This Crazy Writing Life: Four Million And Counting! Please, Somebody, Make It Stop!

By Steven Womack

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As I mentioned in a previous installment of This Crazy Writing Life, it’s impossible to determine how many books are published each year throughout the world. However, most experts seem to agree that our best guess estimates now pop four million a year.

Four million books a year!

It gobsmacks the imagination. And with the advent of generative AI, that number’s going nowhere but up. It’s indicative of how much alarm this has caused that Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)—Amazon’s indie pubbing platform—now limits you to publishing three books a day. If you’re good with AI, you can produce a “book” in under an hour. There’s evidence that there are thousands of accounts out there uploading more than 100 books a month.

It’s insane.

So when British writer and indie pubbing guru James Blatch (who is perhaps best known as Mark Dawson’s partner in what used to be called Mark Dawson’s Self-Publishing Formula before rebranding itself) wrote a Substack post a couple of months ago in which he suggested that KDP should charge $300 per upload…

Well, as we say in the screenwriting biz, chaos ensued.

This sent people straight into panic mode. I get it; most self-published books don’t earn $300 over the course of their entire lives (and a lot of trad books don’t). This would put a ton of folks out of business. And it’s going against the tide of where the indie-pubbing industry is headed. Ingram used to charge to upload a book, but now they’ve dropped that.

Apparently, Blatch (who is a genuinely nice guy; I had dinner with him and Mark Dawson at the Novelists, Inc. conference a few years ago) received nothing short of an avalanche of insults and threats over this idea. In a follow-up to the original Substack post, he wrote that:

Clearly the figure of $300 was the main issue. Even if it covers all derivatives, including translations, it would adversely affect more authors than I considered. But I will stand by the theme of the post.

Blatch makes a good case for putting up some kind of seawall against this word tsunami. If there’s no limit to AI slop, then we’ll all soon be drowning in it. Let’s also not forget The Elephant in the Middle of the Room, which is that a great many human-written indie-pubbed books should have never seen the light of day either (okay, there, I said it).

Of course, I’m not talking about your book or mine, but c’mon folks… We’ve all seen indie-pubbed books that are, frankly, embarrassing.

Prior to AI, my reasoning would have been that the market would have been the seawall. Word gets around that a book sucks and nobody will buy it. But these AI-generated tomes are also encased in AI-generated covers and backed up by AI-generated marketing. And if you’ve ever noodled around with AI covers and marketing (I have), you’ll soon learn that AI can produce some pretty good B.S. Their covers aren’t bad either.

This massive digital landslide hurts serious indie-pubbed writers. Amazon doesn’t give a rat’s rusty flip about you as an author. What they do care about is profit, and how do you protect profit?

By not p^*#ing off your customers.

Blatch wrote that Amazon has achieved this by altering its algorithm so that indie titles are penalized and held back from some chart positions. The algorithm has been tilted to the conservative side, so that books that make the best-selling charts tend toward those with a larger sales history.

I get why Amazon does this.

But it still hurts.

What we’re up against is the business model of AI-generated books. Humans who take writing seriously want to produce quality work that sustains itself over a long period of time. In the early days of my writing career, I imagined that my books would be a kind of annuity that would support me in my dotage and then continue to produce for my family after I’ve gone (reality quickly shut that dream the hell down).

AI-generated books are a new business model. When you’re producing a hundred books a month, if each one sells a couple dozen copies before people realize they’re drek, then you’re on your way to making a good living.

All this sounds like there are people running clandestine AI-slop farms from obscure offshore locations with no extradition treaty, like the folks with exotic accents who call me ten times a day offering me help with Medicare or make an offer on my house. That’s not always the case, though. Consider romance novelist Coral Hart, who was profiled a couple of months back in The New York Times. Ms. Hart is open and aboveboard about it: she creates romance novels with AI (specifically Anthropic’s Claude). She produced more than 200 last year, selling over 50,000 copies, and earning a good, solid six figures. To prove it could be done, she generated one while being interviewed.

It took her not quite 45 minutes.

So that’s what we’re up against. The competition was bad enough before AI. Now it’s even worse, and it’s not going away.

Now this effluent storm has even hit the trad publishing space. Hachette cancelled publication of the horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard in the wake of The New York Times raising suspicion about the book. The cancellation of the novel, originally self-published and then picked up by Hachette after presumably good numbers and reviews, has caused a real ruckus in publishing. Apparently, there was a lot of speculation about AI content in the book from the get-go, but Ms. Ballard has vehemently denied in interviews and statements that she had anything to do with this. She maintains that the editor used AI to change some of her text without her knowledge.

But this begs the question of why a professional author wouldn’t go over the editorial revisions and catch the AI changes. Most writers that I’ve ever known, myself included, go absolutely medieval over a manuscript that’s been touched by an editor. Sharyn McCrumb once told me she was so put out over a copyeditor’s changes to her manuscript that she had two rubber stamps made. The first read Stet. The second read Stet, damnit!

The other issue that pops up here is why didn’t Hachette catch the AI problem before the Times pointed it out. Publishing industry guru Jane Friedman speculated that perhaps publishers need to start taking advantage of tools like Pangram, which are designed to detect AI. Maybe trad publishers are just behind the learning curve on AI.

But, Friedman pointed out, the real issue is that AI has now evolved to the stage where it’s going to get harder and harder to detect it. As she wrote: “I hope (finally?) that this is a wake-up call for publishing professionals. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Jane Friedman is spot on with this one. AI isn’t going anywhere; in fact, it’s going to get a little bit better each day. I read a blog post by a very famous and important writer (no need to name names here) who raged against AI, saying it was the devil incarnate and he’d never have anything to do with, never touch it.

I think that’s short-sighted. For one thing, if you don’t know anything about AI and refuse to even look at it, then you won’t notice it when it sneaks into your life. If you consider AI the enemy (and I don’t, by the way), then the first rule of war is know your enemy.

To circle back around to James Blatch, he wrote recently that he’d had a conversation with a senior Amazon executive, who told him that Amazon would never introduce an AI checker. As soon as you created one, AI would find ways to get around it. The technology moves too quickly on both sides of the equation.

I don’t have an answer to this one. I’ve noodled around with AI and found it to be an incredibly useful tool. I’ve done everything from generating marketing copy with AI just to see what it looks like, to screening stocks for options opportunities, and planning travel itineraries. AI’s like any other tool; it can be used for useful, worthwhile purposes or it can be used to cause great harm.

The one thing I would never do is use AI to generate copy that I then put my name on.

Bottom line: this is the price we pay for, as the old curse says, living in interesting times.

Next month, I’ll have some news on a project I mentioned in a previous column.

Until then, as always, thanks for playing along.

Drop the Pen! What Every Writer Should Know About Real Police Work: The Bladed Stance: Why Do Cops Stand Like That?

By David Lane Williams

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One of my students recently observed two police officers interviewing an intoxicated man who’d caused a disturbance in a downtown bar. The student is pre-law, taking criminology electives to better understand a profession she’ll often engage with after she passes the bar. The incident she witnessed took place in a party district near her campus, an area dominated by college kids on any weekend night. 

She had questions about how the two walking beat officers engaged with the belligerent man. One of her questions concerned how the officers were standing. In her words: “There was something odd about their posture, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.” 

What she described is something that writers of police procedurals or mysteries involving police officers should understand. Knowing how and when this “odd” posture comes into play could give your work an insider detail that other writers might not know to include in their stories.

Watch a cop the next time you see him talking to someone he doesn’t yet know if he can trust. I predict you’re going to see him standing in what is called a “bladed stance.” Think of a boxer staring at his opponent across the ring. His hands are up, one leg is in front, the other back to lend stability in case he takes a punch.

The bladed stance in police work is the same thing, except the officer’s hands aren’t raised in fists. The stance is taught in police academies around the world because it works well for what it is supposed to do. It gives tripod-like support from behind in case the officer is punched or shoved, while allowing the cop to move out of the way faster should the suspect(s) suddenly try to tackle him. 

Let’s pretend you’re playing a game in which your opponent gets a point every time she throws a rubber ball and hits you in the chest. Were you to stand with your feet planted firmly facing your opponent, your ability to move out of the way is slower when the ball is thrown than if you were to stand slightly sideways. The bladed stance allows you to move quickly while only moving one leg back the moment the ball is thrown. Now, imagine replacing the rubber ball with a fist or an attempt to grab you. Being able to move nimbly and with minimal coordination between your feet makes you faster and better able to dodge or absorb the impact. 

A bladed stance also offers the distinct advantage of placing most of the officer’s weapons farther from the suspect. There are people in this world who seriously practice grabbing a cop’s gun out of the holster. Outlaw motorcycle gang members have been known to hold practice drills for their members to perfect this dangerous attack. Subsequently, cadets in police academies practice blocking such an attack so that they are never caught off guard or stripped of their weapons during a physical confrontation.

Take a moment to observe a police officer engaging with a citizen the next time you have the opportunity. Chances are, he’ll have his gun, baton, and pepper spray on one hip, with his radio, flashlight, and taser device on the other. In a bladed stance, the deadliest weapon is on the opposite side of the cop’s body from a suspect or detainee. 

This makes it more difficult for someone intent on taking a cop’s weapon and using it against him to reach a gun holstered on the opposite side of the officer’s body. The bladed stance adds a layer of protection, making this type of attack less likely to succeed. 

There is an additional detail I’d like you to observe next time you’re around officers. Watch their hands. Well-trained and experienced officers will most often stand with their hands in front of their torso while engaging in conversation with someone they’re trying to size up as a potential threat. Some steeple their fingers, others clasp one palm against another. This stance with their hands out in front offers a couple of advantages. 

First, their hands are in the perfect position to respond to a surprise attack. I used to have a police chief who would bellow all kinds of less-than-kind things if he spotted a cop standing with his hands in his pockets. The chief’s communication skills could have been better, but his reasoning was sound. Only a brazen idiot stands with his hands in his pockets when facing someone who might mean them grave harm. Being ready for anything means standing in the guarded position I’ve described but doing so in a way that doesn’t telegraph your plan. 

Second, a police officer who keeps her hands visible is proactively using body language to convey peaceful intent. This is especially important when dealing with someone experiencing anxiety or who does not automatically trust the police. We talk a lot about training officers to be good communicators in stressful situations. While that certainly means using our words to de-escalate tense moments, this also means conveying benign intent with our entire bodies. 

Policing is both a science and an art. The bladed stance is data-proven to be reliable when violence erupts. Great communication skills learned and utilized during some of the most stressful moments between human beings is an art form. Being able to seamlessly blend such science and art is foundational to great police work, and applying such skill to your protagonist makes for outstanding prose that your readers will appreciate and remember. 

Carry on.

Between Pen and Paper: Flaneuring Through a Writer’s Mind – Column 14: The Missing Hour: The Curious Elasticity of Time

By Andi Kopek

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Last night was one hour shorter than usual.

My phone said so, my car clock confirmed it, and my coffee maker seemed slightly offended by the sudden schedule change. At two in the morning, we simply moved the clock forward and politely agreed that sixty minutes had vanished.

This annual ritual is called daylight saving time. Yet it rarely makes me think about daylight, and it certainly doesn’t feel like savings.

What it really makes me think about is something much stranger. Time.

Time appears perfectly orderly when we look at a clock. Seconds march forward with mechanical confidence. Minutes stack neatly into hours, hours into days, days into years.

But the moment we pay attention to how time actually feels, the neat machinery begins to wobble.

Five minutes waiting in line for coffee can feel longer than two hours spent sipping it with friends. The last ten minutes before a deadline accelerate with alarming enthusiasm. Meanwhile a “quick check” of the phone somehow lasts forty-seven minutes. And childhood summers, when we were eight or nine years old, somehow lasted forever.

Clocks measure minutes. Humans measure experiences.

Writers know this especially well. Three hours at a desk may produce a single stubborn paragraph. Yet occasionally an idea arrives and five pages appear in twenty minutes as if the words had been patiently waiting somewhere outside ordinary time.

For the reader, of course, the ratio reverses. A page that took three days to prepare may be consumed in thirty seconds.

Writing, in this sense, quietly bends time.

Time becomes even stranger when we start moving across the planet itself.

One of the most delightful examples appears in my all-time favorite book, Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, a storytelling genius. In the novel, the famously punctual Phileas Fogg travels around the globe to win a wager that he can do it in eighty days. When he returns to London, he believes he has lost the bet by a single day.

But he has forgotten something subtle.

Because he traveled eastward around the Earth, crossing time zones along the way, he quietly gained a day without realizing it. While racing the clock, he had slipped ahead of the calendar itself.

Travel in the right direction around the planet and time behaves differently.

Our modern system of time zones is surprisingly recent. In the 19th century every town in America kept its own local solar time. Noon simply meant when the sun was directly overhead. That worked fine until railroads appeared. Suddenly trains were trying to run on hundreds of slightly different clocks. In 1883 the railroads solved the problem by introducing standardized time zones across North America.

On November 18, what became known as “The Day of Two Noons,” thousands of clocks were reset in a single afternoon. For a brief moment, some cities experienced noon twice.

Modern science fiction has pushed this idea even further. In Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, astronauts visit worlds where gravity stretches time so dramatically that a few hours for them equal years back on Earth.

You do not need black holes, however, to find a planet with a different clock.

I am currently working on a science-fiction novel that takes place partly on Mars.

A Martian day, called a sol, lasts about twenty-four hours and thirty-nine minutes. Each sunrise arrives just a little later than the one before it, as if the planet itself prefers to linger.

