It’s cheating.

The printing press was cheating.
Photography was cheating.
Digital cameras were cheating.
Photoshop was cheating.

And now, apparently, AI-assisted writing is cheating.

Give humanity a new creative tool and someone will immediately stand up, point at it, and declare that this is where real art ends.

They have been wrong for centuries.

If you spend any time on Substack, in writing communities, or just wandering into the general chaos of the internet with a cup of coffee and too much optimism, you have seen the AI witch hunt in full swing. The breathless declarations and the comment section pile-ons. The passionate manifestos from people who have apparently decided that their most urgent creative calling is policing how other people make things.

Writers are being publicly torn apart for a tool they used and it is loud and relentless. And it is, frankly, one of the most historically illiterate arguments happening on the internet right now.

Because none of this is new, not even a little.

Every single time a new creative tool has arrived in human history, someone has stood up, pointed at it with great moral authority, and declared that this — this, right here — is where real art ends. They were wrong every time and they are wrong now.

The receipts go back centuries, and to see the future, one must look to the past.

The Renaissance Survived Without a Comment Section

By 1515, Raphael had assembled what was probably the largest painting workshop ever put together. Reports place fifty artists accompanying him to the Vatican each day — some apprentices, some fully mature artists functioning as partners. Raphael set the vision for every project and designed the compositions. He directed the execution, and oversaw the result. He did not personally paint every inch of every canvas, and under the guild rules of his time, he didn’t need to. A master’s signature meant the work met his standards and reflected his vision. It did not mean his hand had touched every surface— authorship was about the vision.

It was always the vision.

This wasn’t a secret or a scandal. It was simply how art got made — the same way a CEO builds a company. They have an idea for something that doesn’t exist yet. They assemble a team, the team uses tools, and those tools bring the vision into the world. Nobody storms the boardroom to inform the founder that the company isn’t really theirs because Sally drew the blueprint. The vision was theirs, the leadership was theirs, and the direction was theirs. The decisions about what the vision would be and what it wouldn’t — entirely, unmistakably theirs.

Raphael. Da Vinci. Rubens. Every major Renaissance master operated this way. The name on the work belonged to the person with the vision. That understanding held for five centuries without anyone requiring a Twitter thread to explain it.

The Renaissance didn’t have a comment section and the work survived anyway.

Ghostwriting Built the Industry That Now Wants to Draw the Line

While we’re doing historical housekeeping, let’s talk about the publishing industry’s favorite open secret.

Ghostwriting— and I have written about this before. You can read it here.

Estimates from inside the industry place somewhere between fifty and ninety percent of nonfiction bestsellers as ghostwritten or heavily co-written. That celebrity memoir you bought at the airport — in all likelihood, a professional writer shaped every sentence of it. That business book by the thought leader you admire — the odds are not in their favor. The influencer novel, the politician’s autobiography, the titan of industry sharing hard-won wisdom — the ghost economy built the shelves those books are sitting on.

And nobody is in the comments screaming about it. Nobody is writing impassioned notes about the inauthenticity of a memoir that was voiced into a recorder and handed to a craftsperson to shape into something readable. Nobody calls the author a prompter and nobody questions their vision or their voice or their right to claim the work.

Because the ghost is invisible and the assistance is hidden. And if we’re being honest, the argument stripped down to its bones is simply: “A robot helped.”

Which is funny, because most people aren’t actually interacting with a robot, they’re interacting with a language model that arranges words. The same computer they’re typing on is packed with automation. The cell phone, the car, the camera, the computer, the search engine— all robots, all machines, all things we happily accept as machine assistance everywhere in life. But when the machine starts helping with language—the thing we consider uniquely human—the discomfort suddenly becomes visible.

Photography Already Fought This War and Lost

When photography arrived in 1839, painters were dismissive from day one. Critics argued for decades that photography couldn’t qualify as real art because it lacked — and I’m quoting the actual period criticism here — “something beyond mere mechanism.” A machine available to anyone, they said, could not produce what a trained painter’s eye and hand could produce. The outrage was passionate, the moral authority was absolute, and the photographers of the time quietly kept shooting anyway.

