AI search is changing how books get found, and we explore why authors may need to think less like advertisers and more like production studios. This recap breaks down GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, and why rich worldbuilding, character art, behind-the-scenes process, author diaries, and conversational content may help AI tools understand who a book is for.

Instead of stuffing pages with keywords, authors now have a chance to build deeper story ecosystems that attract readers through meaning, context, and creative depth.

✅ What GEO is and why it may matter more than old-school SEO
✅ Why AI search responds to context, specificity, and relational story data
✅ How authors can use worldbuilding, interviews, art, and process posts as discovery assets
✅ Why readers who love a story often want the wider creative universe around it

See Joanna Penn's Post

NOTES FROM GEMINI

The marketing paradigms that have sustained indie authors for the last decade are currently undergoing a “Great Reset.”

As of March 2026, the traditional search engine optimization (SEO) techniques used to drive traffic to author websites are being superseded by “Generative Engine Optimization” (GEO). This shift is precipitated by the transition of consumer behavior away from browsing lists of links and toward interacting with AI “answer engines” and agentic workflows that provide direct recommendations.

For the busy SFF author, this means that simple keyword stuffing is no longer sufficient; discoverability now depends on how “legible” an author’s brand is to large language models and generative search algorithms.

The industry data from early 2026 indicates that AI-powered search is fundamentally shifting discoverability. When a reader asks a generative engine for “a dark, industrial fantasy with necromancy and a brooding protagonist,” the engine does not just look for those words; it analyzes the context, depth, and relational data of available metadata.

Authors who have built rich, authentic online presences—filled with detailed world-building, interviews, and conversational blog posts—are being surfaced at significantly higher rates than those who rely on static, promotional copy.

Why this is cool and useful

This is a massive win for authors who treat their writing like a studio, as it rewards depth over volume. The “Generative Engine Optimization” model values the quality of the data points an author provides to the internet.

If an author’s website contains a “grimoire” of their magic system or a detailed history of their sci-fi world, the AI search engines (like Gemini or the search-enabled GPT models) can synthesize that information to present the book as the “perfect match” for a specific reader query. It moves the marketing burden away from “gaming the algorithm” and toward “feeding the engine” with high-quality, creative content.

Furthermore, the rise of “Live Selling” on platforms like TikTok Shop and through integrated Shopify storefronts is providing authors with a direct-to-consumer (DTC) revenue stream that is independent of retail giant whims.

Roughly half of authors earning over $10,000 per month are now leveraging these direct channels, utilizing 1,000 “True Fans” to sustain their studios.

Sometimes, simply putting attention on yourself shows you areas of opportunity, areas to be proud of, and ideas for what to do next.

Press here to open this Canva Template:

Get the Canva Template

You can drop in your photo, swap out the background art or make it blank, even fill it in in Canva. Or print it off, color it in, and pin it up on your wall!

Each page has meaning to get you to think about your life. The next few parts in this course explain it like a heroic adventure.

Sheet 1: How to Build Your Own Character Sheet (and Why Every Writer Should)

“To be a hero, you first have to know yourself.”

We don’t often think of our lives as stories. But what if you did?

What if your daily existence wasn’t just a blur of to-do lists and tabs—but the opening chapter of something legendary? And what if you, right now, are the main character... like Bilbo, on the edge of going on an adventure?

That’s the idea behind this character sheet for real life. It’s a tool, borrowed from tabletop RPGs and game design. It helps you step back and reflect on who you are right now, and who you’re becoming.

Storytellers, especially, need this. We invent characters on the page all the time. But we often forget that we are characters too, living out a story worth telling.

Let’s get into it.

1. Name & Backstory: The Wounds and Wonders That Formed You

In fiction, a character’s backstory explains why they are the way they are. It offers clues. It shows where they came from and where they’re going.

What’s your backstory?

This isn’t just about childhood facts. It’s about identifying key moments, places, or people that left an imprint on you. What stories raised you? What scars shaped you?

When you write this out, you realize your current situation is more than random. It might mean something, if you look.

1. Name, essentials, and Chronotype

Fill in your personal details like you’re a character in a story. Your name big and center, your family name down at the end, your family origins, and your own backstory. You know your chronotype now, and your role in the Wheel of Legends.

2. What Season Are You In?

One of the most interesting parts of this exercise is naming your current life zone. Are you in a season of growth? Grief? Hiddenness? Momentum?

Use metaphors if you like: “fog,” “storm,” “sunrise,” “wilderness.” Once you name your season, the feeling of how life is going for you, you can stop fighting it. You might begin to work with it.

It’s also a reminder: seasons change. You’re not stuck here forever. You’re just in a chapter.

3. Stat Ratings:

Now it’s time to rate yourself, 1 to 10, in categories that matter for creators and adventurers alike:

• Creativity

• Courage

• Curiosity

• Discipline

• Stamina

• Empathy

• Humor

This isn’t a test. It’s a snapshot. The point is to get honest. Maybe you’re a 9 in curiosity but feel like a 3 in discipline. That tells you something. It shows you where you thrive, and what needs strengthening if you want to level up in life.

Just like in a game, knowing your stats helps you play to your strengths. Sometimes you have stats you can’t change, either at all, or in this season of life. Simply being honest about that can give you fresh focus on where you can move.

4. Special Skills: Own What Makes You… Weird?

Most of us downplay our gifts because they don’t feel special. But this section pushes you to name your Special Skills—the quirky, overlooked talents you carry.

It could be anything:

• “Spotting patterns”

• “Creating calm in chaos”

• “Making others feel safe”

• “Seeing stories in everything”

When you write these down, you begin to see yourself differently. You recognize that your toolkit is already filled with magic. You don’t need to become someone else. You need to become fully yourself.

5. Your Big Dream

What’s the dream that glows in your heart, even when everything else goes silent?

Maybe it’s finishing your novel. Or publishing a comic. Or starting a publishing house. It doesn’t matter how big or small it is. What matters is that it’s yours.

This becomes your “main quest.” Your True North. Everything else aligns from here.

6. Battle Cry: The Phrase That Fires You Up

Last, choose your phrase. Your motto. Your war cry. Make it up. Or think about the phrase you turn to often to get through tough things.

It might be:

• “Write like it matters.”

• “Do the next right thing.”

• “Tell the truth in fiction.”

• “The world needs me.”

Writing it down makes it real.

Final Thoughts for this Page:

You are not a background character. You are not a passive observer. You are the author and the protagonist of your story.

Creating your character sheet isn’t just for fun—it’s a tool for clarity. A mirror. A map. A way to get unstuck and step boldly into your creative life.

Stage 2: Map Your World Realms

“You can’t explore new lands until you’ve mapped your own.”

When people think about improving their lives or becoming more creative, they often focus on mindset, goals, or motivation. But rarely do they stop to ask:

Where am I actually living my life?

Not just geographically, but from the view of your emotions, your digital alliances, and your spiritual realms. Where do you move each day?

We all live in invisible landscapes. The rooms we spend time in, the websites we check, the people we text… these form the architecture of our days. Most of us walk through these spaces without noticing.

That’s what this exercise is about: mapping your world. If you want to grow as a writer, a creator, or a human, you need to know the terrain you’re operating in.

You start to see:

• Why certain days feel draining and others feel alive

• Which places feed your creativity and which slowly erase it

• Where you’re stuck, and where you might break through

Mapping your world doesn’t give you all the answers. But it gives you better questions.

The Terrain of Your Life: What to Map

Grab a journal, sketchbook, or our printable Legend Role Adventure templates. Or just pull up a blank doc. Build a map of your real, living world.

Regions of My Realm

This section is your world; and it’s deceptively simple. Home, Church on Sundays, school, the park, grandmas… what is your world? Focus on places that are good for you, that you want to keep in the map of your life.

More things to include:

1. Daily Grounds

Where do you physically go in a typical day? Home? School? A park, church, café, friend’s house?

Each of these spaces has a specific feeling and role. Name them. Write a word next to each: “draining,” “safe,” “focused,” “loud.”

2. Online Realms

What websites, platforms, or apps do you check every day? Instagram? YouTube? Discord? Substack? Gmail? (*cough… LegendFiction…)

These spaces can shape your attention and emotion too. Note which ones help you grow, and which keep you stuck scrolling away from creativity.

3. Allies

List 3–10 people you interact with regularly. Friends, mentors, siblings, co-workers. These are more than ‘just people in your life.’ These are people lean in toward you on purpose.1
Label their role in your life like RPG classes: “Mentor,” “Fellow Scribe,” “Tank,” “Comic Relief,” “Healer.”

You’re building a fellowship, even if you didn’t realize it.

4. Traps and Drains

Where do you go (physically or digitally) that leave you feeling worse afterward? Maybe it’s your bedroom when it’s too messy? Maybe it’s Twitter doomscrolling? Maybe it’s a friend group that no longer nourishes you?

Name the shadowlands. Put warning symbols.

5. Power Spots

Where do you feel most yourself? Most creative? Most peaceful? These are special, even if they’re simple. A favorite tree. A corner in a library. A YouTube channel that always lifts you up. A playlist. A bench.

These are like your shrines that bring you to life. Maybe… go there more? Or go on purpose.

6. Unseen Realms

What spaces or communities have you always been curious about, but never entered? This could be a local writing group, a Zoom group of creatives, a fencing class, or a retreat center. These are your new realms you’re open to. No need to go yet. Just put them on your radar.

What You Might Discover

• You may be spending 60% of your creative energy in environments that kill creativity.

• You haven’t visited your favorite coffee shop in months.

• You’re talking daily with someone who doesn’t believe in you, and rarely with those who do.

Mapping like this helps you see the invisible outline of your habits. And once you see it, you can start to reshape it.

Your Life is a Living World

Writers talk about “world-building” all the time, but what if the first world you build… is your own? What if you took as much care naming your real zones as you do designing fictional realms?

Because this is the world where your story unfolds, and you’re not a tourist here. You’re a legend in training.

Stage 3: Gather Your Guilds

“No one levels up alone.”

In every great story (especially the kind writers love) there’s a moment when the main character realizes they can’t go it alone. Frodo needs Sam. Harry needs Ron and Hermione. Luke needs Obi-Wan, and then a whole messy band of rebels.

That’s because real growth doesn’t happen alone. It happens in guilds, in shared spaces where people train together, struggle together, and challenge each other with the truth.

And if you’re a writer or creator trying to grow on your own… maybe you’ve already noticed something: isolation holds you back. You lose clarity and confidence. The monsters in your head get louder. You keep rewriting the same chapter of your life… and calling it progress.

What’s a Guild?

Think of a guild as any group where:

• You learn

• You practice

• You get stronger with others

Guilds can look like:

• A local writing group

• A critique partner you email weekly

• A coworking call with a friend

• A creative Discord server

• A class you’re taking

• A friend group that builds each other up

You might already be in one without realizing it. Or you might be floating alone… wishing someone would just invite you in. Maybe it’s up to you to ask. We’re not meant to create in a vacuum.

Without a guild, it’s easy to:

• Lose belief in your work

• Confuse perfectionism with progress

• Spin in circles instead of leveling up

But with a guild?

• You get outside your own head

• You gain fresh feedback, vision, and accountability

• You remember you’re not crazy for caring so much

You may write alone. But you don’t grow alone.

1. Fellow Creators: Who’s in Your Guild Now?

List 3–5 people or groups who show up in your creative life:

• A friend you bounce ideas off

• A mentor who challenged you once

• A coworker who reads your blog

• A small online group where you share

Label each one with their role: Mentor, Fellow Traveler, Cheerleader, Challenger, Muse, Scribe, etc.

2. Creative Communities: Where Are You Training?

What space, online or in person, makes you better? These are places where you ‘go to train,’ to practice, check in, and hear from other people.

• A Substack you read weekly

• A writing circle you joined (but forgot to visit)

• A class or retreat you did last year

3. Mentors & Guides

Who are you learning from? Who are your heroes, your teachers, guides whom you look up to or go to for advice?

4. Why Am I Training, & What Am I Learning?

This section will evolve, but it’s good to write it down. Can you identify your goals, and list the steps you’re going through right now?

This is like every hero on their off day in the training grounds, where they stare at a mountain for a minute, and catch their breath. Their minds race over what they are doing, and how far they have come.

Writing it down makes it real.

Start your own Guild?

You may not live near any groups or guilds you can join. So what happens now? Sometimes you don’t always find a guild. Sometimes, you build it.

If there’s no group that fits your creative DNA, start one. Invite 2 people. Make a 1-hour window every week. Pick a plan:

• “Weekly Critique & Chill”

• “Friday Night Worldbuilders”

• “Coffee & Courage Creative Check-Ins”

Name it something fun or strange. We all like things with identity.

• In college, I started study groups every time a test was announced, and fellow students thronged to come, purely because someone offered a time and place to get stuff done.

• In LegendFiction, members can start 4-person groups to compete in the monthly tournament, but really, it’s about 4 friends cheering each other on and checking in.

• Some author members print off a poster inviting fellow writers to gather together, and make friends. Post it in your coffee shops (with permission), and see who comes. Maybe you portal into completely unexpected and new friendships.

Don’t Stay Alone

Your life story isn’t just your own. It needs companions for this sort of adventure… Quest… thing. It needs friction and feedback. It needs fellowship, laughter, fun, and probably food.

So gather your guild. Even if it starts with just one friend, one invite, or one room where you belong.

No one lives a legend alone.

Hope this was fun and helpful!

Tell me what you think below, and what new thoughts came to mind as you worked on your sheets.

Writers keep doing this odd little trick where they spend three hundred pages summoning dragons, revolutions, and the end of the world, then introduce themselves like a mildly competent stapler.

Name. Credentials. A safe adjective or two. Nothing that might alarm the locals.

And then they wonder why nobody remembers them.

A reader has just walked through fire. They have seen impossible things. They come out the other side expecting to meet the sort of person who would willingly build such a Narnia and live in it for years. Instead they meet…a desk clerk.

This is a mistake.