Even more striking, however, is the Martian year. While Earth circles the Sun once every 365 days, Mars takes 687 days to complete its orbit. A year there is almost twice as long as ours.

The simple astronomical act of circling the Sun for nearly twice as long as Earth has surprising consequences.

A ten-year-old by the Martian calendar would be roughly the same age as a twenty-year-old on Earth. Education might unfold differently. Careers might develop at another rhythm. What does retirement mean if a year is nearly twice as long? And what exactly is a thirty-year mortgage on a planet where years stretch so far apart?

Birthdays themselves might become rarer and perhaps more meaningful. On Mars, a child might wait nearly two Earth years before blowing out another set of birthday candles.

That reveals something quietly profound.

A year is not a universal measurement of time. Change the planet and you change the calendar. Change the calendar and you change the meaning of life.

Which makes our annual daylight-saving ritual seem almost modest by comparison.

Last night we misplaced an hour when the clocks jumped forward. Jules Verne once showed that a traveler could gain a whole day by circling the Earth. And somewhere on Mars, a twenty-year-old visitor from Earth would discover that, by the local calendar, they are barely eleven.

The more we think about it, the stranger time becomes.

We imagine it as something universal and precise, yet it quietly shifts depending on where we stand, how fast we move, or even which planet we call home.

Einstein showed that time is relative. Perhaps it is more like an ocean, and every world simply drifts through it at its own pace.

Last night was one hour shorter than usual for some inhabitants of the pale blue dot drifting through endless space.

But if that missing hour sparks a moment of reflection about lost hours, gained days, and life on other planets, then perhaps it was not lost at all.

Andi

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Andi Kopek is a multidisciplinary artist based in Nashville, TN. With a background in medicine, molecular neuroscience, and behavioral change, he has recently devoted himself entirely to the creative arts. His debut poetry collection, Shmehara, has garnered accolades in both literary and independent film circles for its innovative storytelling.

When you’re in Nashville, feel free catch one of his live performances. When not engaging with the community, he's hard at work on his next creative project or preparing for his monthly art-focused podcast, The Samovar(t) Lounge: Steeping Conversations with Creative Minds, where in a relaxed space, invited artists share tea and the never-told intricacies of their creative journeys.

website: andikopekart.ink

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Literary Alchemy: Ingredients of the Story – Misdirection

A series designed to elevate your skills and empower you to write like a pro.

By Chrissy Hicks

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Misdirection is a sneaky literary device that leads readers to believe one thing while hiding the truth. Consider the shocking betrayal on the Ides of March, when Caeser’s best friend stabbed him in the back. Et tu Brutè? Likewise, you want your reader to never see it coming.

Why use Misdirection?

• Maintaining suspense is a primary reason to use this mechanism. Keep your audience guessing what happens next. In Lest She Forget, by Lisa Malice, the main character awakens from a coma with no memory. The storyline is chock-full of misdirections, as readers are thrust into a twisty narrative with one reveal after another, often contradicting what we (and the protagonist) originally believed was true.

• Big reveals will be more impactful when the truth contradicts earlier assumptions. Through clever misdirection, you can achieve the coveted “plot twist” reviewers can’t stop talking about! In The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), even the title hints at the main character’s rise and perceived success, leading readers to expect the realization of his dreams. Yet the true nature of Gatsby’s wealth and George’s mistaken identity, leads to a tragic ending which comes as a shock.

• Show complex character traits by exposing their true nature only when the time is right. Consider the classic by Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None. Dr. Armstrong initially comes across as competent and professional, but his past indiscretions are later revealed: operating on people while drunk and covering up his involvement in a patient’s death. These reveals create uncertainty and suspicion.

• This technique mirrors the uncertainties of real life. People often make erroneous judgments based on incomplete information. At the start of my flash piece Overdue, Marty assumes he’ll quickly find something he can pawn from a suburban house in a well-to-do neighborhood, but the outside doesn’t match what he finds on the inside.

How and When to Use Misdirection:

Utilize misdirection by introducing seemingly factual information which later proves deceptive, paving the way for shocking plot twists that captivate and surprise your audience. This can be done through:

• Characters’ Secret Pasts: Clues of a character’s past can seem innocent until pieced together for a bigger reveal later that exposes their secrets. For example, Dr. Armstrong presented as a trustworthy doctor. His claim of not knowing a patient was a lie (though the reader doesn’t know this yet): “The name meant nothing to me when it was spoken. What was it Clees? Close? I really can’t remember having a patient of that name, or being connected with a death in any way.” It wasn’t until people were picked off one by one by an unidentified murderer that the survivors confronted him, and his deception was revealed, leading to a tense scene where his past failures were exposed. (And Then There Were None).

• Setting: Consider how you can use the expectations of a setting and flip them upside down. “Marty crept toward the two-story cookie-cutter house in the quiet cul-de-sac... Rumors had painted the residents as well-off... he needed the extra cash rich people left out—a purse on a table, a coin jar on the counter...” The reader, like Marty, encounters anything but the norm they presumed: 

Entering the dining room, Marty’s heart sank. A handwritten grocery list lay abandoned on the table, shoved aside a stack of bills stamped ‘overdue’ in violent red ink. The familiarity hit him like a gut-punch. They were trying to survive. (Overdue).

• Unreliable (or biased) Narrators: In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carroway, though not entirely “unreliable,” idealizes Gatsby, focusing on his dreams and aspirations while glossing over his flaws and the moral decay. Because we only see the story through his biased perspective, readers are misled regarding Gatsby’s true nature, such as his involvement in illegal activities and his obsession with Daisy. 

• Subplot: A subplot that distracts from the main conflict can create an excellent ruse. For example, in Lest She Forget, a mysterious visitor arrives, leaving the protagonist unsure whether he’s there to protect or harm. What’s more, there’s an underlying attraction between them, hinting at a possible past relationship. This thread keeps the reader guessing about their true connection and adds to the protagonist’s confusion. The reader is left to wonder whether this subplot is part of the major conflict or something else, and leads to a surprising discovery.

Red Herrings: Red herrings are misleading elements that divert readers by suggesting something through foreshadowing or clues about a character’s intentions, goals, or traits, ultimately revealing all is not what it seems.

• In Christie’s book, we question Dr. Armstrong’s innocence when we discover the poor choices in his past. When Captain Phillips is accused, readers are distracted and pointed away from the true killer.

• In Malice’s book, several women died during the blizzard, and we suspect a cover-up regarding the protagonist’s survival, though the motives remain unclear. The mysterious visitor could be friend or foe, and the protagonist must rely on her gut instincts for survival. All these point us away from the truth and further into the protagonist’s confusion and terror. 

• A subtler red herring in Fitzgerald’s book, is Gatsby’s wealth: the focus on this and his extravagant parties detract the reader from what he’s really after (Daisy) and the illicit origins of his fortune.

• At the start of my flash piece, readers might perceive Marty as a typical burglar, but when he breaks into the house, he’s confronted with his own traumatic past and a startling revelation about the family he’d planned to rob.

• Omission: What’s said is often as important as what’s left unspoken. Consider what a narrator leaves out, or what a character fails to notice. By the time you drop your plot twist, your readers won’t have seen it coming, but it should still ring true. When Nick tells Gatsby, “I thought you inherited your money,” Gatsby replies that he’d lost most of it in the panic of the war, then adds nonchalantly that he’s been in several things and changes the subject: “‘Do you mean you’ve been thinking over what I proposed the other night?’ Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house and two rows of brass buttons on her dress gleamed in the sunlight.” The reader is immediately drawn to Daisy, and we’ve forgotten all about Gatsby and his “business affairs.”

Lookout! 👀

Be on the lookout for signs of misdirection (through red herrings, omissions, secrets, etc) in your favorite movies and books. Consider how the author (or director) accomplished the use of this device. Was it effective? What hooked you and made you turn the page or keep watching? How can your understanding of what they did help you accomplish the same?

Prompt 📝

Write a scene where your protagonist is misled by another’s actions. The actions could suggest this secondary character is heroic or villainous, then twist this so the protagonist realizes the character is the opposite of what they initially believed. The reveal should be surprising but believable, stemming from a misunderstanding rather than an implausible shock.

Further Reading: 📚

• https://literarydevices.net/red-herring/

• https://literarydevices.net/ad-hominem/

• https://authorspathway.com/writing-process/writing/the-power-of-the-unspoken-how-omission-creates-tension-and-subtext/

• https://writershelpingwriters.net/2023/01/build-suspense-with-secrets/

Headcase: How To Avoid Eye Strain, Headaches, and Pulling Your Hair Out

By Mary Lynn Cloghesy and Jason Schembri

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While most of our healthy living articles are divided between the physical conditions and mental or emotional challenges that can affect a writer, this one addresses both. Why? Let’s try a little experiment. Go and stand in front of a mirror. What do you see? Most people will say “myself” or “me,” which suggests that we identify most closely with our faces. 

If we asked you to look at your arm or knee, your answer would likely have been different. Because the neck, head, and face are so intimate to our understanding of ourselves, it’s important to take a more holistic approach. As bestselling, nonfiction author Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., has said in his titular book, “The body keeps the score: if the mind is traumatized, the body bears it.” Let’s explore this further.

First, we’ll consider three afflictions that can cause pain or discomfort from the neck up, namely eye strain, tension headaches, and Upper Cross Syndrome (UCS)—sound familiar? At the beginning of this series, we wrote an article on UCS, so in this one, we’ll focus specifically on “Tech Neck.”  After that, we’ll take a look at the self-care practices that a writer must develop to deal with rejections, criticism, and creative blocks.

Three Conditions, One Root Cause

The three pathologies mentioned above share one root cause: musculoskeletal dysfunction based on prolonged periods of sitting and/or focused attention. We consider this to be the number one occupational hazard for writers. A lack of movement signals the body to compensate or create patterns that hold you in place but impair your overall health. In order to understand how this works, we’ll give you a primer on the new science of fascia. 

Fascia: What Is it? Why Does It Matter?

Fascia is the biological fabric that knits you together, meaning the soft connective tissue throughout your body. You are composed of about 70 trillion cells—neurons, muscle cells, epithelia, and others—all working in conjunction to keep you healthy. Fascia is the three-dimensional, “spider web” that binds structural units together and secures them in place. Think tendons, ligaments, bursae, and the tissue in and around your muscles, as well as the “bags” containing your organs. 

Here’s what it does for you:

• Provides Structural Support: It pins every muscle, bone, nerve, and blood vessel in place, serving as an inner “invisible body suit."

• Enables Smooth Movement: Fascia allows tissues to glide fluidly as a substance between its layers called hyaluronan acts as a lubricant.

• Transmits Force: Its webbing transmits the force generated by muscular activity to the bones and joints. This tissue is highly innervated and responds to injury first.

• Detects Sensation (Proprioception): Because it is densely packed with nerve endings—even more so than your skin—it helps the body understand its position, movement, and internal state.

• Acts as a Protective Barrier: It separates muscles and shields all your organs.

When fascia becomes unhealthy—meaning dehydrated, tight, sticky, and/or clumpy—it loses its ability to glide, leading to widespread structural and functional issues. Unhealthy fascia essentially transforms from a slick, lubricating web into a stiff, tangled, painful, and knotted structure. Impaired fascia is referred to as having adhesions. 

Unhealthy Fascia = Eye Strain, Headaches, and “Tech Neck”

Eye strain can be characterized as an overuse “injury,” associated with heavy, tired, aching, or burning eyes. Tension headaches often accompany eye strain, as the eyes orient the head and neck position. Here’s another quick experiment: try to balance on one foot with your eyes open. Now, close your eyes. You’ll quickly appreciate the role your vision plays in aligning the body. “Tech Neck” refers to chronic pain or stiffness in the neck, shoulders, and upper back caused by repeated forward-bending while using smartphones, tablets, or computers. 

Imagine sitting down to write and having to think about holding your head up. . . Impossible, right? The good news is fascia does it for you based on mechanoreceptors (Ruffini and Pacini receptors) that detect the speed, direction, and intensity of your movement—or the absence of it. Here’s the ironic part, even if you use pen-and-paper to write, you can still suffer from “Tech Neck.” Fascia doesn’t care why you’re immobile. It responds the same way. 

Fascia and Stress

For a writer, rejection and criticism not only land on the page, but also in the nervous system. Emotional resilience, defined by the American Psychological Association as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress,” is dependent upon self-care and awareness. Some research scientists and holistic therapists believe that fascia actually “stores” emotional energy. 

An article by the Somerset Osteopathic Clinic lists these potential reasons:

1. Neurological Pathways: During times of stress, the sympathetic nervous system (the body’s fight-or-flight mechanism) can signal your fascia to tighten as a protective response. Tight fascia in the scalp, temples, jaw, and upper neck can create that band-around-the-head feeling.

2. Biochemical Changes: Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline can influence the elasticity and hydration of the fascia. Chronic stress reduces the fascia’s flexibility, creating adhesions and restrictions.

3. Memory and Somatic Imprints: Negative emotions, such as grief, anger, or anxiety, can leave somatic imprints in the fascial system, much like a scar left by physical trauma.

Whether you agree or not, it’s indisputable that the body contains biochemical and biomechanical markers of stress. For the sake of argument, let’s consider the three issues of rejection, criticism, and creative blocks to be traumatic for a writer. Referring back to The Body Keeps Score, author van der Kolk claims, “We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. . . It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.” 

