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 have spent a few years writing my first book and now its finally going to be published by the end of the week! I just wanted someone beside family to know.

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.

The trouble with looking this up online is that most anecdotes about rejection end with success through perseverance! Are there any examples of authors who continued to have work turned down as not good enough (i.e, not because of subject matter or personal behaviour)?

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?

Interestingly enough, The Guardian, which is a mainstream British newspaper, has been taking a very strong stance on the value and importance of human authorship of books and creative writing. This is not even close to the first article this year I've seen on the subject. But this one seems particularly appropriate for the forum.

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?

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

Hope you’re all doing well!

Just got laid off, so here I am looking for people to talk to. Guess I’m finally free from the corporate grind, might as well take the leap and see where this writing thing takes me. Would love to meet some fellow writers along the way.

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

One of my characters broke down after a certain circumstance and I actually felt teary eyed after. This has happened several times after hitting 50K words

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. 😂

Just wanted to ask what cool/annoying/interesting writing quirks you people might have. They could be the ways you write, the real life positions you be in when you write, stuff you do before during or after you write, or any other quirk. I’ll share two: when writing by hand, I almost always capitalize my Rs for some reason, and when I get stuck on a passage, I’ll cut to the next section I feel confident in writing then come back to bridge from where I left off.

Recently, I heard about Novel November, and I was thinking about taking it on. At this point, I have little more than an idea for a story, and I haven't really written a novel before. I wonder: who has attempted the Novel November challenge before and why? And if you have done it, what kind of experience or knowledge did you gain from it? Would it be worth it for those who are new to writing novels?

(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.

I've written five different endings (3-4 chapters each). Some of them have set up more mysteries without resolving anything, some of them have wrapped up a few and left a few threads hanging, and some of them tried to resolve them all. I wanted to make a sequel, but I don't want the last few chapters to feel like a "comedown" ending, but I don't want to leave a cliffhanger. I'm pretty confident in the first 40 chapters, but the last five are always shaky for me. What do you do?

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?'

Recently, I wrote a short prose analysis for my AP Literature class, for which we were specifically asked to write only the thesis and first paragraph within a 30 minute time frame. Whenever I take a look at what I can only describe as my abysmal writing, I find myself tearing up. It genuinely feels as though improving is an impossibility. I don't even know where to begin or what I'm supposed to do. Last year, in my AP Lang class, I would constantly ask my teacher how I could improve, whether there were any books, articles, or other resources she could recommend, but she would always look at me dumbfounded, as though I'd just asked her the most absurd question in the world. I write for school every other day, and I read far more than most of my peers, arguably at a much higher level, yet whenever I'm asked to articulate my thoughts in writing, I feel trapped. I consistently struggle to transition smoothly between textual evidence and my own analysis, and occasionally, while writing, I find myself almost dissociating, losing my train of thought and stop writing altogether before regaining my focus.

Below is the Prose Analysis I wrote and what the teacher expected below it:

In the Everfair by Nisi Shawl, there is a tension between the main character Lisette Toutournier and her surrounding environment as she cruises along in her bicycle ultimately illustrating the capricious nature of life in adolescence.

Near the beginning of allotted paragraphs, the narrator begins to speak about the troubles Lisette faces whilst she rides her bicycle through the French countryside, "Oh, how the insects buzzed about her exposed skin, her face and hands and wrists and ankles" (Shawl 1). Through mentioning the supposed wish of these insects to ravage specific sections of her exposed body, the narrator elucidate the potential pain they might bring about her, serving as an allegorical symbol of the pain brought about by external forces such an impertinent peer that is typically seen in youth. She further expounds on potential troubles, mentioning the "Vexing heat" which "bid fair to stifle her as she climbed the hillside" (Shawl 1). The metaphor of the vexing heat, which brings trouble in form in she has no controls in, shows the hostility that a person face youth through seemingly predetermined factors such as class or wealth. The narrator further brings attention to her tension from her environment, citing that she " pushed it along through underbrush and creepers, woodbine and fern giving way before the wheel" (Shawl 1). Through bringing attention to the physical tussle between the machine and the surrounding countryside, she again reinforces a tension in one's youth from predetermined factors but in a more material sense, such as possibly pernicious geographical location that one is born in which we have very little agency to change until adulthood. 

In the next upcoming paragraphs, I was going to highlight the joys she experienced through her innocence regardless of pain that one faces in adolescence and the allegory of the bike which I believe to be friendly peers who help to push forward ultimately underscoring a contrast between the pain and joy we experience in adolescence.

1. Write a defensible thesis statement (include all required elements).

2. Write one full body paragraph.

3. Write one sentence telling me what you would have written for your other body paragraph so that I know where you would be going with your essay.

4. Use direct quotes for textual evidence!

Gamemode: survival

By Silver Spoon

Chapter 1

“Generating World”

A young man with slightly bronze skin lay asleep on the forest ground, letting the air move his light brown hair and clothes, which consisted of a light blue T-shirt and a pair of darker blue jeans, as it pleased. The scattered rays of sunlight soon reached his chest before moving up his neck, just before reaching his lips and stopping at his eyes. That's when he finally came to life, rapidly opening his eyelids and revealing the shining dark blue of his pupils.

That's when he sat up and took a moment to see the world around him.

“Where am I?” he thought before shaking his head. A deep migraine had just made its way into the deepest parts of his skull.

“I can't remember a thing, but this doesn't seem to be a dream, at least not the type I would normally have. Wait, how do I know what types of dreams I have and yet nothing else? Not even my own name. Have I been drugged and then dropped into a random forest? No, what would be the point of that? Well, I can get answers later; what matters now is that I get some information.”

That's when the young man got to his feet and started walking among the light brown trees, inspecting the bark of the closest one before putting his hand on it.

“There's nothing special about this tree. All I can tell is that it's a normal oak tree, perhaps a little wider than usual, but not enough to be weird.”

That's when he jumped at a sudden sound coming from his left. He took a closer look, and what he saw left him perplexed.

“Am I seeing things, or is that a sheep? What's a sheep doing in the middle of the forest, especially such a white and fluffy sheep? You only see those when they are cared for by people. Does that mean I'm close to a farm? I have to look around. Hopefully, I can find the owner and ask them for help.”

He spent the next few minutes looking around for any sign of the owner or any human presence at all, but he was disappointed to find no indication of any humans. As far as he could see, the forest seemed to have no end, so he approached a nearby elevation, trying to see over the sea of trees. However, he soon became disappointed when he saw nothing but an endless expanse of green leaves.

“Just how big is this damn forest?”

He approached a nearby tree and sat by its trunk. He naturally moved his hands over his face to calm his frustration.

“What will I do if I can't find a way out? No, it's too soon to have such negative thoughts. I have to work with what I have.”

That was when he finally took a moment to look himself over. Due to his lack of previous memories, he had no reference point to know if his body or clothing had anything out of the ordinary. That's when he noticed that his jeans had pockets.

“If I'm lucky, I might have a phone in them,” he said to himself in a self-mocking tone as his hand reached into his right pocket.

Something peculiar happened.

“It almost feels like my hand is in a void, even though I can see it from the outside, bending the fabric of my jeans. My hand almost feels like it's touching nothing. Even when I move my fingers, I can't feel the fabric from the inside.”

That's when he made a fist and pulled his hand out, a chill running down his spine. However, when he inspected his hand, he noticed a perfectly square piece of impossible white paper that said, “Welcome to Minecraft, Steve.”