A novelist is already a suspicious and fascinating creature. You chose, repeatedly, to spend your life making things that do not exist until they do, which is the sort of behavior that would have worried your ancestors. You kept going when there was easier work available. You followed threads that led nowhere and called that progress. You listened to voices that never once offered to help with the rent.

There is nothing minor about this.

Yet the story you tell about yourself is usually the smallest one available.

If a stranger wrote your life as a character, they would not begin with your degree and your fondness for coffee. They would start with the long stubborn line running through your years and say: that is the real story. Everything happens because of that.

From a higher vantage, the pieces line up. That early obsession becomes your origin moment. The abandoned projects become evidence of appetite rather than failure. The odd detours acquire new meaning. You begin to look less like a person who “likes writing” and more like a person on a mission.

Which is closer to the truth.

I get it; there is a fear here. It sounds like vanity. It smells like ego. It threatens to become one of those dreadful performances where someone declares themselves important and waits for applause.

That’s not what this is.

To mythologize yourself is to accept the actual size of the thing you have been doing and speak from there without apology or inflation. It requires a kind of humility that feels almost backward. You step aside from the small, polite version of yourself and allow the larger version you’re in love with to step forward.

You do not add anything. You stop subtracting.

Readers respond to that, because how couldn’t they. They recognize someone who’s been shaped by the same forces that shaped the book. Someone who did not arrive by accident.

So here’s your challenge:

Take your life out of the filing cabinet.

Put it on the table. The whole thing. The parts you hid. The dreams you were half-ashamed of because they felt too big for you. Stare at them long enough, or talk them over with a friend, till you start to notice a pattern. Like footprints crossing the same patch of ground over and over again.

That was you. Coming into focus.

Like one of those horrible stereograms from school days where you shoved a book in your nose and cross your eyes, and hope something cool apparates from the pages.

You keep calling it “writing” as though it were a hobby that got out of hand.

It isn’t. It is the thread in the dark that keeps pulling you back when other, more ‘sensible’ paths presented themselves with proper salaries and greige chairs that matched.

Something in you refused.

And here you are.

Still circling the same fire.

So stop pretending this is a small thing you do on the side of your real life. This is part of the shape of your life. You do not lack belief. You have been acting on belief for years. You sat down. You created. You came back. You tried again.

People without belief do not do that. They find something easier and call it wisdom.

You have been looking at your life from too close, nose pressed to the glass, seeing only smudges and fingerprints and the occasional disappointed reflection. Step back. Far enough to see the shape of your life.

There is a person there who keeps choosing the harder road. That person deserves a clearer introduction.

So when you speak about yourself, do not start with the safe details. Start with the adventurous, interesting thing that keeps happening.

Only this time, stop hiding it.

Want some help with this?

I built a GPT with OpenAI called ‘Mythic me’ that you can use for free. Either drop in your full bio, or your website URL, and it will study your story. Then rewrite it for you to reveal the myth behind your receipts.

Try the Chat Tool

For me, I ran it a couple of times, pulled the best bits together, and wrote my own draft. For now, I think it’s pretty cool. While I may update in the future, it’s a good starting point.

It does feel more like me.

When does your creativity actually peak?

For many authors, the answer has little to do with discipline or motivation and much more to do with biology.

In a recent discussion with the LegendFiction writing community, founder Dominic De Souza introduced an idea unfamiliar to many writers: the concept of the chronotype, a person’s natural rhythm for sleep and wakefulness.

“Your chronotype is your sleep pattern,” De Souza said while presenting the concept during a community walkthrough. “And if you’ve never heard of that, which most of us never have, it’s extremely helpful to know about.”

The idea comes from sleep research and describes the internal clock that determines when people feel alert, tired, or mentally sharp during the day.

For writers — whose work relies on sustained mental focus and imagination — understanding that rhythm may change when and how they write.

Content courtesy from UCLA Health | Sleep Foundation

The Hidden Clock Behind Creative Energy

Chronotypes describe the body’s natural preference for sleep and wakefulness, a rhythm influenced by genetics and the circadian cycle that governs the body’s daily functions.

Researchers studying sleep patterns have found that these rhythms shape more than bedtime. They influence energy levels, mood, productivity and cognitive performance.

“Chronotypes are natural preferences of the body for wakefulness and sleep,” De Souza explained while walking through research compiled from sleep studies. “An individual’s chronotype is influenced by genetics and it’s driven by your circadian rhythm.”

In practice, this means some people feel sharp at sunrise, others in the afternoon, and others long after midnight.

For writers who struggle to produce work after a long day, the discovery can feel validating.

“You kind of want to be writing at the time of day when you have the most energy,” De Souza said. “If you can swing it, put the things that matter most to you at the time of day when you have the most energy.”

The Four Chronotypes: Lion, Bear, Wolf and Dolphin

Sleep researchers often group chronotypes into four animal-based patterns popularized by sleep specialist Dr. Michael Breus.

The categories translate sleep rhythms into recognizable behavioral patterns.

The Bear

Bears represent the majority of people.

“Bear chronotypes make up about 55 percent of the population,” De Souza explained.

People in this group tend to follow the sun. They wake and sleep at conventional times and generally perform well within traditional work schedules.

“They do well with traditional office hours,” he said, “but they have no problem maintaining a social life in the evenings.”

For many writers balancing work, family and creative projects, this pattern offers flexibility — writing can happen in the morning, afternoon or early evening depending on the day.

The Wolf

The wolf represents the classic night owl.

Wolves often feel mentally alive long after sunset and struggle with early mornings.

“The wolf chronotype is equivalent to the classic night owl,” De Souza said, noting the group is believed to represent roughly 15 percent of the population.

These writers may produce their most imaginative work late at night, when the world grows quieter and distractions disappear.

For decades, famous authors have described this pattern — working through the night and sleeping well into the morning.

The Lion

Lions occupy the opposite end of the spectrum.

They wake early, often before sunrise, and produce their strongest work in the morning hours.

“The lion chronotype stands in for the early bird,” De Souza explained.

Morning productivity can come with tradeoffs. Many lions find their energy fading quickly at night.

“They wake up early and they’re most productive in the morning,” he said. “But they may have more trouble following a social schedule in the evenings.”

For writers in this category, dawn writing sessions may produce their best work.

The Dolphin

The dolphin chronotype describes people who experience inconsistent or disrupted sleep.

The name comes from an unusual biological trait in real dolphins: the ability to rest half their brain at a time.

“The fascinating reason dolphins are actually in this is because dolphins do something weird,” De Souza said. “They can shut down half of their brain and put it to sleep and the other half stays up.”

Human “dolphins” tend to have lighter sleep and irregular schedules, often resembling chronic insomnia.

“Nobody else does this,” he added with a laugh. “The rest of us just crash and that’s it.”

Why Writers Often Ignore Their Natural Rhythm

Despite how strongly chronotypes shape energy patterns, many people work against their internal clock.

Job schedules, family obligations and cultural expectations frequently dictate sleep habits instead.

“We often fight these natural inclinations due to work obligations or family schedules,” De Souza said. “Or fear of missing out on stuff.”

For writers, this can mean trying to produce creative work when the brain is already exhausted.

“Most people are simply trying to cram their creative life into an already crammed existence,” he said.

The result can feel like a lack of discipline or motivation, when the real issue is timing.

Finding the “Magical” Window for Creativity

Writers who align their work with their chronotype may discover a surprising shift in productivity.

De Souza described these peak periods as moments when the brain has easier access to creativity.

“How can we truly enjoy our creativity,” he asked, “if we’re not accessing the magical time of day when we have access to our deepest creative selves?”

The solution may begin with simple observation.

Pay attention to when focus feels strongest. Track when ideas flow easily. Notice when fatigue shuts down creative thinking.

From there, writing sessions can move toward those high-energy hours.

“Knowing your chronotype can give you more confidence about yourself,” De Souza said. “You’re working with yourself instead of against yourself.”

Turning Sleep Science Into a Writing Strategy

Within the LegendFiction community, the chronotype lesson appears as part of a broader guide for writers building sustainable creative habits.

Members explore the four types and identify their own patterns before adapting their writing schedule.

The exercise also includes small behavioral adjustments, such as aligning exercise, sleep, and writing with peak energy periods.

“If you’re a night owl who needs to wake early,” De Souza explained, “optimize light exposure in the morning and limit it at night.”

Consistency also plays a role.

“Go to bed the minute you feel tired,” he said, encouraging writers to avoid fighting natural sleep cycles.

A Simple Idea That Can Change a Creative Routine

The concept remains surprisingly unfamiliar to many writers.

“Most authors that I’ve met have never heard of chronotypes,” De Souza said.

Yet the discovery often reframes how writers think about discipline and productivity.

Instead of forcing creativity into an inconvenient hour, the goal becomes simpler: find the moment when the mind naturally wants to create.

“You will be happier because you’re working with your system,” De Souza said.

“And you’re working with how you want to function — instead of how you’re being forced to.”

All this and more is neatly gathered as a mini-course for members.

Get the Legend Guide

TL;DR: Here’s the cool thing: you actually have to be talented to have it. If you don’t have any sense of your own excellence, you don’t get imposter syndrome. You just get delusions of grandeur. The kid with the bicycle going, “watch this, no hands.” That guy’s not shaking. Tony Hawk still gets the shakes.

So maybe the feeling isn’t proof you’re a fraud. Maybe it’s proof you recognize you’re about to step out and do something epic. Or hard. And you might not make it.

What’s the answer to the impossible dream? Look straight down. What is the next right step? Not the destiny. Not the massive dream. The next step.

If you don’t have confidence, get evidence. Repetition is better than strength. Build a habit around simple things you actually believe. Pick up a chair ten times. Write the hundred words. Open the Word doc, start a ten-minute timer, and write rubbish.

Let’s bring down the mental inflammation, the feeling of pressure. Build systems that outlast your motivation. You don’t eliminate imposter syndrome. You just get better. And better.

Life is hard, so we gotta get 1% harder.

8. You Feel Like a Fraud Because You Care

Imposter syndrome doesn’t show up when you’re delusional. It doesn’t show up when you’re the caveman screaming “Zog, hold my cave beer” before launching yourself off a cliff at a brachiosaur with zero sense of consequence. That guy doesn’t doubt himself. He just dies.

Imposter syndrome shows up when you’re in the wings of the stage and the lights are about to hit and your number is coming up and you suddenly realize, oh. I could miss this note. I could forget this line. People are about to see me.

That called focused awareness.

If you didn’t have any sense of excellence, any sense of standard, any sense of what good looks like, you wouldn’t feel like an imposter. You’d just go. You’d just do it. You’d be the kid skating the unstable ramp going Look ma, no hands!

But you’re not that kid.

That’s the first thing to ground in. You might actually be really good at this.

7. Don’t Pole-Vault the Canyon

The place most writers freeze is not at the beginning. It’s when the dream gets specific.

• “I want to write a novel” sounds romantic.

• “I’m at the climax and I have to land this plane” feels like staring across a canyon and realizing you cannot jump that far.

And you’re right. You can’t.

So stop trying.

In Indiana Jones, he says the penitent man shall pass. The penitent man kneels. He looks down. He doesn’t throw himself wildly across the gap. He shuffles forward one step at a time.

When you’re frozen, it’s usually because you’re looking at the whole canyon. The whole book. The whole career. The whole destiny.

Look straight down.

What is the literal next thing you can do? Not the heroic thing. The next thing. Open the document.

Describe the character. Write the worst possible paragraph on purpose.

You don’t vault across a canyon. You climb down, cross the river, and deal with the other side when you get there.

6. Sometimes It’s Not Imposter Syndrome

A lot of what we call imposter syndrome might actually something else.

Sometimes it’s burnout. Sometimes it’s digital inflammation. Sometimes it’s a brain that has been shredded by notifications and Slack and email and twelve browser tabs and then you wonder why you can’t enter a flow state.

Who trained you to believe that you’re supposed to respond to every ping immediately? That your phone owns you? That every request is an emergency?

If your nervous system is constantly in low-grade fight-or-flight, of course creative work feels impossible. You’re trying to write an epic fantasy while your caveman brain still thinks a saber-toothed tiger is waiting outside the cave.

Lower the temperature first.

Take a walk without headphones. Sit and stare at a wall for ten minutes. Yes, literally stare at a wall.

I tried it. It’s awkward. You feel ridiculous. Then something changed in me that felt better. The feeling of mental inflammation lowered, and I could focus again. Set a timer for 10 minutes and lie down.

Sometimes you don’t need more discipline. You need less noise.

5. Repetition Is Stronger Than Heroics

Confidence is accumulated evidence.

You don’t become strong by lifting something enormous once. You become strong by lifting something modest every day. Pick up a chair ten times. Do it again tomorrow. Do it again next week. Watch what happens to your body’s idea of itself.

Writing is the same.

Three hundred words a day is boring. It’s unglamorous. It’s not Instagrammable. But it rewires you. You start seeing yourself as: “I’m the kind of person who shows up.”

If you don’t have confidence, get evidence.

4. Systems Are Boring… Systems Are Freedom.

Almost everything I ever fixed in my life got fixed when I stopped asking, “How do I feel right now?” and instead started asking, “What happens when this happens?”

That’s a system.

• When I wake up, what do I do first?

• When someone texts me, how do I respond?

• When I hit resistance in a chapter, what do I do?

If you don’t have an answer to those, you’re winging life every day. That’s exhausting. It feels like a zombie apocalypse movie where you don’t know what comes next.

A system is just a decision made in advance. A system is a prepared decision.

For example, these are some of my daily systems:

• No emails before noon.

• Can’t write fiction? Then write every email and blog post with great care.

• If stuck on a chapter, try a disconnected scene.

• If I’m feeling wiped, take a 10-minute nap, or a half-hour walk

You can hate systems. You can roll your eyes at them. But they are the scaffolding that lets your creativity breathe.

3. Good Enough Is a Doorway

You sit there adjusting wording for twenty minutes because if the sentence isn’t perfect, you might have to admit the scene doesn’t fully work. And if the scene doesn’t work, maybe you don’t work. And suddenly this isn’t about the project, it’s now about you.

