years ago? Ten? Without looking it up? I didn’t think so.

Yet, I can still name the important literary novels of forty years ago, because they got all the press, and I do mean allthe press.

It’s impossible to get all of the press now. The best way to get attention is to give your readers what they want. If they like your work, they want more of it.

If they want more of it, the only person who can give them more is you.

And the only way to do that is to write a lot, whatever that means for you.

One sure way to teach yourself to write at a comfortable pace is to clean up your language. Watch every word. Make sure you’re using the right phrase—when you’re talking about writing.

Clean “churned out” from your vocabulary. Don’t say you “cranked out” a novel. Don’t apologize for writing fast. Don’t tell anyone how long it took to finish a novel.

Write and release.

The only people who judge fiction writers for how fast they write are people for whom reading isn’t something they do for enjoyment but for prestige. They want to impress others with their literary acumen.

I don’t know about you, but I want readers who get lost in the story, not readers who have already determined that I’m a hack because I don’t write at the proper speed or in the proper genre or with the proper attention to language.

Enjoy your writing. Take as much—or as little—time as you like to compose your stories.

Because how you created the story doesn’t matter. How much readers enjoy the story does. Readers don’t care if it took you one week to write that story or fifteen years. All readers want is escape.

And it’s your job to provide it.

“Churning It Out” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites starting at the end of May. The new edition will release on July 14.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post appeared on my Patreon page in October of 2025, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

GETTING LOST IN THE WORDS

From 2025

This past week, I finished the largest Fey book I’ve written to date. It is the fifth book in my side series on the Qavnerian Protectorate…and it ended up at 240,000 words long. I trimmed about 50,000 words out of it, and wrote the scenes that I missed. (Mostly the validation, because I always skip the validation in my first pass.) I figured the book was long because of how I wrote it. I dabbled at it during the two years of crisis that we endured at the business. For a while, I gave the book up entirely because I simply couldn’t concentrate on a story that big. That was when I wrote some of the novellas that came out this year, as well as a novel that will appear in late 2026.

My mind was trending long, I think, because I didn’t want to keep coming up with new things. I didn’t have the brain space for that.

I also found that I couldn’t make any decisions while still in the thrall of that huge, gigantic, super-sized novel. I wasn’t in the position to decide what I would do next. I’m going to figure that out in the next few days.

But some of the small things I meant to do included typing in about 6,000 words that Mick Herron wrote in the middle of his Slow Horses novel Bad Actors. He wrote a scene filled with mayhem that stretched over a couple of square miles of London and had at least four main viewpoint characters. (If you want to know what scene, it’s the one that more or less culminates with the iron and the bus, as well as a brick to the head.)

When I first read the thing, two years ago now, I became aware at the very end of the section that I not only had a feeling of mayhem, but that I had understood each part of the action. When a writer uses a technique that isn’t in my writing toolbox, I figure out how that technique works. Sometimes I can eyeball it, but occasionally, I type it into my own computer using my word program and my set-up, so I can see how it all works on the page.

It took two days’ writing sessions to do the typing, partly because I stopped to give my wrists a break and also because I would look up any words I didn’t know. As a reader, I skipped over the British slang that I was unfamiliar with, choosing to get it out through context, but as a writer, I wanted to know what he was doing.

So louring, cack-handed, and a whole bunch of other words entered my consciousness and, in the case of louring, changed my perspective on a moment in the scene that I was typing in.

Usually, when I type in another writer’s work, it’s a serious struggle. I want to add commas or punctuation or paragraphs or different words. Aside from the British slang, I did not feel the need to add or change words, but I did realize that he uses punctuation very differently than I do. There are a lot more colons in his work than there are in mine, and not as many commas. The only quibble I had, in fact, was that he wouldn’t use a comma in something like “For a moment he was thinking of his wife…” I would add a comma after “moment.” And he wouldn’t use an ellipsis plus a period for the end of a sentence. I don’t know if that was deliberate, a British punctuation thing, or personal preference. It caught me every time.

But the one thing I did note was this: I have been deep in the words in my own writing. Because life has thrown me a lot of lemons in the past year, I would catch them and consider them before making the lemonade. In other words, my critical voice was and is on very high right now.

Sometimes as I worked on the biggest Fey novel to ever come out of my computer, I would stop and stare at the words and think them very plain. That’s not a normal thought for me—or it wasn’t before this past year or two.

As I typed in Herron’s section, I noted that I reached the “words are plain” stage somewhere around 3,000 words in. His words were plain and sometimes repetitive. There were copy editing issues as well, one or two misspellings (not British spellings, but actual misspellings) and a few missing hyphens that my eye caught while I was working out his technique.

I had to pause and consider that moment, though. By putting his words into my format, I hit the same “these words are plain” place I hit in my own writing. Which meant that critical voice was not doing its job and looking at the technique. It was critiquing the words used instead of the effect those words had on the reader.

Copy editors make this error a lot. I train copy editors and have done so for decades now. The traditional publisher for my Grayson books in the 1990s used my books to test copy editors. If I got a heavy hand, the copy editor didn’t get hired. My Grayson books, like Herron’s Slough House series, are voice heavy. If the copy editor missed that, and put the book into proper English with traditional punctuation, they had no right to be called a copy editor at all.

