Last year I self-published my debut novel, Critical Balance, in August. Since then I've been hard at work on the sequel.

2026 has been a hard year. In January I had to put my sweet cat of 17 years to sleep due to kidney disease. It was awful. Then in the spring we had to move out of our home and find a new one. That took over two months during which time we had to live in Airbnbs and hotels. We finally found a house, moved in, and then my wife got laid off from her tech job (completely not her fault, you can guess why.

Despite all of that, I managed to finish the first draft of the new novel, Citizen Zero, and now I've finished the second draft. This feels like a major accomplishment!

I was hoping to get it published this year, but that doesn't seem realistic at this point, as I still want to send it out to alpha and beta readers, get feedback, and then do at least a couple more revisions. My debut novel went through seven revisions before I felt it was ready to publish.

I'm over the moon that I've made so much progress on this book! It was a lot of work, and at times extremely difficult, but it was also a joy to create. I can't wait for people to read it, and I'm especially looking forward to hearing what readers of the first book think of it.

Here's the blurb for the first book:

Twenty-two-year-old Tia Moreno never expected her first job as a robotics technician on Unity, a city-sized space station, to turn into a deadly game of cat and mouse. But when strange vibrations lead to the discovery of a serial killer lurking among the station's residents, Tia must use her knowledge of robots to track down the elusive murderer. As the killer's body count rises, Tia realizes she may be the only one who can stop him before he destroys everything she's come to love. With the help of her new friend Minji, Tia races against time to catch the killer before he strikes again.

Fans of sci-fi thrillers will be on the edge of their seats as Tia fights to save Unity from a seemingly unstoppable villain. Readers who enjoyed Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary will be hooked by the high-stakes action and futuristic setting of Critical Balance.

It is a common style I see. Perhaps it is an amateur mistake. Maybe it’s just generated content.

Every paragraph is short.

When I read something like this, I dismiss it immediately as low quality. Poor writing.

It reads like the author finds their every word to be building tension. All the pauses. All the breaks.

It’s exhausting.

Books aren’t written like this. There’s a reason for that. So why are you writing like this?

**

Seriously guys, develop your paragraphs. I’ve seen this writing style in self-published works as well as when I go to my local writer’s circle. It’s an awful experience to read, and the only thing I can do with something like that is give up. If you find that you’re writing like this, go read some more books and study how the pros structure their writing. Please.

i’m querying for the first time and have received my first response—a rejection 😂 not sure why but i’m still excited.

I really hate when this happens. It's inevitable, especially with so many books out there, but it's still so annoying. I just had this happen today while reading a book in the same genre I am currently writing in. And it's for a series I am specifically trying not to be too similar to and BAM! The main series arc I had just figured out for my books gets hinted at for the end of the series I am reading.

head desk, head desk, head desk...

I am not going to change my series arc at this point but I did want to rant about it because ARGH!! Anyone else relate? What did you do, change it, plow forward and something else?

I'm an indie author with a very limited marketing budget. Yeah... same old story.

Services like Freebooksy and Fussy Librarian can get expensive, especially when you have no guarantee that free downloads will lead to actual sales.

So I started experimenting with a different approach: What if I uploaded my first book, completely free, to sites that aren't exactly known for respecting copyright?

You know which ones. :)

After all, these platforms already attract millions of people looking for free ebooks.

Why spend money trying to bring readers to a free book when you can bring the book to them?

I own the copyright, so I'm not pirating anyone else's work. I'm simply giving away my own.

I've just started testing this approach. No results yet.

Maybe it's a terrible idea. Maybe it'll bring me a few readers. At least it won't cost me $50 every time I try.

Has anyone else experimented with deliberately distributing their own books through piracy sites? Did it lead to any actual readers or sales?

I’m writing a book set in a world where humans never existed. The focus of the story is a society made up of wolves. I need help coming up with terms for lengths of time. Like, a year could be a cycle, a month could be a moon, etc. I’m particularly struggling with words for “hour” and “minute”. I thought about using a time system based on howls, but I’m worried if that could be confusing.

Thoughts? You can share your own advice In the comments.

NSFW because of mentions of suicide

So the thing is… I had something terrible happen in my already not very good and stressful life so I got into the state of sheer apathy where I can’t do shit. Including fucking writing which is literally the most important thing in my life, I breathe mainly for it. Like I open my text, try to concentrate but then thoughts about all the shit which happened still find me, I start thinking about all that and don’t write anything in the end :(

Idk, maybe I’m too hard on myself (I’m literally ugly crying every fucking day, was having suicidal thoughts, I can burst into crying any fucking time if I start thinking about all my troubles, no matter how happy I’d be like a second ago) but I still want to write. I ask writers who’ve been through something similar and for whom writing was vital, like how to push forward? Do I even need to do it or should I give myself some rest instead? My apathy doesn’t only touch writing, i can’t do literally anything so should I even bother pushing myself this much?
I’m not ever writing anything new rn, I’m mostly editing the third half of my novel.

Please help lol

Edit: thank you all for suggesting me therapy, but I’m already getting it. I have two therapists and on medication (just started it tbh), shit’s still hard :p

I've been thinking about this. Some of the most memorable characters are actually pretty awful people. Selfish, arrogant, manipulative, sometimes downright cruel. Basically, the kind of people you'd avoid like the plague in real life. 😂
And yet, somehow, you can't stop reading about them.
Personally, I don't need a character to be a good person.

