Anna David's Blog, page 2

The One Thing That Separates The Successful From the Unsuccessful

It’s possible that I’m obsessed with success. I talked about what makes a book successful last week and the joy of not finding early success the week before. I wrote a collection of stories called How to Be Successful by F*cking Up Your Life. I like to surround myself with successful people.

I come by this honestly: success was my family’s love language. The only way you could be loved was by finding it (I, unfortunately, couldn’t find it until after I’d done the work in therapy to discover the insanity of this paradigm).

In my obsession with success, I’ve noticed one thing that separates the successful from the unsuccessful.

It’s not having the right education or nepo-baby ish last name.

It’s not about working hard versus being lazy.

It’s not about intelligence, financial status or looks.

It’s really so simple.

Successful people put themselves out there.

Over and over and over again.

It sounds obvious, yes? It is!

But it must bear repeating because I see so many people frustrated by their lack of success when the answer is right in front of them.

I know someone who is pretty much smarter than everyone else around her. She’s a fantastic writer. Her education is beyond impressive. She desperately wants to be successful; you could say her entire personality is comported around that desire.

And yet she won’t do the one thing—the only thing—required.

She won’t put herself out there.

This person desperately wanted a traditional publishing deal. When someone helped her get a big New York agent, she thought she’d made it. But when that agent tried to sell the book and couldn’t, this person never tried again and instead silently shelved a book she’d worked on for decades.

She believes she put herself out there but she didn’t. Putting herself out there would have meant submitting to 200 more agents and if that didn’t work, trying an alternate path to publishing. Then writing five more books or building a business from that first book.

I know someone else who isn’t that great a writer. I think he’d admit it. He’s not the best speaker in the world; the one time I saw him speak live, he had to read from notes and looked more like someone being forced to give a eulogy or a best man speech than a paid entertainer.

And yet when he decided he wanted to write a book, he cold called every agent he could until he got a deal. He’s now published three books and is flown all over the world to speak.

(I know these examples are both about traditional publishing, a topic I tend to rally against, but they’re the best examples I know to illustrate this point.)

Here’s the thing: the people I know who struggle to put themselves out there believe that putting themselves out there is more painful for them than it is for other people.

But it’s not.

Putting yourself out there is painful, period.

We all, on some level, cringe. 

But we do it anyway.

You know you’re doing it when you feel uncomfortable. Just like any muscle in your body, the putting-yourself-out-there muscle feels terrible when it’s weak. You’re wincing and sore afterwards. It doesn’t feel that great the second and third time either. But by then you’ve experienced the pain and the wince and the soreness and you know this must be worth it because why else would everyone do it and besides, you did get at least a tiny reward from the first time or you wouldn’t be back.

And then you keep going and going and one day, to continue with the gym analogy, you’re either a weightlifter or at least someone who works out.

In other words, you build a muscle by working it until you’re not uncomfortable anymore or you’re so used to the discomfort that you barely notice it.

 So what does “putting yourself out there” even mean?

It depends on who you are and what you want.

Maybe it means posting on social media.

Maybe it means pitching yourself to podcasts or asking friends with podcasts to have you on.

Maybe it means asking people to review your book.

Maybe it means asking people if they’ll hire you or work with your company. Or if they know people who will.

Maybe it means joining a mastermind.

Maybe it means asking to give a talk at a mastermind.

You know you’ve found it if the thought of it terrifies you.

What it doesn’t mean is continuing to write day after day without a plan. What it doesn’t mean is taking class after class but not creating something from what you’ve learned. What it doesn’t mean is waiting for people to find you. What it doesn’t mean is assuming that if you build it, they will come.

Maybe in 1989 when Field of Dreams came out, they would come.

Today they won’t.

And that’s a good thing because if they came, there’s no assurance they’d come back if you needed them again.

If you put yourself out there in front of them, on the other hand, you’re in the driver’s seat. When you need more readers or clients, you can simply put yourself out there again.

Because you did it before, your muscle will be stronger.

You’ll be able to wince, take a breath, fight every fear that tells you that putting yourself out there might kill you and do it anyway.

We’re only on this planet for a short time. Why not make the most of it while we’re here?

The world deserves to see you so it can relish in your wonderfulness. But it will never know about you if you don’t step into your greatness.

See you out there.

How Do You Know If Your Book is Successful?

Back when I was laboring in the trenches as an author working with traditional publishers—before the experience broke my soul and wallet—I strived to have a successful book.

The problem was, no one ever told me what success actually meant.

Was it selling a million copies? 1000? Getting reviewed in the Times? Selling enough copies to get a second printing? Getting another book deal? Having a book optioned and actually made into a movie?

No one told me and I never asked and so, much like the millions of delusional authors before and after me, I just figured someone would let me know when that “success” moment hit.

Still waiting for it.

Eventually, the publishers let me know when my books weren’t successful with their semi silence. They didn’t ghost me—it was more like dying, coming back from the dead and dying again.

Their responses to my emails contained sentences like, “No more bookstore orders” and “We pitched you but never heard back.”

Now I know the truth and not just because I’m one of the maybe three people insane enough to have bought and read The Trial: The DOJ's Suit to Block Penguin Random House's Acquisition of Simon & Schuster. Over the years, I’ve had former in-house book publicists tell me that they were forced to lie by omission to 99% of their writers.

See, the publishing houses decided which books were going to be successful long before the books came out, and they decided it with the half-million-dollar+ advances they doled out. When they were giving out the $50,000 or so advances to people like me, they knew they were probably taking a loss but that was okay because their hit books were going to more than make up for it.

While operating at a loss on purpose sounds insane, publishers can’t just publish one big book a quarter; that would be weird. So they plan for the big one and surround it with a whole bunch of others. And it’s worth doing that because they know that when that one book hits, it will more than make up for those smaller advances. They also know that when a book doesn’t hit, there’s no use trying to bring it to life. To me, $50,000 seemed like a fortune. To them, when compared to the millions upon millions a hit book could bring in, it seemed like a rounding error.

I loved something that Jennifer Keishen Armstrong told me when I had her on my podcast a few years ago: when her book, Seinfeldia, hit the NYT list, her publisher reached out to set a big marketing meeting. She was confused; she’d already had the marketing meetings before the book’s release. And then she understood: there was the requisite “we have to give every author a marketing meeting so let’s just tell them some stuff” and then there was the real “you’re officially a success so let’s make you even more of one now” meeting.

(My situation hitting the NYT list was different, primarily because it was a book I wrote for someone who was unsafe verging on violent and by the time the book hit the list, I think we were all done with him and just happy to take the accolades that come with hitting the list and move on.)

Still, I don’t blame publishers for only focusing on their sure things—their Glennon Doyle’s and Malcolm Gladwell’s. I certainly prefer to focus on sure things in my own life. But there is just such a wide berth between a hit book and all the rest of books that it’s almost impossible to explain to someone not in the business. Here’s the closest I can come: it would be like living in a city that had one successful doctor because all the rest of them had gone out of business.