Clearly, writers require a multipronged solution. We’ll start with some physical remedies, then move on to more “heady” matters. 

What You Need to Do to Stay Healthy. . . 

• Move More Often Than You Think: Fascia responds to biomechanical signals. Sitting for hours at the keyboard (or writing by hand) causes it to lay down layers that reinforce your seated position that thicken over time. Frequent movement breaks matter more than ideal posture. Short breaks = more glide + flexibility + ease. For every hour you write, move for fifteen minutes.

• Hydrate Well: Fascia is a water-dependent tissue. Dehydration can cause stickiness and pain. As a writer, think of yourself as an endurance athlete. The longer you sit, the more you need to restore your tissues. Drink water regularly. Check-in as to your balance of coffee or tea and water. Water wins every time. (Avoid sugary drinks like sodas)

• Use Slow, Varied Movements: Pulling or tugging on tight tissues won’t help, whereas gentle twists and stretches keep fascia elastic and responsive. Remember, support = release. Use the floor, a chair, or other supports when you move or stretch to maximize the benefit and minimize any latent injuries. 

• Manage Stress and Emotional Load: Mental, emotional, and physical tension is evident in shallow breathing and tight fascia, especially around the neck and shoulders. Pause, breathe deeply, and check in with your body and mind before returning to writing. Short mindfulness breaks and/or practices like meditation can reset your nervous system.

• Prioritize Sleep and Recovery:  Fascia repairs and remodels during deep rest, as does your mind. Ensure you stop writing when your body tells you to. Hint: if your eyes ache, or you find yourself rubbing your neck, it’s time to stop. Your muse can wait, but your tissues can’t.

• Feed Your Mind with Perspective: Treat rejection, criticism, and creative blocks as normal. Learn from other writers and discuss your journey with trusted peers or mentors. Meet any feedback with curiosity not self-doubt. As van der Kolk has said, “Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”

Top Tip: Your body can deal with almost any situation you throw at it related to daily living, but only for a period of time. There are three key factors that will cause your system to thrive or fall apart: fuel, movement, and rest. 

Give your body the energy it needs to meet the challenges of each day by fueling it with “real food.” Real food is unprocessed (with ingredients you can pronounce). Movement, even something as simple as a daily walk, can be tremendously beneficial, especially for your fascia. You won’t regret committing to your health, but if you overdo it, you can move on to the final element: rest. Circadian rhythm studies show that your body was designed to work during the day and repair at night. Writing a manuscript late into the evening will prevent you from recovering properly. So, to keep it simple, fuel early in the morning, move throughout the day, and get yourself to bed at a reasonable hour to maximize your deep sleep cycle.

We’ll finish with reassuring words from The Body Keeps Score, where van der Kolk states, “Until recently, this bidirectional communication between body and mind was largely ignored by Western science, even as it had long been central to traditional healing practices in many other parts of the world, notably in India and China. Today it is transforming our understanding of trauma and recovery.”

There’s No One Right (or Write) Way

By Lois Winston

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Lately, I’ve wanted to crawl into bed, pull the quilt over my head, and not emerge until we return to a time before the pervasive “My Way or the Highway” mentality that has taken us to the edge of a cliff. Remember when people could agree to disagree and still be friends? Remember when we didn’t cringe whenever we attended family dinners that included certain relatives who hold opposing views and who take every opportunity to try to convince us that they’re right, and we’re wrong? Hold the roast beef and mashed potatoes. Pass the Tums and Xanax.

This “My Way or the Highway” attitude has seeped into nearly every aspect of our lives, even our writing lives. Internet articles and various “experts” (who may or may not actually be experts) tout the best way to write a novel, how to get an agent, how to market your books. They’ll tell you agents and editors only want A, B, and C. Or if you don’t do X, Y, and Z, you’ll never sell a book. Some of this information is only a click away, but others first want your credit card number before imparting their knowledge.

I’m on quite a few listservs with both published and unpublished authors. Every day an unpublished author will either post about great information she found online or ask whether such-and-such service is worth the money.

Writing scams are a topic for another day. Today I want to discuss information posted online or provided in other ways. Writers should never believe everything they read and hear. For one thing, much of it is often contradictory:

• Always plot out your novel.

• Plotting stifles creativity. Just write. 

• You must produce at least 1,500 words a day.

• Don’t worry about word count. Just write. 

• You must write every day.

• Don’t stress about writing every day. It’s counterproductive.

• Always write forward. Never go back to reread/tweak what you wrote the day before. 

• Always go back to reread/tweak what you wrote the day before.

• Never edit while you write your drafts.

• Whenever you change something, always go back and edit your other pages.

• There’s no such thing as writer’s block. 

• Writer’s block is real.

I have heard well-known authors state all the above. However, the statements were made in the context of what works best for them. Their process. Not as “rules” that must be adhered to if you want to get published.

I recently saw an interview with Ken Follett. He spends a year writing the outline for each of his books. He then sends successive drafts to family, friends, editors, and even historians he pays as consultants for their input. That’s the process that works for him. He wasn’t suggesting that his way is the only way to write. He wasn’t even suggesting that anyone should mimic his process. Yet, there are probably some who will come away from watching that interview thinking that Ken has the secret to success, and if they do as he does, they’ll get published.

I find it disheartening that so many writers are so desperate to get published that they spend too much time searching for a secret sauce that has never existed. They constantly fall into the trap of believing they should follow every piece of advice they come across. Their self-confidence continually takes a hit when what they believe to be the secret sauce doesn’t work for them.

But who are the experts doling out this advice they cling to? Sometimes, they’re not experts at all. In my writing infancy, I entered many contests for unpublished romance authors. When the contest was over, most supplied entrants with the judges’ scoresheets and comments. The draw of these contests was that the finalists were judged by editors and agents, and there was always the hope that these professionals would like what they read enough to request the full manuscript.

I finaled or won many of the contests I entered, but I also received some very questionable advice from some of the anonymous first-round judges. One wrote, “I don’t really understand point of view, but I’m marking you down because I don’t think you do, either.” There was nothing wrong with my point of view according to the two other judges who gave me top scores on point of view.

Another wrote, “Editors want the hero and heroine to meet within the first three pages. Yours don’t meet until the end of the first chapter.” That might be the case for a 45,000-word Harlequin short contemporary romance, but I had entered the mainstream category where manuscript lengths were a minimum of 85,000 words.

Advice is only as good as the expertise of the person giving it. However, even when the advice comes from an expert, that advice is always based on that person’s experiences. What has worked for them. It may be the best advice you ever receive. Or it may not work at all for you.

Process is individual and develops over time. No two writers approach their writing the same way. The trick is to keep learning and keep writing, but don’t ever believe everything about your writing sucks based on one rejection, one how-to book, one article, one author talk, or one conference. Or even multiple rejections and more than one person’s advice. After all, Stephen King had decided to give up after thirty publishers rejected Carrie. Luckily, his wife convinced him otherwise.

Yes, there will be aspects of your work that need improving. Every author I know wishes she could go back and rewrite her earliest books. Some have. We all continue to grow in our writing. As you work at your writing, you’ll hone your skills. You’ll develop confidence and hopefully learn to view “My Way or the Highway” advice through a more discerning lens.

Constructive criticism and advice should never be discounted. It very well may be exactly what your manuscript needs. However, that’s not the same as someone insisting that their way is the only way to success. Think twice about that kind of advice and always check the credentials of the person dishing it out.

Meanwhile, my only advice for dealing with family dinners that include a “My Way or the Highway” relative is to take a book with you and hide in an empty room if the conversation gets too heated.

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USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. A Crafty Collage of Crime, the twelfth book in her series, was the recipient of the 2024 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for Best Comedy, and Sorry, Knot Sorry, the thirteenth book in the series, recently won the 2025 Silver Falchion Award for Best Comedy. Embroidered Lies and Alibis, the fifteenth book in the series, releases February 10th. Learn more about Lois and her books at www.loiswinston.com. Sign up for her newsletter to receive an Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mini-Mystery.

Drop the Pen! What Every Writer Should Know about Real Police Work: PTSD

By David Lane Williams

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This month, I thought I’d write about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as it applies to first responders. I went back and forth about taking on such a serious topic, but my job in this column is to help you comprehend people like me so you can better understand the characters you’re creating. I just took a few deep breaths, and my head is right. Let’s dive in.  

I’ve been streaming The Pitt, a series set in a woefully short-staffed, often hostile, and always overcrowded emergency room in Pittsburgh. Each season tells the story of a single shift in a place where tragedies and miracles happen every hour, and the medical staff is composed of naïve rookies and burning-out veterans. It is a glorious series that has been in my head since the first episode.  

Other than taking a few unnecessary potshots at cops, it felt so real and accurate for me. It took me back to the glory and gore, the terror and elation in those early days working in Austin when AIDS didn’t even have a name yet, and gang violence swamped swaths of the city.

Our “Pitt” was Brackenridge Trauma Center—Brack—and this show hit those old vibes with an accuracy I’ve rarely seen in medical dramas. I experienced adrenaline dumps at some points, heartache at others. I became choked up during some scenes, glad to be alone with just my dogs and all those memories. One of the characters made a comment about crying: “Tears are just grief leaving the body.”

Amen. 

I don’t know a single police officer, paramedic, or firefighter who doesn’t have some emotional scarring after a few years on the job. Like a combat veteran, the carnage and cruelty can get to you after a while. Multiply that times a twenty, thirty, or longer-year career, and there is little to no chance of escaping without some damage. If you’re going to write about veteran first responders, you have to understand that this is part of the story. It doesn’t have to be front and center all the time, but your cop protagonist has a demon inside his brain, and the demon is always whispering. 

The trick is to learn coping skills, the earlier the better. It can be a nightmare if you don’t. Depression, anxiety, and suicide are all facets of the equation. Careers and marriages are cut short, and officers who had always performed rock-solid in the past make rash, bad decisions. 

I’ve always considered myself lucky. My symptoms include some mild anxiety when in public. People close to me notice that I look over my shoulder as I walk through a parking lot and scan the tops and higher windows of buildings. If I sleep on my back, I have nightmares of being attacked or of drowning, so I always place a pillow on either side of me in bed to stop from rolling supine in the middle of the night. I probably check door locks more than necessary, and I use cameras and motion-sensor lights around the perimeter of my house. 

Despite this, I still consider myself an optimist. While I harbor concerns about some humans, I remain hopeful for humanity. I believe our evolutionary path is leading inevitably toward a new species I like to call Homo Pacificus— Peaceful Man. I’m realistic we’re not there yet, but I believe our descendants will make us proud—even as they wonder how the hell we survived one another. 

I know cops who take a pistol with them into the bathroom and shower. They eat family dinners with one strapped to their ankle, and they get almost frantic if their wife forgets the family rule about always being on his off-hand side as they walk in public. They tend not to associate with others outside their police family because they have serious trust issues. 

Part of this trauma is related to specific cases. Perhaps the nightmares come from the images of destroyed children or a body charred in a house fire. Maybe the pain lingers from seeing a teenage girl ripped in two from a car wreck or a mother who committed suicide during a post-partum depression crisis. Maybe it’s from having to tell one too many parents that their child is never coming home again.

Irrational fear and anger can come from too many people treating the officer like the enemy or Satan for doing their job. Imagine starting a career with ambition and a passion to help, only to find you are not trusted or appreciated, and often despised. 

Then, of course, there are the life-shaking moments when someone tries to shoot you or gets the better of you in a deadly street fight. Winston Churchill is quoted as saying, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without results.” 

He’s right. It’s thrilling to survive a close brush with death, but weeks, months, or years later, the thrill is gone, replaced with jagged nerves and trembling hands. It’s trauma, and it’s real, and it’s prevalent. 

So, how do first responders cope? Some, too many, crawl into a bottle or seek relief through opioids. Others live at the gym, where every rep of every set is a struggle just to keep the demon exhausted, so sleep will finally come. Some take the stress out on their spouses and kids, and others become hermits except when they’re on duty. 

Culturally, PTSD is kept at bay with dark humor. People who have died violently—especially those who were doing something stupid at the time—can be targets of the most obscene jokes back at the station. Someone who died in a fire is a “crispy critter,” and a motorcycle rider without a helmet is an “organ donor.” The only joke territory considered off limits is children. 

I know how appalling this sounds, but that obsidian-dark humor may be the most reliable and effective means of keeping more cops from hurting themselves and others. If you’re writing about a first responder, bleak humor has to be part of the package. Humor bonds first responders, and sarcasm can keep them sane.

As I mentioned, I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a knack for putting bad thoughts in a file cabinet and closing the drawer. As I write this, I know that comes off as denial. I think of myself, however, as an empathetic human being who wants everyone to be safe and feel safe. That can’t always happen, so my ability to put sad or tragic thoughts away for a while has been beneficial. I know there are therapists and care providers out there who just groaned. I’m aware that shutting haunting thoughts deep into the recesses of my mind might not be the best long-term practice, yet I could also argue it has worked well in my life for four decades. 

I used to carry a little bottle of soap bubbles in my duty jump bag. The kind kids blow at birthday parties. Sometimes I’d pull into a secluded area such as a park or an empty drive-in theater when all the filmgoers had gone home. I would then stand outside my car and blow bubbles, watching them rise and fade in the dark. This practice had a way of taking the edge off whatever stress I’d been fighting. Four, five, maybe six bubble blows later, I’d be ready for whatever the Dispatch Center sent me on next. I never shared this with my colleagues—no one needs a nickname like “Bubbles” in a police squad room—but it was a coping mechanism that worked for me. 