Write the bad draft.

Then close it. Work on something else. Come back in two weeks. Your brain will have be fresh again.

I do a lot of graphic design. Every single time that I start getting mad with a project, it’s because I’m over designing. I’m trying to be a designer. Instead of cutting everything back to a simple question: what are the basics that must exist? And then build up from there to where it gets the job done. It’s good enough.

I don’t know how to be the kind of writer who only has one project. I need multiple hatch valves so steam can escape. If one story stalls, I can switch over to another. That keeps me sane. Sort of.

You’re not trying to produce a masterpiece today. You’re trying to keep the creative child willing to come out of the dark room.

2. Talk to Yourself Like a Human

If your best friend came to you and said, “I want to write this epic novel but I don’t know if I can,” you wouldn’t mock them.

You’d remind them of what they’ve already done, the skills they’ve built, or the hard things they’ve already survived.

Do we talk to ourselves that way? A bet you don’t. You’re probably pretty savage. Or is that just me? Just me?

Why is your internal voice so savage?

Sometimes imposter syndrome is that younger part of you that doesn’t trust the adult yet. It doesn’t believe you can keep it safe.

So maybe the work is less “push harder” and more “I’ve got us.”

Look at yourself in the mirror. Actually do it. Lock eyes. I know, it’s weird. You feel like you’re disassociating for a second. Stay there. Say out loud, “I’m here.”

(I do that, and hope no one is walking by the bathroom. I mostly mutter it like a grousy teen.)

Treat yourself like your own best friend. Be nicer. You’ll like it.

1. Sorry, You Don’t Eliminate Imposter Syndrome

Instead, you outgrow your reaction to it. For me, I’m three novels in. It still shows up before a new project, before a new channel, before pressing publish on something.

The difference now is I recognize it faster. I don’t believe it’s a prophecy. I can interpret it as a signal.

So I look down. What’s the very next step I can take on this?

• Open the document.

• Set the timer.

• Write something imperfect.

And then tomorrow, do it again.

That’s it.

I can’t always be as glamorous as the guy in the mirror. Not as heroic as my heroes on TV. But I can put one foot in front of the other, and do that more times than everyone else. When everyone else quits, I keep shuffling forward into the dark.

Maybe, eventually, you look back across the canyon and realize you’re already on the other side.

Maybe you weren’t an imposter after all. Just further ahead of the others.

A community member asked: what are the basic skills every writer needs?

It’s a good question because everybody has their default answers, and I wanted to see what the usual advice looks like before I trust my own brain too much.

So I went and Googled it and did a quick scan of what people say online, because I was already starting to build my own thoughts and I wanted to compare.

One list I saw actually felt pretty solid. It said: read and analyze the best stories, force yourself to practice regularly, mine ideas from your own life, probably keep a journal, keep a story swipe file, and learn the basic plot lines. I read that and I thought, yeah, that’s pretty true. It’s basic, but it’s pointing at real stuff.

And I’m saying this while also admitting I want your ideas too, because if you’ve got your own list of essential skills, I’d like to hear it, and I’m open to doing a part two later.

Skill One: Can You Actually Make Letters Behave on a Page?

When I talk about writing skills, I’m thinking about the actual mechanics of writing a novel, meaning the basic ability to translate an idea into text and then build word count on purpose. That’s the core skill. It’s like painting: can you put color on the canvas at all? Or, if you’re writing with a pencil, can you shape letters? Can you word good?

So when I say the first essential skill is learning to write, I mean you’ve got to have some sense of how to structure sentences, how to do grammar, how to make your thoughts show up in readable form. Put it all together and you get the simplest truth: you can’t be a writer if you have no idea how to write.

In the same way, you can’t paint if you’ve never practiced or messed around with painting. You’ve got to learn how to put words on a page, and a lot of that comes from reading books and then writing enough to feel what works and what doesn’t.

Skill Two: Creeping on Humanity for Plot Material

Another skill that feels essential to me is learning to notice ideas from your own life. It’s basically learning to pay attention to yourself. As I get older and hopefully wiser, I catch myself watching how I process things, and I’m also paying attention to how other people go about things and thinking, that’s interesting, that could be in a story.

There’s that old joke that people say, don’t do dumb stuff to me or I’ll put you in my next novel and it may not end nicely.

I get why that joke exists, because paying attention to each other, and paying attention to how humans work, is a real writing skill. People watching is part of it, and movies can be part of it too. I know movies are orchestrated stories, but they’re also a great example of compressing the complexity of a human into a character who can solve a problem.

And that leads into how I think stories work. When we run into problems, we collapse a million thoughts into one big question: what version of me is needed for this situation? Stories usually start with one version of you, and then you find out that version can’t make it to the end.

So that version has to change into a new version. If you can learn to pay attention to yourself and to other people, and build real self-awareness, I think you’re learning one of the most important writing skills there is.

Skill Three: Habits Beat Motivation, Even When I Don’t Want That to Be True

I think building habits is awesome, and I also think it’s valuable because motivation is not going to do it.

I’m saying this as someone who avoided writing a novel for ten years, so I’m not saying it like I’m above the problem. Motivation can carry you for a moment, but then Monday shows up, or life gets busy, and you stop.

Months go by, you feel overwhelmed, and suddenly writing becomes the thing you used to do when you had energy.

I admire people who built the habit anyway. I always think about Ray Bradbury, the Fahrenheit 451 guy. I remember hearing he’d stand in his basement with a typewriter before and after work and he’d type. I admire that a lot.

Then I look at my own life and I make excuses, like I don’t have a typewriter, and I don’t have a basement. Perfectly reasonable.

My day is scheduled carefully, and when free time shows up, my brain wants to crash. I want to relax. I want a cheat day. So what I’m realizing is that I can’t sit around waiting for motivation, because motivation shows up like a drip that hits the gas tank, and then it vanishes the next day.

Building habits is different. Habits are what run your whole life already, even when you don’t call them habits.

You have habits for meals, for driving, for how you act in different places, for how you talk to get access to what you want, whether it’s a bookstore or a speakeasy. You don’t think through every step of getting on the highway because you practiced it until it became automatic.

So I’m asking: what if we did that with writing?

Sidequest 1: Building a Writing Habit Means Building a Writing Environment

For writing, habits can look like creating an environment you like and stacking small rituals that tell your brain it’s writing time. That might mean something to listen to, something to snack on, something to smell, something to drink, and it’s not because you’re being fancy, it’s because you’re telegraphing to yourself that you are writing.

Some habits can be as plain as closing everything on your computer and opening your document, or opening your project file, or looking at your notes. I’m wary of anything that pulls you toward social media because that can derail you fast, but the bigger point is this: you need triggers that make your body feel it’s safe to create.

Sometimes I think about it like sleep. In Minecraft you can’t sleep if there are mobs nearby, and a lot of us are like that in real life too. You lie down and you can’t rest because your mind is full of stress, unfinished tasks, and tomorrow’s problems. The mobs might be inside you. And I think writing can be the same. If you don’t feel safe, if you don’t feel settled, it’s hard to enter that creative headspace.

So maybe the early habit is tiny. Maybe you sit for five or ten minutes and write three words like I am here. Or I am a writer. Or you reread your notes. The win is you’re associating that place and that time with creative work, and you’re building the habit slowly enough that you don’t burn out and disappear.

Sidequest 2: Forcing Yourself Can Backfire, So It Has to Fit Who You Are

I don’t think habit-building can be about forcing, because forcing works for about five minutes and then resentment shows up. You’ve probably seen this with animals and people. You might win a short battle, but if the inside of you hates what you’re doing, you won’t keep doing it. A person convinced against their will is of the same opinion still, and that’s true for you too.

This is why I don’t love advice where someone says, here’s the right way, this worked for me, copy me, and you’ll get the same outcome. I look at that and think, I’m not that person. I don’t want what you want. I don’t want to live the way you live. I need habits that come from me, that work with my energy and my attention.

Some people do need hard forcing because they’re stuck in laziness, and some people need the opposite because their life is overloaded and they need to slow down, stop saying yes, and figure out what they actually want.

For me, I’m trying to solve my own problem. I’m trying to build a habit of writing, and I’m seeing that sometimes what blocks writing is everything around writing. If my day has no system, writing has no place to land. So I need a day I can count on, the same way sleep works better when your body can count on a cycle.

Sidequest 3: Rest, Boredom, and Sleep Are Part of Writing, Even If That Sounds Weird

I’m realizing I didn’t allow myself time to be bored, and boredom matters because it creates space.

This past year I had a dream where I died, and one of my first thoughts was regret… regret that I’d never write all the things I wanted to write. That hurt. Got me thinking about how my attention is so constantly hacked by social media.

The modern world is always on. News is always on. Everyone is always on. Netflix is always running. Social media hums all day.

I have this metaphor that we’re born to be hobbits, and we get dropped into a Warhammer 40K ever-war, and we didn’t evolve for that. I watch a show like All Creatures Great and Small and its full of humans building friendships, marriage, family, home, care… and I think that looks like a good human baseline.

High-intensity living exists, but it isn’t a healthy default.

And if you’re stressed, and you’re everywhere, and you’re not centered, what good are you to yourself or anyone else? That question connects to something else I’ve been thinking about: the idea of running away to finally write. We fantasize about a studio apartment where nobody bothers us, but if you’re running from people completely, what kind of storyteller do you become?

I think storytellers are called to be in dialogue with people, even if we do it through books.

Sidequest 4: Stories Are Always Saying Something About the World

Even when a story is fun or mindless, it still carries a worldview.

Murder mysteries are a good example. The message they repeat is: when something bad happens, will somebody do something about it? We tell stories about people who do. That’s a world worth living in. It’s almost like every murder mystery is answering Cain’s question, am I my brother’s keeper, with yes, I am.

I watched His & Hers on Netflix recently, and it pulled me in fast, and it kept the pace up, and it had a twist that landed at the end. Underneath the fun, it’s still playing with the idea that people can seek redemption and try to become better by trying to help others, bring justice, and heal what’s broken.

Stories come from how we see life, and writing gets better when we understand what we’re really saying.

Skill Four: Building a Time Fortress So Everyone Else Can Buzz Off

Time is another essential skill. Can you manage your time at all? If your boss can call whenever, family can call whenever, friends can drop in whenever, and you can’t protect any space… it’s hard to find the stillness where creativity starts.

So you need some kind of system for your day, or at least a way to build predictable pockets. Some people thrive in chaos, and if you’re one of them and you can still write, I want your secret, because I don’t think most people can do that.

Bodies need basics: meals, water, sleep, safety, calm, a roof, and some predictability. If you’re in a place like college where people are constantly coming in and out, maybe you need the library, an alcove, a room, somewhere you can control interruptions.

Because writing is a kind of active contemplation. You’re stepping out of regular reality into a dream-like state so you can channel it into words. If people can interrupt you and split your attention, it’s hard to build any habit at all. So controlling time is also controlling access, and that includes boundaries.

I’ve learned I’m bad at boundaries. I redid Myers-Briggs and got ENFJ, and I know that type is famous for wanting to save everyone, and being uncomfortable saying no. But boundaries matter, and I’ve found inspiration in a weird place: Reacher. I love how someone asks him to do something and he looks them in the eye and says no, with no explanation.

I want to be more like that… because people ask me for things. They do that because I’ve trained them that I’ll say yes.

And once you create a boundary, the people who love pushing boundaries will test it immediately. Sometimes that means you can’t even be at home if everyone knows where to find you.

You may need to go somewhere else to feel safe enough to write.

Skill Five: Sleep and Chronotypes Help You Find Your Real Writing Energy

Or, going to bed so your brain stops acting like a gremlin.

Sleep is the last essential skill, and I’m treating it like a skill because it’s hard, it changes over time, and you have to adapt. I get revenge bedtime procrastination, and I also think it’s possible you’re fighting your natural sleep pattern. That’s where chronotype comes in. A chronotype is the pattern of when your body is built to sleep and when your energy peaks.

Some people rise with the sun. Some rise mid-morning. Some rise later. Some are all over the place. People use animal names for these patterns: bear, lion, wolf, dolphin. The point is your peak energy hours happen at different times, and flow might be easier during those hours. If you can figure out your peak energy time and protect it, you can put it toward what matters most, and if writing matters most, that’s where it belongs.

I’m seeing this change in myself. I turned 38 last week and I’ve been sleeping a ton, and I can’t get up early like I used to. I also had surgery and winter changes things, so I’m trying to rebuild my rhythm. But the idea stays the same: figure out your energy pattern and build your writing around it if you can.

Sleep hygiene matters too. Reduce blue light at night, darken your room, avoid caffeine late, do calming activities, keep a predictable routine. Some nights won’t work and you give yourself grace, but the skill is learning what tees up sleep, because sleep feeds creativity.

Creativity comes from the same place dreams come from, and if you don’t nurture that, your writing suffers.

My Five Essential Skills, Put Together

So when I look at the question again, the five essentials that stand out to me are: learning the basic mechanics of writing, building good habits so you’re not relying on motivation, learning self-awareness by paying attention to yourself and other people, learning to manage time and protect it with boundaries, and learning to navigate sleep so your creativity has a home to grow in.

That’s my long answer to a simple question. If you think I missed something that belongs on the essentials list, tell me, because I’m fully open!

😊 I livestream every week on Youtube

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This post’s for people who still care about their ideas, even when their brain feels fried. You’ve got stories in you. You’re thinking about them, planning them, researching them, building them in your head.

You’re doing creative stuff, even when the actual writing part feels heavy. Instead of pretending discipline magically fixes everything, this is about how momentum really comes back. Small wins. Better tools. Fewer distractions. Letting boredom exist again. Letting yourself play with ideas without pressure.

Creativity doesn’t run on force. It runs on energy, evidence, and giving yourself room to function the way you actually function.

Let’s get into it; maybe this sounds like you. You’ve got this really cool novel idea. You’ve been building it up for a while. It feels meaningful, it matters, and you keep layering detail. You’re researching, adding more and more depth to it.

