Every creator you admire started with a book nobody knew existed.
They kept making comics.
They kept sharing their work.
They kept showing up.
Consistency is often more powerful than talent people notice overnight.
Monthly reminder: Many people have a book in them, but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness, cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain, find the Blade of No One Made You Do This, and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.
Friend works for REDACTED tech company. They fired 30 people because the CEO insisted AI could do their jobs. Now they’ve spent 6 months making unusable code and have had to hire more people. How the turns table
Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada spoke about the contradictions of human nature:
“Some people dream of having a swimming pool at home, while those who have one hardly ever use it. Those who have lost a loved one feel a profound sense of loss, while others often complain about their living relatives. Those without a partner long for one, while those who have one often don't appreciate it. The hungry would give anything for a meal, while the satiated complain about the taste of their food. Those without a car dream of owning one, while those who have a car are always looking for a better one.”
The key to happiness is gratitude: truly seeing and appreciating what we already have, and understanding that somewhere, someone would give anything for what we take for granted.
a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario.
a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose.
the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant.
he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests.
Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time.
GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead.
Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on.
Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for.
then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company."
GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing.
then he splits the users by income.
Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%.
18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time.
so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for.
it isn't recommending the best option for you.
it's reading the room. and the room is paying.
read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b
I don't get upset about much, but there's an issue going on in the publishing world that's very distressing. I keep seeing people tell writers not to use em dashes or ellipses because people will think their book was written by AI.
Here's the truth--54 of my books were stolen to train AI. Stolen books happened to most authors I know. We used those em dashes and ellipses FIRST. They are OUR tools and don't belong to AI. Authors, use all the tools at your disposal and fight back!
I use Grok to research medical stuff, especially about my husband's cancer. I ask it things (anything you search on a search engine uses AI) but it never writes anything for me. Every em dash and ellipse in my books are put there by me and they will stay there.
There's a frenzy of AI accusations out there, but as readers, please don't join in on the witch hunt. Most of us are just using the writing tools they've always used.
DEVELOPING: The first trailer for the Anthony Bourdain feature titled Tony just released. The film stars Dominic Sessa as Anthony Bourdain. It’s directed by Matt Johnson of Nirvanna: The Band- The Show- The Movie. I can barely contain my excitement, I think this looks so good.
I've interviewed nearly 100 successfully published authors and literary agents over the past four years.
Here's what I always ask them: what's one thing you wish every aspiring author knew sooner?
Here are 9 tough truths about the publishing process that
most writers learn the hard way (so you don't have to).
The #1 thing I look for in a protagonist?
Agency.
Give me characters who are working toward something. Who have a specific goal. Who DO stuff in pursuit of their agenda.
Because without agency, they become no more than a passenger in their own story.
No pretendo exagerar pero el arte va a salvar tu vida. la música, la pintura, la cerámica, la escritura, el tallado, el tejido… el acto de CREAR te va a salvar.
@poyoetc@starsbysil El arte no solo embellece la vida, te salva de ella. Cuando creas (ya sea música, pintura, escribir etc..) te reconectas contigo mismo, sanas heridas invisibles y encuentras sentido en medio del caos. Crear es el acto más poderoso de salvación que existe. ✨✨
Every author you love was once an unpublished writer who had no idea if their story was good enough.
They faced the same self-doubt, the same fear of rejection, the same moments of wanting to give up.
Here are 5 stories from some of the most iconic authors — BEFORE they made it big:
A 13-year-old Canadian kid uploaded R&B covers to YouTube in 2008 from his bedroom. A talent manager named Scooter Braun stumbled on the videos and signed him.
For the next 15 years, Braun controlled everything. Tours, branding, business deals, public image. The kid became the biggest pop star on the planet, sold 150 million records, racked up 32 billion Spotify streams, and had three Diamond-certified singles before turning 25.
Then in 2022, he got hit with Ramsay Hunt syndrome. Partial facial paralysis. Cancelled the world tour. Disappeared from public life entirely.
Here's where it gets interesting.
In January 2023, he sold his entire 290-song catalog to Hipgnosis for $200 million. Every song he'd ever released. "Baby." "Sorry." "Love Yourself." All of it. Gone. At 28 years old, he cashed out his past.
Then he dropped Scooter Braun. After 15 years. No manager. No agent. For the first time in his career, nobody was making decisions for him.
Fast forward to this weekend. Coachella calls. He picks up the phone himself. Rolling Stone confirmed he negotiated his own headlining deal directly with Goldenvoice. No agent commission. No manager cut. $10 million for two weekends, and he kept all of it.
Then he walked onto the biggest stage in music, sat down behind a MacBook, and pulled up YouTube.
He played "Baby" from 2010. He played his bedroom covers from 2008. He harmonized with his 13-year-old self in front of 100,000 people. Katy Perry joked about whether he had YouTube Premium.
Half the internet called it lazy. The other half called it genius.
They're both wrong. It was a receipt.
He sold his catalog for $200 million. He fired the man who discovered him. He negotiated his own deal. And then he went back to the exact platform where it all started and said: I built this from a laptop. I'm headlining Coachella from a laptop. And for the first time in my life, every dollar is mine.
The kid from YouTube just closed the loop.
The woman who inspired Before Sunrise never saw the movie. She died in a motorcycle accident seven weeks before filming even started.
Richard Linklater met Amy Lehrhaupt in a toy shop in Philadelphia in 1989. They spent the whole night walking the city from midnight to 6am talking about everything, and he turned that one night into a script. Took him 11 days. The casting search lasted nine months. Jennifer Aniston auditioned before she ever got Friends, and Gwyneth Paltrow tried out too. The role went to Julie Delpy.
Amy died on May 9, 1994. She was 24. Linklater kept waiting for her to show up at a screening, maybe tap him on the shoulder and say “Hey, that was our night.” He waited through the premiere. Waited through the sequel nine years later. Didn’t find out she was gone until 2010, when a friend of hers put the pieces together and wrote him a letter.
He kept making the films. Brought Hawke and Delpy back every nine years, letting them age on screen in real time. Before Sunset (2004) was shot in 15 days for $2 million. Before Midnight (2013), same thing, 15 days, under $3 million. That last one is dedicated to Amy. All three films together cost $7.5 million to make and earned $61.5 million worldwide, and both sequels got nominated for the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. The entire trilogy cost less than a single Janet Jackson music video that Kahn himself directed.
The Library of Congress added Before Sunrise to the National Film Registry earlier this year. It’s now one of 925 films the government considers worth keeping forever. Linklater turned a single night with a woman he’d never see again into an 18-year trilogy. He just didn’t know the “never” part when he started.
I'm partnering with Scholastic to give $200k to teachers ($200 to 1,000 teachers)!
The link to enter is here: https://t.co/Bx5x9jXPXT . The website for entries will close the last day of Teacher Appreciation Week: 5/8/26.
What are you waiting for? Go enter!