Thursday, September 24, 2026
Considered writing on technology, design, business, and the craft of doing better work.
A human book coach, an MFA, a critique group, a shelf of craft books and an AI writing coach are five different products sold under one word. They cost between nothing and $60,000, and they fail in completely different ways. Here is what each one is actually for.
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Four days without words is where most books die. Not at the blank page, not at the ending — at the fourth silent day, when guilt takes over from momentum. Here is what the behaviour-change research says about that gap, and why streak counters and public pledges make it worse.
Eight story structures, one decision. They are not rivals describing different stories — they are different resolutions of the same photograph, and the right one depends on how you write, not on which book you read last.
Most people looking for a Scrivener alternative are solving one of three different problems — sync, cost, or the fact that organisation was never the thing stopping them. Those need three different answers, and picking the wrong one wastes a year.
Written by the people who set the price, which you should weigh accordingly. Here is exactly what sits behind the paywall, what stays free forever, the three writers who should upgrade, and the two who genuinely should not.
Most 'how to write a book' advice is a list of tips in no particular order. Finishing is a sequence problem: nine stages, each with a decision that has to be made before the next one is survivable. Here is the whole sequence, with the failure mode at every step.
Romantasy is the hardest thing to outline in commercial fiction, because it is two full arcs sharing one book. Get the peak order wrong and the ending deflates. Here is the beat structure, the failure modes, and how the ACOTAR and Fourth Wing pattern actually works.
Almost every cloud writing tool stores your draft in a form the vendor can read. That is fine for a shopping list and a different proposition for an unpublished novel, a memoir about living people, or a diary. What zero-knowledge encryption actually changes — and what it costs you.
Every writing app asks you to hand over your unpublished manuscript. CipherWrite is the one that encrypts it in your browser first, then still manages to run an AI beta reader, a craft curriculum and a manuscript auditor on top. Here is what it does, what it costs, and where the trade-offs are.
Eight story structures and nine genre starter kits, with the beats, the word targets, the attributions — and, unusually, an honest note on when each one is the wrong tool. A working guide to outlining, not a listicle of names.
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The US has recorded more measles cases in seven months of 2026 than in any full year since 1991, and is on course to lose the elimination status it earned in 2000. The virus's contagiousness is the part most coverage skips.
On 12 August 2026 the Moon's shadow crossed Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain — mainland Europe's first totality since 1999. It lasted barely two minutes. Next August, one lasts six and a half.
A channel 33 km wide at its narrowest carried a fifth of the world's oil. Traffic through it has collapsed to a tenth of normal, talks on reopening keep stalling, and the reason there is no workaround is mostly plumbing.
Searches for fibermaxxing are up 115% in 90 days and dietary fibre interest has hit an all-time high. The underlying evidence is unusually strong — which makes it worth being precise about where the trend gets it wrong.
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Thousands of impressions and zero clicks usually is not a title problem. It is a position problem — and Search Console's average position column is the first place to look, once you know how it is actually calculated.
GA4 now has a native AI Assistant channel, and it undercounts. Here is how to set up the reporting properly, why a large share of assistant clicks land in Direct no matter what you configure, and how to sanity-check the real number.
The stat doing the rounds — that most AI-cited pages carry structured data — is real and proves much less than it is used to prove. What schema demonstrably does, what the evidence cannot support, and why it is still worth shipping.
From 15 September 2026 Cloudflare blocks 'mixed-use' AI crawlers by default on ad-bearing pages — for new customers, new sites, and every free plan. What that changes, who it hits, and the settings to check before the date.
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A green Lighthouse score and a failing Core Web Vitals report are not a contradiction. One is a simulation on your machine; the other is 28 days of real Chrome users. Only one of them counts for ranking.
You can ship fast, relevant search on the database you already run. Here's how tsvector, GIN indexes, and ranking fit together in real projects.
In March 2024, Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital. Here's what INP measures, the thresholds that matter, and how to fix a slow score.
Largest Contentful Paint should be 2.5 seconds or less. Here's what LCP measures, the four parts a slow score breaks into, and the fixes that actually move it.
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Good alt text is a small craft with an outsized impact — on accessibility, on SEO, and on the moments when an image simply fails to load.
Visitors decide whether they trust a site in seconds, mostly on how it looks. Here are the research-backed signals that build credibility — and a checklist to audit your own site.
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