Between raising two kids, working in healthcare, and training for an ultramarathon, Lesley Prosko doesn’t have endless hours to feed the social media algorithm, and neither do most authors. In this piece, she makes a refreshingly guilt-free case for letting AI handle the grind while you save your creative energy for what actually matters.
Most writers file their rejection letters somewhere they never have to look at them again. T.D. Severin did the opposite, mining his for three throwaway lines that sent him back into Deadly Vision for a full rewrite. That rewrite went on to win the Clive Cussler Adventure Writers Competition, the American Fiction Award, and the Grand Prize at BookFest.
Not every writer is built to crank out a 300-page novel, and C.K. Sobey is here to tell you that’s a good thing. She reflects on how a pandemic-era clear-out of old journals revealed her true creative rhythm, and why chasing someone else’s format might be the thing holding your best work hostage.
Setting isn’t scenery. J.H. Mann makes the case that a rising tide or a looming house can do the work of an antagonist, with craft advice drawn from du Maurier’s Manderley and Cornwall’s Atlantic coast.
Award-winning author B.A. Bellec used one of the most debated tools in publishing to help edit his fourth novel, Cobalt Lungs. In this series, he documents exactly how he did it, what it saved him, and the ethical questions he worked through along the way.
Who actually created the book? Bellec works through ownership, training data, disclosure, job loss, and the environmental questions, and lands on an answer that stays honest about its own uncertainty.
Why a decade of beta reads and failed drafts, not raw intelligence, is what made AI useful to award-winning author B.A. Bellec.
The three-document system B.A. Bellec used to brainstorm and draft his novel to 40,000 words with AI as a working partner.
Where AI fails a novelist. B.A. Bellec on the failure state he hit and how he took back control of his fourth novel.
B.A. Bellec asks AI for 100 questions, keeps half, and adds 10,000 words: how he treats the machine like a second alpha reader.