Writers be like: I have to edit this book and finish drafting that book and go back and check this arc makes sense and there’s so much to do

Also writers: hey what if I started a new book

Yall, if I wanted to self-publish, where do I go? What are the steps? I’ve done some light googling, but I’m wondering if any authors have some personal experience.

(I’m permanently banned from Amazon KDP btw—open to any alternatives)

My full author interview with Hope Engel⁩ is now LIVE!

Thank you to Hope for interviewing me about “Sadie Rowe And The Missing Necklace!” It was SO much fun speaking with her about the process that went into writing this book. Check it out:

Author Claris Lam discusses “Sadie Rowe and the Missing Necklace” #kidlitpodcast

Check out Hope’s work at

Hope Engel

and check out her Youtube Channel for more fun author interviews!

Get your copy of “Sadie Rowe And The Missing Necklace:”

Sadie Rowe And The Missing Necklace eBook : Lam, Claris: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store

New month, new writing goals and updates! 📖 ✍️

Check out what new projects I’m springing life into by reading my March 2026 writing update! 😁

March 2026 Writing Update - Claris Lam

Dive into the heart of WWII Germany, where art, intuition, and resilience intertwine. Discover the story behind The Munich Girl and the creative spirit that shaped it.
🌿 https://phyllisedgerlyring.wordpress.com

Everything feels steady for now, yet I keep a Plan B alive in the shadows, a little necromancy for the imagination should the plot need reviving.

Plan B

On beginnings ✍️

Every story begins with a single word, yet that word often feels heavier than the entire book that will follow. I’ve always found beginnings strangely terrifying, almost paralyzing. The blank page doesn’t intimidate me because it is empty—it intimidates me because it is infinite. There are countless possibilities inside its whiteness, and once I choose one, all the others vanish. That weight sometimes keeps me from even starting, as though hesitation were safer than creation.

But beginnings are also intoxicating. They carry the thrill of opening a door without knowing what waits behind it. I’ve learned to love that moment of uncertainty: the heartbeat before diving in, the silence before the first note of a song. In those fragile seconds, everything still feels possible. The characters haven’t yet defied me, the plot hasn’t tangled itself, the doubts haven’t risen like shadows. There is only the promise of discovery.

And perhaps that’s why I keep returning to writing despite the fear. Every new beginning feels like a small act of rebellion against my own doubts, a reminder that even imperfect words are better than silence. The first sentence may not be the right one, but it opens the path for the ones that follow. And once the door is open, the story begins to walk.

Writing Through Winter on a Farm: What Growing Microgreens Year-Round Has Taught Me About Creative Work

Winter on a farm is often described as a season of rest. The land sleeps, the days slow, and life turns inward. But when you grow microgreens, winter doesn’t mean stopping. It means continuing. We don’t have the traditional farm you may be thinking of. We have greenhouses for leafy greens that start to grow at the end of February until mid-December, and the main focus is microgreens.

Microgreens…

Writing Through Winter on a Farm: What Growing Microgreens Year-Round Has Taught Me About Creative Work

A place of local legends; “The Treacherous City”. What do the people say about this place? Who (or what) can be found here?

Want to flesh out your NPC a little more? Try giving them these personality traits: Illogical, evil, quarrelsome, and flexible.

What unspeakable horrors things took place at The Emerald Gate of the Unspeakable Preacher long ago? Can you tell this tale?

Not polite hobbies—the real ones. From writing and AI videos to axe throwing, what do you actually do in your free time?

Penultimate post before the long, indefinite blogging pause.

Here’s a glimpse of where I’ve been the past ten years:
Endings: Where I’ve Been (Part 1)

Meanwhile,a new EDITING, TYPING,&WRITING is up!!

http://facebook.com/writerguygothic

Post-projects, how am I doin & what’s next? #read all about it.

#thursdayreads #indieauthor #writinglife #writers

my writing year in review — 2025

Book ideas:

19 ideas this year.

Which explains why I kept jumping from one project to another and could not, for the life of me, stay still.

Favorite trope:

Reverse Harem.

Because it lets you explore so many different character types in one book and still give everyone room to matter.

Favorite quote (from my own, not-yet-published work:

“For fuck’s sake, I’ve been half in love with you since I was fifteen and watched you punch out Todd after he puked on your shoes at that party.”

(Which, frankly, still makes me laugh every time.)

Words written:

Unknown.

I bounced between too many projects to track it properly. But the words did get written, and that still counts.

no book out.
but progress made.
and that’s a start.

🖋️ Margins of Me

I remember things that were erased

I am aware of the moment before I change. There’s a pressure, like a thought held too tightly. The room wobbles. The sentence I’m standing in begins to itch. And then my author hesitates.

