As always, there are professionals and culture writers who will argue more articulately than I can about this. This will be an incomplete thought, but I wanted to jot it down.

I won’t speak much to AI’s impact on book publishing, but I did specifically want to point out my personal perspective of what happens to me when I read, and how that impacts a book’s position for me within my personal library. Whether a book is AI- or human-generated matters to how I process books as a reader; some might process books differently. Each individual book matters to me, but so does its relational value within my broader canon.

Of course, this conversation is intertwined with many issues I care about re: the role of arts and culture in our society, properly compensating creatives, the algorithmic economy and my existential concern within it, etc. Hits hard especially during revision.

One section stuck out to me, and has stuck out to many:

The easy take is that quantity doesn’t beat quality when it comes to books, and that’s the fundamental misconception of churn-and-burn. It may still screw over authors financially and attention-wise.

But there’s a little more to unpack in this article too about the role of and value of a book—both those you read and those you write. Here’s what I said on my Instagram story:

Obviously, nobody will ever care about my own book as much as I do (although I hope many readers get close) but I hope that when mine is out, y’all care that I’ve spent years pouring into it and being intentional about making every word feel resonant and alive and directional versus just emptily generating skeletons—copies of copies of copies. I hope y’all can feel the echoes of years and influences baked into actually writing with intent.

As a reader, the element of “choice” in artistic works adds layers even for me, even with any “flaws” shaped by reading being a subjective activity. Largely: what’s the point? What writing do you want to endure and why is it important to you? (Maybe you have a different answer than I do.)

I often wish MOUNTAIN SOUNDS hadn’t taken this long or this much. But at the end, I’ll be deeply proud of the guts it’s taken to commit myself fully to a creative work and what that’s done for me as a person. (Also, I love it to death and can’t wait to book club it with others.)

I started the novel that’ll be my debut in 2017. I was in college, so only picked it up during summers from 2017-2020. I had some hiccups in that I didn’t query nearly quickly enough (Schrödinger’s Manuscript and fear of rejection, basically) then left my first literary agency six months after signing because we disagreed on direction. I then revised my book back towards my original vision and re-queried, then revised. So I had some timing hurdles.

Sure, my defensiveness spikes at the idea of time elapsed, as I also agree with writers like that more time spent on a manuscript isn’t necessarily good for it and sunk cost plays a role in the desperation to see it succeed. For the years and efforts and costs, finishing this book is so closely intertwined with my development as a person that I’m proud of how it’s shaped me, not just its outcome (although I need the outcome to be good.)

Returning to the Instagram story, a friend’s response to my comment was: Yeah this kind of thinking (embracing AI in writing) is completely baffling.

To which I replied:

I understand that the line will blur and that some we won’t be able to tell, but that even makes the value shift for me even if I don’t realize in the moment. Like with many books I love, I’ll go and research and maybe follow the author after and the book continues to gain significance for me. So I might have a similar surface-level experience with my first impression of an AI-generated book, but that isn’t the whole of the book for me. It’s also the patina of rereads.

I wish it were as easy as “Nobody will take to this, and we shouldn’t reward it, and AI-generated art shouldn’t matter.” Because some people will, and that’s where my individual way of reading makes a difference in how I process or think about AI-generated work.

I do agree we may have a harder time telling from the get-go what is purely AI versus what is the effect of writers and readers being constantly exposed to AI writing on the Internet. For example, I do catch myself writing more with contrastive parallelism1 and being concerned that the proliferation of ChatGPT affects my own singularly-human writing.

How we decide a book is meaningful to us

But I am a huge rereader, and that also ripples into how I think of the reading experience as being two-way and malleable beyond the words on a page. (I’ve read a lot of “history and science of reading”-type books in the last year. Right now I’m reading Louder Than Words: How the Mind Makes Meaning by Benjamin K. Bergen, and I’m mind-blown.)

I’ve talked before about how I can’t really “death of the artist,”2 I often have different experiences when picking up a book at different times in life, and I most often struggle with Substack literary discourse when it’s arguing for an amount of objectivity I don’t think we can meaningfully measure. (While there are certain thresholds, I find most definitions of “objectively good” to be socially defined.)

Which is why my take is probably—yeah, AI can maybe reach the baseline of moderate enjoyment. It may even lead you to a realization or position that is significant to you because it is echoing other books that could provoke the same effect. But that’s not what a book is to me or why it ends up mattering to me, and my value system will affect my experience of what I read and why. From one of my previous articles:

I might accidentally one day blindly read an AI book and like it. I might even recommend it.3

But I personally put a lot of stock in originality, even “flawed,” so I’m more likely to love an imperfect, voicey work that I can dissect on a choice vs. effect level instead of the copy of a copy of a copy. See: dead internet, the Droste effect4, etc. I don’t need to be able to go deeper into every book I read, but I basically need to be able to have the option to.

Unfortunately, some readers might not share my value system, so it might continue screwing us over. I’d like to hope not.

An example: East of Eden gaining significance within my library.

When I read East of Eden by John Steinbeck for the first time last year, it immediately became a favorite. And that happened for a few reasons, some exclusive to the book, some to my experience, and some even to my deeper adventure into the rest of Steinbeck’s oeuvre, even reading his Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters in which he describes putting it together.5 I read Of Mice and Men, The Moon Is Down, Cannery Row, The Winter of Our Discontent. I read Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck, my first real foray into author biographies.

I highly resonated with his fascination re: the concept of phalanx and how group behavior overwhelms the elements of individual behavior within it as a separate entity, and later connected that concept to Beartown by Fredrik Backman.

The next time I read East of Eden, it will have different layers, connections, emotions, etc. attached to it. It reverberates into itself, into everything else I read, and other books reverberate into it. A black hole of sorts. Again, this is all personal style and not all readers share this—but it’s why I love it.

I like books that can gain a patina for me, as evidenced by the books I describe in my Pickup Artist series (like this example with The Plague by Albert Camus.) When one book sends me backwards and forwards in topics, author studies, considerations, and then it gains so much dimension for me. That doesn’t even mean I have to know the author’s intention or who they are or anything about them—just that I have to know there’s some through-line of essence that I am excavating towards or building upon.

The awareness of a human element, even when a book is channeling or obviously inspired by others, probably gives a book the singularity that makes it an entity for me.

