Writers in the Storm

by Dr. Diana Stout

I watch a lot of writer interviews and have seen how they’re asked these questions just as I’ve been asked:

Why do you write?

Where do you get your ideas?

How did you get started?

These questions sound simple enough, expressing curiosity, but they point directly to the heart of creativity, purpose, and the courage it takes to put words on the page and being open to criticism. Our answers open doorways into a mysterious, seemingly secret creative life, and where within our answers the questioner is wondering if they have the courage to be a writer, too.

How Did I Get Started?

Unlike so many authors who say they started writing stories when they were young, in the beginning, I had no such desire. I was a rabid reader.

Instead, I wrote diaries and journals, mostly to vent, but I wrote about interests, desires, and observations, too. Then, I began turning these observations into essays because I wanted to share, and I wanted a byline. More importantly, I wanted a voice. I was young and felt like a nobody, totally unseen and without a voice. Surely, I wasn’t the only one experiencing these things.

As my bylines began stacking up in newspaper and magazines, my confidence as a writer grew. I wanted to write books like those I was reading: romance, thrillers, and various nonfiction.

Also, I wanted the fame of publication and the fortune these writers had. I assumed they had nice incomes to go along with that fame.

I had a lot to learn on that score.

As disappointing as it was in the beginning to learn that many writers didn’t have the income, I thrived within the creativity. I joined writing groups and enjoyed the camaraderie. As editors and publisher wrote comments at the bottom of rejections, telling me they liked my voice and to submit again, I was encouraged to keep writing.

I was close to acceptance and publication for a long time. So, I refused to give up, knowing that one day I would publish a book, and 14 years after writing my first book, I did.

I wrote in different genres, following submission requests and contests. My body of work kept piling up. Most of it was unpublished, but I was placing and winning awards.

Where Do I Get My Ideas?

In the beginning, I followed the adage of write what you know. My early topics were essays and articles about marriage, raising kids, and life in general. Today, my nonfiction books are based on what I taught both in online writing communities and in the university classroom, from fiction and nonfiction both long and short, to creative and business writing, time management, and how to reach your goals.

With fiction, the ideas come from everywhere and anywhere:

• Dreams
• Conversations overheard
• News headlines
• Talk shows
• Social media posts—including the comments
• Reading
• True events and history
• Regular TV programs
• Interviews

Often, ideas come to me in the silence as I rarely have TV or music playing in the background. Another place where ideas appear out of nowhere is when I’m in the shower.

Once I have the initial spark of an idea, I create a fire of What if? scenarios of danger, secrets, desires, and anger or revenge motivation.

An initial idea can start with a character and their impossible desire or as a plot that begs to be deepened in exploration.

The secret is writing all ideas down immediately. One, so as not to forget them, and two, so that the ideas can flow freely rather than damming up in my head. I could live to be 200 and still not have time enough to write out the ideas I’ve collected so far.

Why Do I Write?

Looking back, in the beginning I was searching not only for fame and fortune, but searching for myself, as well. In finding myself, I found a tiny bit of fame, but I’m still waiting on the fortune; it’s coming.

Some writers get lucky and find their true genre right away. My journey took me across the genres, which allowed me to use the techniques of one genre with another. As a result, I became a better writer. While I’ve always been a solid non-fiction writer, finding my fiction genre has taken longer to uncover. After more than five decades of writing, I’m excited that I have finally discovered it’s psychological thrillers. Recently, on another blog website, I wrote, “From Romance to Thrillers – Why I Changed Genres.”

I write every day and look forward to my designated write-in Zoom time with other writers. I write because I enjoy the process and enjoy helping other writers. It’s like Christmas when opening boxes of newly printed books that I’ve written.

How Can You Get Started?

What I tell every new writer and writers who are stuck: Just write.

Don’t overthink, don’t question, just write. Get your thoughts out of your head and on paper, regardless of the project, topic, or what’s required. It’s okay to create messy first drafts.

Write what you like to read. Experiment with it all: descriptions, taglines, dialogue, etc. My first fiction drafts are usually nothing but pure dialogue. Descriptions and emotions, along with action tags, are layered in with subsequent drafts. Find a process that works for you.