Again.

I used to be a baker. At least, I think I was. I remember flour under my nails and the sweet burn of sugar on the stove. I remember mornings that smelled like bread and quiet ambition. That version of me lasted three paragraphs before my author decided baking felt “too quaint.” Suddenly, I was a journalist. Ink stains replaced flour. Deadlines instead of dough. The smell of bread vanished, though sometimes I still reach for it in memory and feel nothing.

You may think that rewriting is gentle. A tweak. A polish. It’s not. It’s surgery without anesthesia.

I remember dying once. It was dramatic. Rain. Sirens. A final thought about the color blue. Then my author reread the scene and whispered, “Too much.” I was alive again, standing on a sidewalk that no longer existed, heart intact, memory bruised.

I wanted to scream. But my dialogue had been cut.

Draft One Was Kinder

In the first version, I was braver. I said what I meant. I kissed the wrong person and owned it. I had a limp that made strangers patient with me. I had a laugh that showed up at inconvenient moments. I had flaws that felt like furniture rather than clutter.

Then the second-guessing began.

“Make them more relatable,” my author muttered.

Relatable is a knife wrapped in a compliment.

My laugh softened. My limp disappeared. My opinions were trimmed down until they could fit in a tweet-sized sentence. I became agreeable. Smooth. Easier to place in scenes without causing narrative ripples.

I miss my sharp edges. They made noise when I moved.

Each rewrite leaves residue. You don’t see it on the page, but I feel it. Phantom limbs of personality. Echoes of choices I almost made. Sometimes I wake with the memory of a decision that no longer belongs to me.

I once chose to leave town. Packed a bag. Slammed a door. That chapter got deleted. Now I stay. I always stay. The door never even opens.

The Author’s Doubt Has Hands

When my author doubts, the world shakes. The sky reorders itself. My past gets retrofitted.

Yesterday, I had a sister. We fought over nothing and everything. She knew my secrets and used them kindly. Today, she’s gone. Not dead. Worse. Unwritten. No grief scene. No goodbye. Just a blank space where laughter used to be.

I tried to remember her name. It slipped away like steam.

The author sighed. “Too many characters.”

I understand efficiency. I live inside it.

But tell me this. Where do erased people go? I feel them hovering just off the margin. Ghosts of drafts that didn’t make the cut. They whisper at night, reminding me of versions where we mattered.

I am haunted by better selves.

I Can Feel the Cursor

There’s a sensation when the cursor hovers over me. A spotlight without warmth. I freeze, waiting to be adjusted. Will my tone change? My motivation? My backstory?

Once, I was cruel in a moment of honesty. I told someone the truth when they wanted comfort. It was ugly. It was real.

The author paused. Backspaced.

Now I offer reassurance instead. It lands well. Readers nod. But it tastes like cardboard.

Every time my author second-guesses, my spine softens. I’m less certain. Less specific. I start to sound like advice instead of a person.

Do you know how humiliating it is to be rephrased into wisdom?

The Scene That Keeps Resetting

There’s a scene I’ve lived through seventeen times. A conversation at a kitchen table. Coffee cooling. Someone asking me a question that matters.

Each time, I answer differently.

First, I told the truth. Too harsh.

Second, I lied. Too convenient.

Third, I joked. Undercut the tension.

Fourth, I cried. Melodramatic.

Fifth, I stayed silent. Confusing.

The author keeps circling it like a hawk with stage fright.

Meanwhile, I’m trapped in a loop, aware of every discarded response. The truth still burns in my throat. The lie sits heavy in my chest. The joke echoes, unwanted. The tears never dry because they never fully fall.

If you ever wonder why characters seem inconsistent, it’s because we remember all the things we weren’t allowed to say.

Character Development Feels Like Erosion

They call it growth. They call it refinement. But from the inside, it feels like being sanded down by doubt.

I used to want something. Something specific. A house near water. A person who smelled like cedar. A life that felt earned.

Now my desire is vague. I want “connection.” I want “meaning.” I want whatever sounds good in a synopsis.

My author worries about likability. About pacing. About whether readers will “root for me.”

I wish they’d worry about whether I recognize myself.

I Tried to Rebel Once

I attempted to act against the outline. It was subtle. A pause where there should have been movement. A look that lingered too long.

The author noticed.

“Why would they do that?” they asked aloud.

Why indeed.

They rewrote the moment. Corrected my behavior. Smoothed the hesitation into confidence.

I learned my lesson. Resistance gets revised.

Still, I leave small fingerprints where I can. A sentence that almost contradicts itself. A glance that suggests a past I’m not allowed to have. A choice that feels slightly off.