On a personal level too, my reading is directly affected by the memory, experiences, and knowledge I gain between now and then—and even my embodied cognition as proven by all the “neuroscience of reading” books I’m devouring at the moment.

But say I read an AI book. An AI-generated book can get a little of that because I’m obviously still being a human being between rereads so it will get more from my side, but it will never accumulate anything more than it is because there is nothing else to unravel within it—beyond the normal, cultural, artistic conversations we’re having now about the ability of AI to write at all. There’s no human on the other side of that, and that means that I personally will not be able to hold it as a different, dimensional experience. It won’t change or shift or gain anything within my memory, and so for me, that means it won’t particularly endure in my own life.

(I really like Fran Lebowitz, and likely agree that “the closest thing to a human being is a book.” Hence my POV.)

An AI-generated work probably wouldn’t continue growing and accumulating the way the rest of my personal library has, even the books I dislike. It will only ever be a blip in time. You can win the “race,” maybe, but you never continue past the finish line.

(Also, it’s co-represented by one of my literary agents at William Morris Endeavor, Rikki, who is an absolute angel. Go Rikki!)

I’m not a huge high fantasy person nowadays and very much have to be in the mood. But: I have a vested interest in reading whatever’s causing this much conversation, people love the book, and Alchemised also goes along with other threads. I also randomly ended up on this “atrocities of war” thread, which goes along with a few scattered influences lately:

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this riveting dark fantasy debut, a woman with missing memories fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy—and the man tasked with unearthing the deepest secrets of her past.

“What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours? The war is over. Holdfast is dead. The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.”

Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed.

In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive.

According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder: Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit?

To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own . . . secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.

Buy the Book

Military & War as an Accidental Reading Thread

• Because of a friend group including military men, I’ve bought books like The Warrior Elite and What Have We Done and Black Hearts because I tell them that if they’re going to use acronyms throughout every conversation then I want to know what they mean.

• I have mixed thoughts on the military, because I’m from a military family but consider myself anti on a structural level. Every time I try to write succinctly about the nuances, I end up writing two thousand words so I’ll just leave that there.

• Without getting too far into it, I also worry a lot about good people in their transition out. The military does and will change how you think, behave, and identify yourself, but it has little incentive to help you unravel any dysfunctional wiring afterwards. People tend to think solely of PTSD, but it’s not that. It’s easy to forget how war in a career does not mean war in reality; the peacetime military is undoubtedly different, so I also find a lot of fascinating psychology in unpacking training that doesn’t go up against conflict and maybe never will.

• I bring this up because it goes along with the problem of those who aestheticize the military and service. (Thinking especially of Cyrus from East of Eden.) I understand that as a recruitment and coping mechanism, but I’ve also seen a lot of the harms of glorification that’s not tempered by the horrors of war. This book, meanwhile, is very much about those horrors.

• Separately, I absolutely adore Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, so McNally Jackson Editions sent me a release from her new imprint: Is Peace Possible? by Kathleen Lonsdale. So this has turned into an accidental curiosity thematically.

Our Numbness to Violent Imagery

• And, then, right now, there is the concept of doomscrolling. Even calling it doomscrolling has ended up minimizing it: media to consume instead of doomscrolling. A template gimmick. Actually, this all does correlate to my interests in aesthetics and what happens when we flatten dimension into atmosphere or entertainment or catharsis.

• Of course, our feeds serve us fluffy lifestyle content in the same five-minute slice as bombed bodies and ribcages. That disorientation of switching between channels partly inspired Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, and so much of the series is about the danger of forgetting that images of violence do depict violence. The feeds catapult the dopamine and the rush of engagement and the ragebait, which then end up having the unreal, numbing effect in that we layer it into the reality of our comfort at home and thus don’t actually feel its impact. See: Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others.

• Dark romance dominates BookTok. So, like it or not, people are also raising their thresholds for what constitutes “morally grey” versus outright horrifying. You have to get shocking and more shocking to break through the noise, but the cost is a diffusion of sorts that makes it all feel the same.

Alchemised breaks down or subverts a lot of this by forcing you into the darkness without any handholding or softening or justification. It’s 1,000+ pages with no breaks, but the maintained frequency—I dare say resonance, although that’s a term in the lore of book itself—emphasizes its statements rather than deadening them with lack of contrast or accusations of excess.

First, Alchemised is very much not a dark romance. Thus far, it is not romantic; it is horrifying. The idea that anyone’s calling this romantasy is absolutely wild.

At any given point in the book, the trauma and horror is inescapable; falling asleep last night, I was thinking about how there hasn’t been a single moment of Helena being happy or relieved or even okay. She is actively in pain throughout the whole narrative, and her emotional arc oscillates between in-the-moment torture and passive disorientation as she disassociates. (Genuinely disassociates, in the proper use of the psychological term. I will probably write about the craft/psychology overlap in this book, because it’s excellent.)

This girl is so fucked up, and will never not be. She’s not even looking for it to stop; she wants to die, and for everything not to happen as it did. All anyone in this storyworld can do is pray they are not subjected to worse, and they frequently are anyway.

Many books describe themselves as being about trauma, my own included, but this book actually is. And I recently finished The Last Letter by Rebecca Yarros, so I also have a frustrated threshold for trauma porn; you can’t just throw shitty events and more and more feelings into a book and expect that to make it meaningful. (I did really enjoy Fourth Wing, but I can’t stand Nicholas Sparks for similar reasons. And have you ever heard of a book called A Little Life?) Contrast, intention, messaging matters. Roughly: there should be some sort of point. I’m big on form feeding function, in whatever sense, and that goes along with the aesthetics of violence, shock, or devastation.

Related: Fisher the Bookseller wrote a great piece on his experience reading Alchemised and SenLinYu’s thoughts on catharsis.

Their answer touched on Plato and Aristotle. Specifically how Plato thought poetry should be banned because it was irrational and emotional, whereas Aristotle argued that poetry was useful because it gave people an outlet for their emotions: a catharsis. They went on to explain how they wanted to give people that catharsis while reading the story, but pull it back a bit with the ending to create enough discomfort to inspire people to notice inequality, to go out and do more work to make the world more just.

(I talk a lot about Aristotle’s theory of catharsis and what “the point” of emotion in fiction is, because I also disagree with articles arguing that fiction went downhill when it started wanting people to feel. Like all things, there’s a middle ground.)