And then somewhere along the way, the joy starts to die out. It’s harder to step into it and feel excited. It starts to feel like work-work.

Like drudgery.

Where did the fun and joy go?

I don’t live in candy land on this topic. It’s real for me too. I’m not actually able to do a lot of long-form writing right now, because of a bunch of things going on in my mind.

Case in point: I got out of surgery yesterday for an erupted tooth. The second in two years. The backstory is ridiculous. I sat in a room for two years and inhaled black mold, and didn’t know it. My ADD got really bad. My creative motivation tanked.

I’ve been unable to write longer novels, so I spend a lot of time thinking about writing. Planning about writing. A lot of my energy has gone into building up the LegendFiction community and doing short-term, fun quests. Stuff that keeps the energy up. Stuff that keeps proving to me I can still do things.

A lot of people will give the advice like you’ve got to chug the frog and just get it done. Chugging the frog doesn’t work. For a bunch of us, you’ve got to build up steam. Rack up some small wins first.

And I find it helps to hack your senses. Literally surround all your senses so you can get into the writing zone.

Here’s 5 ideas that instantly come to my mind.

5. Are you bored enough to be unhackable?

But also, at least for my ADD, you have to practice a little unhackability too.

So like two or three weeks ago, I dropped Twitter and Facebook and Instagram off my phone. I was defaulting to them after hours, during meals, all the time… and it was sapping everything I was doing.

Since doing that, I’ve actually watched a ton of movies I always wanted to watch. Before, I wasn’t even interested in watching movies, because I couldn’t. I wasn’t bored enough to be able to have attention for anything.

I’ve also read through a ton of books on topics I never anticipated.

It didn’t make me write, not yet. I didn’t suddenly become a novelist again. But it has been healing. It’s been re-nourishing.

So if that’s not happening, that does need to happen. You can’t run a marathon if you’re so starved you’ve lost the feeling of hunger.

4. No confidence? Get evidence.

When it comes to writing, I’m can’t yet write a big novel. I want to. I’m close to a couple of them. I’ve got a ton of editing that needs to happen. But I keep procrastinating.

But sometimes I’ll write a short story. Usually when I get to a point where I’ve scrubbed through the whole story like a movie in my mind. I know what I want to do. Then I sit down and I can bang out 6,000 words over two days. And that feels so good.

I love this piece of advice: if you don’t have confidence, build evidence. Get evidence.

Build one brick at a a time.

So here’s what I do to build evidence for myself:

Every time I go to write anything, an email or a blog post, I want to be intentional about the words.

Because it’s practice. It’s practice learning to communicate briefly and quickly and accurately.

Every opportunity to write is still writing. It’s still skill-building.

There’s the skill of communicating.
There’s the skill of nourishing myself.
There’s the skill of allowing boredom back into my life by dropping social sucky fluff.

The last three weeks have been so much better.

And I think I’m getting back closer to recapturing energy and joy, and the ability for longer-term thinking. Because thinking about a bigger story takes energy.

3. Finding a Tool You Enjoy

The other part of what I’m doing is finding a tool that can keep up with me, do what I want, and not tempt me with fancy options.

I used one tool for two years (Obsidian). It was cool, but it had too many options. If I typed the wrong character, things broke. My ADD can’t handle the feeling of being on unsure ground.

So I went back to another tool I bought ten years ago (Upnote). It was designed beautifully. It looked like Apple made it. I always wanted to use it, and I never studied it to see how it could work. I kept trying to make Obsidian behave like this newer one, and it didn’t.

So I dumped it.

Now I’m back to the tool that I basically can’t break even if I wanted to. That’s a huge relaxation point.

I’ve been dropping everything into it. Characters. Outlines. Art. Sometimes I’m going back through and organizing everything.

Builds confidence.

2. Field-Testing Story Ideas Against Formulas

When I’m working on a story idea, I’ll field-test a story idea against a few.

Pixel storytelling theory.
Save the Cat.
Take Off Your Pants.
And a couple more.

And I’ve also built a couple of AI tools that I built for myself, and shared publicly for others to use.

Like, I’ve got a Christmas novel about mice that I’ve been trying to write for two and a half, three years. I hit the midpoint, and then realized I’ve got one character and he’s going to go away, and I don’t know what I’m doing with him for the rest of the novel.

And like an idiot, I sat there for two years.

Life happened, everything got crazy, I did nothing.

Then I pulled up one of my own AI tools, described the story, and it gave me a bunch of awesome ideas. Suddenly I could move forward again.

Having a tool that can do that with me is fantastic.

So when I can’t write, I’m ideating and organizing notes.

1. Sketchbooks, Half-Finished Worlds, and Permission to Begin

And this is something I think we don’t talk about enough.

Not every idea you have has to become a thing that exists. Some ideas can be sketches in a sketchbook. You’re mentally flexing.

You can create a world, mess around with it, have fun, and not commit yourself to writing it. You don’t have to tell anybody about it.

Some ideas you’ll get halfway, brainstorm, flesh out, and maybe five years from now you come back and write it. Who knows.

But you’re flexing the capacity to begin at all. That’s valuable.

We don’t give enough permission for that.

Especially kids. They start a million things and they never finish them. I actually think it’s important to cultivate that ability to just start stuff. Encourage that. Don’t force them to finish stuff.

Because how many of us never even start, because we believe we’ll never be able to finish?

We carry that attitude into adulthood. Then we have to reteach ourselves that we can begin. That we can enjoy the process. That we can store notes.

I love Pinterest for pictures. I love generating my own art. With Midjourney or ChatGPT, I’ll generate art and more ideas will come out of the art, and those feed back into the story, and the story gets more depth than I expected.

A lot of this is permission.
A lot of it is freedom to function the way you function.
And allowing yourself to dream.

Also, rest. Sleep. If you’re tired, if you’re not dreaming, dreaming is a whole other conversation, and it’s essential too.

I hope some of this is helpful!

Comment below what jumped out at you, and share your own thoughts. :)

I’ve been meaning to write this down, which of course means I nearly didn’t.

The year contained writing. Some of it will never be shared. Some of it pretty cool. Most of it done at strange hours with regrettable posture. Some of it imagined very sincerely and then avoided with equal sincerity.

So I asked the LegendFiction community members about their writing habits, and found really interesting patterns. Some I suspected, some I didn’t. What’s important is that each writer has their own pattern, and that’s a vital discovery.

If everyone tried to copy their favorite authors’ writing habits, they’d burn out.

What’s the first thing I noticed about everyone’s answers?

Almost nobody begins with words.

People begin with arrangements. A candle. Music, usually chosen with great care for vibes, and then studiously ignored. Coffee, which is somtimes less a drink and more a declaration of intent. Prayer can focus intention somewhere productive.

This is how we can coax our timid imagination out out from under the desk. It’s allowed to come out and play. But it needs to trust that you’re friendly.

The second thing is that the clock works differently for many of us.

Some people write at six in the morning because nobody sensible is awake to interfere. Others write at midnight because the world has finally stopped asking questions. Both groups will insist the other is mad. Both are correct.

What matters isn’t the hour. It’s the feeling that you have control over yourself, your space, your time, and what you do with it. Writing thrives when left alone, much like cats and last night’s dishes.

Third, large promises are dangerous beasts.

They look noble. They sound impressive when announced. They also will apparate to the Andromeda Galaxy when you’re not looking, and wish you’d leave them alone.

The writers who kept going weren’t the ones who overwhelmed themselves with grit and die-hard motivation to see a goal through. They were the ones who negotiated with that under-desk imagination, promising a short small session. “I’ll do this small thing,” and then they did it. A paragraph. A scene. A short visit. Fun was had by all, and a new playdate set.

Fourth, some people need to think before they write, and others need to write in order to think.

This sounds obvious, which is how you know it’s important. You just have to practice with yourself to see which works.

Getting stuck doesn’t mean you’re a failure.

Early drafts are raw. Energy goes missing. Dogs stare at laptops and wish they could eat homework, like the good old days. But this isn’t the end. The writers who finish are the ones who leave themselves a way back. Like a breadcrumb through the forest.

It could be a note. Reading the last page. Talking with a friend who gently pokes at them with encouraging mumbles. Or taking a break and writing something completely different.

What worked this year was more than running a someone else’s system.

Once people stopped trying to be a different beast, their own ways of working grew stronger. Not faster. Stronger.

Ideas for starting sessions

• “Listening to jazz and writing on scratch paper helps a lot.” Trey M.

• “I put on a candle… a giant mug of coffee… headphones… a good playlist… I say a quick prayer… and then try to begin… Or not! Sometimes I go to a completely different section of my book.” Anna P.

• “I’ll say a prayer to my patron… get a cup of chai and put on some music… Usually Celtic, but whatever fits the mood.” Catherine W.

• “Morning Pages… coffee… Morning Prayer and walk the dog, daydreaming my story… read the last few pages, and pick up where I left off.” Patrick D.

Stuff like jazz plus scrap paper does something cool: permission. It’s not about productivity the freedom to improvise.

This stack of small acts forms a humane on-ramp. Focus isn’t about being perfect. It’s about managing attention. Snacks, music, daydreaming—even small distractions—can help if they keep the mind from locking up. Writing doesn’t need purity. It needs flow.

Not all writers must begin with words on a blank page. They begin with a more humane onramp: lighting up the space around them with the feelings of being in their creative worlds. Candles, music, prayer, paper—these things are signals. They tell the imagination, “It’s okay to be here.”

You don’t just create your environment like picking out a set of clothes. Your environment creates you back, the same way your clothes help you get into your day and feel a certain way. Create a place for yourself that is neat, intentional, and rewards you for being there.

And fight like hell schnell to keep it, so that you can count on it.

6. Time Windows and Energy Cycles

• “Staying up until the wee hours isn’t always the best choice but I’ve done some really good work late at night.” Lily S.

• “I wake up at six before anybody is awake… pray, and then write while listening to a playlist.” Grace S.

• Writing late works, “as long as I don’t leave it till 2am to start.” Sir Ringil W.

Writing works best when people leave us alone. For some, that’s early morning. For others, perhaps like teens in high school or college, it’s late night. Some of us are at a phase of our lives where we are night owls, and that’s good… as long as it’s real, and not just Revenge Bedtime Procrastination.

But the hour often matters less than the quiet. Some of us turn to really late/early hours because we don’t feel like we can control our day. As long as you’re getting the sleep and rest you need, do you.

When we stop copying other people’s schedules and listen to our own energy, writing gets easier.

4. Habit, Consistency, and Small Promises

• “I give myself small milestones to accomplish.” Trey M.

• “Having a set word count goal… writing consistently at the same time every day… You really can train your brain to be more creative!”Grace S.

• “I’ve gotten in the habit of writing everyday… Everyday is different, and depending on how busy I am that day, my word count varies.” Catherine W.

Rigid habits can break when life crashes in, and then we feel shame for snapping. Flexible habits survive contact with real life, because they are system that works for you.

Big goals can scare the work away. Small promises invite it back. When writers aim for something they can actually finish today, they build trust with themselves. Over time, that trust matters more than waiting around in the hope of bursts of motivation.

3. Faith, Prayer, and Orientation

• “I can’t do anything without Him… Even when I try to stop, He keeps leading me back to writing.” Trey M.

• “I say a prayer, then start writing.” Anna P., Grace S., Catherine W., J P. H., Patrick D.

With a little prayer, writing can stop being about proving something and starts being about responding. About collaboration. When the work isn’t all on your shoulders, it’s easier to return after you’ve wandered off.

2. Knowing What You’re Writing Before You Write

• “Until I know what I want to say, I don’t see much point in writing things down.” G. M. (Mark) B.

• “I always have mental notes… vibe, characters, imagery… usually also… a detailed outline.” J P. H.

Some writers need to think first. Others need to write to think. Both are important. I think the trouble starts when you force yourself into the wrong method and then feel bad when it pushes back and saps your energy, instead of feeding it.

Knowing how you discover the story saves years of frustration.

And yep, a little prep acts as ballast. It keeps the draft from capsizing.

1. Momentum, Slumps, and Return Paths

• “Early on writing is a slog, but as the story progresses, it gains momentum until I sprint to the finish.” Patrick D.

• “Sometimes I need someone to tell me to write then I’m good.” Lily S.

Getting stuck doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It usually means the story’s changing or life interrupted. What matters most is having a way back.

Writers who plan their return don’t panic when the motivation calls in a vacation week.

What this teaches us overall:

There isn’t one right system because people aren’t the same. Each writer here learned something honest about themselves. Once you stop trying to be a different kind of person, your own way of working starts to grow stronger.

What would you add?

Come and check out the post in our community, or add your own thoughts in the comments below!

See the full post

A short story is a self-contained story where a character wants something badly enough to act, faces one main problem, and delivers the promised outcome within a few tightly chosen scenes.

Rule 1: Deliver the promise of the premise

You must finish what you tell the reader you’re doing.

If you say the story is about:

• finding a lost friend → you find the friend

• stealing the doohickey → you steal the doohickey

You do not pivot at the end and decide the real story was moral restraint unless that was clearly stated up front, and that’s the point of the story.

Bad version: Opens as a treasure hunt → ends with “actually it’s morally superior not to take it.”

Good version: Opens as a heist → ends with success, failure, or consequence of the heist.

Rule 2: State the promise early (3–5 paragraphs)

By the first three to five paragraphs, the reader must know:

• who the character is

• what they want

• what kind of story this is

• what sort of outcome they should expect

If page two ends and the reader doesn’t know where this is going, the story has problems.

Rule 3: A short story stands on its own

It can hint at a bigger world. It cannot depend on a bigger world.

“A whole complete self-contained story.”

You may leave a door cracked open at the end. You may not require a sequel to make the story feel finished.

Rule 4: One main want

A short story tracks one desire, not competing ones.

Good:
“I need to get this thing.”
“I need to survive this night.”
“I need to make the handoff.”

Bad: “I want the treasure, and the queen’s love, and political reform, and inner healing.”

That’s a novella.

Rule 5: One main problem (with pressure), not many problems

You can complicate one problem, but you can’t stack unrelated ones.