I started in photography in the 90’s when it was film. I remember getting my first digital camera and I remember the arguments back then— photographers I knew who had spent years mastering their craft, treating digital like it was a personal insult to everything they’d built. And I understood the feeling because film required a particular kind of discipline. You couldn’t see what you were shooting until it was developed. You had your aperture, your shutter speed, your light meter, different lenses, limited number of images per roll of film and then the processing of film in the dark room— that was the palette. Every shot had weight because every shot cost something.

But here’s what those photographers refused to see: digital didn’t shrink the palette, it exploded it. Manual shooting on a modern digital camera gives you over a hundred ways to manipulate light — exposure, ISO, white balance, shutter speed, aperture, color profiles, sensor characteristics, the way different camera bodies render shadow and highlight. It is a more demanding creative instrument than film was in many ways, not a lesser one. The photographers who resisted digital the hardest are not remembered as the guardians of something pure. They’re just the ones who got left behind while everyone else kept making images.

And then came Photoshop — and the whole argument started over again.

Photographers who had accepted digital drew a new line in the sand. Photoshop was cheating and manipulation. It was an insult to the craft of capturing what was actually there. Some purist photographers didn’t use it. That conversation got loud and stayed loud for years — until it didn’t, because Photoshop became so embedded in the industry that the argument simply ran out of air. Now those same tools live inside your camera, inside Instagram, inside the free app you downloaded on your phone last Tuesday. The thing that was going to destroy photography became the thing photography runs on. Nobody calls it cheating anymore. Nobody calls it anything. It’s just editing and now industry standard.

Today, the retouching I do with AI assistance produces results in seconds that would have taken hours of manual work a few years ago. Even with this tool, my eye is in every frame and my vision shapes every edit. I am not less of a photographer because my tools got better and the argument that I’m less because I do is the exact same argument that was made about Photoshop over a decade ago and about digital in 2004, and about photography itself in 1839.

Same argument every time, different tool. Same people standing at the edge of the wave insisting it won’t reach them.

It always reaches them.

But What About the Water?

Ah yes, the water argument. The one that started appearing in AI criticism once the art theft argument got complicated and the “it has no soul” argument got philosophically awkward.

Data centers do use significant amounts of water for cooling — large facilities can consume up to five million gallons per day, and that is a real infrastructure challenge worth real conversation. The concern about water-stressed regions is legitimate, and the lack of transparency from tech companies about their usage is a fair criticism.

But let’s be precise about what that argument is and what it isn’t.

It’s worth remembering what these data centers are actually powering.

They are not giant warehouses built exclusively so fantasy authors can ask ChatGPT to help fix a paragraph. The same infrastructure supports cloud storage, video streaming, online banking, credit card transactions, email, search engines, GPS navigation, social media feeds, video calls, online shopping, cybersecurity systems, scientific research, weather forecasting, logistics networks, emergency response systems, hospital record systems, medical imaging analysis, pharmaceutical research, fraud detection, language translation, recommendation algorithms, smart home devices, autonomous vehicle development, content moderation, internet search, business analytics, and much of the modern internet itself.

The AI systems people criticize today are also being used to identify cancers in medical scans, detect diabetic retinopathy before patients lose vision, optimize power grids, accelerate drug discovery, improve accessibility for people with disabilities, translate languages in real time, assist customer service teams, analyze cybersecurity threats, and help researchers process data sets too large for humans to review alone.

In other words, when someone points at a data center and says, “That uses water,” they are not pointing at AI-assisted writing. They are pointing at the infrastructure behind a significant portion of modern digital life.

If we want a serious conversation about the environmental costs of that infrastructure, we should absolutely have one. But pretending the entire burden exists because a novelist used AI to brainstorm chapter titles is like blaming a single Netflix viewer for the existence of the electrical grid.

It isn’t an argument against AI-assisted writing. It is an infrastructure and regulatory argument about where data centers are built and how they are cooled — a conversation that belongs between tech companies, municipalities, and policymakers. When someone uses it in a Substack comment to dismiss a writer’s creative work, they have taken a genuine environmental concern and turned it into a rhetorical weapon aimed at the wrong target.

And the technology is already moving.

Closed-loop cooling systems can reduce freshwater use by up to seventy percent. Immersion cooling — submerging servers in non-conductive fluid — removes heat without evaporating water at all. Google and Microsoft have both committed to being water positive by 2030. The same innovation curve that drove AI capability is now being applied to AI’s resource footprint, because that’s what happens when a problem gets big enough to be worth solving.