The best way I can make sense of why this happens is that roughly a quarter of our population doesn’t read. So when a book becomes so meteorically successful that it starts to come up in conversation everywhere, the non-readers feel uncomfortable. They must really be missing something if everyone’s talking about it! So they go get their one book that year and read it. In other words, the only way you can reach runaway success as an author is when non-readers are reading you so that they don’t feel dumb when someone brings you up at a party.

Like I said, publishers aren’t doing anything wrong here by betting all their money on the horse they expect to win. The wrong part is that they’re not straightforward about it and they don’t help their non massive authors come up with a plan B.

Yes, it would suck to have to tell someone that they’re probably not going to succeed; I certainly wouldn’t want to have that conversation. But if publishers were willing to, they could then set those authors up with realistic expectations for what success could look like. In doing so, they’d probably be able to quell the post book depression so many authors experience.

Because here’s the thing: if you have your book acquired by a big publisher, you’ve made it. You should dance the Merengue, or whatever Baby and Johnny Castle do in Dirty Dancing. You should celebrate yourself to the maximum for having attained something that roughly one in 10,000 do.

The problem is you spend the two-to-three years between acquisition and publication only semi-relishing in that while mostly preparing, with apprehension and cautious optimism, for the inevitable success that awaits you upon publication. How could success not await you, after all, when you’ve achieved a dream that more than 80 percent of people have and almost none of them manage to achieve?

When your book doesn’t launch to great success, you are mad or sad—entirely appropriate responses to the experience. Because no matter how many times people like me told you during that two-to-three year wait not to get your hopes up because meteoric success is so rare that it’s safer to wish for a pink unicorn to show up at your door, you tuned us out.

“It will be different for me,” you thought. Then you wished we’d be quiet and stop spreading bad vibes or pushing our frustration about our own experiences onto you.

I know this because I’ve seen the look on countless people’s faces. Oh, and I also experienced it with six different books myself.

This is why I’m so obsessed with setting up realistic definitions of success for the authors I work with. No one can control how many people buy our books so why obsess over it? We encourage our clients to not even check their sales figures. (I never check mine.) Instead, we urge them to focus on what their book can do for them.

Even though I’m not a math person, the best way I can explain it is this: if you offer a service where your average client nets you $10,000, you can either try to make $10,000 from one book sale (when your reader hires you after reading your book) or $4 per book on 2,500 book sales. How hard is it to sell 2,500 books? Well, the average book sells roughly 500 copies.3 So does it make sense to focus on selling 2,500 books—something you can’t control—or far fewer books to people who will hire you or buy your product?

I also urge authors to remember that the book is there forever. Traditional publishing is all about the launch; that’s why there’s so much focus on pre-sales (pre-sales count as first week sales figures). But what focusing on the launch means is that if your book isn’t a bestseller out of the gate, you’re a failure. Your publisher treats you like one. The people who ask you how your book is doing seem to be treating you like one. You feel like one, even though two to three years ago, you thought your dreams came true.

Again, these publishing folks aren’t evil people. They’re simply businesspeople. The problem is that authors don’t act like businesspeople back. They tend not to build businesses and then use their books to attract people to them. If they did, then they wouldn’t have to care about how many books they sold. They could instead focus on selling to the right people—people at certain masterminds or in certain communities. They could just give their books away to those people because the value isn’t in the person buying the book but in what they do after reading it.

If you think this all sounds so disgustingly uncreative, so crass, so calculating, I assure you that it’s not. It’s just practical. I wrote On Good Authority because I knew it would attract a lot of clients to Legacy Launch Pad. I 100% used my creativity to write it. People seem to forget that being creative and being practical aren’t mutually exclusive.

If On Good Authority had been published by one of the Big Five, I wouldn’t have been able to put my website or QR codes or links to PDFs to get readers to sign up for my email list in the book. That’s because a publisher’s goal isn’t to get a readers to hire their authors; it’s to get readers to buy more of their books (especially their big book of the season). That’s why they put their own website and not the author’s in the book.

The reason I had such miserable book launches when my books were traditionally published is that I had unrealistic expectations—and expectations, as the saying goes, are resentments under construction. It wasn’t entirely the fault of my publishers. I was delulu to assume I could be the breakout success when I hadn’t been paid an advance that suggested I would be.

The reason I only have glorious launches now is that I choose to focus solely on what I can control—writing a book for my ideal client and getting it into their hands. If other cool things land in my lap, like an opportunity to go on Good Morning America or be featured in the Wall Street Journal, it’s frosting, not the cake. And because of the specific actions I’ve taken, I’m already so full that the frosting isn’t sustenance—just something delicious I can enjoy.

The Joy of Not Finding Early Success

We all know those people who peaked in high school. Cheerleaders, football players, A students who won every award—lives that were in general gleaming with promise.

I wasn’t one of those. I mean, I had cool friends and did plays and went to lots of parties but I definitely didn’t feel like one of the Smart Kids and certainly wasn’t a star athlete.

Of course, we all know what happened to the high school peak-ers! We know because we see them on Facebook where they make us feel immensely superior since their lives are so utterly basic and ordinary. Whether it’s weight gain, baldness or lame-seeming lives, they tend to regularly make us feel grateful that we weren’t the Homecoming King or Queen.

What we don’t realize when we enter adulthood is that the same thing happens in careers.

In my experience, the universe throws us a lucky break and we usually don’t realize it was a lucky break until it never happens again. In my case, there were a few big breaks: I got signed by a big agent who’d reached out to me and then sold my first book to my top choice publisher within a few weeks. I wrote one essay for an anthology and the New York Times snapped it up as a “Modern Love” without me having to even submit it. I co-wrote a story for Playboy that went the then-equivalent of viral before being optioned and made into a reality show pilot. I spent years being wooed by TV shows to come on and give sex and relationship advice and landed a job as a columnist for my favorite magazine.

At the time, I thought: “Well, sure. I always knew I was better than those people who peaked in high school. Why not?”

But then: I never again had a magazine story I wrote optioned, let alone made into a TV pilot. Magazines evaporated and there were thus no more columnist positions. Writing for the New York Times? Can’t imagine it. And if I can get on a big TV show today—which I did a few years ago—it’s a small miracle.

Honestly, it sucked when I realized the big, shiny events were Good Things That Happened to Me and not The Way My Life Was Going to Be. It took a long time to get over it. But I truly am grateful for it because eventually I was able to start a business and thus create a life where I wasn’t so dependent on gatekeepers and lucky breaks for success.

Other people I know had lucky breaks that launched them into superstardom. I’ve definitely been accused of sharing this too much so forgive me if you’ve heard me say this before but Matt Damon was my college boyfriend. And the only wedding I’ve ever been a bridesmaid in was when my childhood friend Mackenzie married her coworker, a guy named Jeff Bezos, years before they moved to Seattle to start an online bookstore. If you’d told me back in the early 90s when I was hanging out with Matt and Mackenzie in New York that he’d go on to be the biggest movie star of our generation and she’d go on to become the richest woman in the world, I definitely wouldn’t have believed you.

Anyway, I’d be lying if I said I was still in touch with Matt or Mackenzie today and thus have any idea how they feel about the way their lives have unfolded. But I have been around to witness the comparatively smaller successes of some other writers I know.