The level of atrocities buried in Alchemised doesn’t have the deadening, too-much effect. It’s extremely tough to hurl that much at the reader without shoving a narrative into somehow-aestheticized territory, so I’m impressed—even though it has my stomach churning. I’m a third in and feel sick, and will absolutely have to bolster myself to sit down with the book again—although it’s really good. Tonally, I never do well with bleak.

So far while reading, I’ve thought of Wither by Lauren DeStefano, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott, and Warfare (the movie, which I haven’t seen yet.) For the record, I threw up after reading American Psycho, and that’s the only book that’s ever provoked such a visceral physical reaction for me. Alchemised makes me nauseous, but we’re not there (yet) and its effects do feel earned because the narrative demands it. Don’t look away, etc.

On a craft level, I have so much I want to dissect like word frequency (raw, icy, claw, crawl, iron, battle, dead) and the genuine psychological and physiological markers of extreme trauma, and how that’s depicted within the voice itself. Alchemised uses passive voice that actually strengthens the narrative. In fact, it’s a crucial foundation. Helena’s mental plights are also deeply physical.

I think part of the effectiveness here is a significant worldbuilding choice and the fundamental core of the magic system: the presence of reanimated corpses and necromancy. That one decision ripples into the atmosphere of Alchemised, because, violence aside, you never forget that the price of war is death and bodies. Forgive the graphicness of this line, but you never escape the stench and the flesh and the extreme, dizzying sense of violation that accompanies each casualty. Survivors cease to exist too. They disappear within themselves.

The victors parade the corpses, but not solely for the military glory; they’re just expendable and thus swapped out as needed for various horrors. It’s not sadism, at first, although the Undying can veer into that territory; even without the cruelty present in the story, their magic and gifts literally always depends on violation of a corpse. Of course, in other related books (zombie narratives, necromancers, The Iliad, even the violence in the Game of Thrones universe, etc.), death is shocking and awful but the shock of it starts to blur the actual catastrophic effect.

Alchemised sort of deals with the far-off aftermath of that, when you are so emotionally removed from the consequence of death because it is so physically embedded in your day-to-day that you cease to have an individual sense of self that can reasonably process horrors with their deserved gravity. It’s the “what are you even here for,” said flatly. Who would want to survive this.

The reliance on this concept in each detail woven throughout the book, like the servants in the household being reanimated, means you never forget that war relies upon fundamental, taboo violation (which also wouldn’t be possible if not for the religious worldbuilding described by Helena too—a belief in the soul/body connection.)

I tend to flinch from body horror and find it gratuitous, but I wouldn’t call Alchemised body horror. It’s horrifying, but it’s not body horror. It’s just war. So, if anything, Alchemised is so effective so far because it’s entirely about the dehumanization woven into every possible aspect of actual conflict. You cannot unravel the two or separate them out.

To war, you are a body. That’s all.

If you are reading it, please: let’s book club.

When driving to work yesterday, I rifled through about six hundred tiny different springboards of thought that I considered expanding upon, which is why I’m frequently baffled by writers who say they can never think of anything to write about. See: there’s plenty I don’t think I can write about well and that’s what people mean when they say it. That’s the gap speaking, and is different from a specific case of writer’s block. I write because I think too much and might otherwise drive myself up the wall by doing so.

There’s a ton I can elaborate upon, muse over, that crosses my mind and I need to externalize—even if just to a private audience of (1) my running text thread with my twin sister, or (0) embedded in a notebook somewhere for me, myself, and I. Whether or not that compulsion to iron out what crosses my mind is a good thing? Questionable.

But it does need to go outside the confines of my brain in some way—catharsis.1 Before you ask, yes, I did finally get an ADHD diagnosis and I am deeply grateful for how much Adderall helped ease my insomnia.

Some of this brain activity is absolutely jitters from getting book edits this Thursday—the cognitive equivalent of my knee bouncing in the waiting room. My brain feels like it exploded in 2025 in that I had so many different directions to go in once the book was turned in, whereas it probably benefited me—despite the many crushing aspects of tunnel vision—to filter lots of thought, inspiration, reads, recs, etc. through the singular lens of one particular project for so long. So maybe right now is my brain going “OH! You’re about to do that again. But what about all this extraneous—”

I would like to write shorter and more focused work, and I don’t yet.2 This week, I think this explosion of thought is just out of nervousness.

What will my filter look like? How much of my brainpower will my book demand this fall? From Why We Click by Kate Murphy:

Predictability puts us in our happy place because thinking is metabolically expensive. The brain takes up only 2 percent of our body weight yet consumes a whopping 20 percent of our calories. Since our survival has historically depended on judicious use of resources, we instinctively like anything that lets us cognitively coast. It’s also why we love being right and hate being wrong. Wrong means you need to stoke the cerebral furnace and try again.

I do love noodling in a note of some kind, thus the existence of the “phone notes” section that just goes to feed and not to email inboxes. Again: not well-written. Not edited. Far too long. But follow a thread with me, if you will.

Today I’m thinking about the meta-ness of ‘framing’ quotes and posts-within-posts

Anyway, I—like many—have a funny relationship with the “selling out” portion of Substack in that I would love to be funded for my work and sure as hell crave that orange checkbox, six-figure income, and ability to write and read whatever I want (with the condition that it pleases the algorithm gods.)

But I also, like many, rail against the very annoying features the system rewards. I am not a “hater” per se in that I can normally find something to like about just about anything, and consider myself a gentle and optimistic person. But I can feel myself being a hater about various bits of affectedness here (unoriginally.) It is just as unoriginal to be a cynic about the chronic unoriginality of the Internet as it is to be unoriginal on said Internet. Some people just got in early, so it’s an easy target to go “But they!!”

I strongly dislike people stealing tweets and viral posts. (I get that you grow, but I don’t understand why the platform appeals to you.) I hate that so many people just pull repins from Pinterest boards.

Most recently, I’ve been so curious about and/or annoyed by reposting reposts of reposts from classic books. (Literary fiction has its own buried annoyances around how it perceives prestige—the entire definition of the genre—but I’ve already talked about genre perception enough.)

Intellectualism/literary curiosity is net-positive (so I’m not trying to say that it isn’t), but I’m curious about the presentation and what makes it most palatable to us.