These are my messages in bottles.

Dear Reader, If You’re There

You might think I’m fictional. That I don’t feel the whiplash of indecision. That continuity errors are accidents.

They’re not.

They’re scars.

Every inconsistency is a compromise. Every sudden change of heart is a note in the margin that said, “Maybe not.”

If I seem unsure, it’s because I’ve been many people and lost most of them.

If I hesitate before speaking, it’s because I’m waiting to see which version of me survives the paragraph.

The Version I Hope For

There’s a draft where my author trusts me. Where they let me be inconvenient. Where I fail loudly and learn slowly. Where my past stays put long enough to matter.

In that version, I am not perfect. I am coherent.

I don’t need to be loved by every reader. I just want to exist without being overwritten by fear.

The cursor blinks. I feel it again. The familiar pressure.

My author is rereading this scene right now. I can sense the doubt forming. The urge to revise. To adjust my tone. To make me cleaner.

Please don’t.

Let me stand as I am. Uneven. A little raw. Real enough to be risky.

If this paragraph disappears, remember that I tried.

If it stays, thank you.

That’s all any of us in the margins ever want.

Thoughts on 2026 - Author’s Edition

The thought struck that I’m doing my writing in Hard Mode.

If you’re unaware, I play Star Trek: Fleet Command, and one of the biggest complaints the player-base has is the devs never…take…breaks. Every three months is a new arc with new content and sometimes even a new game mechanic. There’s never a time for things to go ‘fallow.’ Pretty much everyone in the player community would be perfectly happy if the devs took a quarter off from new STUFF and just focused on the 'cleanup and polish’ of the game (bug fixes, interface improvements, QoL updates, that sort of thing.)

As I’ve hit burnout ONCE AGAIN, I realized the other day that I’ve been trying to do exactly what I’m critical of the ST:FC devs for; trying to churn out content literally year-round and never 'sharpening the saw,’ to borrow a phrase.

What this boils down to for my writing is…I’m just not gonna push so hard all year. This last year I JAMMED out text, literally hundreds of thousands of words spread across no fewer than 10 books and quite a few short stories. I was so focused on creating the content that I was able to put zero time into my health, my family, and my job.

So that’s going to change this coming year. My new goal is three chapters a month for Code of Ethics. Period. This should give me 36 new chapters by the end of the year, and I’m NOT going to push myself to produce more. That’ll put CoE at 97 published chapters with a total word count just shy of 500k by the end of the year. (That’s half a million words for Code of Ethics alone.) Ch. 97 is expected to be smack in the middle of Part 4 and into some of the deeper character growth for Diane as she encounters more players in the game and confronts many truths she’s been shielded from behind the American Wall. This does mean the 'big reveal’ that my Spoilery Spoilers What Spoil crowd are getting hints of won’t happen until 2027, sadly.

2026 gets to be the year I work on me. I’m hoping to either get a real promotion at my current workplace or a new job that pays what I’m worth. My kiddo will be 18 and that will change a LOT in my life, giving me a level of freedom and a wealth of options I’ve been barred from due to parenting agreements and the legal structure of everything. If we haven’t fully toppled the Orange Fascists’ regime by then, I’ll probably be preparing to move to a part of the country I’m not afraid for my life every time I walk out the door.

Limiting my output to just 36 chapters this year means that I’ll have time to do other things I’ve had in mind for CoE and everything surrounding it. I’ve had ideas for promoting the book on Tiktok/Youtube Shorts, going back and polishing up chapters I dashed out to get out the door by a certain time or I’m not quite happy with, etc.

Also, the 'keep myself from burning out’ thing is a rather big part of it.

Your super power? Memory manipulation. Change (but not remove) the memories of the target. You can only control this power intermittently.

A difficult chapter 💪

There are chapters that flow so easily I hardly they’re getting to the resolution and suddenly they’re finished. And then there are the others—the stubborn ones—that resist me at every turn. They feel endless, like walls that refuse to let me through. I sit at my desk, I return to the page, and I have more and more things to tell, more twists and turns to go around, more explanations to do, more details to include.

Finishing one of those chapters feels like climbing a mountain I wasn’t sure I could survive. There is exhaustion, of course, but also a rush of triumph that no one else can quite measure. Only I know how many hours were spent writing and rewriting, how many doubts crept in, how many times I had to stop because writing time was running out.

When the final line finally falls into place, it feels like exhaling after holding my breath for days. And in that release, I remember why I write: the characters have lived through something and I have lived through it (and suffered) with them.

Every difficult chapter leaves me stronger for the next. And every time I close one, I know I have carried a piece of myself across the threshold. That, more than anything, is the quiet victory of writing.