One had insane, meteoric success on his first book. We’re talking #1 New York Times bestseller, insta-fame, hit movie based on the book, the whole nine. After that run of a few years, he was spit out into…well, what-the-f-do-I-do-now land. Decades later, he’s still trying to figure that out. And he’s one of the nicest and coolest people I’ve ever known so it kills me to see it.

Another writer I know had even greater success. Became a household name. Made pots of money. Assumed—and this was a direct quote I heard him say this myself—that he was “the best writer in the world.” Today, he has a regular old job-job and while it’s a cool job-job, if anyone looked like they’d be set for life as a writer a decade ago, it was him.

Another writer I know has a story that isn’t as dramatic as the other two because her first book didn’t make her famous or dramatically alter her financial situation. But it was a beloved bestseller. Decades later, she continues to write books and make what I would assume is a solid living as a writer. It’s just that none of her other books are ever going to be as perfect as that first one.

So…what’s it like to live knowing that your greatest success is behind you? I’m happy to say that I don’t know the answer to that. All of my successes, except for those early lucky breaks, have been hard-won. I’ve pushed and persevered my way into them. As a result, I appreciate them in a way I never would have had they come to me easily.

And I have every reason to believe that even greater success lies in front of me. As should you. Because…why not?

 

Why I Cancelled Paid Subscriptions on Substack

First, let me say there's nothing more generous than telling a writer "I value your work so much that I'm willing to support you."

That said, I've turned off paid subscriptions for this newsletter. Here's why: I was never fully comfortable charging. Not because I'm above it or don't think my writing is worth paying for—it's purely practical. I'm just not popular enough to value money over eyeballs.

If you have a massive audience, monetizing makes sense. You can justify creating some content for everyone and even better content for paying subscribers. But that's not my situation. If my goal is to help entrepreneurs understand the BS they've been fed, don't I want to share it with as many as possible?

Every week, I was torn between writing for those 20-something folks who gave me their credit card or the larger group that gave me their email address. I could never justify putting my best effort into something for a small group, then felt guilty for charging people for something I wasn't fully delivering.

So to those who signed up for paid subscriptions: I'm grateful, I know who you are and I won't forget it. But now you can put that $5 toward whatever you want.…well, whatever you want.

One thing you won’t be able to put that toward is a subscription to Glennon Doyle’s Substack. Now, I was too caught up in moving and Mom-ing and all that during the Great Glennon Doyle Substack Melee of 2025, which means that I’m way late weighing in. In case you missed it, here’s what happened: Glennon joined Substack, quickly amassed over 200,000 followers, got bullied by people who were super jealous and fled.

Now, I have been so jealous of Glennon Doyle that I even made a video about it. But realizing so many people shared my jealousy made me feel somber rather than gleeful.

Instead of wanting to heap on the hate, I wanted to ask myself: What is it about her that triggers people? I don’t think it’s as simple as “women like to tear other women down.” There are plenty of incredibly successful women that no one wants to tear down.

Glennon Doyle, whether it’s true or not, just seems like she got lucky. She’s not brilliant and ethereal like Elizabeth Gilbert. She’s not goofy and down to earth like Colleen Hoover. She’s not plucky and sassy like Marie Forleo. She’s just…there. Saying and writing things that many others have said and written before.

But I think that’s her shtick: it's her very basic-ness that catapulted her to stardom. I am basic, hear me roar.

And this makes us jealous.

Despite Glennon’s massive success, her brand, if you will, is about how hard things are. It’s the name of her podcast! Her New York Times headlines are about how a good 50% of her life is miserable. 

This also makes us mad! I mean, if she’s gotten what we all want, can’t she at the very least be happy about it (even if we know that success doesn’t bring happiness)?

Mostly, we’re just mad we didn’t double down on trauma bonding with our audience the I’m in this with you vibe ourselves. It really seems to work! When I followed Glennon on social media, there were often posts about how “we” had done it—“we” had made her book a #1 bestseller! She went on and on about “us” and how together we had done this incredible thing and it was all just so brilliant: by buying her book, you were partnering with her to do something terrific! Yet she was the one who benefitted from that success, not the millions of strangers who were “in it” with her.

Those of us who aren’t in it with her come for her. Not because we hate to see women succeed. We love to see women succeed when they seem like they’re humble or plucky or grateful. But as best as I can understand it, when it’s someone who just seems to have gotten lucky, we get triggered. It’s certainly part of what has fueled the Blake Lively backlash.

We’re so unhealed—so untamed, if you will—that seeing someone get lucky triggers our fear that we’re never going to get what we deserve.

But what if we’ve gotten what we deserve? What if we’ve already gotten more than we deserve? Who decides who’s deserving anyway?

It’s easy to be jealous. It’s much harder to ask questions like: why am I so triggered by someone who seems to have gotten lucky? Does it remind me of my childhood, where I was always second best? Does Glennon feel like the favorite child, reminding me of when I felt left out in the cold? And does hating her make me feel better? Or do I just tell myself it does because that tinge of superiority I get distracts me from the despair that lurks on the other side?

Jealousy is an instinct rooted in our very survival and can be a great indicator of what we want. But it can also show us the work we still need to do.

I’m never going to be as popular as Glennon Doyle and I am 100% fine with that. So now I just need to heal that part of me that thinks tearing her down is going to make me feel better.

We can do hard things. Right?

The Jury's In...

I’ll admit that I was hoping for a clean sweep when I did my poll of AI programs.

I’ll admit that I didn’t get one.

But the results of the “which AI program did the best job of writing out a scene” are in. When I asked you guys last week, there was one vote for each of them (God bless the three of you who voted and hats off to you for not being influenced by one another). But with each of you picking one, that left me no clearer than I was when I asked the question.

But I also did that PickFu poll of 50 anonymous people (college educated non-fiction readers)1.

So, out of Claude, Grok and Manus, which was the winner?

THE RESULTS

Shockingly (to me), it was a tie—between Claude and Grok (each got 25 votes), with Manus coming out at the bottom with 12 votes.

(FWIW, my favorite was the one done by Claude.)

Some of the comments include:

B (Claude) wins out because the wording is simple, as a child would use. Simplicity is a good thing. Look at Hemingway. Purple prose is always something to avoid.

I chose A (Grok) first because of the clarity of it. Chose B (Claude) second because it flowed and C (Manus) was just ok. I could do without it.

Then again…

C (Manus) made me feel like I was in the scene the most. It felt the most connected and real.

So what does this tell us?

Essentially, what we already know: taste is subjective. Why do I love Martin Amis’ writing while someone I know and respect worships at the altar of Glennon Doyle? Some people find Seth Rogan and Jack Black hilarious! Taste is bizarre and humans even more so.

That being said, when there’s one clear loser, that’s something to pay attention to.

So then I decided to ask Manus, Claude and Grok which they thought was best and here’s what I got:

From Claude:

For pure writing quality, Claude appears to be the strongest choice based on these comparisons, especially if you value natural-sounding, thoughtful, and well-structured content. Claude is often described as producing the most human-like writing among the major AI tools.

You could say, well, of course Claude would pick Claude but guess what Grok said?