Transcript example (Thrill Runners):

• Main problem: escape after the heist goes wrong

• Complications: elevator shaft, drones, cruise ship jump
  Same problem. Rising pressure.

Bad version:
Heist → romance → betrayal → war → spiritual awakening

Rule 6: Cut scenes, not words

Short stories fail because they have too many scenes, not too many sentences.

“You cut scenes, not word count. You don’t have a bunch of scenes and make them shorter.”

Practical limits from the conversation:

• 1–2 scenes = ideal

• 3 scenes = pushing it

• 4 scenes = only if you’re unusually disciplined

Rule 7: Skip the “normal world”

In a short story, the inciting incident usually already happened.

You can:

• imply the before

• focus on the now

You do not need to run the full novel opening sequence.

Rule 8: Fewer characters (three is safe)

Most short stories break when the cast grows. There’s just too much to keep track of.

Transcript consensus:

• 3 characters is a safe cap

• Side characters do not need arcs

Side characcters exist to:

• poke the protagonist

• ask questions

• force action

Rule 9: Side characters externalize the main character

Side characters exist to pull thoughts into dialogue.

“Someone literally asks, ‘What are you going to do?’”

This helps to:

• get the character out of their head

• clarify the plan

• move the story forward

Flat side characters are a feature, not a bug

Rule 10: Character change must be small

Short stories cannot sustain massive conversion arcs.

Brother hates sister → car accident → loves her. That’s a 180 degree change, with nothing in the setup to allow that much of a change.

“I never felt like it worked.”

What does work: 1% change.

Rule 11: You must be able to summarize it in one sentence

If you can’t say what the story is in one sentence, it’s not a short story yet.

“It’s a heist that goes wrong.”

Bad summary: “Well there’s a city, and factions, and relationships…”

Rule 12: Rules exist so you know when to apply them. Or not.

Exceptions exist. They are earned after mastery. First practice the formula and color by the numbers, so that you know how. Then later on you can swap or change things.

What would you add?

Comment below!

Something awesome has happened in the community this past month. Several members marched up to the front desk, dropped heavily annotated ideas on the counter, and declared, “These should be anthologies.” And now… they are. Multiple open calls. All live. All hungry for short stories.

You keep your copyrights, of course. You get revenue share. And the submission rules and guidelines are published here where everyone can find them.

This new year, we’re all about publishing more stories, collecting more worlds, and encourage more writers to fling themselves into creativity with gusto, dignity, and only a moderate amount of panic.

Have a sneak peek of how our open calls work:

You’ll see the story outline, a feed where you can share your pitches, and a place to see all the members involved in the anthology. You can see what others are brainstorming, plus see developmental feedback from the mentor, and share your own suggestions to create better stories.

How to get started

Not yet a member? Start your free 30-day trial and enjoy the sort of support system wizards would avada kedavra for:

• Pitch your idea before you write it, so you know you’re not wandering into a swamp when you meant to find a meadow.
• Get developmental feedback from mentors and peers who have opinions and aren’t shy about them.
• Post your drafts in the Stories forum and ask for supportive feedback.
• And (for the wonderfully ambitious) a professional editor is around to work with you one-on-one, provided you don’t bite. They don’t either.

What’s waiting below

Each anthology pitch is listed underneath, complete with themes, deadlines, and what the editor hopes you won’t do. Pick the ones that excite you. Submit to one. Submit to all. The universe is large and so are your possibilities.

Grim Winter

Grim Winter is a book of stories that end where the snow begins—those pale, uncharted places where the sun rarely rises, and old things murmur your name in the dark. Here, in the ruins of frozen kingdoms, men and monsters shuffle through the same shadows. The nights are long enough to grow legends, and the wind carries the howls of prayers that never come home. The heroes are tired. The gods are changing guard. The firelight flickers over faces that know too much about hunger, and the gradual, glacial pressure of a hope harder than the mountains.

Inspired by

See this Open Call

The Curious & Fantastical Adventures of Young Santa Claus

Long before anyone called him Santa, he was just Nik: skinny as a birch twig, curious as a fox, and forever blundering into trouble he absolutely did not mean to cause. Part tall tale, part fairy folklore, part gleeful northern nonsense, The Curious & Fantastical Adventures of Young Santa Claus steps into a world where nothing behaves, everything has a story, and Santa’s has only just begun.

See this open call

Fell Semester

Fell Semester is a book of stories that bring school—and magic—into session. Wands and woodshop, bestiaries and biology, element-bending dances, economics, and English. And, of course, the odd monster or villainous alumnus. Welcome to class. Now prove you can survive.

See this open call

The Emporium at the Edge of the Universe

A colossal department store floats at the edge of known space—an impossible retail labyrinth where every aisle collects the most meaningful, storied, dangerous, or downright unusual objects in the universe. This is The Emporium, the final stop for items that should be preserved, protected, or passed on.

See this open call

Arclight Hollows

In the world of LegendHaven, Arclight Hollows was the site of our recent convention. This city is older than the sands, from before the drakes and wyrms. The toothless wall-carvers grunt it is older than the gods. Who knows. The music comes from everywhere. Kite-drawn rafts with sails like giant birds careen in through mirages. Sandsleds and side-runners, nimble glassfin racers, even great trimarans with their spirit totems and leashed lantern crabs.

See open call

Which of these books would you like to read more? Comment below!

This is just the beginning, and we plan to add more!

And if you’ve been waiting for an invite to join our community, this is it. We can’t wait to see your stories!

Join the writing challenge

An invite from your host:

Every word you write is a drop in your own deep well—one that, over time, becomes a rushing fountain of creativity and wisdom. You don’t have to wait for inspiration to strike; you just have to show up at the page. That’s what this month is about—showing up together.

“The words of a man’s mouth are deep water; the fountain of wisdom is a gushing stream.” — Proverbs 18:4

Whether you’re outlining your first novel, finishing a novella, or tinkering with a collection of short stories, you’re not walking this road alone.

We’re carving out a dedicated space just for this challenge, where you can write alongside others who share the same goal: to make writing a daily habit.

You’ll get daily check-ins from your host to keep you grounded, motivated, and encouraged. Want to share your progress, your drafts, or even your struggles? You can. Want to fly solo and keep it all to yourself? That’s perfectly fine too. This challenge meets you wherever you are in your writing journey.

The goal is simple: write 1,000 words a day. Some ask for 1,600; we’re asking for 1k. That’s it. No gimmicks. No impossible standards. Matter of fact, we just want you to write and let us know. Build for yourself a daily rhythm of consistency, discipline, and creative flow.

Every time you log in, you’ll mark your progress and watch your streak grow on a built-in tracker. Stay consistent for the full month, and you’ll earn digital badges every seven days. They are little, public emblems of persistence that remind you that you showed up even when it was hard.

Each day adds another square to the mosaic of your dedication. Each page, paragraph, and sentence moves you closer to finishing what you started. Remember, your words aren’t meant to stay buried: they’re meant to pour out like living water, refreshing not just others but also the writer within you.

So let’s begin. Take your place in the stream. Pick up your pen—or open that blank document—and let’s make this month one that forges your writing habit for good.

Because when you build consistency, creativity flows.

Yes! I want to join

Trey McIntosh

Trey “T.D.” McIntosh is a Fantasy and Sci-Fi novelist, manga author, and freelance writer with over 15 years of experience in the entertainment industry. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University, where he honed his craft and developed his distinctive voice for mythic, character-driven fiction.

We kept hearing from people who said, “I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I don’t even know where to start.”

And we thought, all right, let’s sit down and actually talk through what we’ve learned after ten years of doing this—writing, editing, publishing, marketing. Because it’s not magic. There’s no secret handshake. It’s just a few very human steps that make the whole thing feel possible.

And that’s what this masterclass is: five simple parts, each one answering a question that keeps writers stuck… so that you can get unstuck.

This full, 60-minute masterclass is only $49.50, and includes an epub you can download!

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Here’s what this masterclass covers:

1. MINDSET: Why Starting Feels Impossible

Most people never write their dream novel because they think it’s like running a marathon—something for professionals, not for normal mortals. But that’s not true. We talk about how to lower the threshold, how to find that first mile you can actually run, and how to stop waiting for perfect conditions. Once you get this, everything else starts to move.

2. IDEATION: How to Stay Inspired

Ideas don’t arrive like lightning bolts. They show up when you’re curious enough to ask, “What if?” We show you what to do when your brain sparks an idea, how to store it, and how to build a writing rhythm that keeps new ideas showing up. It’s less about being inspired and more about paying attention.

3. EDITING: How To Survive Your Own Drafts

Everyone gets lost in the middle. That’s normal. We share how to make editing less painful, how to treat it like gold panning instead of surgery. This part is about learning to trust yourself again.

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We used to think you had to get discovered. That’s over. Now, the tools are in your hands, literally free tools that make it possible to share your stories professionally, even if you’re just starting out.

5. MARKETING: How To Share Without Feeling Salesy

This is the part everyone dreads, and it turns out it can be easier than you thought, once you see it differently. Marketing isn’t about shouting, it’s about friendship. It’s storytelling. It’s about sharing enthusiasm.

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Father Roderick and I started this episode talking about mailing lists. Most of us think of them as the boring-but-necessary backbone of every author’s empire.

After that, we get into a wide-ranging therapy session for distracted creatives — complete with ADD confessions, superhero thoughts, and a tree with a mustache.

The truth about email lists

Most writers hate the idea of a “newsletter.” It feels corporate, clingy, or just plain dull. Father Roderick admits he used to think the same way, until he discovered something that actually works: giving something away.

Don’t just yeet a random PDF, but create a genuine gift that matches your readers’ hearts.

He built a following by writing a free Lenten booklet inspired by The Lord of the Rings, “Lent for Little Folk.” It was aimed squarely at fantasy lovers, the same kind of readers who’d one day enjoy his fiction. Within weeks, over a thousand people signed up.

Me personally? I’ve been terrible at it. I never had a plan for what to send. Roderick’s insight flipped on a light switch in my head, and encouraged me to create one for LegendFiction. That’s how ‘Shards of Wonder’ was born.

The rule of entertainment

One thing that can inspire people to keep opening your emails is more than frequency, but fun. If you’re boring or salesy, no one cares whether you post daily or yearly. Father Roderick shared the lesson that changed his whole approach: “Be an entertainer.”

His favorite example is something like “The time I hit a pink elephant with my car.” No one can resist clicking that. Inside was a funny, relatable story that ended with a single invitation: “P.S. If you liked this story, here’s a link to my recipe for pink elephant hamburgers.”

That’s Father’s formula: story first, sell second. Be human, not pushy.

Now his weekly emails follow that rhythm: one story, a few friendly “by the way” links, and low pressure. He writes to entertain and connect, not to extract.

The ADD author brain

From there, our conversation got into how writers like us actually function. ADD is both the curse and secret weapon of the creative mind.

Fr Roderick compared it to the IKEA ball pit: bright, noisy, and impossible to navigate. I said it’s more like a hunter’s brain — hyperalert, tracking every sound and motion. We’re wired to notice everything at once, not to sit quietly in cubicles.

That means our energy comes in bursts. When it’s there, it’s volcanic. When it’s gone, we collapse. The trick isn’t to fight it, but to work with the rhythm.

For Roderick, that means walks in the woods after long mornings of hyperfocus, resetting his brain before burnout hits. For me, it’s naps, protein-heavy meals, and giving myself permission to stop when the energy dies.

Fr Roderick calls them “Potato days,” those moments when your brain turns to mash and refuses to cooperate. Instead of self-loathing, he’s learned to say, “It’s okay to be a potato.”

We agreed that creativity isn’t about forcing consistency, but about managing cycles. When the focus comes, ride the wave. When it vanishes, rest.

Superman and the lost art of joy

That led us straight into Superman. Specifically, James Gunn’s new film and why it hit such a nerve.

I grew up on the Silver Age comics when superheroes smiled more than self-doubted everything. They fought crime with a worldview of optimism, not trauma.

Modern versions got darker and angrier, trying to justify spandex with brooding gravitas. Gunn’s Superman feels different: more humble, more joyful, and more human. “He’s basically a hobbit in a cape,” I think.

Father Roderick loved that this Superman was vulnerable. He doubts himself. He even saves a squirrel. He admits he doesn’t always know what’s right. And yet he keeps choosing goodness for its own sake.

That’s the moral core of every good story — the courage to do good even when the world looks grim. And it mirrored our whole conversation about creativity: being kind, curious, and persistent even when you feel powerless.

Sometimes heroism is just saving the squirrel right in front of you, because that’s a good thing to do today.

Inktober and the mustachioed tree

Father Roderick discovered Inktober, a month-long drawing challenge where each day has a random prompt. The first word on his list was mustache.

He drew an ent (a walking tree) with a leafy mustache. From that doodle, a story bloomed: a proud tree named Tree-Stash who loves his leafy facial hair. When a lost puppy curls up at his roots during a storm, Tree-Stash sacrifices his precious mustache to keep the puppy warm.

A perfect illustration of how story prompts work. You start with one absurd seed and let imagination take over.

Practicing the “what if”

Staying curious is the real magic trick of storytelling. Every great writer plays a version of What if?

What if the candle could talk to the stained-glass saint? What if the potted plant snuck across the room when you weren’t looking? What if Superman just saved squirrels?

I call this the “whatificator.” It’s like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. Write a tiny story every day, dictate an idea on a walk, sketch an image. The point is about motion. It’s staying alive to wonder.

So that’s our challenge to you. Whether you’re sketching, writing, or just staring at the blinking cursor: start small, share often, and follow the energy wherever it goes.

Most of us treat sleep like a necessary blackout .Thirty percent of life, wasted. But what if that “wasted time” is the doorway into the a vital work of being human?

Dreaming isn’t random static. It’s the hidden half of storytelling, the workshop of the soul, where angels, memories, and archetypes gather to teach, heal, and warn.

Two years of deliberate dream practice turned my nights from a waste into learning, and it convinced me: if you write, if you create, if you live with meaning, you cannot afford to ignore the Perilous Realm.