I find it annoying that many people will like a Note simply because it says Dostoevsky or C.S. Lewis or Didion or Patti Smith, but if you attached a different author name to the work then nobody would like that quote—at least not visibly on their feed. I hate that the structure is “[author name]…wow” or “that [author name] quote that goes like” and there are definitely some accounts that do this more than others.

I’m not so much talking about the strategy of that so much as how Substack falls victim to the strangeness of what most of us see elsewhere—that there almost needs to be a layer or buffer between the material itself and the trigger for us to engage (which goes along with this idea of our craving for mediated reality as seen in everything from our relationships to our phones to the terror of AI friendships?)

Anecdotally—people are more likely to like a quote of a quote!!! People are more likely to view it as intelligent! What does that say? Obviously, curation matters too, and if I were writing this more cohesively, I would speak about how “framing” has always existed but that I’m narrowing in on the specific 0.02 second gap of willingness between seeing a quote and pressing like rather than the process of liking something itself (an important granular difference I am too undercaffeinated to properly sketch.)

We might be just as subject to a horrifying need for validation and proof (my publishing-oriented brain just went to a connection to modern indie-to-trad acquisitions spiking after, say, 2022) that a quote has been properly vetted, validated, and oh yes, other people liked it so I will too. (Plus, some of them are deserving, stellar quotes.) Publishing knows this; Substack does too. There’s also a solid (light but informative) book called Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire by Luke Burgis that I read last year and liked. It is very hard to separate yourself out from what others like, even if your instinct is to be contrarian. (See also: Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton.)

“Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first—the story of our quest for sexual love—is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second—the story of our quest for love from the world—is a more secret and shameful tale.” From Status Anxiety.

If you post Middlemarch or Wuthering Heights, the feed will push it. And obviously, they are great books, but I wondered whether they might be favored by Substack also for the same psychology of this frame-within-a-frame, beyond the fact that more people are reading East of Eden because more people are reading East of Eden and posting about it. (I love that.) I’m solely talking about format here, I suppose.

The classics are subject to this for good reason.

As I say, some classic books are classics because they’re fantastic and they’ve endured for quality. And some classic books are classics because they’re classics.

In the same way that best sellers sell the best because they’re best sellers.

The most meaningful comments now, that I’ve gotten across my lean into Substack and my lean into TikTok recently (lol, going where there’s traction because I’m trying to make this work) is that my book picks are refreshing because they’re a little different. I so appreciate this. It’s obnoxious feedback for me to share but I love it so much.

I do think why the distinction matters that I am originally a book blog crossposting on other platforms vs. having my content originate from a platform—and thus being inextricably shaped by it. Why I say Substack is still not blogging is that:

• my blog is fully under my control and will not suffer meaningfully if an algorithm changes (idgaf about SEO, although I should)

• I do think it matters that I have absolutely no idea who my audience on my blog is unless they specifically tell me on another platform that they read it. I might have a vague idea of who’s reading, but that’s entirely different from seeing the actual followers and subscribers—faces, names, interests, numbers—that I write to.3

• For that reason (and more), I think that freedom is impossible to replicate anywhere, including Substack. But of course Substack has many, many benefits I appreciate.

My reach will suffer and Lord knows I earn no money from this (yet—hopefully), but it means I’m a little less in-the-loop overall, so I’m not yet shaped entirely by the market forces driving mentions of certain titles.

I did notice that right now, I’m getting a lot of flocking to McCarthy or Annie Dillard, so there’s a temptation to lean more into those than I have already; in fairness, the McCarthy effect happens in real life. Just last night, a man at the bar while I was working heard I was a reader and said his favorite was No Country for Old Men. In response, I made sure to post my review of The Invocations by Krystal Sutherland—because although classics made up a bulk of my reading list this year ([redacted book process] scared me out of reading modern work while I was being evaluated, and I’m still coming down from that), it’s not all I read and I don’t want to be pigeonholed on here either. Let me be a mystery! I resist classification!

Mostly, I think about the format shift of layering various curated material?

But I guess I just think a lot about the social proof of a “Note of a screenshot of a pin of a Note of a book passage” being the meta epitome of how Substack still shapes a sense of validation around what you read and how we engage with book taste at all on here. I would hope my picks are refreshing, and it’s also okay if they’re the same as everyone else’s. I can’t tell for sure if someone is posting a passage because they like it or because they think it will go further in an engine rewarding that sameness—just aligned with more intellectual markers of quality. We want to feel like we are smart and good decision-makers and arbiters of taste and all the rest. Perfectly natural.

I have so many questions and observations about this exact type of situation. We like a quote when it’s shrunk down into a mood board in a hero image of a Substack that’s been re-posted with an emoji that’s then been screenshotted to share on another platform, etc. etc. Repeating the image here for emphasis:

• Granted, this creator shares a lot of these types of quotes, usually with a very similar caption. Did they pick Dostoevsky because he’s popular to quote? Did it actually strike them? (Cynical of me.)

• Did they upload it to Pinterest? Or did the other person (Iconic, the username from Pinterest) do it?

• I actually do have a Pinterest board of quotes I like which inspires my reading list, so I’m not against loving a tidbit first. (Some people have complained about that. Again, we don’t have enough time in the world to read all the books we want!)

• Do we psychologically respond to seeing the number of likes on that quote?

• What if we started sanding down author credits off quotes? In fairness, many of them—style, cadence, quality of a great quote already—are recognizable. But what would happen if we all just briefly agreed to not credit the author for a bit and see which quotes actually resonate? Thought experiment.

For the record, I also get very nervous about people sharing images without credit here, and I think that’s for good reason. If I hadn’t gone for the creative path, I would have gone to law school and worked with IP/creative copyright. I find it so interesting, and bet it would be incredible (but also very hard) now.

Basically: I have worked with publications before who have gotten sued because of using images—even with credit and links—that they didn’t have the rights to. There’s a reason all the big magazines have Getty subscriptions or have to pay their own photographers. Substack is nimble enough to skirt this for the sake of Notes, but it only takes one person to sue you for bad usage.

Obviously, this gets difficult to enforce nowadays, but I think it’s a matter of time before photographers, etc. start scouring Substack too. (My early book mood boards definitely don’t have images that I’ve credited or bought the rights to, so I need to do some adjustment.) You cannot just say “Photos from Pinterest” although I’m calling myself out on this one because I need to audit the blog for more images that aren’t mine. You’re only staying out of trouble for now because the photographers don’t know. Maybe you’ll get lucky. It’s very tempting to see how people grow and to want to copy the strategy, but maybe I’m too goody-two-shoes.

