Writers in the Storm

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.

By Joseph Lallo

The process of writing fiction almost always requires the author to assemble a handful of the same key ingredients for each story. At the absolute, bare bones, stripped-to-the-studs level, the two things you need are characters and plot. We won’t be focusing on plot today, but as an overview, there are two broad ways to craft it: Plotting (that is to say, writing an outline) and Pantsing (which is just “writing by the seat of your pants”). 

Writing characters is much more difficult to distill into a methodological binary, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try. Different people will have different names for their tactics, but for our purposes the two broad methods will be dubbed “Character Sketching” and “Character Discovery.” We’ll go into them in more detail shortly. For now, just know that my personal method is a combo that we’ll be calling “Character Improv.”

 Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though.

Sketching is for Plotters

It really is as simple as that. If you are the kind of person who wants a flawless, reliable roadmap for the whole story, you’re going to want two things: a complete outline, and a stack of character sketches. Just as the outline is at least a summary and at best a beat for beat blueprint for the story’s structure and events, the character sketches are note for note biographies for the “actors” who will be performing your piece. Think of them as the character sheet for a game of D&D. They can be as loose or as detailed as you want, but at the end of the day they exist to make sure you know, before you set foot along the path of the tale, who will be traveling with you.

Character sketches often include, but aren’t limited to: physical descriptions, character histories, quirks and traits, principles and goals, and interpersonal relationships. Putting together a character sketch can be loads of fun for many authors, as you get to play both police sketch artist and psychological profiler for the star of your story. And more importantly, once you’ve laid out a good solid sketch, you’ve got reference material that will keep your character consistent as you write their story. 

This comes at the expense of flexibility. Stories don’t always go according to plan, and you can’t always predict who will serve the narrative best. If your sketch is too rigid, you may end up with a character incompatible with the changing circumstances. This isn’t a deal breaker, you can always iterate, but in the worst case this will lead to a great deal of redundant work.

This is why a lot of people opt for the opposite side of the spectrum.

Character Discovery

Having a map of the narrative isn’t necessary, or even desirable, for a certain type of writer. Those who like to sit down to a blank page and let the story unfold according to its own whims might decide the best course of action is to let the story craft the characters as well. This would be “Character Discovery,” and there’s really not much to it with regards to technique. Your cast of characters is as clean a slate as your plotline. As the needs of the story arise, the characters who can meet those challenges or who might have been shaped by that world step out of the fog, ready to have their fine details sculpted on the fly. 

This is certainly a more exciting way to tell a story (for the author). Not even you know who is lurking behind each twist and turn. This means of character writing provides you with a naturalistic development of personality that’s difficult to beat. It can also be very efficient, because anything that doesn’t impact the story is never established, so no wasted effort is put into building out a history that isn’t explored.

 But the method is hardly without its obstacles.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the consistency that is a strength of character sketching is a weakness of character discovery. You need to be diligent in keeping track of each new character and detail, or you’ll be at risk of contradicting yourself when the time comes to refer back to concrete details like hair color, number of siblings, or even name. (Let’s not talk about how, for several days, the published ebook for my first sci-fi story had the main character’s birth name change halfway through…). Essentially, unless you have a great memory, you’re going to want to end up with the character sketch that your Plotting counterpart started with. You also have to be disciplined with when and where you introduce new characters and assign new traits to them. It is oh-so-simple to end up with a conga-line of deus ex machinas, with just the right person showing up at just the right time, or our hero revealing a fluent knowledge of an ancient language that they just so happen to have needed right then and there. Revisions and retroactive foreshadowing are your friend here.

But maybe there’s a way to split the difference…

Character Improvisation

Like many authors, I didn’t start my writing journey with a full knowledge of the various methods used to craft narrative. (I guess you can say I “pantsed” my writing career.) Different books were written using different techniques. I’ve planned, I’ve shot from the hip, and I’ve started one way and ended another. These days I find myself pretty firmly in the plotter category for my longer fiction. Despite this, I try to allow for the maximum of flexibility, especially with regard to my characters.