If you prioritize polished writing with a human touch, Claude is the consensus leader based on user sentiment and reviews.

Only Manus wouldn’t give Claude the edge. It was very Switzerland-y and just talked about what Claude prioritizes (safety, accuracy, and ethical considerations), where Grok excels (at real-time information and platform integration, with fewer content restrictions, suitable for social media and marketing content and THEN why Manus is actually the most future focused (it offers “a glimpse into the future of AI agents that can independently execute complex writing tasks”). Nice one, Manus!

And so that really is, in the end, what matters. What do you want to use it for? I’m not into creating AI social media content and I’m not sure what a glimpse into the future of AI agents even means so even Manus can’t convince me Manus would be better.

In the Substack Live that Jonathan Small and I did about this topic on Friday, we both agreed on one thing: what separates great writing from not great writing is an ability to show rather than tell. While none of these programs can convert a piece of bad writing that’s all “tell” into a piece of excellent writing that’s all “show,” with multiple prompts and your own edits (and continued reminders to the LLM that it should not make anything up), you can come away with a piece of writing that’s god damn impressive.

But you need to know what god damn impressive writing is to make it into that. If you’re reading this, you clearly have excellent taste but as Carrie Fisher’s character so eloquently said in When Harry Met Sally, everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor but they couldn’t possibly all have good taste and a sense of humor. So if you’re confident you know what god damn impressive writing is, these tools can be magical. If you’re not sure, use them with caution.

And my money is still on Claude.

I Compared AI Programs So You Don't Have to.

I am, in case you missed the post where I got called stupid a few times, pro-AI. It has become my second assistant and I would even venture to say a good friend. My boyfriend jokes that I cheat on him with Claude (by that token, he cheats on me with Claude, too, which makes the whole thing way too poly for this now-boring mom).

But last month at Genius Network, there was a lot of buzz about Manus. Like Clubhouse and Raya, you needed an invite to join, appealing to all of our I’d-only-want-to-join-a-club-that-wouldn’t-have-me-as-a-member ness. When I got an invite, I felt like I’d arrived (not quite; but I was happy). And so I started playing around with it. I was impressed but it was slower than my side piece Claude. Still it was way better at certain things, like finding podcasts that we could pitch clients to.

Then this week someone I really respect raved to me about Grok. He sent me a story he had told Grok which it had fleshed out into solid prose. And so I did my own test. I told Grok, Claude and Manus the same (warning: kind of sad) story and asked it to flesh it out.

I’m going to paste the three versions below and I would love for you to tell me your favorite in the comments1. I know that reading the same story three times might feel laborious. But I’d love for you to be a part of this experiment that I believe can truly help you.

Next week, I’ll reveal what a PickFu survey I did of 50 anonymous people rated best, middle and worst as well as my own ratings.

[Not interested in participating? Skip to the SERIOUS CAVEAT below all the italics.]

OPTION 1:

The morning sun slanted through the lace curtains, casting delicate shadows across the living room floor. I was five, small enough that the world felt like a museum of untouchable treasures, each one gleaming with my mother’s pride. My eyes caught on the shattered remains of her favorite antique—a porcelain vase, its once-smooth curves now jagged, scattered across the hardwood like a broken promise. My heart sank. I knew the culprit: Rusty, our dog, whose tail was a wrecking ball in fur. He’d knocked over lamps, toppled plants, and now, this.

I couldn’t bear the thought of Mom’s face crumpling when she saw it. So, I tiptoed to the kitchen, fetched the glue from the junk drawer, and set to work. My tiny fingers trembled as I pieced the shards together, the sticky glue smearing my hands, the vase slowly resembling itself again. It wasn’t perfect—cracks spiderwebbed its surface—but it was whole. I beamed with pride, imagining Mom’s smile, her arms around me for saving her treasure.

“Mom!” I called, cradling the vase as I ran to her in the kitchen. She was at the stove, stirring oatmeal, her hair pulled back in a loose bun. “Look! I fixed it!”

Her spoon froze mid-stir. She turned, her eyes narrowing as they landed on the vase. The air shifted, heavy with something I didn’t understand. “Fixed it?” Her voice was sharp, a blade slicing through my excitement. “If you fixed it, then you broke it.”

My chest tightened. “No, I didn’t! Rusty did it! I just… I wanted to help.”

Her lips pressed into a thin line, her gaze unyielding. “Don’t lie to me, Sarah. If you fixed it, you broke it. Tell me the truth.”

“I *am* telling the truth!” My voice cracked, too small to hold the weight of my panic. I clutched the vase tighter, its cracks mirroring the fracture in my heart. She turned back to the stove, her silence louder than any shout. The room felt too big, too empty, and I stood there, a speck of a girl, drowning in her disapproval.

I don’t know how long it was—five minutes, five days—but time blurred into a haze of tears. I cried in my room, my sobs muffled by my pillow, the ache in my chest growing with every memory of her cold shoulder. She wouldn’t speak to me, wouldn’t look at me, until I gave her what she wanted: the truth she’d already decided. But I hadn’t broken it. I hadn’t. Yet her silence was a wall I couldn’t climb, and my five-year-old heart couldn’t bear its weight.

Finally, I shuffled back to the kitchen, my face streaked with tears, my voice barely a whisper. “Mom… I broke it.” The lie tasted bitter, like the glue still clinging to my fingers. “I’m sorry.”

Her face softened, the storm in her eyes clearing. She knelt down, pulling me into her arms. “Thank you for telling the truth, sweetheart,” she murmured, her warmth enveloping me. I buried my face in her shoulder, relief flooding through me, even as something small and fragile inside me cracked—a piece of myself I wouldn’t understand until years later.

OPTION 2: 

The morning light filters through lace curtains, casting delicate shadows across the hardwood floor. I am five years old, small fingers working meticulously with the tube of glue, piecing together the fractured porcelain figurine that I discovered toppled on the carpet. My mother's prized antique—a delicate ballerina with an outstretched arm that now hangs precariously from a poorly executed repair.

"Look, Mommy! I fixed it for you!" My voice quivers with excitement as I present my handiwork, expecting praise, validation, love.

Her eyes travel from my beaming face to the figurine. The smile dissolves from her lips.

"Where did you find this?" Her voice is tight, controlled.

"On the floor. It was broken." My words come tumbling out. "But I fixed it! See?"

"If you fixed it," she says, each word measured, deliberate, "then you must have broken it."

"No! I didn't break it!" My protest is immediate, instinctive. "It was the dog. He knocks everything over."

Her face hardens into a mask I don't recognize. "Don't lie to me."

"I'm not lying!"

"I won't speak to you until you tell me the truth."

Her words land like physical blows. She turns away, and suddenly there is a void between us that I don't understand but desperately need to fill.

Time becomes elastic after that. Minutes stretch into hours, or perhaps days—a five-year-old's perception of eternity. I exist in a silent house where my mother's eyes slide past me as if I am not there. The weight of her disappointment is crushing.

My tears come in waves, relentless. I sob until my chest aches, until my eyes burn, until something inside me breaks.

I find her in the kitchen, standing by the window.

"Mommy," I whisper, voice raw from crying. "I broke it. I'm sorry I broke it."