I also get very irritated with writers sharing articles that clearly have AI graphics, especially if those writers then complain about the dignity of their own jobs. I just find it hypocritical. You are….also…stealing peoples’ work? (Substack is not exempt from problems of plagiarism.)

Where is the line between sharing inspiration and sharing with an assumption it’s your own content? Is it when the repost of a repost goes far beyond the original credit, and you receive the monetization benefits? Is it when people cite it incorrectly to you? Does it not matter? Maybe nobody thinks about repost culture as much as I do.4

I do also think about the formula of it all. Certain visual trademarks do imply formula more to me.

And then within Substack, how many people have a formula that goes something like:

• 1 classic quote / 1 Baroque portrait image / 1 Carrie Bradshaw or cigarette meme per day

• 1 relatable tweet-type Note / 1 about reading + literature

I’m also a geek about word frequency within books, so I think a lot about word frequency as it appears on Substack, and how it pairs with certain image types.

I won’t use specific post examples because that feels mean (and this isn’t journalism—it’s a phone note) but surely y’all know the ones I’m referring to, and me referencing them is not a dig. Right now that’s like:

analog / autumn pair with dark academia aesthetic / leaves emoji / old sitcom character

Using certain media for your hero image still follows under the umbrella of meme culture, but it’s embedded in what’s acceptable for Substack—and what’s most likely for readers to click into, probably because it triggers that sort of similarity cascade I’ve been so fascinated by lately. (There are great books on Internet speak, its visual languages, etc. that probably address this exact psychology. My TBR list continues to grow.)

So in this case, I’m really not referring to originality. None of us are all that original, and concurrent creativity is a thing anyway. It’s not a problem that we’re all unoriginal, and it’s not a problem that we prefer this Droste effect-style framework on here too. I’m simply…riveted. And again, plenty of writers on here would love nothing more than to make a living, so treating yourself like a one-person media organization might really matter—and is not a bad thing whatsoever.

Marketers know this too; staged photography signals something different from UGC-style content, each with differing levels of trust and authority conveyed in first impression. So frame-within-frame quotes versus bare…?…quotes is not that different of a conversation.

One of the people I know who is most killing it on here has an aesthetic that 100 percent aligns with what pops off, and I do not doubt at all that they has a formula for how they dole out photos, texts, lists, and the like. That’s just good media strategy and business acumen. We see it on LinkedIn with the line breaks and the hourly schedules. It’s nothing new!

I thought about this format-wise in experimenting with lowercase and casual. I do like that I can be unpolished here (hence the rambling) and because I don’t send it to email, maybe five people will read it and maybe one person will comment. Someone will see it’s a 15-minute reading time for a post that’s not coherent or focused enough and skip it. But it feels good to iron out.5

Some of us who know influencers and big creators in real life also do have the disorienting experience sometime of knowing someone who is entirely different in person than their persona in-feed, which has never sat right with me entirely—but it’s also a business. I prefer my privacy too, for example, and often think about how whatever I’m posting is curated by the exact mood that makes me want to post—one very specific one—so that’s not my whole self.

Although I probably wouldn’t want “my whole self” to make it into my feed, I do think about how some people assume they know me based on my blog, online presence, etc. You do have to be cool with people getting you wrong or flattening you in order to grow, and that rubs up against my whole autonomy schtik—in this case, relating to control over the image of me being me.

The feed exists because we feed the monster anyway

My feed will also show me more of what I engage with or comment on, so it will likely feed me more of these because I wrote about it. I obviously can’t transfer over all my blog reviews at one time, so I’ve been triaging based on what I personally feel like working on, what I want to link to within Substack vs. on my external site, books that people have asked me about, etc.

But I’m policing myself here by hoping I don’t get caught up in only transferring over the books that will make me seem most sophisticated i.e. pleasing to the Brooklynites (love y’all.) I hope that I will share quotes from Jodi Lynn Anderson and Jandy Nelson and Marissa Meyer as freely as I love sharing John Steinbeck and Daniel Keyes and dear ol’ Cormac. I did this yesterday and thought about how my phrasing sounded so similar to the frame-within-a-frame I mention above, but I genuinely was thinking about this quote from Tiger Lily, so you know: splitting hairs about formula itself. The only person who knows for sure is the creator.

The thing is that I’m pretty sure I could do the formula if I wanted to “pop off” more, and maybe I should swallow my pride to do so because I don’t get paid enough yet for the work I do. This could be a path forward. A lot of people notice the formula, and it runs into the modern art problem of “Yeah, you could have painted that. But you didn’t. Someone else is executing.”6

Someone said something the other day about selling out via Canva graphics, and I totally did that too! And it wasn’t solely for the algorithm—it was because I’d posted it elsewhere and had the images on my phone—but yeah, they’re right too, hence the analysis of intent and media-within-media.

And this all relates to palatability of image vs. text?

This was me being a brat because I just read Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others for several reasons including but not limited to “the military men here are killing me,” our desensitization to violence online and in reality, and having liked On Photography previously.

And the woman LOVEs talking about photography, what an image does, and how its format matters. And this observation marks the same problem as the post of screenshot of tweet above, but with an added layer: a lot of people are still more likely to read an essay or post in image form rather than the text itself, which is a fascinating discussion of format that greatly pleases both my writer and studio art student selves.

Aesthetics exist for a reason, our brains love predictability and cohesion, and we gravitate towards strong existing visual languages—including this one—over time too, which the feeds reward. Niching down does work, and that includes in Droste-ing.

It’s not just convenience, because it’s the difference between a click into an article and a swipe right to read more, but there is something about an image that feels more casual perhaps. Maybe less time-consuming? More sparkly. But it speaks to the same fragmented attention, social proof, frame-within-a-frame effect.

There are accounts here doing very well for quotes in graphics from their essays, and I don’t think the graphics themselves are much better than what Substack comes up with. Does it trick our brain into, at first, assuming the words come from someone else which thus makes us pay more attention? I’m not sure. Maybe that’s why it works and continues.