The people wielding the water argument against individual writers using AI tools are not environmentalists. They’re reaching. And they will need a new reach soon.

AI slop

First, let’s acknowledge that AI slop absolutely exists. So do bad books, bad movies, bad paintings, bad photographs, bad songs, and bad opinions posted with tremendous confidence on the internet. The existence of low-quality work is not a revolutionary discovery and humanity has been producing slop since the invention of humanity.

What fascinates me is the people who can spot AI from three counties away.

They’ll confidently identify a suspicious phrase, a familiar cadence, an overused transition, or a sentence structure they believe gives the machine away, and sometimes they’re right. But to develop that level of pattern recognition, you generally need exposure to the pattern in the first place.

So in reality a significant number of the people writing the most passionate anti-AI articles have used AI. Maybe not to write the piece — but to research it or to summarize sources, or to draft an email, generate a caption, ask a question they didn’t want to Google at two in the morning. The tools are so woven into daily life that most people interact with AI multiple times before lunch without noticing. The reason so many critics can identify AI writing patterns so confidently is because they have spent enough time inside these tools to recognize the output. They’ve studied the fingerprints, memorized the speech patterns, and trained themselves to identify the tells. They have, in many cases, become specialists in the very thing they claim to despise.

The irony.

It’s a strange position to occupy. Imagine dedicating years to proving a restaurant serves terrible food, only to discover you’ve become the person who’s eaten there more than anyone else.

The average reader isn’t conducting a forensic investigation while reading an article. They’re asking a much simpler question: Was this useful? Was it entertaining? Did it make me think? Most readers do not arrive carrying a magnifying glass and a warrant.

I’m not saying everyone, but the people most determined to hunt for AI are often the people who have spent the most time staring directly at it in one way or another.

Tools

Back in the ’90s, Swiss Army knives were everywhere. They were bulky, bright red, and somehow every boy who owned one felt obligated to show you all seventeen attachments whether you asked or not.

The funny thing is that nobody judged how you used it. If you needed scissors, you flipped out the tiny little scissors. If you needed a screwdriver, you used the screwdriver. If you needed a knife, you used the knife. Nobody stood there insisting that real scissors users should carry dedicated scissors, forged by a master craftsman, and stored in a velvet-lined case.

Sure, the scissors were ridiculous. They were small, awkward, and attached to a pocketknife. But if someone needed to cut a loose thread, they got the job done. In fact, the person carrying the Swiss Army knife was usually the hero of the moment because they had the tool when the situation called for it.

A tool is a tool. People use them in different ways. And for most of human history, we’ve judged tools by whether they solved a problem—not by whether they were the purest possible version of themselves.

The Virtue of Doing It the Hard Way

When performance is difficult, effort can become identity.

Think about coffee for a second. Imagine someone who grew their own beans, harvested them by hand, roasted them over a fire they made with two sticks they found in the yard, ground them down with a rock from the driveway, and brewed the whole thing over an open flame at five in the morning.

Impressive commitment. Genuinely. But does that make their coffee better than the cup coming out of the machine on your countertop? And more importantly — does it make them a better person for having done it the hard way? The answer is no, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not actually talking about coffee.

Suffering doesn’t improve the coffee.

They’re talking about virtue and identity. They’re talking about the quiet belief that effort itself creates value.

We do this everywhere. The cyclist judges the driver. The manual laborer looks at the office worker. The painter looks at the photographer. The photographer looks at the AI artist. The writer looks at the writer using AI.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking whether the tool was useful and started asking whether the struggle was sufficiently painful.

But difficulty is not a moral achievement.

If someone rides a bike because they enjoy it, wonderful. If someone drives because they need to get across town in ten minutes, also wonderful. The bike is not virtuous and the car is not lazy. They are tools solving different problems for different people.

The same is true of creative tools. The value of the work isn’t measured by how many obstacles you refused to remove. It’s measured by what you ultimately created.

Because the question was never whether a tool makes something easier.

The question is whether the tool helps you create something worth making.

Where This Is All Going Whether They Like It or Not

ChatGPT alone has roughly 900 million active users. One in eight people on this planet, and it has been widely available for just three years. The trajectory is not toward less adoption, it’s toward more, faster, woven deeper into every form of creative and professional work that exists.