When I’m plotting my scenes, I rarely prescribe exactly what a given set of characters will do in that scene, and almost never do I predetermine what they will say. Outside of the exceedingly rare instances of having a really good idea for a single line or a short exchange, the outline of a scene only tells me the direction the characters need to be heading as it ends. How the characters choose to get there is decided by the characters.

This is where you may note, “But Jo, you are deciding what the characters say. Isn’t that just you deciding how they’ll get there?” Yes and no. I like to write the dialogue line by line, each time asking myself “what would this character say in response to that?” These aren’t actors working from a script, these are performers improvising in the moment. (Hence “Character Improvisation.”) It’s not pure pantsing, because the framework of the scene and it’s place in the plot progression are established, but provides maximum flexibility on an intra-scene level. I find it gives me the fluid, natural conversation of a fully discovered character, while still starting from a place of structure and having a touch of guidance. And best of all, it allows chemistry to develop naturally.

Examples

Let’s look at some examples from my own writing.

When I was planning out Bypass Gemini (the aforementioned story where our main character switched from “Travis Alexander” to “Trevor Alexander” without me noticing.) I planned for there to be a snarky AI in a single scene. The gag was supposed to be that our hero thought it was a simple voice menu, but it was in fact a complete AI with human level intelligence. The outline for the scene called for “a few snarky comebacks due to the misunderstanding.” But as I wrote the scene, I found that the AI was really scoring some fun zingers. I was having loads of fun giving her better one-liners. Building out the main character by having him fairly quickly adjust and begin treating her like a person really gave him some depth as well. It made him feel like a better person, and gave her the opportunity to adjust her own opinion of him as well as her own expectations of how she ought to be treated.

The plot didn’t change much at all, but the AI became a much bigger part of it as I explored and experimented with her, letting her say what felt right at the time and having other characters act accordingly. By the end of the story I’d resolved to make her a staple character in the series from that point forward.

Similarly, when I was writing Free-Wrench (and more generally when I write any story), I didn’t plan romance from the start. This was an adventure story first and foremost, so it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that there would even be romance. Characters interacted, joked, argued, and generally bounced off each other as the scene dictated. And steadily, chemistry started to develop. Characters started flirting. It was never the plan, but these characters paired up nicely., those had too much friction. And entirely naturally, by the time I’d written two or three books, there was romance and drama simply because it was just how the characters had treated each other.

 My story was able to surprise me.

As with the other methods, you have to be mindful of certain pitfalls. This basically provides you with all of the pros and all of the cons of each of the other methods. Letting the characters have long conversations can be fun in the moment but lead to rambling scenes if you’re not gently nudging them toward a point. A willful character can also wrench your story off the tracks entirely, something you’ll need to assess on a case by case basis if their new way is best or if you need to massage them into a compromise. You can also have a sequence of events plotted out in advance that, as the characters develop, will simply feel inappropriate to who they’ve become, and unwinding that can be a bit of a challenge. But at its best this method provides your audience with strong, vibrant characters who have agency and personality that’s hard to plan for while keeping the story’s structure and pace on target.

Chatting with your imaginary friends

One of my favorite ways to describe being an author is “having long arguments with your imaginary friends and transcribing the results.” Regardless of whether I start with a map of the plot or if I hack my way through the literary jungle with nothing more than a machete and a compass, I find that letting the characters develop on their own has always given me and my readers the best experience. Has it meant my planned boy-meets-girl character arcs have ended up in bitter, unplanned breakups three books later? Yes. But it has also elevated characters from bit parts to main cast, and made the act of writing as much fun as the act of reading. You meet some of the most fascinating people when you let your characters pick their own lines. Give it a try and maybe you’ll find a new star!

About Joseph

Joseph R. Lallo hails from Bayonne, NJ--the fabled birthplace of George R. R. Martin. He has written dozens of novels and novellas, including the international bestseller The Book of Deacon and the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series. In addition to writing, he has helped run run the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson.

Header Photo by Sujal Patel on Unsplash