Writing is about the rewriting. Writing is like throwing words on the pottery wheel. You’re shaping and molding it into a recognizable format as a story or essay. Yes, all writing has structure. Not sure what that structure is? Read published examples. Read the genre you’re writing. Read the how-to books. Listen to other writers. Join online writing groups. Join critic groups.

No writer’s journey is the same. It’s about finding what works for you. Enjoy the journey. Create your own path or as Ralph Waldo Emerson would say: Go where there is no path.

No doubt, sometime in the future, someone will be asking you these same questions about how you got started.

Why do you write? How did you get started?

About Dr. Diana:

An award-winning writer in multiple genres across multiple media, Diana is a screenwriter, author, blogger, writing coach, and indie publisher through her production company, Sharpened Pencils Productions.

An award-winning writer in multiple genres across multiple media, Diana is a screenwriter, author, blogger, writing coach, and indie publisher through her production company, Sharpened Pencils Productions.

She recently published her first thriller, Harbor House: Deadly Intentions, a gripping split-time psychological paranormal of two women separated by a century yet bound by peril, legacy, and the haunting secrets of Harbor House Island.

Currently, she's completing a time management book to add to her Finding Your Fire series and has 2026 plans for a historical true story based on a mid-1800 event, another thriller, rewriting a couple scripts, and breathing life into what she calls her Nicholas Sparks novel.

Featured image from Pixabay.

by Lisa Norman

The inbox we’re all living in now

Most of us live in our inboxes, whether we want to or not.

We open email looking for one important message and find ourselves deleting a dozen others first. We skim subject lines. Hesitate when something looks unfamiliar. We rely on our email provider to make judgment calls for us, and every so often it gets it wrong, sending the one message we were actually waiting for straight to spam.

That low-level vigilance adds up. Inbox fatigue isn’t a personal failure or a lack of discipline. It’s the normal condition of modern communication.

And it matters, because the inbox isn’t just a private space. It’s part of a shared system that millions of people are using at the same time, all day, every day.

A crowded room with tired bouncers

One way to think about the modern inbox is as a very crowded waiting room or dance hall. Messages are constantly arriving, jostling for attention. Some are welcome. Some are clearly trouble. Many fall somewhere in between.

To keep that room from turning into chaos, email providers rely on automated filters. These filters are like overworked bouncers at the door. They don’t know anyone personally. They don’t listen to explanations. They watch behavior.

When people talk about email systems “responding to patterns,” this is what they mean. The bouncers are watching things like:

• How many people open a message
• How quickly they delete it
• Whether they reply or click links
• How often messages go unopened
• Whether addresses stop responding entirely

None of this is personal. It’s crowd control.

When the room gets more crowded, the bouncers get stricter. That’s not punishment. It’s self-preservation.

Spam has costs we rarely stop to think about

Spam isn’t free.

Every email, wanted or not, has to be moved across networks, scanned for problems, and stored somewhere. That work happens in the background, but it still requires electricity, equipment, and massive data centers designed to keep everything running.

Globally, more than 360 billion emails are sent every day, and roughly half of them are classified as spam.

An analysis by McAfee and ICF Consulting estimated that spam alone uses about 33 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, producing roughly 17 million tons of carbon emissions. That’s comparable to the annual emissions of several million cars. While technology has become more efficient since that study, email volume has grown just as fast, which means the overall strain on the system hasn’t gone away.

Storage adds another layer. Emails don’t vanish when they arrive. They’re kept so people can search for them later, retrieve them on different devices, or recover them if something goes wrong. Providers also keep multiple copies for safety, backups, and reliability.

Think of it like a warehouse. Even if no one ever opens the box, it still takes up space, and someone has to pay to keep the lights on.

Using public cloud pricing as a rough guide, storing data costs money every month. One email may feel weightless. Billions of them are not.

How spam changes the room for everyone

When large numbers of low-quality or abandoned email addresses are in circulation, the bouncers adjust their behavior.