At the end, I share the tips and prayers that I practice every night.

I stumbled into the topic of dreaming, perhaps by accident.

Within a week, it become so huge for me, that I had to deliberately shut up for two years, and practice it myself. Sure, not always perfectly. Doing it badly is better than doing nothing. After hundreds of dream notes, I can see a change in myself, and my soul.

And I think this is something every human should know.

And if you’re a storyteller, I think it is essential, right up there with a good brand of coffee and building a daily writing habit.

You see, I used to (almost) hate sleep.

I regretted those ‘slices of death’ that felt like a loss of time and energy. I regretted ‘wasting’ 30% of my life, being catatonic in a bed.

Life is already so short, and I never had enough time in a day. I would stay up late with ‘revenge bedtime procrastination,’ spending hours watching movies, reading, or scrolling social media, because it was the only time I felt completely free.

It probably didn’t help that I was inhaling black mold spores.

I would wake in the night with curdling death-frights, or be unable to fall asleep because I was convinced I would not wake, and I was minutes away from meeting God.

I know now that it was my body doing the best it could. It was trying to keep me alive. Bad sleep was affecting my day constantly. And the migraines would show up like clockwork every afternoon.

I thought the answer was to get to sleep earlier. And as it happened, it sort of was. Some of the rest of the answer was to get control of my waking self, to build a daily habit that was healthy for me. To build my day around the block of time when I have my best energy.

And then I stumbled into the world of dream study. Specifically, a talk on ‘dream yoga.’ Naturally, I thought this had to do with somehow achieving lucid dreaming, and then practicing meditation and weird stretches in my dreamscapes.

So I researched, and what I found completely changed my outlook. Completely revived my sense of hope and joy.

Actually, I felt cheated too. Almost enraged.

I learned that very simply: dreams are a vital, purposeful, and beautiful part of what it means to be human. You don’t dream when you sleep. I think you sleep so that you can dream.

Why does this matter? Because dreaming is not psychic static.

Dreaming is a form of story-building, story-learning, play, deep messages, spiritual organizing, and many more. Every ancient culture that I study has had deep reverence for the reality of dreaming.

But, if you’re like me and most people, you’ve been raised with an idea that You end at the edge of your skin. Therefore, dreaming can only be your own private hallucinations, because your brain is bored.

That science is way outdated. Things like quantum entanglement, field theory, the collective unconscious, and more, continue to show that consciousness is somethign else. It doesn’t emerge from matter. Consciousness is the field inside which physics and matter exist. It forms matter.

Christians won’t be that surprised, since we already accept that the heavens and all its beings, all humans, and every aspect of Creation, exists within God, moves in God, breathes and takes its being from God. And our consciousness, a power of our soul, is made of that same eternal stuff.

And it used to be normal for cultures to practice a healthy view of dreaming and sleep. I struggle to understand how fast we lost it in the first world west, with our obsession for scrabbling and scrounging stuff in the sunlight.

Here’s my take: dreaming is the point of going to sleep—for your soul.

Sure, you don’t remember every dream, and you can’t always control it. Some mystics I’ve studied say that you dream every night, but you don’t have the ability to remember. You do speak with the angels and the Holy Spirit constantly, but perhaps it’s like a baby. Faces blurring into colorful focus, but you forget as soon as you fade back and cross into the shape of your skin.

Either way, an attentive dream ‘life’ means you can be more balanced and centered during your day. Dreaming, done intentionally, or when you are open to it intentionally, is a way you can step away from your daylight idea of your self, and meet with other parts of you that you’ve been ignoring.

So I started to change my sleep habits.

Now, most nights, I look forward to going to sleep.

And for two years now, my dreams are more consistent, more vivid. The nightmares of massive dragons, dinosaurs, and trolls have mostly faded, now that I am actively paying attention. It’s almost like they were trying to get me to take them seriously.

Now, I meet more figures who I love, people who inspire me, and see things that challenge what I think. Things I have to think and weigh in my daylight life.

Your attention is the point. Literally.

Every night, your daylight-self lies down. You use your waking consciousness constantly throughout the day. It is like a highly-focused laser pointer. Your mind and your body-senses work hard to filter out all the information you think you don’t need.

But when your body goes sleep, your consciousness doesn’t need sleep. Not the same way. It doesn’t need body-rest.

Your consciousness replenishes itself by paying attention to different things. Sometimes by paying attention to no-thing. Sleep is a little bit like a nightly Dark Retreat, where people enter sensory deprivation tanks for 7 to 49 days.

When you sleep, your conscious awareness returns to the realms of your soul.

The realm where stories come from.

In my chat with David Bentley Hart on dreaming, he pointed out that ancient cultures, East and West, treated dreams as journeys: the spirit departing at night into real places, sometimes revealing, sometimes deceiving. Hart insists imagination and dreams belong to the same continuum as vision and revelation.

He shares some prophetic dreams of his youth—some foretelling events with uncanny precision—and recalls his father’s equally vivid foresight. Dreams can be communications and messages.

Dreams are not only psychic static.

Yes, some of them are.

Some of them are the fears and pressures of the waking mind that we ignore during the day, and they come rushing in to be processed and loved-through, once we are relaxed.

But we’re dealing with the realm of the soul. This Perilous Realm is a universe of Woods Between Worlds, worlds within worlds without end. The Imagination is the amphibious overlap between these sides of you.

Dreams can be even created or curated for you, where angels and spirit guides borrow the “mental furniture” of pictures and ideas in your mind so they can communicate with you.

Your guardian angel is regularly doing this. Beloved family members who are passed can too. Your patrons and the saints (who have adopted you) are also engaged in your life.

This is why messages and ideas remain consistent across cultures, even thousands of years, but the giftwrapping changes. The textures, shapes, and names of things change.

Some people train themselves to pay closer attention to synchronicities that happen during your waking day. Like Cardinal Newman said, paraphysical beings/angelic persons can’t communicate the same way we do, so they use everything else.

Think about Cooper in Interstellar travelling through time to communicate with his daughter.

Training your imagination

I’ve got a mental image that when we sleep, we enter something like a bubble, a holding zone, a spiritual kindergarten, probably governed by our spirit guardian (guardian angel). Our imagination is a door to our own Narnia, and sometimes our angel can whisk us into a bigger, wilder world, or a more piercing, poignant scene to teach us something.

Imaginal worlds nested within imaginal worlds, each person a door. These cannot be forced open. You must become spiritually weighty to cross these thresholds, and learn to cultivate the skills like the saints to open them.

That is why Númenor is out of reach, and Valinor withdrawn from the reach of men. We must be invited. That’s why sometimes we can receive Great Dreams, serious messages with great meaning for you.

Sometimes a dream can spark a whole novel series. Sometimes one dream can completely change your life. And many of us wake up in the morning, and completely forget it all within a second. We’re only left with the ringing echo of a feeling we can’t trace.

But with a little practice, and a little sleep hygiene, you can start to heal yourself from the awful, horrible ideas we have about being human.

When I learned this view of dreaming, I felt a massive surge of joy.

But make no mistake. This is not a safe place. It is a glorious place, and the world we know and love is the classroom that prepares us for it. It needs mature adults with discerning minds to take up the tale, and take up the gauntlet.

Who Lives in the Perilous Realm?

Fairies, angels, monsters, daimons... yes, evil things too, maybe. The beings remain, busy and active, with jobs and pacts and work to do. The furniture changes, the costumes they borrow change.

“Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons; it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.” - Tolkein

In other words: Faërie is the wide and perilous totality of imaginal life. Perilous Realm is a better name, to my mind.

Martin Shaw says that stories are the language of the soul, like a pulse of energy that has a beginning and a reason and an end, and you can organize your life around it. A story is an idea that we can feel and see because a person’s life gave shape to it.

Sometimes we invent stories, the same way sometimes we create our own dreams. But stories ca arrive from outside, like elves making landfall from a crashed galleon, a Green Knight rides into the hall of your soul and demands your attention.

Not all stories are mere fantasies. They are sometimes gifts—sometimes burdens—from Faërie itself. I think we can tell the difference between little stories and Great Stories by how much we are prepared to sacrifice for them, and how much we can’t let them go.

My own tips for building a healthy dreaming life

Naturally, the spiritual parasites (demons, psychic programs, addictive patterns) in our world try to slip in fist. They usually offer power without price, intimacy without responsibility, learning without humility. They keep us isolated and chained among the haunts of dead stories inside our own souls.

We can safeguard ourselves as we field-test the edge of this Realm:

• Practice constant openness and humility to the truth

• Seek the increase of love, courage, and sobriety over fireworks

• Ask your guardian angel to light, guard, rule, and guide your learning

I believe it’s vital to not practice fear.

The more fear is the foundation of your soul, everything will become fearful. You will feel you are a drowning rat, clinking to driftwood in a vast, thundering, unfeeling ocean, under a blank, basalt sky. A slip of the grip, and you are lost to dark drowning.

This is a horrible core idea. But deep down, a lot of us suffer with it, and feel like we can only try to make the best of things.

Instead, the Christian message is to let you know you’re born into a garden, full of good and incredible things, and also some bad and inedible things. But you’re wanted, and everything wants you, and this is only the first step in an infinity of adventures, some cosy, some dramatic, some at the gates of hell, some on the shores of Heaven.

When you pay closer attention to your Dreaming, your imagination will become healthier.

• You will start to notice more.

• Beautiful things will leap out at you more.

• People will come to your mind that you need to attend to.

• Slight twitches in the universe around you can be warnings to pay more attention.

• You will become healthier. Calmer. Probably more centered.

It’s like a leader ignoring their power players forever, and wondering why things are happening in their team, and constantly berating the happy, clueless jock who wants to play in the sunshine and eat good things. When that leader starts paying attention to everyone on the team, treating them all with respect, and everyone starts pulling in the same direction? That’s called wholeness.

And that will make you a better storyteller.

What about lucid dreaming?

There’s a lot of advice online on lucid dreaming, which is not something I’m talking about. Lucid dreaming is the experience of bringing your full, waking consciousness into the Dreaming, like Inception.

I’ve experienced it only briefly, but I admit, so far, I don’t know enough to chase it down. I am concerned that you can get ‘stuck’ in a soul rut, because you will only seek out the things you want and like in your dreams, when you’re in control. Which might mean you don’t learn anything, or can get hijacked.

Until I know more, I prefer to trust that my spirit guide will coach me as I need it. So here’s what I do:

1. Build a Healthy Sleep Routine: Find out when the best time is for you to sleep, build that habit, and guard it as best you can.

2. Look forward to Dreaming: Sleep is not the residue of the day, a waste of time and collapse into an exhausted numbness. Sleep is the essential returning of your body to the healing powers of the world. It is an essential time for you to enter into your own mind and soul, to play, and see what you have to learn.

3. Set your Intention to Dream: Before sleep, grab your journal, or open a note app in your phone, and date it for tonight. This is how you prime yourself to pay attention.

4. Journal your Dreams: As soon as you wake up, journal everything you can remember. Or voice note it. If you can do it during the night, try. By morning, early dreams fade fast. I usually write down my dreams, especially the vivid ones, first thing in the morning. Add a label and date the note.

5. Ask your Guardian Angel: The prayer to the Guardian Angel is constant to me throughout my day, and what I murmur as I drift off: Angel of God, my dear guardian, whom God’s love gives to me, be at my side throughout this night, to light, guard, rule, and guide me. This spirit guide is your firewall from the rest of the Perilous Realm, your best friend, and constant teacher. For this reason, I choose to let my guide show me, or teach me, what is best for me.

Dominic de Souza

Surrender Prayer of the Night to my Guardian Angel

Now I lay my body down to sleep…

Read more

a year ago · Dominic de Souza

Morning dream journaling

When you dream journal in the mornings, I follow the advice (that I can remember) from Carl Jung:

• Write in the present tense, as if it is happening right now

• Try to remember the direction in which things happen, such as turning right or left

• Try to capture what you felt as you experienced the dream, and perhaps what you feel as you revisit it

• Try to write down any meaning that seems obvious. Don’t create one, don’t force it.

I’ve seen some dream practitioners recommend Dream Thesauruses, to look up the association of specific things in dreams, such as water, or flying, or crabbed feet. These might can be helpful to know. I mostly avoid them, unless a symbol is incredibly strong, and I don’t understand it.

But it is more helpful for you to understand what these things mean for you, in particular. You will have your own associations and your feelings of a symbol, or a person, or a thing. These are not right or wrong. They are presented to you, or your subconscious presents them to you, for sorting. I find that after countless dream stories, it’s like I’m tuned in, like learning a language. I can quickly gather what I’m supposed to learn from a dream.

Obviously, most of them mean nothing, or they’re the overlap of things that happened during the day, or troubles on my mind. But it’s like showing up for a dear friend, and practicing the patience to listen and learn what they have to say.

Invariably, being kind to yourself is the only psychically and spiritually healthy thing to do. Judgement and a harsh outlook never works.

Mindset & Theory

Don’t grasp and demand what you want. It’s not how prayer works. It’s not how growth works. The space of soul-related things is handled with reverence and attention.

Your angel has been around for a million years, and knows what’s best. You can’t bully them into anything. They may not want to reveal anything for months, to test your resolve, to help you build resilience. Sometimes, they even speak in whole sentences and complete ideas, as if a friend leaned over and muttered something, even during the day.

That’s happened to me.

Journaling is vital for several reasons: it helps with noticing patterns of ideas or messages. Recurring patterns may be your own subconscious, which is important to pay attention to. It can also be your guide, trying to get you to pay attention to something important.

Journaling is training you to remember. Our imagination can be weak and anemic from lack of use, especially today, with the amount of media use we absorb. When it pulses with something serious, we should pay attention. Like Pavlov’s dogs, if we train ourselves to ignore and forget things, we will not even know when something important arrives. But we can train ourselves to remember, like a muscle. What you pay attention to gets stronger and clearer.

As authors, dream journaling is a way to practice psychic wholeness, where you are seeking to pay attention to your whole self, and not just your physical body. I’m 99% Psyche in the Greek means your soul, which is why psychology is the study of soul.