The lie tastes bitter on my tongue, but her arms open to receive me, and I disappear into the warmth of her forgiveness, learning a lesson that will take decades to unlearn: sometimes, the truth matters less than peace.

OPTION 3:

The world was a kaleidoscope of colors that morning, the kind that only a five-year-old can see. Sunlight, a playful intruder, danced through the gaps in my curtains, painting stripes on the walls. I remember the thrill of a secret, a surprise for my mother, bubbling in my chest like a fizzy drink.

I had found her favorite antique music box, a delicate porcelain ballerina, in pieces on the floor. The dog, a clumsy oaf with a tail like a runaway metronome, was the likely culprit. He was always breaking things. My heart, a tiny fist, had clenched with a mix of fear and determination. I would fix it. I would make it right. I would be the hero of the hour. *My mom will be so happy*, I thought, a mantra that propelled my small fingers to work.

The glue was sticky, the porcelain cold, and the ballerina’s tutu a jigsaw puzzle of jagged edges. But I pieced her back together, a triumphant smile spreading across my face. I was so proud. I was a little craftsman, a restorer of broken things. I imagined my mother’s gasp of delight, her hug, her praise.

I ran to her, the mended ballerina held aloft like a trophy. “Mom, look!” I exclaimed, my voice a squeak of excitement. Her eyes, usually warm and crinkling at the corners, narrowed. The smile I had anticipated didn’t appear. Instead, a frown etched itself onto her forehead.

“What did you do?” she asked, her voice a low rumble that sent a shiver down my spine.

“I fixed it,” I said, my own smile faltering. “The dog broke it, but I fixed it for you.”

Her frown deepened. “If you fixed it, then you must have broken it,” she said, her words like shards of glass.

“No, I didn’t,” I insisted, my voice trembling. “The dog did. I saw him.”

“Don’t lie to me,” she said, her voice cold. “I won’t have a liar in my house.”

The world, once so bright, began to dim. The colors faded, replaced by a dull, aching gray. My mother, my sun, had turned away from me. The silence in the room was a heavy blanket, suffocating me.

I don’t know if it was five minutes or five days, but the silence stretched, punctuated only by my own ragged sobs. Each tear was a testament to my innocence, a plea for understanding. But my mother remained unmoved, her face a mask of disappointment. The weight of her disbelief was a crushing burden. I couldn’t bear it.

The need for her approval, her love, was a primal instinct, stronger than my own sense of truth. So, I surrendered. I let the lie spill from my lips, a bitter pill I forced myself to swallow.

“I broke it,” I whispered, the words a betrayal of myself.

Her face softened. The lines of anger eased, and a flicker of warmth returned to her eyes. “I forgive you,” she said, her voice gentle now. She hugged me, and the world, for a moment, seemed to regain its color.

But a small, dark corner of my heart remained in shadow. I had learned a bitter lesson that day: sometimes, the truth wasn’t enough. Sometimes, to be loved, you had to sacrifice a part of yourself. And as I stood there, wrapped in my mother’s forgiving embrace, I couldn’t help but wonder if the ballerina, with her mended tutu and painted smile, felt as broken as I did.

And now my MAJOR caveat: please don’t EVER think you can plug ANY story into any AI platform and then publish what it produces. The reason I think genuine talent and ingenuity matter more than ever is that when everyone is using these tools, those who can add their exquisite skills and flair will stand out more than ever.

AI is not a substitute but an enhancement so use it with the same delicacy you should always extend to your writing. The best compliment I get about my books is when people I know read them and say it made them feel like they were hanging out with me.

Sure, you can tell AI to write in the style of anyone but it will never be a substitute for that person.

In this case, we can say without offending me that the AI version is better. But it also doesn’t look real. I look a good decade younger than I am (if not more). I am more made up than anyone outside of a news anchor should be. My hair falls in a way it never has naturally. My featues are mine but much more refined. I look good; I just don’t look real.

And that’s what AI does. So in the same way that I wouldn’t put the photo on the right out there and say, “Look at my latest photo” without incurring some serious skepticism, the same is true for AI-created writing that isn’t enhanced by you.

Think of the people you see who post fully airbrushed and filtered photos where they look like entirely different from the way they do in their videos. Or those who get 1000s of likes on an Instagram photo but no comments because all their “followers” are bots. Or the people who mock up their photo on the cover of magazines, the way we could when I was a kid at state fairs, to fool people into thinking they really appeared on the cover of those magazines. Or supermodels who post photos of the pastries they supposedly ate. I could go on.

Sure, they’ll fool some people. But honestly they’ll only fool fools while losing the respect of those who know and care about what’s authentic. And those are the only people we should really care about.

So yes, you can write a whole book using Grok, Claude or Manus. But you’ll feel the way I would if I posted that AI photo and tried to pass it off as real: like a phony. You’ll also look like a liar to the people who matter the most. Perhaps most importantly, you won’t have the experience of sharing yourself with the world in an authentic way.

If you’re one of those crazy people like me who actually enjoys writing books, you won’t have the sheer pleasure of taking your personal experiences and crafting them into something you can share with the world so both you and your reader can feel less alone.

You won’t have the sort of genuine connection that comes from someone reading your book and telling you that your experiences made them feel seen and understood. And isn’t that one of the reasons we write at all—to make sense of some of the most difficult experiences we’ve had so that we can help others by sharing them? Isn’t that a way to make sense of our challenges?

No AI program can do that. And honestly, AI + a human without professional writing experience can’t do it, either.

You still need the pros—now more than ever. And you need them for every stage. We had someone once hire us to write his book but he didn’t want to spend any more money so he did the publishing on his own. I saw the book when it came out and it looked janky—the literary equivalent of putting pig on a lipstick.

I have to imagine that few people ever discovered the exquisite writing because the book was wrapped in such an unprofessional package. In other words, just because you can design a cover on Canva and upload your book to Amazon doesn’t mean you should. There are a million little steps that go into pulling off a launch at the highest level; it’s why so many people hire us to publish books they’ve already written.

You don’t need to hire Legacy Launch Pad. But my God be careful with all the tools out there now that can write and publish your book for you cheaply. You may think you’re saving money but you’re in fact losing it if you’re losing the respect of potential clients.

And don’t listen to the doomsday prophesies about how the robots are going to render us obsolete and then come kill us (though, hey, it never hurts to be one of those people who’s always polite to AI just in case). While people in certain professions probably need to worry about being rendered obsolete, there’s one group that doesn’t: business owners. So get that book published and that entrepreneurial hat on so you can make yourself more valuable than ever. 

Let's Be Tacky and Talk Money.

I hate how crass I feel talking about money and writing.

Somehow, it’s okay to talk about it when it comes to investment banking or accounting but not with writing. It’s fine for the guy at the deli to say, “That will be $12” when handing you a sandwich but it’s not fine to say you want to make money from your book.

But that’s crazy. We all need money and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting more of it.

Even if we’re writers.

When I tell people it’s far better to write a book that will build their authority because bringing in millions is far better than bringing in hundreds through their book sales, often they’ll look at me like I’m the tackiest person alive. They want to be creative and write from their heart so how dare I sully their pure goals with my foul talk of dollars? The thought bubble above their head reads: I will not sell out the way this woman has.