The copy editor’s job is to find actual mistakes (misspellings, inadvertently repeated details, misnaming characters) rather than “clean up” some established writer’s punctuation. And copy editors who are harsher on new writers will often strip those writers of the very things that make their voice strong.

I can’t imagine the discussion Soho Crime had early on with Herron’s copy editors. He breaks every single rule of grammar and punctuation on purpose and does it to make a point in the story.

For example, I noted in his latest book, Clown Town, that in another mayhem scene, one character’s point-of-view section was usually one paragraph long and just a single sentence. I slowly realized that single sentence extended over many sections and many pages. Every time we were in that character’s point of view, there was a lot of punctuation, and not a bit of it was an actual period.

The period arrived at the end of the character’s point-of-view section in that mayhem scene…and I realized (because of how I read) that the character was dead. Herron played with that idea (are they really dead?) for the next twenty pages, and most readers would have missed the period at the end of the character’s section. But I didn’t. (I had the same problem in the book Silence of the Lambs when Thomas Harris has Hannibal Lector escape a well-guarded facility. Harris used an odd phrase, a strange verb, and a long sentence in the middle of a gigantic paragraph. The odd phrase from such a careful writer caught me up short. So I went backwards, looking to see if I’d missed anything else.

And yep, I had. I knew exactly how Lector escaped pages before Harris wanted me to. Most readers didn’t catch it until Harris did a big reveal. And then they would go back and see the odd phrase. I saw it going in.

Those things that excellent writers do out of their subconscious as they’re in the moment are things that a copy editor would “fix.” I can imagine that a novice (to Herron’s work) copy editor adding periods throughout those character sections—and ruining them.

The best copy editors read the book they’re editing for enjoyment first, so that they will see the author’s intent long before they start “fixing mistakes.” Most modern copy editors don’t do that at all, which is why you’ll hear Dean tell you that you don’t need a copy editor. He’s right: better to let some mistakes through than muck up the voice.

I hire and fire a lot of copy editors even now because I have a tendency in my fiction writing to repeat myself. Some of that comes because I write out of order. So I might actually introduce a character for the first time when I write chapter 45, but chapter 45 might have been the very first chapter I ever wrote. Then, later, I might write chapter 7, where the character appears for the reader for the first time and I’ll write the same description (often in the same language without checking back) again. And maybe I’ll worry that I hadn’t described the character when I get to chapter 15, and I’ll write the same description again.

I need someone to find that stuff. What’s amazing to me is that the words-only, rules-only copy editors never find the repeated information. Or the silly stuff, like a character putting on a hat in chapter 27 and then putting on a different hat six pages later without taking off the first hat.

That’s what’s valuable about copy editors. Not fixing the grammar, but fixing the goofy stuff. On the latest book which will appear in 2026, the other book I wrote during the crisis, I changed the name of one of the main characters but never did a search and replace. So occasionally, his name goes back and forth with one letter different. The very good copy editor that I have caught that. None of my first readers did—and neither did I.

In storytelling, the words are tools. Punctuation is also a tool. Paragraphing is a tool.

The rules are there for beginners. Storytellers need to have a huge toolbox, and they need to learn how to use those tools. Most writers get by with a hammer, some nails and a few screwdrivers. The best writers have finesse tools (to extend the metaphor) like a cape chisel, saw set pliers, and an egg beater drill just in case the story needs them.

And I can guarantee you that if the story does need them, the copy editor will probably not understand why they’re there—unless the copy editor is someone who actually reads and understands the story before looking at the words.

As for the rest of us—we storytellers—we need to stay out of the words and not worry about them. So what if they’re “plain”? So what if you’ve written a passive sentence? So what if they seem to lie flat on the page?

If you’re thinking those things, you’re not in the story at all. You’re in copyedit or critic mode.

Stop it.

Remember that you’re a storyteller. Not a writer. And don’t worry about the little fiddly bits. If you misspell them and the story’s compelling, your reader won’t even notice.

Just like reader me didn’t notice all the words I didn’t know in Herron’s work. I was so caught up in that mayhem scene that I went right over those unfamiliar words, and ended up thinking that the sequence was brilliant.

Because it is.

“Getting Lost in The Words” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

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Here’s the book trailer, specifically designed to feature the Kickstarter, for my noir novel, Consecrated Ground. This is the novel that I mentioned on Tuesday, the one that the original editor slapped an offensive title on (which stuck for nearly two decades). I’m using the original title.

This novel is historical through and through, although, like its compatriot in the Kickstarter, the novel straddles two different timelines. Memory and crime feature in both novels.

There’s also a short story collection in the Kickstarter, and it has some previously unpublished stories. Readers who are in my newsletter told me they wanted to see more short story collections, so I’m working diligently to give them what they asked for.

I hope the trailer interests you enough to send you to the Kickstarter. Consecrated Ground won’t be available anywhere but the Kickstarter for several months. So if you want to get a copy early, head on over now.