Your physical body, with all its energy and genetics, is a root, like a seed, planted in the fertile soil of physical creation. Your consciousness, which is in your soul, your mind, your spirit, and runs throughout your atoms, is pushing up shoots and little branches, and growing and greening in the Perilous Realm.

At some point, the seed husk will crack and die, and you will grab the hand of your guide, and your adventures will continue further up and further in. Like C. S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity: “We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”

Dreaming into the Perilous Realm

So imagine what this means about all the stories, myths, apparitions, insights, and life-changing moments from the rich literature of the human family. We chronicle a million things that don’t show up to our daylight eyes.

That’s because there is more to this world than the stuff to right and left. There is depth, and your imagination is the Bifrost that touches it. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that modern culture is deliberately constructed to keep us sleep deprived, so that we can’t dream. And it is intentionally built to help you gaslight yourself, and convince you that everything means nothing.

Maybe I do know better.

Arthur and Avalon are of this realm. That’s why we can’t stop talking about them. Dragons are probably the greatest landmarks of this realm, because it is here we meet them: sometimes to slay, sometimes to befriend, sometimes to endure. This realm is the underlying reality to the world.

You are a threshold set in a real door, in a real house, among real people who need you to return with something worth bringing. Walk the marches with reverence. Keep your feet. Open your attention.

Test everything. Be patient with the weeds, be careful of uprooting everything too fast in seeking the good, but hold hard and fast to the good.

Stories are how our souls survive.

Stories are perilous things, becuase that’s where they originate. And so do you.

For most of us humans… perfection is a choke hold. It’s an idea, like a looming diorite statue, dim in the gloom of a museum exhibit. Play is a street market that throws you a broken orange and dares you to juggle with spurts of zest and juice in sunlight.

Every lively project I’ve helped build, such as LegendHaven booths, scrappy author anthologies, late night “ship a scene” sprints… it all starts with play.

Not because play is childish, but because it lowers the cost of being wrong.

You can move. You can tinker.

When I say play, I don’t mean “procrastinate with a sweet soundtrack.” I mean diving off the high board with a fat dinosaur swim floatie ring. Unseriousness with teeth. Apparate like a house goblin into a Swiss vault with a Polaroid camera, and leave the picture behind.

Try this: open the document and ask your protagonist to lie to you. First sentence that arrives, keep it.

Doesn’t fit the outline? Try it for a minute. We’re not married to the outline; we’re speed-dating possibilities.

Try to sketch a crooked district, and include a street that means something to a dream you had, and only you know about. Write down the lie the city is proud of, because someone was embarrassed to admit they made a mistake. The sillier, the better.

Cue Daniel Craig…

Perfection wants you to audition for your own work. Play hands you the keys and says, Drive until it sputters in the middle of Arkansas. Then pop the hood, do a rain dance on its steaming bones, and then portal to the party anyway.

The paradox: when you lead with play, you finish more.

Not because the muses descend with a catered lunch and tuxes for good little girls and boys, but because play creates artifacts in your soul: little survivals of movement.

Try this: something with a friend you trust.

DM the one who actually replies, and tell them, “I’m trying something. Sending you a raw scene in an hour. Be nice.” Then write it like a postcard from a war zone, no edits, slightly ridiculous, more holes than a Swiss cheese salad.

Have fun. Be a goblin. Keep to the timer. Hit send.

You were never going to do anything with that scene anyway. Total throw away. And your friend will snort and go “Hey, you ok over there?” Or “Should we call for an intervention? That new movie came out, and I have Pumpkin Spice Popcorn…”

But here’s what’s not a throwaway: the fun you had.

You finished a little something.

You did it.

So make a pact with yourself, the future editor in a pinstriped suit and a calzone saying “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse…” They can have the manuscript tomorrow.

Today belongs to the goblin in the workshop, the one who laughs and glues sparkly antlers to paragraphs.

Play is not the opposite of professionalism. It’s the ignition.

Finish happens because you were moving.

Fun first. Then finish. The museum can wait; the market is open.

What’s next?

You should check out this awesome convention coming soon, where people are full of imagination and funny stories. And if they’re not, then you can return your dragon, no questions asked.

There is a country that runs alongside our own, touching it, like a dimension that is everywhere, but we can’t access it.

At least, not in the daylight way of things.

• Tolkien named it Faërie, the Perilous Realm.

• Henry Corbin called it the imaginal ream: the mundus imaginalis, a stratum of reality “neither purely spiritual nor purely material,” encountered through a disciplined imagination.

• C.S. Lewis gave us an amazing image, a wood between the worlds, where still pools serve as doors.

The names differ. The idea is the same. And for storytellers, it matters… because you are probably tapping into this world with your imagination.

Plus, when we sleep, we brink its borders, and sometimes break through. But only one who is summoned can find the way there and back again.

This Realm is more important than we realize as authors, so let’s look at three amazing quotes from Tolkien, Henri Corbin, and Cardinal Henry Newman.

And then we’ll look at why this matters for you every day of your life, as a storyteller.

Because when you dream in your sleep, you walk up the edges of this world, press on the gateway. Sometimes you get through, and sometimes it breaks out through you.

Dreaming is not an accident. In fact, it might be the reason why you sleep at all. And your Guardian Angel/Spirit Guide is your untapped resource.

3: Tolkien: The Air of Faërie

Let’s start with the master;

“Most good ‘fairy-stories’ are about the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches… The definition of a fairy-story … does not, then, depend on any definition … but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country. I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done… Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; … it is indescribable, though not imperceptible.”

Faërie is not a genre; it is a geography of spirit. Martin Shaw calls it Wolferland. Its climate is enchantment; its weather swings from joy as sharp as swords to sorrows clean as knives. It is not safe, nor tame.

And that is why some stories matter, the really deep ones: they can be rooted in the very air of this country, and branch out to flower in our imagination.

2: Corbin: The Mundus Imaginalis

Henry Corbin, drawing from Sufi mysticism, described a realm between pure spirit and our senses, where mystics can travel regularly:

There is our physical sensory world, which includes both our earthly world (governed by human souls) and the sidereal universe [of the stars]… this is the sensory world. There is the suprasensory world of the Soul or Angel-Souls… in which there are the mystical cities… [Then] there is the universe of pure archangelic Intelligences.

The imaginal is a spectrum of unseen continents and realms that connects Deep Heaven all the way ‘down’ to our human realm. The Imaginal is the stomping grounds for angels of many hierarchies, daimonic presences, where archetypes and instincts are great universities of being.

Tolkien and Corbin converge here. Tolkien’s “air that blows in that country” is Corbin’s “order of reality.” Both reject the reduction of imagination to idle daydreaming. Both insist it can be a truth-bearing faculty.

1: Cardinal Henry Newman: On the Two Worlds

“THERE are two worlds, "the visible, and the invisible," as the Creed speaks,—the world we see, and the world we do not see; and the world we do not see as really exists as the world we do see. It really exists, though we see it not.

“The world we see we know to exist, because we see it. We have but to lift up our eyes and look around us, and we have proof of it: our eyes tell us. We see the sun, moon and stars, earth and sky, hills and valleys, woods and plains, seas and rivers.

And again, we see men, and the works of men. We see cities, and stately buildings, and their inhabitants… All that meets our eyes forms one world. It is an immense world; it reaches to the stars. Thousands on thousands of years might we speed up the sky, and though we were swifter than the light itself, we should not reach them all.

“And yet in spite of this universal world which we see, there is another world, quite as far-spreading, quite as close to us, and more wonderful; another world all around us... All around us are numberless objects, coming and going, watching, working or waiting, which we see not…

“When [the dead] depart hence, do not cease to exist, but they retire from this visible scene of things; or, in other words, they cease to act towards us and before us through our senses. They live as they lived before; but that outward frame, through which they were able to hold communion with other men, is in some way, we know not how, separated from them, and dries away and shrivels up as leaves may drop off a tree.

“They remain, but without the usual means of approach towards us, and correspondence with us. As when a man loses his voice or hand, he still exists as before, but cannot any longer talk or write, or otherwise hold intercourse with us; so when he loses not voice and hand only, but his whole frame, or is said to die, there is nothing to show that he is gone, but we have lost our means of apprehending him.” Cardinal Newman, Sermon 13

Many of the gods of mythologies emerge from this country, especially the good ones.

The Perilous Realm is their common address, and some of them make their homes in the literal mountains or seas where a culture meets them.

Sometimes, what differs are the masks and languages they wear when they cross into our side, borrowing the mental furniture of an age to be legible to its people. It’s important to know that the mystics of each culture clearly claimed to travel there and back, to meet figures who lived for thousands of years. Greeks saw Olympus, the Norse to Asgard, and so on.

The multiplicity of myth is not proof of falsehood. It’s more likely that human cultures strained to interpret similar encounters with different words.

No, I don’t think all mythologies are all exactly, equally real, but something deep inside them is. Their followers were pretty adamant they’d been there, in meditation, in dreaming, in visions, in mystic contact.

These are different entrypoints into the same massive, imaginal reality that surrounds us on all sides. We’re immersed in it.

I suspect that NDEs (near death experiences) brink that same realm, and some hallucinogens do the same. This means it is more than a nice literary idea, more than a mythical Broceliande from the Arthuriad, that only exists in fiction. It is tangible and real to the imagination, and it matters.

Some level of reality, a real location that we can access in the Dreaming, is probable.

But it gets wyrder, and more interesting.

Because if the imagination is the part of us that bridges these realms, like an ‘amphibious’ organ reaching through fog to find a new land, then it can go both ways.

Things can come back and share intuitions, imaginations, and inspirations into our mind. And because we don’t pay attention, we assume it’s our own ideas. In fact, as storytellers will tell you… it happens quite a lot.

Yes, it’s true, some of the stuff we imagine we invent. But not all. Some of it we receive. I think the Really Big Ideas are the ones that are gifted to us. And you can tell when it’s a really big idea when your heart is on fire, the same way you love a story or a character or a person, in a way you can’t describe.

I suspect (really strongly) that the Dreaming is the borderland of the Perilous Realm.

And that’s where you in your Imagination goes there, almost every night.

Here’s a section from one of Tolkien’s stories, that I mull on in the Storyteller mini-course:

Smith of Wooton Major

It’s a story of a nobody who lives nowhere (as far as I can tell).

And yet, where he lives is the frontier to elvish realms. As a child, he is gifted a little glowing star, fixed to his forehead like a third eye. An eye full of light.

It is a passport to a life of discovery and adventure, because he can cross over into the Perilous Realm of faery, wander for days without answers, stumble into discoveries and sights most humans have never seen.

By the end, Smith has trekked perhaps hundreds of miles, met the Fae queen, and even learned to dance. He returns, trumping home across the British fields like a disciple on the way back from Emmaus, heart afire.

He realizes he is a different person, but can’t say why. What he has seen and touched has deepened and broadened his soul.

His soul is formed by more than the systems of this little street, but the regions of elvish realms now live in him.

The Perilous Realm: So what?

I believe it’s vital for storytellers to understand the depth and dignity of their craft. If we imagine ourselves as astronauts, wearing helmets to be able to breathe in space, imagine what happens when someone is able to take off the helmet, and discover what Lewis describes in ‘Out of the Silent Planet:’

He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam…. He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes—and here, with how many more!

Ideas crash into the gravel, wind-blown beaches of our mind, like elves making landfall, pulling themselves hand over hand out of the grim, grey salty surf, exhausted, needing care. This beach is the edge of us, where we end, and where everything else begins. We gather up these elves in our arms, some small and huddle them in our hut with a little soup and soft bread. Coax them back to life.

Maybe they stay, maybe they move on.

You yourself are a wardrobe into a Narnia, and from the safety of your desk and your home, perhaps surrounded by blessed items and an ordered life, you can venture into the corridors and hints of laughter that come from behind those ancient doors.

The alternative: as long as we see imagination as mere psychic fluff, where the world is a blank slate and we are forced to create our own meaning out of nothing, and all of us must grin and make the best of a bad deal between two infinite blacknesses (granted, with croissants and Netflix and KPoP Demon Hunters), you will stay stuck and starved in your soul.

You’re welcome to disagree.

But if this ‘wager’ is true that we are immersed in a realm, and half of what it means to be human lives in constant contact with that realm, then training our attention on it can only be a good thing.

Some will lose their heads and their common sense, trying to shove their sanity through keyholes and cram mushrooms down their craw to see what lies beyond. That’s probably not smart.

If there’s anything we know from those who travel there and back again, we must train in reverence, love, and patience.

Life is a classroom, and an infinity of adventures (the kinds that work best for you), lie ahead.

Running a contest doesn’t have to feel like a corporate giveaway. Think of it as tossing out a game to your readers: something playful that gets them creating alongside you.

That’s the valuable part: inviting you fans to create with you helps them to see each other! It shows them that there are other readers and world-followers like them.

Here’s how to pull it off without making it too complicated.

Step 1: Pick a tiny challenge. Don’t go big, go bite-sized.

And to keep it simple, have them share their entries publicly, so that others can see the fun too.

Need it to be secret and judged secretly? Use a form to gather submissions, and release the details later. Can create more mystery and suspense that way…

Here are some ideas I shared for storytellers, with prize ideas:

• 🖌 Fan Art Contest / Coloring Picture / Doodle Art: Draw a character, scene, or moment from my books. Upload your art right here in the comments so we can gush together! Prize: A signed copy of my book, or exclusive special gift.

• ✍️ Flash Fiction Challenge: Write a 100-word story inspired by a prompt from my universe. Enter by commenting right here on this post! Prize: Your story featured on my blog, and I'll send you surprise swag!

• 🤳 Cosplay or Shelfie Raffle: Dress up as a character or post a pic with your book. Upload it to the comments right on this post! Prize: Entry into a raffle for book bundles or Amazon gift card.

• 🧩 Puzzle Hunt: Follow clues that I've hidden across my blog, social media, or downloads. Send me a private DM with your answers, and then comment publicly here 'Done'. Prize: Secret story drop or early access to upcoming projects.