Even my own characters drive me nuts sometimes. 😂

(This is the whole of Chapter 1)

Also, I'm looking for beta readers to send the full manuscript to from mid-November. It's near-future fiction.

Let me know if you'd like to read it!

Thanks so much x

Yesterday, I managed to write thousands of words. They kept pouring out of my fingertips, and I couldn't stop writing because I was so enraptured. Today, I have stared at my computer screen for two hours and thought of nothing.

Opened Tumblr for the first time today and my heart skipped so many beats 🥹... I posted a fanfic last night and I was expecting it to get the usual 30-40 likes and interactions omggggggg

Never thought I'd see the day where a post of mine has the same amount of notifs as my communities 😭

I'm not the best writer. However, in my time learning and growing I've discovered this thought process has fundamentall improved my pros. Starting out, my writing was generic. Some tense shifts and swapped pronouns is all it took with minimal sentence or content changes.

Then I started a story asking, what can I do in first person present tense I can't in other writing styles. My story became an experience. My action scenes went from descriptions, to kinetic and tactile. Emotions went from words, to viscerally sensations of emotions.

So, whatever POV and tense you choose to write in, ask yourself this, 'what can I do with this I otherwise couldn't?'

This book is inspired by my own personal life as a teen girl with BPD trying to navigate family struggles and love. So happy be starting somewhere!

I've always been a highly visual person, and I've watched movies and tv pretty much every day of my life, so I'm guessing those two things factor into this. I write chapters as if they are scenes. Like each chapter is kind of a clear-cut scene. I don't know why I do this, but I want to know if anyone else does this? I feel like it's a detriment to my writing to look at it this way.

just finished my 4th novel - not surprising that I think it’s the best one I‘ve written. Set in a late medieval Buddhist monastery. Religion plays a part in all my novels. I haven’t tried to publish any of them because a) The first one is finished, has plenty of good parts, but is too flawed - worth a second rewrite. b) the second is finished too, but instantly I junked the last third - I know how to finish it now. c) The third one is nearly finished and would have been finished if hadn’t got the idea for the Buddhist monastery one in the early summer this year.*The third one might be the best one actually but I won’t know that for sure until I’ve finished it.

* Starting the Buddhist novel was highly contingent (like all novels are, to different extents). I was at a music festival in the hills of mid wales. It was cold at night and i hadn’t brought a coat bc heatwaves had dominated the weather before the festival and the previous two times I’d attended it had been warm at night. I decided to buy a red Nepalese hooded poncho from a festival clothes stall, which did the job of keeping me warm admirably (I even wore it inside my sleeping bag), and that gave me the idea for the book. I started it immediately - at least partly bc I had been given the production WiFi password (by someone I met) so I could use the internet for research which I needed to do a lot of. Also I was awake for 90 mins before the other three people I was camping with so I sat in the morning sunshine outside the tent, with freshly made black coffee researching and developing the book. I was a very happy camper!

What are your thoughts on writing lists and descriptions of foods in a novel or short story? I typically enjoy reading about food, especially what a group of people are eating at a special occasion, like a feast. It makes me feel hungry and it is a sensory reward. Especially if the food sounds very appetizing. Although, I have also heard the opposite argument, that food lists can come off as overly ' listy' and kill the momentum of a story. But my appetite gets in the way of going for that argument. I find that has a psychological pull. What are other people's thoughts on this?

A couple of months ago, I posted the first page of a story I'd been tossing around in my head for quite a while on a writing feedback sub. It got 10 whole upvotes! That was enough for me to keep going. I've never finished something this long, and I'm super proud of it, even if I know it sucks. I really enjoyed the journey of learning, creating, and falling in love with my characters. I have this planned as a trilogy, so before I try my hand at editing, I'm going to take the sub's advice and walk away from it for a bit before revisiting. I'm not trying to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'm just some dude having fun rediscovering a hobby I'd lost along the way. Never forget why you started in the first place, and just keep writing!

I've been working on this novel for a while now - please note that despite this being three drafts in, there are still some names that are place holder names (such as Old Kingdom & New Kingdom, these will be changed in time, but for now they exist to separate the two)

My concerns:

1. I don't think my first line has enough 'punch' per say. I also feel that despite not directly discussing the weather, it still feels as though its starting with the weather. I'm wondering if it would be worth changing this to something different. Either similar to the scene it's already set in, or something else entirely.

2. Despite my re-writes, I still feel like my character voice is lacking in this chapter. I feel as though I've found it in all the subsequent ones that follow, but I'm struggling to bring it to life here. Am I overthinking this, or do you agree the character voice is missing from these pages?

3. I've not started with an inciting incident. I'm aware this isn't necessary, however I do not know if the scene with which I've started is too dull to grab a reader's attention. I don't know if I should start with her seeing the 'red eyes' before transitioning into the rest of the scene.

4. Is it too much of an exposition dump? In fantasy, there is obviously some world building that has to occur in the first few chapters. I've tried not to pile on a boat load of information all at once, however, reading it back, I think I might teeter the edge of it.

Thank you in advance for any feedback, advice, or comments people might have! It's extremely helpful to get insight and constructive criticism for my work so that I can make it better :)

Hi! General question for people. What kind of feedback is typical when one joins a writing group? I've joined and left a few groups and none of them seem to have a baseline for what kind of feedback is helpful on early drafts. It varies from reader reactions to the story itself, to people full line editing a first draft, and others giving incorrect craft advice. Curious if this is the norm in writing groups, and what is it that makes you enjoy the writing/critique groups you join?