I continue to be proactive in retirement. I exercise six to seven days a week, and I only hang around with people who are healthy, balanced, and humorous. Writing is about the best medicine for me. I don’t self-medicate with opioids, and I am not much of a drinker. I have a wife who cares about me, checks in, and listens. My veteran sons understand me about as well as anyone could, and I am surrounded by family and friends who I know will always be by my side. 

I believe PTSD is like sludgy sewage that has been dumped into a river. It is awful and destructive, but given time, coupled with being around good people and action designed to mitigate the pollutants, the river can clear the toxins. 

Your protagonist has PTSD in some form—why do you think there are so many alcoholic private detectives out there in noir land? I am convinced that writers who keep this in mind create deeper and far more interesting characters. 

And just in case you were thinking about having your guy blow bubbles, I’ve already called dibs on that one.  

Onward.

LISTENING

By Clay Stafford

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I always believed that human glory and life’s meaning were found in the senses: what I saw, touched, felt, heard, smelled, and tasted as I sped down the passing lane of accomplishment. These things provided the richness of living, complementary to the mountainous regions of sentience, the arcs and trajectories of being, and the hills and valleys of experience, the satisfaction of the present moment, and the excitement of things to come. Moving through those elevations and absorbing the delight of each moment seemed attainable only through effort and discipline, verified by visible signs of progress. Passivity, I believed, would not allow fate to deepen. Nor would acceptance or routine. I was not born intentionally appreciating what surrounded me. It was up to me to seek it out. Without intention or constant effort, something in me dragged me downward, turning me negative, and closed my eyes to the beauty held even as close as a flower in my hand.

For me, work and sacrifice were never separate. I approached my work the same way I approached my love of conduct: as a builder, a creator, someone constructing what I envisioned and leaving nothing to chance, mitigating the risk of even a moment lived without purpose. Committed to experience and beauty and the love of spirit, I lived with the belief and what felt like proof that if I worked hard enough, planned carefully enough, and remained devoted to improvement, the more profound human aspects, such as spirituality, intellectual pleasure, and emotional fulfillment, would arrive on their own. I only needed to lay the tracks. I assumed understanding, timing, and wisdom would naturally follow once the visible work and confirmation to my senses were undeniable. What I did not realize was that the skill that mattered most, the one that would ultimately transform my existence and my relationships, was not something I could see, touch, feel, hear, smell, or taste. It was not visible at all. It belonged to the category of things I assumed would take care of themselves if I were disciplined enough to live an examined, well-lived reality.

Whether innate or shaped through observation as I grew and matured, I came to believe that vitality was shaped entirely by purposeful intention. When something failed to work, maybe a relationship, a decision, or a season of my lifestyle, I tried to fix it the only way I knew how: by adding more effort, more thinking, more explanation, more force, more control. Wasn’t it my responsibility to build an existence I could eventually look back on without regret, one I could reach the end of and say, well done? For me, clarity came from that assertion, from believing meaning could be pressed into place if I pushed hard enough and demanded transformation. It was unsettling to discover that my diligence, the very trait I trusted most, was often working against me.

At one of my lowest points, I realized that one’s lot was more than experience, sensation, and action. Viability, I found, communicates just as clearly when it is encountered quietly, indirectly, and without urgency. Being a fixer revealed its limits in moments that required no solution, situations that asked for no action, and questions that had no immediate answers. I flailed there. I didn’t know how to stand still. I wanted so much more from destiny than what I believed I had been given that I failed to notice what was already present. When this recognition arrived, it did so subtly, yet with quiet unease. The problems that continued to trouble me were not rooted in lack of effort or achievement. They stemmed from failure to listen to things that did not need to be, but were, without asking for my attention.

Hearing and choosing when not to attend was what I had missed. Discernment. Not paying attention for approval or instruction, but being attentive for boundaries, for signals, for the difference between what wanted to be rushed and what needed time. I had to hear the quiet truth that some things were not asking me to act, repair, or improve; they were asking me to stop interfering. And yet, I wasn’t taking heed.

To my surprise, taking into account itself became an act. It was not passive. It required restraint and patience. Concentrating asked me to tolerate uncertainty without rushing to resolve it. It asked me to leave unfinished things unfinished, to resist tidying them up or wrapping them up prematurely. Keeping my ears open meant trusting that clarity sometimes arrived only after I stopped demanding it.

At first, this felt unproductive. From the outside, monitoring resembled hesitation, pausing instead of advancing, waiting instead of fixing. When I stopped pushing, I felt lost. In doing nothing, I wondered what I was doing at all. There were fewer markers of progress, no surge of momentum, no thrill of accomplishment. Slowing down felt uncomfortable in a world and in my own world that rewarded decisiveness and speed. And yet, something began to change.

When I took note instead of forcing outcomes, the quality of my decisions shifted. My perceptions changed. I stopped shaping results that didn’t truly fit. I recognized when something was complete rather than refining it beyond necessity. I learned, often uncomfortably, that others did not always want solutions; they wanted to be heard. Silence, I discovered, could carry weight without being filled, and tuning in altered my understanding of doubt. Uncertainty became information rather than a shortcoming. Things were not broken; they were unresolved, and that distinction mattered. It gave me patience I had never practiced before.

I came to understand that the apparent inactivity of focusing was itself a form of action. It was not instinctive. Like any skill, it was built slowly through humility, repetition, and restraint. It sharpened not through effort, but by stepping back and allowing actuality to reveal itself without interruption. Once perceived, it grew. It became the foundation beneath every visible skill, every tangible accomplishment. Everything I did depended on this quiet test for its truest execution.

The quietness began to permeate my continuation. I found myself longing for it. No amount of effort could replace it. No amount of planning could override it. Without lending an ear, progress dissolved into noise. A new reality had come. And in returning to the full circle, I discovered something unexpected: even stillness had direction. I had not underestimated listening because I considered it unimportant. I underestimated it because it was quiet.

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

Between Pen and Paper: Flaneuring Through a Writer’s Mind – The API of the Human Heart, or Why Your Characters Keep Misunderstanding Each Other

By Andi Kopek

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There has been no shortage of criticism lately regarding artificial intelligence (AI). Some of it is thoughtful, some quite theatrical. I may dedicate a future column entirely to the ethical, economic, and existential anxieties surrounding AI. Today, however, I want to focus on something far less dramatic and far more revealing: how advanced AI systems actually talk to one another, how this can shine new light on human communication and miscommunication, and how it could inspire a modern writer.

Beneath the glossy headlines and dystopian forecasts, most modern digital systems communicate through something called an API, an Application Programming Interface. An API is essentially a structured contract that defines how one program can send a request to another, what format the data must follow, what information is required, and what kind of response will come back. In other words, before artificial intelligence can destroy our civilization, it must first agree on grammar.

Imagine two computer programs trying to talk. They cannot rely on vibes. They cannot roll their eyes. They cannot say, “You know what I mean.” They must follow a strict contract, a rulebook for how one system talks to another. An API. If the message does not match the expected structure, it fails. Not emotionally. Structurally. The receiving system does not feel hurt. It returns an error code: 400 (Bad Request).

Let’s have a little fun and apply this communication model to human interactions. Every person you know is running an API. It is undocumented. It is unstable. It auto-updates without notice. Your internal API defines what tone you accept, what topics are permitted, what context you require, what emotional load you can process, what you interpret literally, what you interpret as subtext, what feels like attack, and what feels like affection. When someone speaks to you, they are making a request against your interface. When you respond, you are sending data formatted according to theirs. Conversation is not just expression. It is parsing.

In programming, parsing means interpreting incoming data according to a defined structure. If I send { emotion: sad } but you expect { mood: sadness, intensity: 0.7 }, the request fails. Not because we disagree about sadness. Because we disagree about formatting. Now consider the most dangerous sentence in the English language: “I’m fine.” One person means: I am overwhelmed but not ready to unpack it. The other hears: Everything is okay. Same words. Different schema. According to our little game, human miscommunication is not malice. It is incompatible parsing.

If humans were honest, we would speak in status codes.

200 OK: I understand you.

401 Unauthorized: You do not have access to that story.

403 Forbidden: That is a boundary.

404 Not Found: I do not recognize the version of me you’re describing. 429 Too Many Requests: Please stop asking.

503 Service Unavailable: I am exhausted and pretending otherwise.

Instead, we say things like, “Whatever,” which is the emotional equivalent of a corrupted packet.

In AI networks, data can be corrupted, and signals can degrade. In humans, fatigue, stress, trauma, and cognitive overload can increase the error rate. The same sentence can succeed at 9

a.m. and fail by the late afternoon. Moreover, different neurotypes run different parsing defaults. As a simplified analogy, consider autism as a condition where parsing is more literal. If someone says: “It’s cold in here,” one person hears a temperature observation. Another hears a request to close the window. Different inference engines. Not broken. Just different schema.

From this perspective, depression can look like low processing bandwidth, high error sensitivity, and reduced response generation. Instead of getting a return of 200 (OK) for a typical request, the system returns 503 (Service Unavailable). Anxiety resembles a hyperactive validation layer. Every incoming message is checked for threats, rejections, or hidden errors. Neutral packets get flagged as suspicious. False positives multiply. Psychosis might be described as a model in which incoming data is integrated into a framework that diverges from shared consensus reality. The API still functions internally, but its mapping to the broader network has shifted. The person is not failing to process. They are processing through a different model.

AI systems do not have feelings, though they are becoming increasingly sophisticated at parsing human emotion in text and speech. So what about empathy, a feature we tend to reserve for living organisms? Some would say only humans. In this model, empathy is not absorbing someone else’s emotions like a sponge. Empathy is adaptive formatting. It is the willingness to say: Let me rephrase that. What did you hear me say? What did you mean? How would you prefer I ask? Empathy does not eliminate conflict. It reduces unnecessary 400 errors. Rigid APIs cannot do that. Flexible ones can. Consequently, the opposite of empathy is not cruelty. It is interface rigidity.

Since I’m writing this in February, I cannot ignore Valentine’s Day. Love, perhaps, is long-term API alignment. Over time you learn each other’s required fields. You anticipate response formats. You adjust rate limits. You recognize known error codes. You stop assuming malice in malformed packets. I think we could use more long-term API alignment right now.

Now, writers, this approach can be useful to your craft. Characters do not fight because they disagree. They fight because they parse differently. One character speaks in subtext. Another requires explicit declarations. One needs reassurance before vulnerability. Another needs vulnerability before reassurance. Each is making valid requests against an interface the other does not fully understand. Conflict is born in the gap between intention and interpretation. A character says, “You never listen.” What they mean is: “I don’t feel seen.” What the other hears is: “You are incompetent.” Boom. 400 (Bad Request), followed by 500 (Internal Server Error).

In thrillers, the villain often exploits API weaknesses in other characters. The villain withholds required fields, manipulates format, overloads of the emotional bandwidth, and sends signals designed to be misparsed. Gaslighting, in this model, is deliberate schema corruption. It forces the victim to doubt their own parsing logic.

And when two characters finally understand each other, what has actually happened? As in love, they have aligned their APIs. They have learned that “I’m fine” sometimes means “Please try again.” LLMs (Large Language Models) require enormous amounts of training data to achieve alignment. We train on years of shared experience. And still …

We live in an age obsessed with communication tools. Faster messaging. Smarter devices. Infinite connectivity. And yet our communication remains fragile and far from perfection. The next time a conversation collapses, pause and ask: was this bad intention from a sender, or bad formatting in the receiver’s API?

I hope that this little mental exercise will help to deepen characters in your story, sharpen your dialogue, and make the conflicts feel inevitable rather than contrived. And in your own life, you may discover that many arguments are not wars. They are documentation failures. Which, hopefully, can be revised.

Andi

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Andi Kopek is a multidisciplinary artist based in Nashville, TN. With a background in medicine, molecular neuroscience, and behavioral change, he has recently devoted himself entirely to the creative arts. His debut poetry collection, Shmehara, has garnered accolades in both literary and independent film circles for its innovative storytelling.

When you’re in Nashville, you can join Andi at his monthly poetry workshop, participate in the Libri Prohibiti book club (both held monthly at the Spine bookstore, Smyrna, TN), or catch one of his live performances. When not engaging with the community, he's hard at work on his next creative project or preparing for his monthly art-focused podcast, The Samovar(t) Lounge: Steeping Conversations with Creative Minds, where in a relaxed space, invited artists share tea and the never-told intricacies of their creative journeys.

website: andikopekart.ink
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THE CHAIR IS STILL THERE

By Clay Stafford

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Mostly working from home for the majority of my life, there was no boss to meet, no comptroller checking my clock-in for work, no meetings I had to be on time for, only me, waking up and stretching in bed, thinking of how I envisioned my day to play out.

Most days were and are filled with excitement. I knew what I was going to do. I loved what I did. I was blessed to be able to do it. Most mornings were filled with ambition and excitement, so I couldn’t wait to get to work and get started. But there were those dreaded mornings when I awoke, stared at the ceiling, and realized there was no fuel in the creative engine for the day. On those mornings, there was no urgency to get out of bed, no spark inspiring me to begin. There wasn’t even resistance. In the dim light of the morning sun coming through the cracks of the closed plantation shutters, there was simply a hollow quiet where momentum typically was and should have been. Those moments felt empty, nothing resembling the welcomed heaviness of life, just a distant void, as though everything that normally mattered had somehow, during the night while I was dreaming, slipped down the hallway to another bedroom and closed the door, sometimes even locking it behind it, climbing into the bed and pulling the covers over its head.