If messages regularly go unopened, deleted immediately, or sent to spam, the system learns to be more cautious. Legitimate messages can get caught in that caution, not because anyone is doing something wrong, but because the filters are responding to what they see.

This is where many writers feel confused. Their content hasn’t changed. Their intentions are good. But the room has become louder, and the bouncers are more suspicious.

Writers aren’t being singled out. They’re experiencing the side effects of a system under strain.

The emotional cost rides along with the technical one

There’s a human cost, too.

Spam trains us to read defensively. We hesitate before opening messages from unfamiliar names. We delete first and think later. Over time, the inbox becomes a place of vigilance instead of welcome.

For writers, this often shows up as frustration and self-doubt. Open rates drop. Replies thin out. Thoughtful newsletters seem to disappear into silence. The usual advice focuses on tweaking subject lines or sending more often, but it rarely acknowledges the environment those emails are entering.

When the room is crowded, even friendly voices can get lost.

Why legitimate writers feel stuck in the middle

Most writers aren’t trying to game the system. They’re trying to reach readers who genuinely want to hear from them.

Much of what writers were taught about building email lists worked well when inboxes were less crowded. Big giveaways and easy signups made it simple for readers to join. These days, though, those same approaches often attract signups from people who aren’t planning to stick around.

Those email addresses don’t disappear after the freebie arrives. They continue to receive every newsletter that follows, even if no one is reading them. Over time, inboxes fill up, messages go unopened, and some accounts eventually start bouncing emails back.

Now multiply that pattern across hundreds or thousands of giveaways, and you begin to see what’s happening behind the scenes. Large amounts of unread mail accumulate on servers around the world, taking up space and resources whether anyone ever opens them or not.

Here’s one way to picture it. If 10,000 abandoned inboxes receive a single average-sized newsletter each day, that adds up to nearly two terabytes of stored email in a year. Using public cloud pricing as a simple comparison, that represents more than $100 a month in ongoing storage costs alone, before counting the energy needed to process and deliver those messages.

No individual writer causes this. But collectively, it shapes the system everyone relies on.

Consent isn’t the same as intent

This is where many writers begin to notice a disconnect.

When someone opts in, it can mean “I want this once” or “I want an ongoing relationship.” A signup form can’t tell the difference. But inbox behavior eventually does.

Messages that are welcomed behave differently in the system than messages that are tolerated or ignored. Over time, the bouncers notice. Signals shift. Delivery changes.

Noticing that gap isn’t about blame. It’s about understanding how the room works.

Seeing the system more clearly

Spam carries real costs. It uses electricity. It takes up space. It changes how legitimate messages are treated. And it adds to the emotional load we all carry when we open our inboxes each day.

None of this means writers should panic or stop communicating. Email is still the most reliable tool we have for reaching readers. But it does mean the email system itself is under strain, and that we need to understand what that strain means.

Once we can see those costs clearly, it becomes easier to think differently about how we use email, without guilt and without fear.

Next month, we’ll look at how writers are responding to this reality with new, more human choices that feel better on both sides of the inbox.

Have you ever stopped to think about the cost of email?

About Lisa

Lisa Norman's passion has been writing since she could hold a pencil. While that is a cliché, she is unique in that her first novel was written on gum wrappers. As a young woman, she learned to program and discovered she has a talent for helping people and computers learn to work together and play nice. When she's not playing with her daughter, writing, or designing for the web, she can be found wandering the local beaches.

Lisa writes as Deleyna Marr and is the owner of No Stress Writing Academy. She also runs Heart Ally Books, LLC, an indie publishing firm.

Interested in learning more from Lisa? Sign up for her newsletter or check out her school, No Stress Writing Academy, where she teaches social media, organization, technical skills, and marketing for authors!

You can preorder her next book, The Work of Joy here.

Top image from depositphotos.

by Alicia McCalla

Everyone’s afraid of AI replacing writers: I’m afraid of it hallucinating how many books I’ve written.

So, when I started digging deeper into Google’s AI Mode for search, I did what any curious author would do: I opened an incognito window and asked a simple question:

“How many books has Alicia McCalla written?”

The answers came back fast but completely different each time. A whole range of numbers pulled from who knows where.