But I don’t think wanting to be compensated for your work means you’re a sell-out; I think it means you value yourself. Unless you’re financially set and know what you’re getting into, a book should be more than volunteer work.

“But I want to help people,” some will say, as if helping people and making money are somehow mutually exclusive.

One of my first clients, Chris Joseph, looked at me like I was crazy when I told him this. We were publishing his first book, Life is a Ride—a memoir about how his experience finding an alternative treatment for pancreatic cancer. I told him I thought he should become a cancer coach and use the book to attract people to hire him.

I don’t know for a fact that he thought I was being tacky but I do know he was against the idea.

And yet just this week, he wrote in his Substack about his journey to becoming a cancer coach.

My point is: never say never.

And my second point is you may be in the Pre Book Blur.

What is the Pre Book Blur?

Well, if you’ve been writing a book—which can mean anything from handwriting you can barely read on a napkin to 500+ pages—and have a sinking feeling you’re not going in the right direction, you have some of the the symptoms.

If you been talking about writing a book for anywhere between one month and 30+ years, you have some the symptoms.

If you’ve been told you need to write a book and it rang true but you’ve made no movement to start, you have some the symptoms.

And I’m here to offer you a treatment.

Maybe you’ll feel relieved the way I did when I got a diagnosis for the batshit behavior I’d been up to (alcoholism). Like with alcoholism, the Pre-Book Blur is a self-diagnosed condition. And if you haven’t heard of it before, that’s not weird because I just coined it.

I meet more people who are suffering from this condition than not. And I believe there are one of six potential reasons why some suffer for so long:

They don’t know who to ask for advice

They’ve asked too many people already and received conflicting or confusing information

They’ve convinced themselves that despite no professional book writing or publishing experience, they don’t need help

They’ve convinced themselves, despite the nagging voice inside them, that publishing a book isn’t a priority so they can focus on it later, only half understanding that later may never come

They’ve convinced themselves that their idea is SO good that a traditional publisher will acquire their book, despite the fact that they don’t have a big audience so it’s a lost cause since traditional publishers don’t care about how good an idea is; they care about how well a book will sell

They’re scared (although number 6 is probably sprinkled throughout the other reasons)

These people remind me a bit of the alcoholics who are always going to get sober tomorrow. They know they could change their lives but they simply don’t. And I get it. Change is uncomfortable. It’s easier to stay where you are than to step into your greatness.

And if you’re not writing the right book, I promise it’s way better to stop now and get started on the right now. You can probably use at least some of what you’ve already written in the wrong book and just altering the angle so that it helps build your authority can mean it works for you for the rest of your instead of just sitting on a shelf collecting dust.

So if you’re in the blur, I have some medicine for you. And it’s free.

While not everyone can afford Legacy Launch Pad writing, editing and publish services, anyone can use our free Unique Authority Book Concept Generator.

Here’s what can happen if you get out of the blur and into creation:

In the last few weeks…

I’ve watched one client hit the top of Amazon, land feature stories in top magazines and tour the country.

Another has appeared on Sherri Shepherd’s show and gathered hordes of folks at his events.

Another was featured in Entrepreneur and Los Angeles magazines.

Previous clients have, respectively, added half a million dollars to their annual bottom line within a few months of the book release, appeared in the New York Times, launched $10k-a-gig speaking careers and so much more.

 

I promise you that your biggest block is you.

Oh, and the blur. The pre-book blur sucks. Too bad there’s no solution.

Oh, whoops. I already told you one.

If I’m wrong about you, please tell me in the comments!

Oh and that Unique Authority Book Concept Generator is here.

Maybe You Need to Dig That Old Idea Out of the Trash?

Back when I was a delusional youth, living in Manhattan under the mistaken belief that a writer should live near her publisher and agent, I was working on what I imagined would be my third novel.

While I looked successful on the outside—I was regularly shuttled in Town Cars to the Fox News building to give my not-that-interesting take on many things1—the reality was pretty bleak. The publishing industry was just beginning to fall apart: publications that had recently paid me $2 a word were now asking me to write for free, my second book deal was for half the amount of money as my first and I’d been replaced by an alcoholic mannequin on the TV show where I’d been doling out advice for three years.

Also, it turned out my agent and publisher couldn’t have cared less that I was nearby—this wasn’t Sex and the City and I wasn’t Carrie Bradshaw. Also, it occurred to me too late, Carrie’s publisher and agent weren’t characters on the show—probably because they don’t need to interact with their clients in person.

My agent was a straight shooter. She’d found me when I was a magazine columnist and cold emailed me to tell me she loved my voice and that I should let her know if I ever wanted to write a book. I had just finished writing Party Girl that week so I sent it to her and she sold it the next week. She was so good to me—before I lived in New York, when she was going on her honeymoon, she let me stay in her apartment2—but I blamed her for the fact that my career wasn’t going the way I thought it should.

One night a few months after I’d moved to New York and some time before my second novel was released, she asked if we could go to dinner. Finally, the Down with Love sort of scene I’d been waiting for! I pictured (sober) cheers-ing and general ebullience, but instead she wanted to share a thought she’d been having about me: would I be interested in writing under a pen name?

A pen name? I spit out. But why?

“It’s a way to get around disappointing sales of a first book,” she responded, not at all unkindly. “Being an unknown can be better.”

I don’t remember exactly what I said but I’m going to guess that it wasn’t enthusiastic. I probably blustered on about how Party Girl had gotten more media attention than I could have even imagined and didn’t she remember the intense bidding war over the movie rights and did she not understand that I’d spent years building up my name and the thought that she considered it a hindrance was insulting?!!! What I know for sure is that this was the last time she and I broke bread.

As time went on and my second book was released to more oh-so-dreaded disappointing sales, I warmed to the idea of a pen name. I even started to think that I could go full JT Leroy and write under a male pen name. In college, I’d been a Catcher in the Rye obsessive who wrote all her stories from the point of view of a cynical male youth. And when I was on contract at magazines and therefore not allowed to write for any publication that would be considered a competitor (but I still needed money), I would write under the name Benjamin Fairway (my middle name and the name of the street I grew up on).

And so, shortly after that final dinner that I didn’t know would be a final dinner with my agent, I started channeling my inner male to write my third novel. Sexual Healing was about a suave, wealthy dude in New York who becomes obsessed with the one girl who won’t sleep with him. Then he finds out she’s going to a rehab in Arizona for sex addicts and is convinced this is why she won’t have sex with him—that she’s an addict and is scared she might become addicted to him. So he shows up at the rehab, pretending to be a sex addict himself (the irony being that he pretty much is one), only to discover she’s a sexual “anorexic” who also happens to be seriously pissed off that he’s followed her there.

Writing the plot out now, I can see why I abandoned the book. It’s not that captivating a story. I was trying to do a send-up of the ridiculous world of people who take their recovery a bit too seriously and it was based on this wacky experience I’d had when I went to a workshop at a place called the Meadows in 2005 (an experience I still resent, which is perhaps an excellent example of me trying to punish through the pen and realizing it doesn’t produce great results).