Those were days that felt like failures even before they began, and because I predetermined them while lying in bed, they usually turned out as I expected. I used to think I could only show up for my life when my inner world was in agreement, when want and purpose matched, when I knew why I was doing something, and when the effort made sense. I could only do things when I felt like it or when the meaning was clear. When that alignment was absent, I assumed the day was already lost and a wasted day of failure lay ahead. I felt it in my heart and even in my bones. I hadn’t yet learned that the real discipline of my life wasn’t built on feeling ready, but on returning.

It wasn’t until later in my life, when maybe maturity or practice, or even serendipitous events, proved me wrong, that I realized these mornings were simply a different kind of threshold, their own unique entry into a day that, at first glance, felt formless and uninspired. Somewhere along the way, I learned that discipline, what I needed to create the perfect day, was less about preplanning, force, or even intention, but more about presence.

I don’t know when my thinking started to shift. I certainly didn’t make it happen. I didn’t will it. It certainly wasn’t some trite self-help or productivity hack. It didn’t even arrive with some revelation. It came oddly and unplanned, as a habit. Whether I had the vision for the day or not, I got my coffee as usual, set up my desk, and sat down in my chair to work, even when I didn’t know what I wanted to work on or, if I did, even when I wasn’t inspired. Motivation didn’t earn me a spot at my desk. Routine did. On those days, I kept the bar low. I didn’t promise much to those hours except the assurance to my computer that I’ll be close by if needed. No plans were negotiated, no meaning defined, and rarely was any enthusiasm offered to the Muse as tribute. Sometimes on those days, I thought my purpose in life was to drink a cup of coffee, watch my birdfeeder, and ponder, in the world of evolution, what crazy lizard found itself jumping out of a tree and realizing it could fly, thus creating a new species of birds. In other words, with no plans or inspiration, I sat there because I didn’t know what else to do.

It surprised me at some point how little was required to sit there. It was freeing. Even on those hollow mornings, the chair was still there, waiting. I didn’t need conviction. I didn’t need direction. I didn’t need to believe that anything I was doing mattered. I only needed not to leave. I needed to sit with whatever drifted through my mind. The common thread behind it all was my chair, on productive days and on days of nothing. It was always sitting there, consistent, no matter where my head was. So, I returned to it, some days with more fervor than others, but always with a refusal to hand over control to the weather outside (I write outside on my porch) or even the weather, no matter how calm or turbulent, going on inside of me.

Those neutral days of nothingness were not heroic. They were days that neither lifted nor dragged, days that offered no motivational or dramatic reason or inspiration to move forward, but at the same time, no compelling reason not to be there. It seemed on those days that the world asked nothing of me other than attendance in that chair, across the lawn from the birdfeeder, pondering the processes of the past few million years.

When I think back on my own evolution now, what strikes me is not how much time I wasted sitting there, but rather how honest those hours were. Out of boredom, I did begin to tinker, but without the need or motivation to impress, accelerate, or aim beyond the moment, I moved straight to the essentials as they popped into my head. It was all rather casual. There was no adornment, no performance, no word count, no chasing of superiority. Just small, impulsive, inner-driven activities, whether rain or shine, just some sort of private continuity with days more productive, but with no invisible audience or ego applauding, but at the same time nothing left undone. When inspired, sitting in the chair, I did what I felt inspired to do, letting direction come from the nothingness.

Over time, something shifted. Those neutral (I wouldn’t call them wasted) days, those unremarkable returns to the chair each morning, began to alter the way I understood myself in the same way that I could envision lizards growing wings millions of years ago. I don’t think I ever patted myself on my back for my consistency of sitting in a chair (that hardly seems a heroic act), but I did begin to trust it as an inkling of something I couldn’t put my finger on began to take form in my consciousness, in my being. Showing up and sitting down, I began to sense that I did not need to feel aligned with my work or even with myself to remain connected. Just drink coffee and watch the birds, and occasionally look at my computer screen. I didn’t need the weather, inside or out, to give me permission. Before I stepped into the day, I needed to go to my chair and sit. And, surprise to me, somewhere along the way, my fingers would find their way to the keyboard, and I would start to type. Somewhere by the end of the day, I would pause and look back on all that I had accomplished, even though I had had no preplanned direction.

Trust accumulated in ways I couldn’t have articulated then, but it did soften the drama around the difficulty of being aimless. It quieted the argument between desire and duty. It reframed commitment as identity rather than effort. I began to see that most of what endures in life is built not on bursts of certainty but on the steady, unimpressive, evolutionary cadence of return.

The curious, but also understandable, thing is that the work of my life didn’t constantly improve in those days, but my relationship with my work, and even myself, did. Sitting down in my chair became less conditional, less dependent on mood or inspiration, or the unpredictable tides of self-belief or raw motivation. Sitting down in my chair became, instead, something like a morning welcome, a companionship, coming with the predictability and comfort of knowing that the sun will rise each day and I will sit: steady, imperfect, patient.

Looking back, I never found the dramatic clarity I once believed I needed to move forward. I saw something quieter. I discovered that life continues, like birds in flight, even when eagerness does not. I found that meaning doesn’t always come hand in hand with willingness. I discovered that neutrality is fertile in its own way. We don’t need a parade; we only need a chair.

I once thought that discipline was a loud, cinematic declaration, something founded in great ambition or proven with relentless, knock-the-walls-down drive, but the truth, for me, instead lived in a place outside on the back porch, an ordinary chair, waiting without fanfare, and asking for nothing other than my presence. “Come as you are,” it called. “If nothing else,” it said in its Southern way, “just sit a spell.”

Perhaps the unexpected lesson for me is this: the parts of life that endure are not always those born from passion, certainty, or predetermination while lying in the bed in the morning and staring at the ceiling with the morning light coming in through the shutters, but instead it is from the steady, unremarkable decision to get my coffee, in my routine, and sit in my chair long enough for meaning to find its way back. The chair is always waiting.

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

Literary Alchemy: The Ticking Clock

A series designed to elevate your skills and empower you to write like a pro.

By Chrissy Hicks

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The “ticking clock” is a narrative device that introduces a time constraint or deadline, heightening tension and urgency in a story. It compels characters to act quickly, often leading to dramatic stakes and heightened emotional engagement. This device not only propels the plot forward but also immerses readers in the characters’ race against time, making every moment feel critical.

Why Use the Ticking Clock?

To effectively use this technique, include a deadline—whether it’s something drastic like a timed bomb, or something more subtle, like a bus arrival or cigarette break—the type of deadline will depend on your story’s plot. This can create:

• Heightened tension since a looming deadline creates a sense of urgency that keeps readers on the edge of their seats. In 24 (TV Series), Jack Bauer’s race against time to thwart terrorist attacks amplifies the stakes, making each second count.

• Further character development as the pressure of a ticking clock reveals a character’s true nature, showcasing their strengths and weaknesses. In The Woman in Cabin 10 (Ruth Ware), Lo Blacklock frantically attempts to get the crew to take her seriously about a crime she’s witnessed. If she can’t convince the crew or find evidence of the crime before docking, she risks losing the chance to address the situation entirely, as the potential perpetrator could escape or cover their tracks.

• Gain plot momentum and lose the muddy middle. Time constraints can drive the plot forward, forcing characters to make quick decisions that lead to unexpected twists and turns. In The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown), Robert Langdon, is thrust into a race against time to solve a murder mystery. The urgency is heightened by the fact he must decipher these clues before a powerful organization can act on their own agenda.

• Pacing is enhanced with this method, because it creates a sense of rhythm that propels the narrative forward. This urgency keeps readers eager to turn the pages, as they feel the pressure alongside the characters. When Lo finds herself trapped below deck, readers are wondering what will happen next and if she’ll escape before the boat leaves the dock (The Woman in Cabin 10).

How and When to Use the Ticking Clock:

To incorporate the ticking clock into your narrative, consider the following techniques:

• Set Clear Deadlines: Establish a specific time frame that characters must adhere to, whether it’s a countdown to an event, a deadline for a mission, or a race against an impending disaster. “I am going to ask you one last time. Who are your co-conspirators? You have until the count of three, or I will kill you” (24).

• Create Consequences: Make it clear what’s at stake if the deadline is missed. This could involve personal loss, failure of a mission, or even life and death situations. “The answer was Trondheim. . . All I had to do was make it until dawn.” (The Woman in Cabin 10).

• Use Real-Time Elements: Consider employing real-time storytelling, where events unfold in sync with the ticking clock, enhancing the urgency and immediacy of the narrative. “Gray... people in this country are dying, and I need some answers. Are you gonna give ‘em to me or am I gonna have to start hurting you?” “Actually, you're hurting me now.” “Trust me, I'm not” (24).

• Incorporate Flashbacks or Foreshadowing: Use these techniques to reveal past events or hint at future consequences, deepening the emotional impact of the ticking clock. “Now, with over four million copies of The Way in circulation in forty-two languages, Opus Dei was the fastest-growing and most financially secure Catholic organization in the world. Unfortunately, Aringarosa had learned, in an age of religious cynicism, cults, and televangelists, Opus Dei’s escalating wealth and power was a magnet for suspicion.” (The Da Vinci Code).

Lookout

Pay attention to how the ticking clock is used in movies you watch and books you read. Analyze how the author or director builds tension and urgency. What techniques do they employ to keep you engaged? How can you apply these insights to your own writing?

Prompt 

Write a scene where a character faces a looming deadline that forces them to make a critical decision. What if you condensed 24 hours to 15 minutes? Consider how the pressure of time influences their choices and the emotional stakes involved.

Further Reading: 

• Screenwriting from Iowa: Ticking Clock

• Narrative Tension and the Ticking Clock

• Use the ticking clock device to add suspense to your stories! (Video)

Writing Historical Fiction

By James L Hill

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Writing historical fiction requires research. How much and how in-depth depends on the type of story you are writing. As with all forms of writing, there is no one way to do it, or a right and wrong way. It all depends on the writer.

Let’s discuss three styles of historical fiction and the amount of research involved. 

First, is the fiction based on a time period. Your main character is fictitious, and your aim is to tell a story based on a time and event. The event is an anchor that the reader can relate to. The story is about the life of your main character.

You pick the Battle of Trenton during the American Revolution, December 26, 1776. This is a pivotal battle in the Revolutionary War. A time most people will recognize by the famous picture of Washington crossing the Delaware even if they don’t recall the battle that followed. Now, you can tell a story of the life of your MC with little actual research into the facts. Depending on who he is, a private, lieutenant in Washington’s army, or a Hessian’s soldier for the British, you only need to know a little about the clothing, weather, and culture of the time.

You will need to do a deeper dive into the facts surrounding the Battle of Trenton if your story is about Washington as seen through the eyes of your MC. You have to know a lot more about the main character because his status in life will direct how much he knows about Washington and his proximity to him.

If your MC is a private, he will have limited direct contact with Washington. Your story will rely on Washington’s general speeches and commands to his troops. If he’s a lieutenant or higher-ranking officer, then he will live a different life of privilege. And he will be among Washington’s inner circle on and off the battlefield. However, you are still telling a story from the MC’s point of view, and your readers will expect more details from both their lives.

 When writing alternative history, the what-if variety, you still need to know the facts you plan to change. This kind of story can be more difficult because you have to know what effect changing an event would have in your new future. For example, your MC is among the survivors of Washington’s forces as half drowned on the Christmas night during the Delaware crossing. Instead of withdrawing, Washington presses on with the attack believing the element of surprise will offset his loss of manpower. Washington is defeated, perhaps captured, or killed, and your MC is left to deal with the failed revolutionary war. What would the British have done in such a situation? What recourses would the colonist have had? To write a compelling and believable story, you need to know the state of England and the Americans at the time. You probably need to know more about other important figures too.

Writing historical fiction is more than knowing the facts, it’s about how you use those facts to tell a story that is interesting, believable, and satisfying. If you are just stating the facts, you are writing a new story. If your aim is to entertain, then you are writing historical fiction.

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James L Hill, a.k.a. J L Hill, is a multi-genre author, currently working on a three-part historical fantasy Gemstone Series, The Emerald Lady and The Ruby Cradle are in publication with very good reviews. The third book, The Diamond Warrior, is due soon. The four-part adult urban crime series, The Killer Series, is complete. Killer With A Heart, Killer With Three Heads, Killer With Black Blood, and Killer With Ice Eyes are five-star novels. Then there’s the psychological dystopian science fiction thriller, Pegasus: A Journey To New Eden for your reading pleasure. A collection of eight short stories spanning four decades have just been published called, The Moth and Other Tantalizing Tales. He also owns and operates RockHill Publishing LLC which published twenty books by eight authors in Adult Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Romance. https://www.jlhill-books.com and https://www.rockhillpublishing.com

THE WORLD GOT WIDER

By Clay Stafford

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For a long time, I believed that anything worth pursuing should come with a clear signal, some sign, momentum, or external confirmation that I was moving in the right direction. I think I was waiting for the circus to come to town. Looking for that exterior confirmation, though, quietly narrowed my world without me even noticing.