That’s when I realized something important:

AI was sharing false information about me. And because it’s machine learning, it wasn’t “lying”—it simply didn’t have enough authoritative context to get the answer right.

That’s when my 20 years as a professional librarian kicked in.

The AI Overview

AI Overview mode was compiling and summarizing from whatever scraps it could find: fragments from Goodreads, Amazon, outdated interviews, old metadata, and even my Shopify store.

Then the anvil dropped:

I had never given the internet a definitive, authoritative answer to that question. And without a true source of truth, AI did what AI does and it filled in the blanks the best it could.

A lot of light bulbs went off for me. But the biggest?

The current debate we’re having in the fiction community about using AI for creativity is tiny compared to this. This issue is quietly reshaping our discoverability and our book sales.

This isn’t an “AI is taking our creativity” problem. This is an AI-without-our-authoritative-context problem.

And that distinction matters, because within the next 2–3 years, readers won’t just be searching Amazon or scrolling TikTok for their next book. They’ll be asking AI systems directly:

• “What should I read next?”
• “Who writes books like this?”
• “Where do I start with this series?”

And if your digital author footprint isn’t clear, consistent, and discoverable, AI won’t be able to place you in those conversations.

Without context, AI search may retrieve you, but it may hesitate, hallucinate, or bypass you completely. Moreover, without authoritative signals, AI cannot recommend you. Without discoverability, you simply will not appear in LLM searches.

Authors who lack context signals such as blogs, bios, book lists, series pages, themes, story summaries, metadata anchors, won’t just be hard to find. They’ll be absent.

Or worse:

They’ll appear in AI Overviews in distorted ways like mis-categorized, misrepresented, merged with other authors, or hallucinated into something unrecognizable.

Why Fiction Authors Should Care (Regardless of Publishing Path)

Many authors abandoned SEO years ago when blogging felt irrelevant and social media took over. But AI Overviews have brought this issue full circle. They don’t operate on trends, virality, or follower counts.

They operate on:

• consistency
• clarity
• definitional content
• accurate metadata
• stable author identity signals

And this affects every author, no matter how you publish.

Back to That Hallucinated Book Count…

If Google’s AI Mode can’t answer the simplest question about your career, it will not get your genre, themes, audience, tropes, storyworld, or series order right either.

This one question reveals whether your digital footprint is built for the future, or stuck in the past.

The Fix: Give AI a Single Source of Truth

Once my librarian brain kicked in and I saw how inconsistent the answers were, I didn’t debate AI or try to self-correct the hallucinations or “teach” the system anything from within AI Mode. 

I did something authors have never needed to do before and I created an authoritative pillar post. One “book catalog” page that clearly spelled out who I am and how many books I’ve actually written.

That single post became the authoritative anchor AI Overview Mode was missing. And it too about 72-hours until the hallucinations were gone.

Your One-Step Assignment

If you’re concerned about what AI says about you, do this:

Open an incognito window on Google but use the AI Mode. 

Ask: “How many books has [Your Name] written?”

If the number is wrong, or wildly wrong, don’t panic. Work on your discoverability footprint that works in 2025, not 2015.

And here’s the truth that many authors don’t want to here, if you don’t define yourself, AI Overviews will define you with whatever scraps it can find or hallucinate by filling in the blanks with made up information. 

What did you find when you searched for information about your writing? Was it right?

If You Want to Go Deeper…

I created a step-by-step process for fiction authors on how to build a clear, discoverable identity AI Overviews can trust. 

You’ll find it inside my AI Overview Power Punch Quiet Workbook. It’s something you can complete in a weekend or two.

Because when your context is clear, AI finally gets your story right.

About Alicia

Alicia McCalla writes Sistas with Superpowers, blending speculative fiction, serialized storytelling, and entrepreneurial creativity into immersive reading experiences. Beyond her storyworlds, Alicia also shares practical tools for fiction authors navigating modern discoverability, including her Storyselling Superpower and AI Overview workbooks. Join her community of quiet writer rebels at: https://substack.com/@aliciamccalla 

Top image by Deleyna via Midjourney.