Why I’m Doing This in Public (And What’s In It for You)

I'm writing my first novel, and I've decided to do something that scares me a little: let people watch while I do it.

The book is called Firm Persuasion: No One Refuses Twice. It's a crime saga set in Detroit in 1977, a city in the middle of real, painful change, about a small, ambitious crew who build a protection racket from nothing, the shop owners who refuse to pay them, and the cop caught in between who grew up in the same neighborhood they did. I won't say more than that here. I'd rather you read it than have me summarize it.

Here's why this blog exists.

I don't have an MFA. I don't have an agent, not yet anyway. What I have is a story I can't stop working on, and a hunch that the process of building a novel, the plotting, the dead ends, the moments a character surprises you and does something you didn't plan, is worth documenting honestly, not just the finished product at the end of it.

So that's what you'll find here. Not excerpts. Not spoilers. Just an honest, regular account of what it actually takes to write a book, chapter by chapter, mistake by mistake, from someone doing it for the first time in real time.

If you subscribe, here's what you actually get:

● A notification every time I post — no algorithm deciding whether you see it, no digging through a feed. New post, straight to you.

● First access to an advance copy of the finished book, at a discounted price, before it's available anywhere else. Subscribers are the first people who get to read it, and the only people who get it at that price.

That's the whole pitch. I'm not trying to build an audience for its own sake. I'm trying to bring a small group of people along for the actual process, so that by the time this book is finished, it doesn't feel like it appeared out of nowhere. It'll feel like something you watched get built, because you did.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, subscribe below. I'll see you in the next post.