I didn’t really understand this belief, this idea that I was essentially performing for others. I didn’t think about it. It wasn’t something I put into words. It just showed up, thoughtlessly, like the morning sun. Unlike the mark of a new day, however, this subconscious belief or need for validation manifested as hesitation, maybe doubt. When no one clapped, no one replied to my desperate phone calls, letters, or emails, or no one offered a word of encouragement or support, I found I slowed down. I started to wait. “Give me a sign,” my needy heart exclaimed. I started second-guessing my map. I equated uncertainty with fear, that I was about to make a mistake.

I don’t know when this thinking began; it may have started in childhood, perhaps reflecting a need for parental approval in a conditionally loved world. The shame is that it shaped my life more than I realized. It made me cautious, even timid, in moments that required courage. Wherever it began and however it grew, this subconscious belief that I needed that validation trained me to seek approval from others rather than to seek direction from within. I couldn’t help but think that when progress was slow, and especially when it stalled, it was proof that I was off track. When I felt something mattered, but yet it demanded so much unapplauded effort, I wondered if I wasn’t forcing something that should not be rather than earning something that should not have to be affirmed.

Somewhere along the way, it hit me. Why? Maturity? God-given insight? Not sure. I know nothing external changed. There were no circus clowns. No breakthrough arrived. But inside me, the moment that my life began to change, the moment that I began to change, was a shift in the limiting belief itself.

Somewhere in my Los Angeles days, I began to notice that the work that mattered most, not only to me, but to others, oddly rarely announced itself. In its inception, in its call to adventure, it made no promises. I didn’t have to wait for the green light to proceed. I didn’t need any person in power to give me some grand confirmation that I had finally found the path. Instead, my life and work began to show up, not with fireworks, but in small, unglamorous ways.

I found I was passionately involved in my work and life when previously I would have told myself to quit. Problems or roadblocks? Instead of avoiding or dismissing them and walking away, I found I started returning to them day after day, living and loving life regardless of who, if anyone, ever noticed. The silence, the fact that no one was even noticing, stopped coming across to me as a warning. The silence became the mental space where my life and work began to live and grow. And from the silence, to my surprise, others began to notice.

“Reassurance” is the key word. I no longer needed it. And when I began to accept this, to believe and live it, subtly, my attention changed. Without needing approval, I began to notice the quiet pull toward specific ideas or desires that were intrinsically my own, not someone else’s to validate. Life started at that moment to be an adventure, even if it was nothing more than showing up, even when nothing was resolved. It didn’t matter. I was living me. I accepted that sometimes understanding comes only after effort, not before. Looking back, I realized that my strongest decisions, the ones that actually changed and transformed my life, were rarely made in moments of confidence. They were made in moments of scared commitment.

With regret, but also with thankfulness for the experience, I realized how much life-energy and opportunity I had wasted, misreading what were, in fact, neutral conditions and neutral exterior feedback. No response didn’t mean that anyone was rejecting me. Resistance didn’t mean I was going in the wrong direction. Slow progress didn’t mean I was a failure or ill-equipped.

Letting go of the belief that I didn’t need external validation for how I wanted to live my life didn’t erase doubt. Don’t get the wrong impression. But what it did was to strip doubt of its authority. Uncertainty stopped being a verdict and became something I could walk alongside. I could live in the present, not the past or the future, and though it might feel uncomfortable to take risks others dared not, doubt was no longer in charge. Living the life I wanted to live became the mantra.

Letting go of that belief, that need for affirmation, didn’t suddenly make my progress in the world easier, but it did make it wider. Possibilities that had always been there came into view, and I was able to accept them without any need for anyone else’s approval. These possibilities that I dared not dream of didn’t change. They were there all the time. I simply stopped requiring permission to see them. Or honor them. Or rather, I realized the only permission I needed to live the life of my dreams on my own terms was mine.

I realized the world doesn’t widen because circumstances change. It widened when I stopped asking permission to dream big dreams. I wasn’t walking with the consent or acceptance of others anymore. I was walking with uncertainty, and noticing I still belonged, not to the whims of others, but to myself. I began writing my life, telling the story I knew should be told, even when I walked alone.

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

Drop the Pen! What Every Writer Should Know About Real Police Work: Garrity Warning

By David Lane Williams

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This month, I’d like to dovetail off a previous article on the Miranda Warning (April 2025) and talk a bit about the Garrity Warning, a cousin to Miranda that writers of true crime and crime fiction should understand. The Garrity Warning is issued to government employees, usually police officers, who are suspected of committing a crime and of violating departmental policy. 

Let’s use an example of a police officer who took a bribe to look the other way as two men robbed a bank, effectively delaying a police response until the robbers could get away. In this scenario, the officer is an accomplice to a serious crime, and he also violated departmental policy regarding graft and corruption. Our plot advances when one of the thieves is caught and makes a deal to inform on the officer in exchange for leniency. The corrupt officer is about to have a very bad day. 

As a cop, you know you must abide by a direct order from a superior officer (unless that order is, itself, illegal or unconstitutional). If a captain says you’re going to answer questions about a bank robbery, you’re duty and policy-bound to answer any questions the investigator assigned by the captain may ask. 

However, answering those questions would likely incriminate the officer in our scenario. He’s stuck between having to answer questions to keep his job or rank and wanting to exercise his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Enter The Garrity Warning. 

In our scenario, there should be two different investigations. One is for the crime itself (accomplice to a bank robbery), and the other investigation is for departmental policy violations. Such a two-pronged investigation involving a public employee requires two different investigators. 

I investigated several such cases during my career. One involved a violent incident in which an officer had attacked his wife. My job was to determine the facts of the matter on the criminal side, which meant that any statement I took or evidence I collected would go to the prosecutor’s office and potentially result in the officer’s arrest. The other investigator was a police lieutenant who was investigating for the policy violation of “Conduct Unbecoming an Officer.” 

In such cases, I tried to be the first investigator to speak with witnesses. Witnesses may clam up after the first interview, so I tried to be the first in line. It didn’t always work out that way, but that’s how it goes sometimes. 

Anything I gained during my investigation was open book for the administrative investigation, but the opposite was not the case. In other words, that lieutenant was not allowed, due to the rights afforded by the Garrity Warning, to share what she’d discovered in the course of her investigation. This is always a bit frustrating for the criminal investigator, but it is the only fair and constitutional way to conduct an investigation. 

So, how does this apply to what you may be writing? Let’s say you’re crafting a novel about a good-guy cop who is being set up so that it looks like he took a bribe and helped bank robbers pull off a heist. The cop must endure an investigation and perhaps even a trial. The Garrity Warning, and all it implies, can allow you to raise those dramatic stakes. Now he’s not on trial just for the criminal conspiracy; his career, pension, credibility, and rank are all in peril. He’ll feel pressure from not one, but two investigations and two different detectives, all while still dealing with the real bad guys trying to set him up. Knowing how Garrity works can be part of your strategy for piling on the drama in order to reach a more satisfying and heroic ending. Have fun with it.

Literary Alchemy: Ingredients of the Story – Foreshadowing

A series designed to elevate your skills and empower you to write like a pro.
By Chrissy Hicks

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Foreshadowing is a literary device used to hint at what’s coming later in the story. It creates anticipation and builds suspense, engaging readers by making them eager to see how events will unfold. As Chekhov so famously put it, “If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.”

Why use Foreshadowing?

• Build suspense and tension by hinting at future conflicts or outcomes. In Gone Girl, (Gillian Flynn) Amy’s use of the “treasure hunt” game, leaving clues for her husband Nick (and the police) to find, foreshadows the underlying (and much more sinister) game she’s playing with him, which we don’t learn until about halfway through the book.

• By providing subtle clues, foreshadowing encourages readers to engage with the text. They become detectives, piecing together hints to predict what might happen next. In the classic, The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), Myrtle’s death foreshadows the tragic consequences of the other characters. Her reckless behavior and desire to escape her life leads to her fatal accident. This event sets off a chain reaction that leads to Gatsby’s demise.

• Create cohesion with foreshadowing by tying together various plot elements. When a writer plants clues early on, it allows for a satisfying payoff later in the narrative. For example, in Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), Victor Frankenstein’s early fascination with the works of occult philosophy foreshadows his tragic downfall, linking his childhood curiosity to the catastrophic consequences of his scientific pursuits.

• Prepare readers for impactful emotional beats, making them feel earned rather than abrupt. In The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins), Katniss’s early demonstrations of her archery skills foreshadow her survival tactics in the arena, allowing readers to invest in her journey and the stakes involved. The reader isn’t caught off guard by her abilities.

• Foreshadowing can also highlight central themes within a story. In my flash fiction story The Last Tour, the canyon, with its vastness and depth, symbolizes both characters’ emotional chasms and the literal danger they face. The tour being the “last one” of the day hints at the finality of their journeys, ultimately foreshadowing the tragic events that will unfold.

How and When to Use Foreshadowing:

To effectively use foreshadowing, incorporate subtle clues that may seem insignificant at first but gain importance as the story progresses. This can be done through:

• Dialogue: Characters can drop hints in their conversations or make ominous statements or jokes that hint at darker outcomes. “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. ...And what's inside it. I think of that too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes” (Gone Girl). 

• Setting: Use elements in the environment that reflect future events. “. . .the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry- god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom curtains. Accusing: You have been seen. You will be seen” (Gone Girl).

• Symbolism: Introduce objects or motifs that will later play a crucial role. Introducing a motif that recurs throughout the story can create a sense of continuity. “But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose.” Later, “. . .we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare.” (The Great Gatsby).

• Character Actions: A character’s seemingly minor actions can foreshadow future events. “Eve decides to celebrate her 50th birthday with a Grand Canyon excursion. She doesn’t research companies or pricing. She knows exactly which trip she’ll book. The last tour on Saturday, leaving from Boulder City, Nevada.” (The Last Tour).

• Flashbacks: Consider how a past trauma influences a character’s decisions later in the story. “My father knew and he taught me some before he was blown to bits in a mine explosion. There was nothing even to bury. I was eleven then. Five years later, I still wake up screaming for him to run.” (The Hunger Games).

• Dreams or Visions: These may foreshadow future events. (Be careful: often these can be too on the nose). “I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death. . .” (Frankenstein). 

• Weather and Atmosphere: Atmospheric changes can foreshadow emotional shifts or upcoming conflicts. “September 9th, the ice began to move, and roarings like thunder were heard at a distance as the islands split and cracked in every direction.” (Frankenstein).

• Physical Objects: Objects that hold significance for a character can foreshadow future events. “I think I’m finished when Cinna pulls the gold mockingjay pin from his pocket. . . I remember now taking it off my mother’s dress, pinning it to the shirt.” (The Hunger Games).

• Narrative Tone: A dark or foreboding tone can signal that something tragic is on the horizon, while a light-hearted tone may suggest a twist or surprise. “Lonnie’s family labels him a failure; his therapist, a lost cause; the justice system, another burden. So much for the American dream. Or any dream.” (The Last Tour).

Lookout! 👀

Be on the lookout for signs of foreshadowing in movies you watch and books you read. Consider how the author (or director) accomplished the use of this device. Was it effective? What hooked you and made you want to turn the page or keep watching? How can your understanding of what they did help you accomplish the same?

Prompt 📝

Write a scene where a character notices a seemingly trivial detail—like a broken clock, a dead tree, or a faded photograph—that later becomes pivotal to the plot or precedes a major event. Consider how this detail can create a sense of foreboding or anticipation.

Further Reading: 📚

• Grammarly: Foreshadowing in Writing

• Oregon State University: What is Foreshadowing?

• LitCharts: Foreshadowing Definition and Examples

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Chrissy’s debut novel, Inheritance of Lies (Marble Press Books), was a 2022 Claymore Suspense Award finalist. Her writing is featured in anthologies and magazines, including Story Sanctum, Killer Nashville Magazine, Black Works, and The Broadkill Review, among others. Her unpublished manuscripts secured First Place in the 2024/2025 Thomas Mabry Creative Writing Award, 2024 Seven Hills Literary Contest, and “Top Pick” in the Suspense category for the 2024 Claymore Award. A Northern transplant who traded snow for Tennessee heat, Chrissy actively volunteers for Killer Nashville Magazine and is a proud member of Mystery Writers of America and International Thriller Writers. Aside from thinking up ways for characters to die, she hikes, runs, reads, and drinks dark wine. Visit her online at chrissyhicks.com or hire her for your next editing project at emberskyeeditorial.com. Join her free newsletter for author updates, a glimpse into a busy writer’s life, and book recommendations.

Crafting Ethical and Moral Dilemmas in Crime Fiction

By Chris Berg and Paul James Smith

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In crime fiction, the most powerful moments often aren’t about car chases or shootouts—they’re about impossible choices. Think of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. At the climax, undercover cop Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) faces off against corrupt officer Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon). Costigan has proof Sullivan is a mob mole; unfortunately for him, his cover’s blown too. Both men have a decision to make—cling to their oaths or focus on staying alive. Neither option comes easy, and whichever path they take, both moral and ethical consequences follow.

These are the crossroads we construct as thriller writers. They're neither black nor white; they thrive in the gray spaces that test characters' mettle, deliciously unsettle readers, and propel plots into uncharted territory. Incorporating these dilemmas into your narrative can evolve a simple crime yarn into something truly memorable.

Building the Perfect Dilemma

A moral or ethical dilemma isn’t just a tricky choice. It’s a collision of imperatives: follow one, and you sacrifice another. There’s no safe option, no loophole. A detective may bend the law in pursuit of justice. An officer might cover for a corrupt partner at the expense of his or her own integrity. The power lies in the personal and professional damage they cause.