• 🎧 Dramatic Reading Contest: Record yourself reading a dramatic passage from my book (or I’ll pick one). Share it on Instagram or Tiktok, and link it here. Prize: Public shoutout, super special custom merch!

• 📜 Quote Match Game: Match character quotes to the right scene or speaker from my book. Happens live during the con! Prize: Character sketch, world lore sheet, or exclusive map.

Step 2: Spell out the ground rules. In your blog post, give fans the exact how-to:

• Post your entry in the comments below (or drop a link).

• Deadline: [insert date here] Don’t let it last too long, or you’ll lose steam!

• Winner: chosen by [you / random draw / best meets X theme].

• Keep it clean, keep it fun.

Think of it like instructions for a board game.

Step 3: Dangle a prize.
Your prize doesn’t need to be money. Readers love things that feel personal:

• A signed copy of your book

• A shout-out on your socials

• A 15-minute Zoom chat

• A cameo of their name in your next short story

• A special object sent to them from an Etsy store

Pick something you’d be excited to give away.

Step 4: Cover permissions (without killing the vibe).
Tuck in one friendly line: “By entering, you’re cool with me sharing your entry on my blog and socials so we can all enjoy about your brilliance.” That’s all you need.

Step 5: Celebrate
When the deadline hits, show off the entries. Make a blog gallery, tweet your favorites, or record a short video flipping through them. The whole point is spotlighting your fans.

Step 6: Rinse, repeat, and maybe team up.
Once you’ve done one contest, you’ve basically got the template for the next.

Change the theme, swap the prize, and you’re good to go. Or go bigger—team up with two other authors and all run the same challenge.

Triple the fun, triple the reach.

In the past, I’ve used tools like Kingsumo to run whole giveaways, which are always fun, but harder to get fans to do do more than ‘like’ a post. Inviting them to get creative with you is much more exciting.

What are your suggestions? Tried this before? Comment here!

Let’s meet Celeben Arinya! This writer is building a saga with dragons, crowns, and a God everyone’s forgotten about…? And it’s not just about fire and swords—it’s about redemption, philosophy, and fighting off those pesky inner demons that whisper “you’re not good enough...”

What happens when your quest to write something as epic as Tolkien collides with Pinterest distractions, perfectionism, and spiritual warfare? Would you keep pushing forward, or give up the crown before the story’s even written?

With such a cool penname, I had to ask what inspired it. Celeben says: “I made the pen name in Quenya for a fanfiction. 'Celeben' is silver flame and 'Arinya' is my own elvish, for silver quill.”

What is your current WIP about and why does it matter to you?

I am working on the first book of my epic fantasy series The Chainbreaker. This is the redemption story of a broken girl, and the story of a righteous boy who suffers for doing the right thing. This means almost everything to me because I want to write something morally upright and SIMPLY EPIC.

And because I want to make something as good as Lord of the Rings. I'm definitely closer than I was when I was 12, first coming up with the idea. We'll see if that happens :P

Though the story is not as simple as that, of course: there are dragons to slay and twelve Rings to collect in order to slay the prince of all Dragons, who has the world in a network of pagan religions. After having lost it for five thousand years, his kingdom is falling apart, and he wants his Crown back. It is up to the main characters to destroy his Crown and expose his lies. And, of course, for thousands of years, Mortals have been trying to kill this Dragon. But since he is the most powerful of all created beings, the only one you can turn to to slay him is the Unreachable God, the Forgotten God, the god none of the nations worship anymore--except one.

"The might of Mortals and Metiwin alone cannot slay The Dragon." Listening finally to the words uttered at the Banishment, the only hope for Mortals is the Second Prophecy: "I will send you a Chainbreaker to take The Dragon's chains from you and place them back where they were made." The fiery, ambitious princess of the tiny, single nonpagan country and the quiet, meek prince of the biggest, most sprawling pagan empire find themselves on the same quest. She goes to restore her family's honor. He goes to save his sister.

What they don't realize is, they are being swept into the biggest quest Midguard has ever seen--far bigger than their Mortal mind could have first imagined.

How do you know what to write?

Really, I just read good books. That always helps. And by good books, I mean the stuff I list in a later question (Question 5!) as well as a variety of philosophy books. BOY do I love philosophy.

Without philosophy, my work would have no grounding. I simply cannot overestimate the influence of philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, Aquinas, Agustine, Plato, Micheal O'Brian, C. S. Lewis, and, of course, my all time favorite TOLKIEN. Literally, I field test story ideas by comparing them to the genius of the artists I love, and seeing if it all makes philosophical sense.

Though to be fair, I also come up with some of my best ideas by making 'what if...' Silmarillion fanfiction. Also can't overestimate the influence of the Silmarillion.

Easily my favorite fantasy book of all time ever. Fight me.

What is the most difficult part of writing (a book or a story), and how do you handle it?

Ok, let's be honest, a lot of it is looking at art on Tumblr or Pinterest instead of actually writing. I have a serious problem of just vibing and not actually writing. Probably because the vibe is so much cooler than the final product, at least in the frustrating first stages.

But also stress. I stress a lot, I worry about projects never getting done. I am also a perfectionist, which never helps.

But mostly demons. Idiot demons trying to keep me from actually working on my books. They REALLY do not want me writing those books. Oh man, the lengths they have gone to keep my creative spark dead!

The things they have shown me that I cannot unsee, the suspicious rise in torment when my book's concept improves by leaps and bounds! It is very clear I am doing a good thing.

Thank you, idiot demons, for making my path more clear.

What important advice would you give yourself as a first-time author?

Improve relentlessly.

Think Zuko. (Just...be sure to balance out your ambition by finding yourself an Iroh.)

How would you describe your writing style, and what influences formed it?

I have always struggled with making my own unique voice. However, I can mimic other authors down to sentence structure and word choice. I would make an excellent ghost writer.

Consequently, my voice is very flexible depending on who's POV it is currently. Each MC who gets to narrate has their own unique voice. Ok fine, every character has their own unique voice, even if they don't narrate. But I usually prefer archaic or semi-archaic language unless certain characters are narrating.

Man, I've been writing seven years and still I'm not entirely sure what my style is! OH well, I guess we will see as time goes on :>

What are your favorite books, movies, games, or other media that inspire you?

Ahh, so many. But let's organize them all by genre.

AUTHORS: Tolkien, Shakespeare, Cressida Cowell, Aquinas, Aristotle, Michael O'Brien

FANTASY: Lord of the Rings, Silmarillion, Hobbit, How to Train your Dragon (both books and 1st movie), Hamlet, MacBeth, Richard II, Amulet by Kazu Kabushi, Avatar the Last Airbender, Kpop Demon Hunters, Howl's Moving Castle, and a various spattering of Greek plays and North European Mythologies. Bro I live off that stuff.

PHILOSOPHY: The Bible provides all the spiritual grounding for everything, of course. But I also love to read Aristotle and commentaries. I love classical thinkers, as well as a few modern ones such as Michael O'Brien, who wrote Landscape with Dragons, a book beginning and forming my journey to make books that not only discourage evil, but encourage good. It's one of my favorite books of all time--if you are a fellow writer, check it out!

FAV VISUAL ARTISTS: Jenny Dolfen, Silmapens, John Howe, Ted Nasmith...so basically, any Silm artists who make more hardcore/realistic stuff that takes itself seriously. The silly Silm artists? Not so much. With all due respect, silly undercuts the dark glory of the book (though I fully understand why some people would go that route--how else do you handle the glorious darkness?)

Follow my Substack for a fairy tale:

See my Medieval Art Tumblr

Celeben published her story in this anthology:

Stuck trying to finish your book? might be your secret weapon. She walks through exactly how she helps writers get their novels done—from concept to final draft. She talks about her 10-week accountability sprints, how she uses flexible outlines to help with planning and revision, and how character arcs are at the core of everything.

Learn why she never fires slackers, and get the one thing she wishes all authors understood before hiring a coach. Whether you're curious about how book coaching works, or just need a jolt of motivation to keep writing, enjoy!

Visit Katelin's Website

With a background in both fiction and nonfiction, Katelin offers structured yet flexible coaching that meets writers where they are—whether they’re planning, drafting, or revising.

We kick off with a look at Katelin’s credentials and passions: she's trained through Author Accelerator and specializes in fantasy, Christian nonfiction, and memoir.

She’s also a gamer and fantasy fan, which deeply influences her storytelling lens. Her own novel is currently in the querying phase. It follows a sculptor whose magical muse turns out to be dangerous, forcing her to choose between her dreams and her freedom.

How the coaching works

Katelin explains how her coaching begins with a concept assessment—a one-page worksheet tailored to fiction, nonfiction, or memoir. From there, she guides writers through "Blueprint for a Book" outlines, which provide enough structure to stay focused without stifling creativity. These include the Inside Outline (fiction), Outcome Outline (nonfiction), and Impact Outline (memoir).

Once the plan is clear, Katelin supports clients through one-on-one developmental editing or her popular 10-week accountability sprint. The sprint, open to 10 writers at a time, doesn’t include page edits—just honest, supportive group check-ins where writers commit to goals and learn to adapt when life gets messy. Her approach celebrates progress over perfection, helping writers better understand their own pace.

She shares real success stories, including Mary Rose Kroeger, who received developmental feedback on her upcoming book The Green Blade, and Thomas Salerno, who credits Katelin's sprints for his consistent writing practice. Even when goals change, Katelin emphasizes that it's all part of the creative process.

Advice for Authors

She wraps advice every writer should hear: the key to a novel isn’t just a good plot, but an internal transformation the reader can feel.

Katelin looks for stories where the external plot and internal arc are inseparable, and encourages writers to make character emotions and motivations crystal clear.

For writers seeking accountability, encouragement, and deep story development, Katelin Cummins is the real deal. Find her at KatelinCummins.com or on her Substack:

Visit Katelin's Website

When she was sixteen, another young writer scribbled in her book, “Keep writing forever!” She’s proof that sometimes stubborn independence (hello, self-publishing) is exactly what keeps the spark alive.

Let’s meet Paula!

What is the best advice you have received as a writer?

When I was 16 years old, I was a finalist in the "Yesterday, I Will" anthology competition. We had a book launch and interview special at a local book fair, and I got to meet some of the other finalists. We signed each other's copies of the book, and one of my fellow finalists inscribed my copy with "Keep writing forever!"

That message has stuck with my all of these years. It wasn't fancy or profound advice, but it meant a lot to a teenager who had just published her first short story. It meant I was a real author. If I had written and published something once, I could do it again, so keep moving forward.

Today it's a reminder of the joy and accomplishment I felt in that moment. I don't know where my fellow finalist is now, but if he happens to read this—I've followed your advice. I've kept writing.

How do you avoid burnout from all the pressure of being an author, and get back your creative spark?

I think one of the best ways to avoid burnout is to just take a break sometimes. There have been several times when I simply put a story to the side and work on something different to give my mind a break. Then I can come back later with a fresh perspective, and that different perspective can help a lot with moving the story forward.

As with a lot of things in life, one of the keys to writing is moderation. If you push yourself too much, the story can come out feeling stilted and unnatural. Sometimes you just need to give your brain a break.

A lot of times, you will find that any plot tangles are a lot easier to resolve when you return with a fresh perspective.

Where does your self-discipline come from?

From homeschooling! I was homeschooled from pre-K to 12th grade. The self-discipline I learned through homeschooling has greatly helped me in other areas of my life, including my writing. Homeschooling frequently requires you to be a motivated self-starter, and it's easy to fall behind if you aren't diligent.

By keeping myself disciplined to do my work every day, I got into the habit of staying motivated no matter what I was working on. It was not always easy--there were a few stories that lapsed because I didn't dedicate as much time to them as I should have--but having that basis and previous experience with homeschooling definitely helped me form the habits for staying motivated.

What is the most difficult part of writing (a book or a story), and how do you handle it?

The part I tend to struggle with writing is the ending.

My ideas get too big, and I can't come up with a good way to conclude everything satisfactorily. This ends up leading to frustration and sometimes not finishing the story at all.

With some practice, though, I've been making some improvement in this area. Something that helps me is streamlining my ideas so they are more manageable, sticking to the points that are the most important to the story.

It may not be as grand or as epic as I first wanted to write, but at least the story got finished, and that's the main point.

What do you think makes a good story?

I think the best stories are stories about universal themes—heroism, courage, love, survival. These are themes that people can relate to regardless of where they come from or how old they are.

They transcend boundaries and speak to everyone, inspiring them to greatness, giving them hope. They can unite readers from all over the world; people who might not think they have anything in common suddenly find that they love the same book.

In a world that seems increasingly divided, I think being able to unite people in this way is something incredibly special.

What is your publication preference, and why does it work for you so well?

I typically stick with self-publishing. It gives me the flexibility to write what I want instead of worrying that publishers will try to make me change my story too much.

Perhaps it's just me being too stubborn and independent, but I know how I want my story to be told, and I dislike the idea of a publisher telling me that it's not what they're looking for or it's not what is currently popular in the market.

Discovering the existence of self-publishing was a revelation to me. It suddenly gave me an avenue to share my stories with the world without worrying about a long stream of rejections or criticisms and being forced to mold my stories into a shape I didn't want.

I'm not opposed to one day publishing a story in the more traditional way, but for now, I quite like the ability to write a story the way I want it to be told and then being able to share it directly with readers.

When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer, and what did you write about?

I don't know if there was ever a concrete moment of realization. Making up stories was something I had simply always done, so I suppose you could say that I was always a writer.

Before I could type, I would draw what I called "picture stories", which was a story drawn out in a series of pictures instead of written with words. When I learned how to type, transitioning to the written word was just the logical next step.

My first officially-written story was a short adventure involving my pet rabbits. I had recently gotten Watership Down from the library, and that inspired me to write a story about my own rabbits. After that, I just kept typing away at the keyboard whenever I had an idea.

Read my Story: Tears of the King

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‘Tears of the King’ was published in Echoes of Avalon, the LegendFiction anthology.