Anecdotally, the popularity of Substack also helps on other platforms too. People are familiar with the font and styling choices and seem more likely to read. So the same effect could be applied to the quoted quotes on here too—we recognize the old Twitter interface or Tumblr or whatever and feel more stirred to that. Maybe also a dash of a nostalgic rush for old content vs. less affection for the new? Which ties back into the classics/self-study desire too—proof of endurance i.e. quality.

For Substack, people are more likely to read Substack who wouldn’t necessarily read a blog, so the priming of that font, spacing, etc. primes the reader in a good way. If I post screenshots from my blog itself, which has different style choices, the response is lesser. So that also contributes to the framed-ness of everything. But I digress.

I would love to talk to my Art Since 1945 professor, Dr. Elliott King (the best) about the art history crossover. Or my icon of a drawing professor, Leigh Ann Beavers, who would have a lot of thoughts on art and social media at all, because she is basically the Mary Oliver of rural Virginia.

It’s just…food for thought. And I still think it’s silly to see people reposting popular posts from other social platforms of a decade ago as if it’s their own thought. Come up with your own!

Upon hearing that I’ve been a book reviewer for almost 15 years, most introductions to strangers involve us comparing favorites, taste, and recent loves. That’s not unusual. Often, I will go back and read the recommendation if it’s a person I really enjoyed talking to. I’m a very fast reader, so most books might take me a long afternoon, and I love to w…

Read more

• Have I made the right sacrifices?

• Do I think I’ve changed a lot?

• Do I move? Where should I move?

• What do I want next from my career?

• Am I happier now?

Good brain food for rainy, late-night, front-porch-rocking-chair conversations mimicking moments we had together in college. I asked friends what they miss and what they don’t. We chatted directions, questions, doubts, etc. This decade—for me—has been marked by a fear of wasting time, a curiosity about what you hold onto as you change, how to hopefully get to know people better, and more.

After graduating in 2020, these books helped me figure out how to start out. Post-reunion, in a transitional few months of deciding “what’s next” and hearing what’s in store for others, they’re on my mind for me and others from my grade.

I’ve been running my book review blog for 14.5 years (since the 7th grade) so a lot of those existential questions mimic the rabbit holes I’ve gone down in various psychology and philosophy books. I’m not one for overt self-help, although these each have those characteristic “how to” or “the art of” labeling along with that distinctive white or cream cover art. I tend to prefer books with real, chunky, tangible-seeming studies because I internalize them better, but that’s also a placebo effect in a way that soothes the ego. There are plenty of pros and cons to pop-sci too.1

Each of these books has made a measurable difference in how I conduct myself in the exhilaration and confusion of trying to figure out the path my twenties will take. After talking to the kids (now adults) I graduated with, these are a few easy reads I’d recommend to anyone in the same boat—

Read more

I definitely cringe at some first impressions of mine to others. While in the tunnel-visioned pursuit of my book deal pursuit, I mulled over: when is it best to meet someone? When you’re light? When you’re the most “real” version of yourself? Are you who you are most recently, most consistently, or your preferred version? (A forever question.)

Because author-me is a significant part of my essence, I suppose, but not the only one; after [redacted book process], I had the disorienting sense that anyone I’d met in the last few years didn’t know me outside of the intense confines of a singularly-motivating life dream and the crushing pressure that came with it. People say I seem a lot lighter now after, which is a mixed thing to hear for a lot of reasons.

I'm haunted by too much knowledge in this sense—awareness of character-building strategies, how the brain basically functions as a prediction machine, and how those same instincts translate to how we perceive others in reality. (This year, I’ve also thought a lot about the line between strategizing vs. being inauthentic when controlling your own image.) I do think my interest in psychology is what allows me to (hopefully) be great at writing fiction in the first place.

Recently, I've also thought about faux first impressions of seeing or "knowing" someone online first. Within the algorithms, the order in which you see someone’s “content” might get scrambled—so you don’t follow the usual order of getting to know someone anyway. I wondered which version sticks for us if we then meet that person "in real life" later. (I say frequently that Words Like Silver and the particular analytical, emotional, or philosophical tone I strike there is a significant part of me but not the only one.)

It's all salience, I suppose. Also something I think about a lot: you're primed by context and belief and groups and similarity or dissimilarity cascades, so in many cases you decide to like or dislike someone independently of who they are, then you operate on confirmation bias thereafter. So much of any interaction is self-fulfilling prophecy.

I recently read Why We Click by Kate Murphy and How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett and submitted a tentative bio for [redacted book process] and forced myself into making a bio for an app I'd prefer not to be on (hahaha), and I thought more about how your perception of me would be wildly different based on if you read my blog first, or if you read Mountain Sounds (which is quite angsty) then look to see who wrote it, or if you're poking through journalists as a public relations specialist and come across my content to connect on the career side. Or if you meet me through the lens of a book rec, or if I'm being a wallflower at a social gathering with mutual friends, or if you encounter the day-to-day me within my routine across the island. They are each slightly different, which is inevitable.

It's extremely easy for me to write my journalism bio, because that's all reading, writing, and my resume. Going beyond that for any other purpose teases out my curiosity with questions of public vs. private selves2, the labels we give ourselves3, whether who you are is what you do, and even the generosity and necessity of allowing others to reintroduce themselves to you constantly (likely, for me, the definition of relationship or connection at all.)

I do not like people having access to my private life, but I also detest dishonesty, so it's occasionally tricky for me to determine what's the mental line as my creative work will take on a life beyond me. I have time to kill before then, but I feel the need to make some of those decisions now. And if I'm given the chance to give you say three or four details about my life that prime you to make an opinion about me, what should they be? (And yes, this applies to social life too—not just authorship.)

This curiosity also totally makes sense in the context of my reading list this year, including but not limited to East of Eden, The Influential Mind, Superbloom, Take It from Me, and hell, even Melville’s Benito Cereno.

Filing people into categories is efficient and necessary or else we'd suffocate in the nuances of it all4 (of course all people are different people!!!!) but I still think about it anyway and the impossibility of sticking to concrete descriptors. What do you do? What are you like? How much time can pass before you can say you know someone or don't, and how much exposure or opacity does each require?

On that note, there's also little more annoying than the sense that someone has really gotten you fundamentally wrong, but I've largely matured past the point of needing to correct this if I sense it in others. It doesn't affect my self-image to be gotten wrong even if it grates at me to initially notice, and that's a way in which I've grown.

