Old writer back from the dead…
On a good day, my typical Facebook post gets a few hundred views and a handful of thumbs. Well, I put one up on a Wednesday morning in July and it did 3,847 views, 404 clicks, and 88 comments. Nearly ten times my normal reach, and I’m still answering comments on it several weeks later. … Read more
I gave away 991 copies of my book in two days, made zero sales, and got exactly one review for my trouble. And it wasn’t from a stranger. That’s the headline. Everything below is me trying to figure out what it means, and I’ll warn you up front that the answer turned out to be … Read more
TL;DR: The White Whale is a 105,000-word modern thriller adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, written by 78-year-old horror novelist Chet Day in transparent collaboration with Anthropic’s Claude AI. It preserves Melville’s characters, themes, and ambiguity while cutting the digressions that make the original the most frequently abandoned classic novel in English. Available now from CasaDay … Read more
In my first two posts of this three-part series, I showed you how to spot scams and explained why indie authors are such attractive targets for fraud. Now let’s talk about what you should actually be doing instead: the legitimate, bootstrap book marketing approaches that work when you’re willing to invest time instead of money. … Read more
In my last post on indie author scams, I dissected a sophisticated email that fooled me for several seconds—a fake Macmillan representative offering to help the memoir I wrote about my late wife reach more readers. Today I want to step back and look at the bigger picture: why indie authors like us are such … Read more
I recently received a fake book marketing email that made my 77-year-old heart skip a beat for about five seconds. Someone from Macmillan Publishers—one of the Big Five traditional publishing houses—had apparently read my memoir Ellen: A Memoir of Love, Life, and Grief and wanted to help me reach more grieving readers. On initial quick … Read more
Five years writing a grief memoir… That’s how long I spent writing about my life with Ellen, my wife of 47 years who died on Thanksgiving Day 2019. Five years of wrestling with memories, confronting regrets, trying to honor a complicated woman and an even more complicated marriage. Five years of starting over, deleting thousands … Read more
Last week I wrote about why memoir is having a moment in 2025 and why your story matters. Today I want to get practical and tell you how to write a memoir. How do you actually take a lifetime of memories and turn them into a coherent story that readers will want to finish? I … Read more
I’ve been watching something interesting happen in the publishing world regarding memoir writing in 20205, and I’ll be honest: it surprised the tar out of me. Memoirs are everywhere. Not just the celebrity tell-alls you’d expect (though yeah, those too), but regular people writing about their regular lives. And here’s the kicker: readers are eating … Read more
In my first two posts, I talked about what documentary fiction is and how structure shapes meaning. Now let’s get completely practical and discuss writing documentary fictions, the tools that help, and the ethical responsibilities you can’t dodge. Because here’s what I wish someone had told me before I started The Healing Physicians: documentary fiction … Read more