The reason they matter is simple: dilemmas pull readers deeper into your story. They imagine themselves in the character’s shoes—Would I do that? Could I live with it?—and the suspense turns personal. This is where thrillers move beyond plot mechanics to something that lingers with the reader.

Thrillers hook readers with action, but it's these dilemmas that leave a longer-lasting impression. When characters fight with right and wrong, they feel human; when choices carry heavy consequences, suspense clings through the last page; and when these decisions shift the story, the narrative gains depth.

Compelling thrillers reveal the world as it is—messy, complicated, morally uncertain. They reflect life’s tangled ethics and blurred lines between right and wrong.

Ethical Battles at the Heart of Thrillers 

At their core, many crime thrillers circle the same inescapable questions—for example:

• Justice vs. Law: Do the ends ever justify breaking the rules?

• Loyalty vs. Duty: Protect a partner—or expose their corruption?

• Greater Good vs. Personal Cost: Is it just to sacrifice one to save many?

• Truth vs. Harm: Is the truth ever worth the cost of an innocent life?

Used thoughtfully, these tensions box characters in and pull readers with them.

Building Choices With Real Consequences

Effective dilemmas live in the character’s DNA, not just in plot mechanics. Begin by connecting the choice to your character's past. For example, a detective who delays reporting misconduct may be afraid not just of professional fallout but also of reliving past wounds.

Then, raise the stakes. If the outcome doesn’t alter lives, careers, or relationships, readers won’t care. Make sure every choice matters. And consider timing and consequences—dramatic shifts, unexpected turns, pivotal moments—when decisions matter the most.

Avoiding Missteps

Even the strongest ideas can falter. A scene overloaded with conflicting pressures quickly loses focus, while a dilemma wrapped up too neatly robs the story of tension. Preaching to the reader rarely works—let them wrestle with the consequences themselves. And characters must remain true to who they are; a cautious cop doesn’t suddenly take reckless risks without careful buildup. These dilemmas aren’t tidy. Show the cost of choices, reveal the fallout, and leave readers to navigate the gray areas on their own.

Consequences in Motion

In real life, decisions don’t disappear with the turn of a page—and in crime fiction, they shouldn’t either. A detective who plants evidence doesn’t just secure a conviction; he carries the fear of exposure, the hit to his integrity, and the strain on his friendships. A protagonist who shields a corrupt partner may find that the betrayal festers, eventually detonating at the worst possible moment. The aftermath matters as much as the choice itself. By showing this, your thriller reflects a fundamental truth: these decisions change people.

Make the Choice Matter

If you’re working on a manuscript, choose a single storyline and place your protagonist in a true moral or ethical squeeze. Force him or her to choose between two bad options. Heighten the cost. Resist the urge to offer a safe escape hatch. Then, see how the story shifts around your choice.

Readers stay hooked not by the action itself, but by the choices that lead to it. When a character is trapped by a dilemma, forced to confront who they are and what they’re willing to risk, the reader leans in, breath held. That is the moment when a thriller truly comes alive.

In crafting these tensions, prioritize authenticity over resolution—let the gray areas stand. This approach not only sustains suspense but mirrors the complexities of real ethical terrain. Apply it deliberately, and your story will gain the weight it deserves.

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Chris Berg and Paul James Smith: Claymore Award Winners | PageTurner Award Finalists | Authors of The Night Police Novels

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This article is adapted from a presentation delivered at the 2025 Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. It explores how moral and ethical dilemmas elevate crime fiction, giving readers moments of tension that linger long after the story ends.

Drop the Pen! What Every Writer Should Know About Real Police Work: Ten Codes

By David Lane Williams

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I recently spoke at a writers' conference in Texas. Those in attendance during my talk were primarily mystery and thriller writers who had lots of questions about authentic police work. One of those questions comes up from time to time: what are “ten-codes,” and how can I interpret them? Truth is, they’re still a mystery to me, even after forty years of practicing, teaching, and writing about first responding and investigations. Let’s give it a try anyway.  

Everyone has heard the term “ten-four,” one of the many “ten codes” used in police work, as well as Citizens Band (CB) radio. Ten-codes are still ubiquitous in policing, but I find them archaic. Anyone who spends the money for a scanner to listen in on police chatter is capable of getting and printing off a list of codes. “Ten-four” sounds like a rogue trucker movie in the eighties, and you don’t even have to tack on the “good buddy,” for it to sound hokey. Further, I think there is plenty for a young officer to learn without heaping on a couple of hundred codes to memorize when plain old words do the trick just fine. That said, I’m in the minority on this opinion, so don’t listen too closely to me on this one. Ten-codes are going to be around for a while.

There are certain codes that are standard across the country: 

• 10-4: Everything is okay or I understood what you just said to me. 

• 10-1: I have no idea what you just said. Say it again.

• 10-6: I’m busy unless you really need me for an emergency

• 10-20: Where are you? (as in, “What is your ten-twenty,” or just “What’s your twenty”)

• 10-100: I need to stop and pee, often associated with 10-200

• 10-200: I need to stop and…you get the idea. I’ve only heard this one over the radio once, during a night shift. A reprimand was issued before sunrise. 

For every standardized ten-code, dozens are only used in a specific jurisdiction. In some cities, there is a ten-code for an animal carcass in the roadway, though why the dispatcher can’t just say, “There is an animal carcass in the roadway,” is beyond me. I can almost guarantee you in that scenario that the responding officer would have to stop the car and look up code 10-gobbledeehoozit before he understood he was responding to a dead animal in the street. (And no one is going to get on a public police channel and ask what it means…except maybe that one guy who calls out 10-200.)

Beyond ten-codes, many departments also use systems called “codes” (distinct from ten-codes) and “signals.” This can get really complicated, but you may recognize “Code Three” as the term for responding to an emergency with lights and sirens, as in, “Adam 12, respond Code Three to a robbery in progress at…” 

In the first jurisdiction where I worked, we had a code for responding with only lights but no sirens. This was termed “Code Two.” When I moved to a different city, however, the term Code Two meant “intoxicated person.” This resulted in a gaffe on my part one evening after I hit the new streets, during which I called for an ambulance “Code Two” because the person I was trying to help was in a panicked state and didn’t need the extra stress of loud sirens. The dispatchers and other officers listening in interpreted this as me asking for a drunk ambulance crew, which was the subject of relentless teasing for the rest of that night. 

I don’t know why there isn’t some standard list, but every town is different. Thus, I don’t want writers to spend much time on this other than to say if it is really important to you, give the agency you’re writing about a call. I bet they’d send you the whole list if you tell them you’re a writer working on a project in their city. This is not top-secret WWII code-breaking stuff. This is some clerk’s version of CB radio-speak made up fifty years ago, now ingrained in that department’s culture. 

If you want more, Michael Connelly has a cool list of codes and acronyms on his official website (Police & FBI Acronyms - Extras - Michael Connelly). Most are specific to the California area, but the list could be a fun rabbit hole during your research phase. Regardless, ten-codes are part of police life for the foreseeable future, but I think you’re safe if you use them sparingly or not at all. Your call. 

Hope everyone is 10-4 with that. 

This Crazy Writing Life: Requiescat in pace—In Memory Of The Mass-Market Paperback

By Steven Womack

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Jim Milliot and Sophia Stewart’s December 12th article in Publisher’s Weekly isn’t actually an article.

It’s an obituary.

ReaderLink—the largest distributor of books to non-trade channel booksellers in North America—just announced that they would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks at the end of 2025. The mass-market paperback—once the single most popular reading format in the world—has been dying for over a quarter-century. ReaderLink’s decision is, to fall back on a perfectly valid cliché, the final nail in the coffin.

An eighty-six-year long ride is over.

The mass-market paperback had its roots in the Great Depression, when a huge demographic could barely afford food and rent, let alone luxuries like books. Publishers would do anything to sell more books, so in 1935 a British publisher named Allen Lane created Penguin Books in the U.K. and with it, the universal format (4.25” x 6.87”) that could be mass produced cheaply and distributed across a wide variety of markets and outlets. The first American paperback book publisher—Pocket Books—released its first book, Wuthering Heights, in 1939.

Not only were mass-market paperbacks affordable, they weren’t limited to sales in bookstores. In time, newsstands, drug stores, grocery stores, gift shops, airports, Big Box stores like Walmart, gas stations—anywhere you could put a cheap wire rack—became outlets.

The mass-market paperback also created what became known in publishing as the “midlist,” which enabled authors who probably wouldn’t make it in hardcover to gain an audience and earn a living. Several generations of writers thrived and became famous thanks to the mass-market paperback. Louis L’Amour wrote more than 130 books in his long career; all but four of them were mass-market paperbacks. Someone once told me that John D. MacDonald calculated the size of his advances for the Travis McGee novels on the first print run of his mass-market paperback.

Is that a true story? Who knows, but it’s a great story.

Mass-market paperbacks also outsold the hell out of hardcovers. In the PW article, Milliot and Stewart cited the figures for Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 blockbuster hit, Valley of the Dolls. Upon its release, Susann’s potboiler sold 300,000 hardcovers that year, which is certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

Then Bantam released the paperback in 1967 and it sold 4,000,000 copies in the first week. It went on to double that number in its first year. The mass-market paperback lifted the fortunes of publishers beyond the Big Five. The mass-market paperback played a huge role in making independent powerhouse Kensington Publishing as successful as it’s been. Milliot and Stewart cited Kensington CEO Steve Zacharius’s statement that the mass-market paperback was the foundation of Kensington’s success. Kensington’s best-selling author of all time is Fern Michaels; the bulk of her 42 million sales were mass-market paperbacks.

All genres benefited from the format, especially the most popular commercial genres like romance, mystery and crime fiction, and science fiction. In my own career, the mass-market paperback made me a nice living for nearly a decade. My first three book deals with St. Martin’s Press were hardcover and the sales were never that impressive. But once I launched my Music City Murders series, featuring private detective Harry James Denton, with Ballantine Books, my mass-market numbers built what career I had. I published six books in that series and every one of them was either nominated or won a major mystery award (including both an Edgar and Shamus Award). It all worked beautifully…

Until it didn’t anymore.

What happened?

I can only relate a personal experience here. In 1996, I signed a two-book contract with Ballantine Books (I had only taken single contracts before because, candidly, the money was pretty terrible and I didn’t want to get locked in). I’d been nominated for an Edgar twice, won it once, and had also been multiply nominated for the Shamus and short-listed for the Anthony. My editor at Ballantine said if I’d take a two-book deal, he'd move me into lead title and the second book in the contract would go hard/soft.

I took the offer. The first book in the deal was Murder Manual, published in 1998. After several Shamus nominations, I was thrilled to finally win one with that book. I began working on the second book in the deal when suddenly my editor seemed to go into an extended period of radio silence.

Finally, I reached out to him and told him how excited I was to finally see Harry James Denton in hardcover. When would I see a cover comp?

Long, awkward, silence…

“About that, Steve,” he said. “We’ve done an extensive audit on the sales of Murder Manual, and we thought the numbers were going to be impressive. Then, out of nowhere, we started getting a ton of returns. Your sell-through ultimately was so low we’ve cancelled the hardcover.”

He explained to me that through the late 90s, there were roughly 1100 companies across the country that were independent distributors; that is, they were small, often family-owned companies that served a specific local market. Most books were sold through those companies.

In the last few years, though, there had been a wave of acquisitions (with Nashville’s own Ingram Books being one of the most active at gobbling up smaller companies), changes in tax laws, and especially bankruptcies, which decimated that market. And while companies were either being acquired or working their way through bankruptcy courts, hundreds of thousands of mass-market paperbacks sat gathering dust, cheap paper fading to yellow, in hundreds of warehouses across the country.

When the companies were acquired or released from bankruptcy, hundreds of thousands of mass-market paperbacks—their covers ripped off and sent back to the publisher as returns—were shredded and pulped.

Milliot and Stewart backed up what my editor told me over twenty-five years ago. They quoted a study done by the Book Industry Study Group that revealed mass market sales in 1996 fell 3.3% from the previous year. The downward slope continued through the early 2000s, through the introduction of the eBook in 2006, until 2011, when eBook sales and mass market sales were roughly equal. Unfortunately, that parity of numbers disguised the fact that mass-market paperback sales were down by $500 million that year, while eBook sales had grown by $1 billion.

To deploy another effective cliché, it was death by a thousand cuts.

And now it’s dead. They’ll surely be a few mass-market paperbacks around for a few more years, but as a cultural force in society, as a huge segment of the publishing industry, it’s over.

The mass-market paperback democratized literature in America; it turned us into a nation of readers. When America went to war in December 1941, publishers stepped up with special format mass-market paperbacks in what were known as the “Armed Services Edition.” I have several of those in my collection, including Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent and several GI paperbacks my uncle carried across Europe and through the Battle of the Bulge. These old treasures are frail now, their cheap, high-acid content paper yellowed and brittle, their bindings cracked and flaking.

But they were carried by hundreds of thousands of soldiers through a world war and all those GIs found escape and comfort in them. And hopefully, they developed a love of reading that they carried with them through the rest of their lives.

It’s sad to see the mass-market paperback sunset. But as I’ve learned the hard way over many orbits around the sun, all good things must come to an end.

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Another valuable life lesson is that when one door closes, another opens. Over the next few months, we’re going to go on an adventure together by way of this column.

I have a writing partner in New York City, Wayne McDaniel. He’s a fabulous screenwriter, novelist, documentarian, with an MFA in Film from Columbia University, as well as a helluva great guy. In 2014, we published a novel called Resurrection Bay.