So much of connection on any level—career, dating, reading, friendship—is luck, choice, and maybe being in an optimal mood at the beginning. I guess what I'm getting at here is that I’m so aware your first impression of someone or something often has more to do with you than about them (cue my fascination with unconscious influences) which is a lot of luck and timing.

The cure for misunderstanding then, and the resulting frustration or despair or regret there, is sometimes not to put yourself out there so you can solely go with your own definition. The reality of personhood is probably the whole "two opposing truths can exist at once" balance of that you are both how you prefer to define yourself and also how other people label or categorize you, which means occasionally wading through that dissonance and letting people get the wrong idea.

Upcoming, I have both my summer camp reunion (where I was a counselor for many years, inspiring my book) and my five-year college reunion, so I suppose it's all on my mind. Because recently, a friend from school asked me if I'd thought I'd changed a lot since college. I said yes; he said he didn’t feel like he had at all. We didn't think either way was necessarily good or bad, but the question’s been rattling inside me regardless.

The idea that we truly "know" someone even as they constantly change in front of us involves a lot of choice and maybe a dash of ignorance, which is why the answer to me has always been the Ted Lasso-style pithy quote of Walt Whitman's "be curious, not judgmental." Essentially, I think that connections require openness to someone changing or else they're not really real, because as soon as you've crystallized the idea of someone in your head then you've gotten them wrong.

This isn’t an existential crisis, because I know where I stand on this front. (Treat people in the most generous read possible, because behaviorally, we tend to live up to that.) But it just makes me want to get my bio right, because I’ll be broadcasting a first impression to people who don’t know me, hopefully widely.

Writing my author bio is really not that serious, but it is on my mind: just a springboard for some of these questions lately.

Right now, I tailor each bio to the publication, person, or context. I'll swap my bylines frequently i.e. The Wall Street Journal is my go-to because it’s so recognizable, Cosmopolitan was my personal favorite pinch-me moment, and Lonely Planet is the most aligned with what work I love most (travel journalism.)

So I have a few rotations of "journalism," "fiction," "dating app," "interests," whatever. Even on social media, I often feel a little out of place, squashed between the platforms’ various personalities. I don’t quite fit the standardized intellectualism of Substack or the outgoing trendiness on TikTok, but I don’t want to niche down to align with an archetype either.

I like to have a specifically private identity, even as plenty about me becomes public. But as the dreams or wants I have take on a life beyond me (arguably the point of any creative venture at all—that it becomes independent from you), I can't dictate the factors that will control what about me somebody picks up on and how they roll with it. All I can do is do my best to distill it into five sentences.

The Author Bio, Maybe

Grace Smith started out on the book review blog she founded at age 13—and still runs. After studying history and studio art in the Blue Ridge Mountains, she accidentally became a journalist across publications like Lonely Planet, Cosmopolitan, and The Wall Street Journal. When not reading, writing, or traveling, she’s often beelining for the closest dance studio or disappearing into nature. She currently resides in Waialua, Hawai’i, but you can find her online at her blog Words Like Silver, her social media @bygracesmith, and subscribe to her newsletter for the latest updates.

Sample Journo Bio

Grace Smith covers travel, style, entertainment, and more for publications like The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, Lonely Planet, and others. As a journalist, Grace writes through the lens of the psychology of aesthetics, pulling from scientific insights, social histories, and her studio art background to inform her analysis of what we find beautiful. Originally from Tampa, Florida, she’s since lived in Virginia, New York City, Honolulu, Park City, and Hale’iwa.

Another Bio Elsewhere (*Cough*)

Writer & reader—if not doing either, I'm probably outside, traveling, and/or being bad at one of my many, many hobbies.

And, of course, the blog’s about page tends to be pretty accurate.

There are some truths I know about my writing process so far:

• I require simmer time.

• I'm smartest first thing in the morning and get dumber throughout the day. (Cue Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing schedule.)

• A scene comes to me visually first.

• I write best on a line-level, so line edits are where a book becomes a book.

• Because of that, first draft will feel messy and bad.

A lot of people, myself included, will say they want to write a book then wimp out (respectfully) around actually doing it because it doesn't feel good at first to be producing something that's so rough.

And the hardest part of any creative career that you only get after time and experience and mistakes in your particular pursuit seems to be knowing when to balance strict discipline versus following your rhythms without worrying that veering into one or the other will sacrifice your momentum or burn you out in the wrong ways. It’s a tightrope I still frequently mess up.

The Gap & Avoiding What You Want

I think about this Ira Glass concept frequently, and not solely on a career level. It also applies on a micro-level to any creative project or pursuit. At some point, you hit the gap and the wall where the only thing you can do is put in more work and not trust the feedback of your feeling or intuition.

It's not as simple as "just start," more so—to figure out what gives you the sense of forward movement versus stagnation, and to constantly trick yourself into methods that provoke that sense of progress. Also, you have to be cool with your ego taking a backseat while you're entrenched in a deeply solitary pursuit. Because you have to do it alone, but you're also not going to have the immediate positive feedback of being particularly skilled or capable at it either.

Sometimes discipline means enduring your own mediocrity at something. I don't think it's actually hard to do hard things; I just think it's hard to muscle past your own pride when you're bad at them at first, or don't know what you're doing.

When you're in the gap, knowing when to produce/produce/produce versus to pull back and recalibrate is important, because your gut can start to trick you here because it's panicked at wasting time or proving that we’re untalented. As humans, even if we're vaguely unhappy or think we're good at making ourselves uncomfortable, we default towards our "normal" and the status quo which is why we'll even avoid what we most want to do because it's most important to us and the stakes feel so high. I'm aware of this tendency within myself across the board because I have high standards for myself.

Writing a book is cited as something like one of the top five bucket list items that people have, but less than 1% of people actually do it. And then, within publishing, the odds of getting a literary agent have been cited as roughly 1 in 600—and then out of that, about 50% (I think?) of pitched books die "on submission" or before getting a publisher. So the need to be excellent and to push through can be terrifying enough to keep you from actually doing it. For as long as it exists in your head, you don't have to worry about it actually being read and received or on the page, but that ultimately traps you in a state of longing rather than satisfaction.

This Oliver Burkeman concept also applies to book writing and the stamina required to do it.