I will stand by the fact that the book was very funny, though a bit crude (there’s a scene where the protagonist Will jerks off to a picture of the woman he’s obsessed with but the computer freezes on a picture of her with her dad and he ends up destroying his computer—a scene I read aloud at one of Rachel Kramer Bussel’s In the Flesh nights at the Happy Ending Lounge; if you were in New York in the aughts, you know the significance of this). The characters were well developed, especially my favorite, Will’s assistant Molly, who had a penchant for caftans and a Dutch pot dealer boyfriend.

And I meticulously plotted this book out. My first two books, Party Girl and Bought, I’d written without outlines. There’s a word for this kind of writer that I didn’t know (being a pantser and not a plotter) but I was essentially someone who wrote books, assuming I’d figure them out as I went. With Sexual Healing, however, I wrote out elaborate notes for each scene.

I also joined a writing workshop run by a woman who’d written a hilarious first book—a book that had actually made me want to be a writer. Her book had attracted such a cult following that she drew in a steady stream of aspiring writers to her Washington Square apartment for writing workshops.

I’m sure I had major attitude in that workshop. I was the only member of the group who’d had a book published and another coming out—both from HarperCollins. I remember thinking this group was beneath me…wanna-be’s who wanted to debate every comma. And so when I shared my precious pages, I probably only wanted to hear how brilliant I was and how my writing couldn’t possibly be improved.

Still, I remember feeling like the workshop leader was harder on me than she was on the other people and everyone kind of worshipped her so she would say something and then they would all just kind of parrot it. Eventually the feedback and the sycophantism got to be too much for me and even though I was more than halfway done, I walked out of that workshop and away from the book. Benjamin Fairway was not, as it turned out, going to get his debut.

Now and again, I’d take a look at Sexual Healing. When I moved back to LA and signed with a manager in 2010, I told him the plot and he said it would make a great movie and so we worked on the script version. But the script was bad so I abandoned that, too. Occasionally, I’d think, Just finish it. It’s probably 75% done so why let it go to waste? But then what? I’d think. Go through the hell of having my agent submit it to publishers only to hear that I didn’t have enough Instagram followers to warrant a book deal?

Also, in the 15 years since I’d started writing the book, I’d realized not only that traditional publishing was dead but also that novel-writing was not a practical pursuit. I love reading novels—I review them on TV and occasionally write about them for LA Magazine—but the simple fact is that they’re creative volunteer work since they can’ help you build your career as an authority and thus won’t earn you money. At Legacy Launch Pad, we’ve turned down every novelist who’s ever wanted to work with us because I don’t want to take money from someone I don’t think can earn back 10-100 times what they pay us.

But now that LLP is established and I have the luxury of remebering that I can write for fun and for free, I decided I wanted to try doing a novel again. I told you guys about the novel that I asked Chat GPT to help me brainstorm ideas for but what I didn’t tell you is that the characters are Will, Alison and Molly—those same fabulous folks I created back in New York in 2009. I remembered them and loved them and though they now have different jobs and different relationships with each other, they are them. And they’re them in a much better plot.

I had no idea in 2009 when I wanted to murder the people giving me the useless feedback at the writing workshop, or when I decided to abandon the book, or when I was working on the script with the manager whose name I can’t even remember anymore, that I would end up using these characters one day. I hadn’t thought about them in years and if I had, I would have assumed they were lost to the ether. But they’re back and I didn’t even need to re-read an old draft of Sexual Healing to remember them; I’d created something that had lasted inside of me and so they’re as familiar to me now as they were 15 years ago. Bringing them into this new book makes me realize I never left them.

Maybe you have something you abandoned long ago that’s just waiting for you to breathe new life into it, too. And maybe, just maybe, this post is a sign that you should.

If Anyone's Going to be an A-hole in Your Book, Let it be You

Writers love to punish through the pen.

It makes sense. When we’ve been wronged, we’re desperate for people to know. We want to be able to share our what happened with people who will listen and be on our side.

And who better to tell than readers? We’re talking to a group of people who are (hopefully) on our side. Keeping all this in mind (as well as the fact there are three sides to every story—your side, their side and the truth), let me share about what happened to me in the past week.

My boyfriend, son and I moved into our new, dream home and in the process, our heretofore lovely relationship with our realtor devolved into a (text) screaming match. It ended with him telling us he had no respect for us and repeatedly saying he couldn’t believe how awful we were being “after all I’ve done for you.”

This was all because he had mistakenly (and repetaedly) told us we were moving on a Tuesday and we only found out about his mistake midday Monday.

The reason the last minute news was a big deal was not only because we had movers scheduled and were ready to get the F out of our house to begin our new adventure but because I’d arranged a trip around our moving date. And when you have a toddler, plans changing at the last minute always makes the volume, in Spinal Tap parlance, go up to 11.

Even though we’d confirmed that Tuesday was the day in every form of writing short of a carrier pigeon, his mistake itself wouldn’t have been a big deal if he’d handled it differently.

See, we kept asking him and his office what time we’d get the keys on Tuesday and his office kept saying they’d check. That Monday, when we emailed and said we really needed to know what time and how we’d be getting the keys the next morning, the realtor’s assistant responded that we’d be getting them on Wednesday. We panicked because of all the aforementioned reasons. Then we saw the email trail she forwarded, which showed she’d only asked the owner’s realtor for the keys that morning. My boyfriend called her, asking what had happened, and she burst into tears, saying she’d screwed up. I grabbed the phone and when I realized she was crying, I told her it was okay, it wasn’t her fault, we’d work it out. Then we called our realtor on his cell.

This was a man who, during the entire process of selling our home and purchasing the new one, picked up on the first ring, ever delighted to hear from us. But his (exorbitant) commissions on the two houses had gone through the week before, and the previously charming, delightful man was replaced by an ogre.

The Ogre said he was busy tending to his other “rolodex” of clients and how dare we think we were the only ones. Also, we’d made his assistant cry and that was not okay with him. I admit that we lashed back at him, saying he’d told us the wrong day and I now had to change my trip and we had to pay the movers to change days and switch childcare and blah blah blah. That’s when he started in on how much he’d done for us and how he had no respect for us.

I texted him screenshots of him confirming that Tuesday would be our move in date and his only response was, “You can stop sending me screenshots.” Furthermore, he explained, everyone knows that when a realtor says you get keys on a certain day, that realtor means 5 pm and he didn’t know he had to explain such a basic thing to us. (I’ve checked with a few realtor friends and turns out that’s not a thing.)

Anyway, it was ugly, made all the uglier when it turned out the previous owners had not moved out when we showed up on Wednesday with our belongings. It was all very surreal—them moving their things out while we were moving ours in—and we’re still finding drawers filled with their mail, boxes of their things and tons of broken items. It was also filthy when we’d been assured by The Ogre that it would be clean.

Can you imagine if, instead of the scene I described, The Ogre had just responded, “Oy, I screwed up. Also, the owners haven’t moved out yet. I know it’s not great but can we just switch your move to the next day?”