Several years after that, we wrote a novel together called Pearson Place. This project is literally one of the best books I’ve ever been involved in. I’ll have more to say on the book itself next month.

Wayne and I have spent the last few years trying to find a publisher for this novel. We gave it everything we had. We set up a Query Tracker account and queried dozens of agents. Zilch. Nada. As many of you know, getting trad publishing’s attention these days is harder than ever.

Finally, through a connection (which is really how almost everything is done in publishing), we got an editor at a medium-sized-but-prestigious-publisher to take a look at the manuscript.

We were gobsmacked and thrilled when she loved the book. Literally, that’s what she told us. She loved the freakin’ thing. As in many corporate entities, though, all decisions are made by consensus and there was one person on the acquisitions committee who had problems with the book and vetoed it.

Then this editor did something I have literally never seen before in my forty years in publishing; she said if Wayne and I would do a rewrite and address the issues her colleague had, she’d take the book back and try again.

Without hesitation, we did a rewrite.

The editor loved what we did and took it back to committee. Six months and more went by and finally she called us, nearly in tears, and said her colleague wouldn’t budge. We were all heartbroken, but I think she took it harder than we did.

So Wayne and I decided to go a different route. We’re going to serialize the book on Substack. We’ve broken the book out into individual Substack posts/chapters and are writing supplemental material to go with it and just learning how this is done.

It’s a revolutionary way to get books out there, digitized and delivered via the Internet. Nothing like this has ever been done before.

Oh, wait. There was that Dickens fellow who did it with David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood—among others—over 160 years ago. I guess everything old is new again.

Thanks for playing along. See you next month.

Between Pen and Paper: Flaneuring Through a Writer’s Mind – Why the Inescapable Laws of Nature Matter to Storytellers

By Andi Kopek

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This month, we’ll experience the shortest day of the year—a cosmic reminder that no matter how aggressively we caffeinate our mornings, how many apps we invent, or how many wars we start or can’t end, Earth continues tilting its stubborn 23.5 degrees and throwing snow in our faces.

We may adapt the environment to our needs—insulate it, refrigerate it, pave it, terraform it (fictionally, for now)—but as a species we remain lashed, quite firmly, to the cosmos and its unamused laws of physics.

It’s a humbling thought: even our wildest science-fiction flights depend on what the universe permits. You can bend physics only so far, stretch it only so thin—try to wink at it, and it raises an eyebrow (or the reader lowers their lips in disappointment). Even the fictional worlds we create must ultimately rest on the four fundamental laws of nature:

1. General Relativity

2. The Standard Model of Particle Physics

3. Quantum Mechanics

4. The Laws of Thermodynamics

These aren’t optional. They are the pillars holding up our worlds, real or imaginary—four immense supports of a suspension bridge stretching into the unknown on both ends. We stand upon it, preoccupied with our current state of affairs, trying to unravel the past or imagine futures, while quarks and entropy play on the cables like Einstein bowing a violin.

Creatives who like to play in a sandbox built by these laws are called sci-fi writers. I became a devoted fan of the genre growing up in Poland in the ’70s, when it offered a rare loophole—a way to smuggle big, dangerous, philosophical ideas past the watchful gaze of the Big Communist Brother. Perhaps some of you, concerned with our own modern flavors of censorship, will take the hint. Maybe your next detective story or mystery will unfold not in Nashville as we know it, but on a distant world; maybe the serial killer you’re chasing isn’t hiding in East Nashville but on PSR B1620−26b (the ancient Methuselah Planet) located in the southern arm of the Milky Way, y’all.

The best sci-fi stories I’ve read use scientific principles not as shackles but as springboards for imagination. Here are a few worth keeping in mind:

Gravity. Gravity determines body size, structure, mobility, and evolution; it influences circulation, muscle mass, bone density, and even how tall a creature dares to grow. A world with twice Earth’s gravity won’t give you graceful gazelles—it’ll give you grumpy, compact, low-slung creatures muttering at an early age about knee pain.

Atmospheric Composition. Life requires a medium for energy exchange. For us, that medium is oxygen, but other molecules could take its place: nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, even sulfur compounds. Change the atmosphere, and you change the biochemistry—and the smell of everything.

Radiation. Cosmic rays (which are mostly high-speed protons) and various types of electromagnetic radiation—infrared, ultraviolet, and microwave—constantly pepper planets. This radiation might nurture life, mutate it (which could mean more diseases but also faster evolution), or erase it.

Temperature. Most Earth life functions within a narrow temperature window (from about –20°C to +70°C), the range ideal for our enzymes and our chemistry. Below 0°C, life largely halts; by – 20°C, most biochemical reactions have effectively stopped. In the opposite direction, proteins denature above +50°C, and DNA strands come apart above +70°C. That’s the limit of our chemistry.

The Universal Solvent. These temperature limits mostly reflect our reliance on water as a solvent. Water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C. Swap water for something else—say, methane, which freezes at –183°C—and life would look radically different. Imagine fish made of wax moving through liquid natural gas.

Magnetic Field. Charged cosmic particles—again, mostly high-energy protons—are deflected by Earth’s magnetic field, which acts as a planetary shield. Without that shield, life on Earth’s surface would be devastated… though not entirely erased. Some extremophiles would endure: certain bacteria (including the famous Conan the Bacterium), fungi (including even more famous Black Mold of Chernobyl), their spores, lichens (a fungus–cyanobacterium partnership), and the legendary indestructible animals—the water bears.

Planet’s Orbit & Tilt. Our planet’s tilt gives us the four seasons; an eccentric orbit would deliver wilder temperature swings. Too much tilt and you get seasonal mayhem; too little, and every day feels like Nashville in March.

Type of Planet’s Star. A star sets a planet’s energy budget as well as day–night rhythm. Remember: the amount of energy a planet receives from its star is inversely proportional to the square of its distance. Double the distance, and the light drops to a quarter. This simple math already creates a universe of possibilities for a writer.

Plate Tectonics / Geologic Activity. This feature is important for creating continents, mountains, mineral deposits, as well as tsunamis and nice views. It also maintains an atmosphere and recycles carbon.

Chemistry & Availability of Essential Elements. Life (as we know it) requires six main elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. But don’t forget the trace metals: iron, magnesium, molybdenum, copper, and nickel. Without them, enzymes don’t work, cells don’t breathe, and metabolism collapses.

So as you sit through this shortest of days, muttering at the early sunset and your cold coffee, remember: the universe with its laws is not your enemy. The cosmos is your co-author. As writers, we should honor the laws that shape our worlds, knowing that imagination deepens—not shrinks—when it leans on truth. If sci-fi authors could sneak philosophy past censors in 1970s Poland, you can certainly sneak a detective onto a distant exoplanet. The shortest day of the year is a great opportunity to recall that we’re temporary passengers on a tilted, spinning, pale blue dot rushing through mostly empty space at 1,300,000 mph*. We are nobody. Let’s respect the laws of nature and enjoy the ride and creativity.

Andi

*1,300,000 mph is the speed of the Earth moving through the cosmos as a part of the Milky Way galaxy’s journey relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background.

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Andi Kopek is a multidisciplinary artist based in Nashville, TN. With a background in medicine, molecular neuroscience, and behavioral change, he has recently devoted himself entirely to the creative arts. His debut poetry collection, Shmehara, has garnered accolades in both literary and independent film circles for its innovative storytelling.

When you’re in Nashville, you can join Andi at his monthly poetry workshop, participate in the Libri Prohibiti book club (both held monthly at the Spine bookstore, Smyrna, TN), or catch one of his live performances. When not engaging with the community, he's hard at work on his next creative project or preparing for his monthly art-focused podcast, The Samovar(t) Lounge: Steeping Conversations with Creative Minds, where in a relaxed space, invited artists share tea and the never-told intricacies of their creative journeys.

website: andikopekart.ink
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FIVE KEYS TO CREATING BELIEVABLE VILLAINS

By Venita Bonds

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My elderly aunt never speaks ill of anyone. When I joked that she could find something nice to say about the devil himself, she said, “Well, he does have a good work ethic.” 

Few people are 100% evil—and this includes bad guys. Mystery writer DP Lyle says, “Everyone is the hero of their own story.” While it’s tempting to make your villain bad to the bone, you have to make him “human” enough to be believable. Villains need at least one fault, frailty, or soft spot that makes them vulnerable. 

Key 1: Humanity and Vulnerability

Think of Boyd Crowder in Justified. He’s a bad guy we hate to love, but we love him, anyway. Why? Because he’s charismatic, intelligent, eloquent, and funny. He’s also untrustworthy and prideful. His human flaws make him vulnerable and often self-destructive.

The cannibalistic Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs is impossible to love, but his brilliant intellect and odd sense of decorum make him believable in a terrifying way. FBI Agents Crawford and Starling think his only weakness is his huge ego, which makes him vulnerable to their attempts to use him to track down a killer. We’ve all known people with the human qualities of pride, ego, and intelligence. Hopefully, they’re not hungry.

Keys 2 and 3: Justification and Backstory

Humans believe we have the right to act as we do. We try to justify our actions, no matter how heinous. Villains are no different. They often use their backstory to justify their deeds. Something in their past explains their rotten behavior—at least in their own mind. 

One caution: Think of backstory as salt sprinkled into the mix with a lean hand. While backstory is a necessary ingredient for you to understand your villains and what motivates them, feed it to your readers only a grain at a time, and never in your beginning pages. 

Your villains do not have to be killers to need backstory and justification. They can be anyone who exerts power: lawyers, preachers, politicians, medical personnel, or company CEOs. 

Alabama native Richard Scrushy drove a cement mixer for a living. In his rags-to-riches backstory, he went from hauling cement to becoming the CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation. Possessing an ego the size of his bank account, he ruled his executives through threats and intimidation. When the Department of Justice indicted him on 85 counts of conspiracy, money laundering, and securities fraud, the company’s stocks crashed. Scrushy justified his actions as those of a philanthropic visionary whose only sin was trusting his accountants.  

Florida prostitute Aileen Wuornos murdered seven johns. Her backstory? Sexual abuse from childhood. During her trial, she highlighted her past to make jurors see her in a sympathetic light. Her justification for murder was that all men were a threat to life and limb. She claimed she acted in “self-defense like any human would do.” She made herself believable enough to garner a fan club. 

Key 4: Body Language

The human body speaks louder than words. We can control what we say and might even pass a lie detector test, but our body language can be a dead giveaway. Even the most duplicitous villain reveals the truth through “tells” that leak out of his movements and mannerisms. To create believable villains, let their bodies do the talking.

Example: 

Her left eyelid twitched. Poker players know that micro movements can reveal a person’s thoughts. I was a lousy poker player, but I’d known Elsa Bea all my life. I saw her tell.

Another example: 

She locked onto my eyes without blinking. Liars do that when they want you to believe they’re telling the truth. Unfortunately, she was bouncing her left leg as though keeping time to a drumbeat. Legs don’t lie. 

Key 5: Secondary Characters

Use your secondary characters to increase your villain’s believability. Like my elderly aunt, secondary characters can provide backstory and justification for a villain. In this scene, a housekeeper is defending a doctor suspected of poisoning elderly women. 

“His primary practice is anti-aging— hormones and hydrogen peroxide infusions,” Geraldine said. 

“Is that what he’s giving Mother?” 

She shrugged. “All I know is that it’s made from plants, so it’s all natural.”

“Poison ivy’s all natural. Rattlesnake venom’s all natural.”

“He’s not poisoning her!” 

“How do you know?”

She threw up her hands in exasperation. “He went to Cambridge. Would the Ochsner Clinic employ him if he weren’t an excellent physician?”

Turn the Key

The most important key to creating believable villains is you. The greater your understanding of human behavior and communication, the more realistic your bad guys will be. Just don’t turn your back on one.  

Suggested Reading and Viewing 

Books

Six-Minute X-Ray: Rapid Behavior Profiling by Chase Hughes 

How To Analyze People: How To Read Anyone Like A Book by Madison Taylor

Confidential: Uncover Your Competitors’ Top Business Secrets Legally and Quickly—and Protect Your Own by John Nolan

Websites and Videos

Thebehaviorpanel.com features educational videos on behavioral analysis, communication and elicitation, deception detection, and interrogation. Participants are: 

Mark Bowden: truthplane.com

Chase Hughes: chasehughes.com
www.youtube.com/@chasehughesofficial 

Greg Hartley:  greghartley.com

Scott Rouse:  scottrouse.com

Scott & Greg:  bodylanguagetactics.com

Television and Movies

“Invisible Monsters: Serial Killers in America” (2021 Miniseries) 

The Serial Killers of “Invisible Monsters” | A&E (aetv.com)

“Monster” (2003 movie about Aileen Wuornos starring Charlize Theron)

“American Greed” (TV documentary series for students of human nature and behavior)

“Catch Me If You Can” (2002 movie about a con man)

Weston Smith’s HealthSouth video on the largest health care fraud in US history:  
https://youtu.be/rjgLRRoc_JU?si=FrfYJsN8WRHDd__2

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Venita Bonds is a retired RN with a background in intensive care and psychiatric nursing. She taught adult writing courses and worked for a defense contractor training human intelligence assets for deployment. The author of four historical novels, she now writes Southern Gothic mysteries and short stories. She was a Killer Nashville 2025 Claymore Award winner. She can be found at www.venitabonds.com.