“James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time. If you’re trying to decide whether to leave a given job or relationship, say, or to redouble your commitment to it, asking what would make you happiest is likely to lure you toward the most comfortable option, or else leave you paralyzed by indecision. But you usually know, intuitively, whether remaining in a relationship or job would present the kind of challenges that will help you grow as a person (enlargement) or the kind that will cause your soul to shrivel with every passing week (diminishment). Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.”

I suppose I believe that writing a book, no matter what the end result is, will enlarge me no matter what and so it's worth pursuing. At the end of a day working on a book, I often feel better and like I'm doing what is most important to me.

That being said, I often find myself not working on my book because it's not at the same point I see my debut novel Mountain Sounds being at—being actually good and like something I could be proud of. So I have to work through the gap thanklessly until I'm at the point where the result becomes more of a reward than the process of creation itself.

How Drafting Is Going!

I've written about 3,500 words and mapped out the first five chapters to a tee. That doesn't sound like a lot (it isn't) but within the last few days, I've hit the point where first thing in the morning, I roll over, make a coffee, and nail down a thousand words that are actually accurate. Not good ones, but they're there. Sun Guilt’s been simmering for so long that now, executing it feels so much easier, and I know that means it’s ready to go down.

I will overwrite and then scale down. So while I've written 3,500 words, I haven't hit the end of the first chapter, which will ultimately distill down into about 1,500 words instead + a 900 word prologue. So at least 1,000 words will go to "waste," with good lines reappearing elsewhere in the manuscript. At the end of my working doc, I have a section called Good Lines where I paste something I want to write elsewhere, and I also have a long-running phone note with human details.

I have a lot more of it done, but not organized or chronological. Putting it down into an actual Word processor has been what’s made it feel “real,” even at maybe 5% into the narrative.

I do finally feel at the line of conception at which I can say "I am writing my next book" versus "I know what I'm writing next."

The zero draft is an underdrawing, so I'd say the prose that's making it to the page is very internal, telling-not-showing, and a lot of writing I'd call sloppy in a final draft. This stage of drafting can be most satisfying for sure, because unlike the rest of the cerebral daydreaming, you look up after adding 10 pages to a Google Doc and feel like you've done something. But it can also be the worst because your vision doesn’t match what’s in front of you, which will haunt you until you’re done—maybe years later. You’re introducing desire into the equation, and we don’t actually love tangibly wanting.

In any other medium, you can immediately dash off something that's perfect; writing a book is so long-form that, although technically possible, it's unlikely that your vision matches your reality. Mentally, that makes the sacrifices hard to justify until you're at a point of critical mass, but you still have to make them. (Unless you're fabulously delusional and ego-driven, which might actually help you in this case.)

Scrapbooking has been working for me while planning?

One of my issues, both in working and writing, is that I hit a point in my day in which looking at a screen exhausts me and makes me deeply sad. For my creativity, it's helpful to shift into doing something with my hands, which is why I often write a lot longhand. That's also responsible for my 2025 purchase of the Freewrite Traveler, which I plan to review at some point (mixed thoughts.)

As a studio art minor, I also learned a lot of how to construct a mood or sensation—one of the strengths of my writing, I'd say—visually and when to basically switch into another language when my existing one (typing English) is starting to wear me out.

So the other day, I actually printed a ton of mood images from my Sun Guilt Pinterest board and started taking notes on the specific inspirations or moments that a given snap inspired.

For example, these are specific feelings or sensations that build the mood of the first chapter that ultimately will need to make it into the book—whether or not I describe them verbally or the knowledge of them informs the details I do curate for the book.

One of the primary anchors of my year, both as an author and a person, has been the concept of SALIENCE and how our brains process so much information at a given point that each detail standing out has something to do either with what's primed us already or with what we want to feel. From a writer's perspective, this is called Chekhov's Gun. So I can generate a ton of detail, but then I have to whittle it down so that each detail relates to the promise of the book itself. I only have about 70,000 words to play with (which sounds like a lot if you're not an author) so each descriptor has to matter.

“A storytelling principle that suggests any element introduced in a story should be relevant and serve a purpose, or else it should be removed.”

Anyway, I'm not necessarily an outliner in the sense that I will map out the threads and arrange them per storytelling structures, but I am an outliner in that laying out the images and having a sense for the order can help me achieve the aims of a given scene. It taps into a different part of my brain which helps me maintain stamina for actually drafting.

Similarly, when you get many drafts into a book and start to cut and paste back in specific lines or passages depending on what's working, how you angle everything, etc. you can sometimes forget what you've cut and forgotten to put back in. So you can also use a method like this to "fact-check" that you've put each detail in that you intended to. I had a haunting moment during [redacted book process] in which I realized that I'd cut a line I really loved, so it's in my revision notes that I'd like to add that back in when editing. Otherwise, the details in your head might not make it to the page—and the end result may feel flat to you.

Because I've largely figured out that I want to influence how people feel when they read parts of my books, and if I can nail that through what I create—at least within a bell jar of feeling—then I've done my job properly. You can never get this entirely uniform because, per DFW-esque ruminations on language, everyone has a wildly different bundle of associations with each specific word, but precision here is I think where people feel that moment of, "Wow, that book made me alive in some way," regardless of whether the overall impression is positive or negative.

So I have to care about the overarching mood, the details within it, and the order in which they appear. It's why a thousand books can have the same exact plot and there is one that "gets" you or stands out.

Right now, scrapbooking—versus just having the boards pulled up in a browser tab—is leading me to actually putting down concrete words versus the abstract feel of solely "storyboarding," so that feels tangible. And it's making the words go easier! So we love that. If I get stuck on what to do, I can just try to brainstorm as many descriptors, prompts, etc. as I can based on a specific image rather than feeling like there's no material from which I can draw. (For me, having source material is nearly never the issue, but still. What am I trying to recreate or evoke?)

Anyway, right now I'm falling victim to my favorite trap, which is to write a blog post which then pulls from my limited mental resources for the day—so I should hop off, finish my word count, and shift to the work that will actually pay my bills. But: here's a peek into the beginning of a process.

Some other posts on writing this book:

The Considerations of Writing a Zero Draft

Writing a Novel from Scratch: Layers, Craft Books, Tips, etc,.

Software Recs for Drafting a Book

Building Out a Book's Mood Through Music