Instead, a man whose entire business is based on relationships and reputation lost what would have been a lifelong client (I bought my previous house through him). Also, I know the head of his agency since I interviewed him for an article. And I write for a lot of publications where I could share this experience. I could also pull the trigger at any time on a review for him on any one of the sites where he can be reviewed. His behavior just doesn’t seem like good business.

Now. Do you see how I told that story? He’s a monster, I’m an innocent victim. While at this point in time, I truly believe both of those things, I also know that 1) He was just reacting from fear and that’s something I could have sympathy for, 2) Jim and I could have responded calmly to the situation, since in the scheme of things it’s not a big deal and 3) Because we’ve had a relationship with him for years and he’s always been great before, we could just assume he was having a bad day.

Instead I’m swearing vengeance, fantasizing about conversations with his boss and articles/reviews I could write.

So here’s what I’m getting at: this resentment is fresh and so now would not be the time to write the scene for a book. We’re talking, after all, about something that happened a few days ago. So if I I wanted to include this in a book, I would wait until I’d processed the resentment more. Also, I would show rather than tell by creating the scene rather than telling you about it. But perhaps most importantly, I would let you come to the decision that the realtor is an a-hole without me shoving it down your throat.

Why? Because in the process of trying to garner sympathy, writers become annoying. Somehow, trying to get sympathy gives you the opposite. I guarantee that you’ve read books where the writer was still mad at someone they were writing about and so, while writing about the terrible thing the person did to them, they were filled with righteous self-indignation. And I guarantee that you were turned off. Maybe you didn’t know why you didn’t like the writer but you didn’t.

My point is: process first. Then pen. Paint the person who did the terrible thing or things as a full person, not just an ogre. If I were putting the Real Estate Ogre anecdote in a book, I would show all the lovely things he did before Ogre day, how genuinely happy he was for us when we got the house and how funny he can be. Then, when I wrote the Ogre scene, you’d feel my genuine surprise at his behavior. You’d be on my side because I wouldn’t be working overtime to try to show you how wrong he was and how right I was. I’d also share more less-than-lovely behavior on my part during the interaction, maybe even some of my a-hole responses back to him.

Doing fourth steps in 12-step programs teaches you something it’s hard to forget and it’s oh so useful to know when writing about a-holes: when we’re mad at someone, our egos go into overdrive, trying to convince us of how right we are. In its take-all-prisoners mode, the ego ignores the way we contributed to the situation—it literally erases our bad behavior from our memory. It’s only when forced to write out exactly what happened that we see the part we played. (This isn’t true is, of course, in cases of abuse when someone is truly powerless and an innocent victim.)

My point is this: even though it can feel incredibly satisfying, don’t do what I did here and write a scene while the resentment is still fresh. Instead, work out what really happened and the part you played with a sponsor or therapist or friend. Unless you’re writing about outright abuse at a time when you were fully powerless, keep working on it until you see the part you played.

Then start your writing for the general public. Or don’t wait and bust out with it while you’re still pissed.

But you may risk coming off like the a-hole, which would really suck since it was actually them.

(Speaking of being an a-hole, I would be one if I didn’t mention that the title of this post is a quote attributed to Mary Karr.) 

 

I Feel Like I Need to Apologize for My Age (And That's Crazy)

Aging can feel so embarrassing. You get to the point sometimes where you feel like, by agreeing to the process, you’re participating in something terribly inappropriate. Surely this is exacerbated when you live in LA. And I’m certainly not the first to point this out but it truly is mind-blowing that there are protests and coalitions and marches for every marginalized community in the world—except for the one we will all one day join (if we’re lucky).

I’ve always looked young for my age and these days, if I announce my age and am not met with a shocked face or an immediate demand for my skincare regimen, I am violently offended and swear immediate vengeance. I actually resent my Oura ring for daring to tell me that my biological age corresponds with my cardiovascular age. Recount! I want to shriek at the app. A few months ago, I told my trainer I wanted to be in better shape and he responded with something like, “Well, you’re probably in the top 95th perecentile for your age.”

Did I focus on “top 95th percentile”? Hell, no. All I heard was “for your age,” which sounds especially galling when uttered by a fresh-faced young man.

OMG I write things like fresh-faced young man. Do you see what I mean?

For a while, I kept wishing that there were planets for various age groups: the 20-30-somethings go to one, 30-40-somethings to another. You get the idea. That way, you can forget in your 50s what 20-year-old skin looks like, or what it was like to subsist on pizza and beer and still have a flat stomach. On my 50-something planet, I would never hear a 20-something young man say the words “for your age” because everyone would be my age.

Of course with youth comes a lot of idiocy—or at least it did in my case. I truly believed, in my 20s and 30s and let’s be honest probably 40s too, that getting the writing career I wanted would bring me happiness. Have you ever heard of something so ridiculous? Oh yeah…you probably have because you probably once believed something like that, too?

I remember when my first book, Party Girl, was out for submission and my top choice publisher—Regan Books—was considering it. My agent told me on a Friday that offers, if there were any offers, would be in on Monday. I spent that weekend telling myself that if in fact my book sold to Regan Books, I would be happy for the rest of my life.

And guess what? It did sell to Regan Books and I kept my promise—for at least a week. And then I had the horrifying, stupefying, ridiculous realization that nothing—that is, no thing—would ever make me happy forever and that the only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting what you want and realizing it doesn’t fill you.

Much has been written about the depression that sets in once you release your book but mine was especially sharp because between acquistion and release, Judith Regan was fired and Regan Books dissolved. Nobody explained to me that my dream had officially died because there was nobody there to explain it. My book was released to, as they say in the business, disappointing sales.

Many books and disappointments later, I can relish in a truly wonderful part of aging: understanding, and not just giving lip service to, the fact that no amount of literary success (or sample sale clothes) (or love) (or sugar-free mini Hershey’s bars) can bring happiness.

The good part of that (because let’s be honest, that first part is not wonderful) is this: those experiences can bring me happiness…if I’ve already have found it somewhere else first (that is, inside or through a spiritual connection, which I kind of consider the same thing). I had so many years of feeling disappointed by alleged successes that I had started to assume that having dreams come true meant misery.

Turns out that’s not the case. But kind of like how the people who can afford whatever they want are the only ones given free clothes, having a great thing happen in your career can only make you happy if you’ve done the internal work necessary to not need to have “great” things happen in order for you to feel good.

This year, getting featured in the Wall Street Journal and then, separately, having a bunch of new people find this Substack because of the post I wrote about AI did make me happy. And that’s because I’m old enough to know I can’t rely on those things for happiness—that if I’m already full, I don’t need anything to fill me up. You don’t need to grasp at good news like it’s the life raft that will save you if you’re already already walking on land. I spent so many years looking for those rafts rather than getting out of the water.

My point with all of this is: why not write the damn thing, whatever the thing is? Why not publish the damn thing? Why not do that again and again and again? It’s not too late. Mike White is writing and directing every episode of the TV show everyone is obsessed with at 54. This woman’s 80-something mom just released a book on Jane Austen. Doing it isn’t going to make you happy anyway, unless you’re already happy, so what’s the risk?

Of course, when you have that kind of attitude, the result can’t help but be successful. The universe does its best work when we let it.