The generation stepping into adulthood right now grew up with these tools. They are not going to arrive at the keyboard carrying the same resistance that some people carry today, because for them AI assistance will simply be part of how things get made — the way spell check is, the way autocorrect is, the way Photoshop filters are now. Every tool that once felt like cheating eventually just becomes the baseline. They will be writing the laws and setting the cultural norms and deciding what authorship means in the world they actually live in.

So let’s be honest about what the argument actually is. It was never really about whether AI should exist. It was about whether you should be allowed to use it openly, without apology, without a disclaimer, without performing sufficient guilt to satisfy the room. That is a very different conversation—and one that often reveals far more about the discomforts, assumptions, and beliefs of the person making the accusation than the person receiving it.

AI Copyrights

The current copyright restrictions around AI-assisted work exist largely because the opposition has been loud enough to force a legislative response, but you cannot pass a law that stops a wave. The tool is too embedded, used by too many people, too genuinely useful for the noise to hold.

By 2035 you will be able to copyright AI-assisted writing without this conversation needing to happen around it. I’d put money on it. I live in Vegas. We bet on things here.

The people writing the most passionate arguments against AI writing right now do not have a clear vision for where this is going. They are looking backward, trying to hold a line the future already crossed.

This Part Is for You

You know who you are.

STOP. Stop explaining yourself.

Stop announcing your tools. Stop defending your process and oversharing. Stop feeling obligated to provide a detailed accounting of every piece of software, every workflow, every shortcut, and every creative decision as though you’re standing before a committee asking for permission to make art.

You do not need permission.

You do not need to justify how you brainstorm, how you outline, how you edit, how you research, or how you get unstuck. You do not need to convince strangers on the internet that your process meets their personal standards for creative purity.

You are creating something.

You’re writing the story that has been living inside you and you’re building the world you cannot stop thinking about. You are trying to get an idea out of your head and into reality using whatever combination of tools, experience, skill, stubbornness, and late-night determination actually works for your life.

And if somewhere in the back of your mind there is a voice telling you that it doesn’t fully count, that you’re somehow cheating, that you need one more disclaimer before you’re allowed to call yourself a writer—

That voice is lying to you.

And here’s something the loudest critics will never say out loud: the person using AI assistance to build a vision is not a prompter. Calling someone a prompter is the new version of calling a photographer someone who just pushes a button — it’s a taunt designed to reduce what you’re doing to its most mechanical description and ignore everything else. You are not a prompter. You are the CEO of your vision and you are building it. You are the founder, the creative director, the person with the vision and the judgment to shape it into something real.

The vision you brought to the page is yours. The direction you gave the language, the details you kept and the ones you cut, the emotional truth you insisted on even when the draft wanted to go somewhere easier — that is yours. No tool generates that and no tool decides what matters. No tool knows what you know, or has lived what you’ve lived, or cares the way you care about the specific vision you are trying to create and put into language.

At the end of the day, every argument against AI-assisted writing is just another version of the same thing: I did it the hard way, so my way is the right way. You’re a better person because you rode your bike to work. You’re a more legitimate writer because you typed every word at four in the morning before your shift. But a writer is not a method— a writer is a human being who has lived something, metabolized it, and found a way to hand that experience to another person through words. If the reader receives it — if they feel something, recognize something, carry something away from the page — then the vision worked.

That’s the whole point. That has always been the whole point. Nobody finishes a book and thinks about how it was made, they think about how it made them feel.

So, you are not getting away with something, you are doing exactly what every builder, every master with a studio full of hands, every founder and CEO with a team of engineers has always done — directing a vision into existence with the best tools available.

The work is yours, so please stop whispering about it and put it out there.

Use every tool available to you and build the vision you came here to build. The readers meant to find it will find it, the community meant to gather will gather, and the people in the comments arguing about how it was made will still be there arguing long after you’ve moved on to the next one.

That’s the difference between building and performing.

So build the vision.

Postscript: Why This Is My Last AI Rant

The title of this essay is Every Generation Calls It Cheating.

And that’s exactly why this will probably be the last time I write about it because the argument is already aging faster than the technology.

Every month there is more AI in the world, not less. More people using it, more businesses depending on it, more writers experimenting with it, more students growing up with it and more tools quietly integrating it until nobody thinks to mention it anymore.

The witch hunts are already getting harder to sustain because the line between “AI users” and “non-AI users” becomes blurrier every day. The people condemning it use AI-powered search, AI-powered recommendations, AI-powered editing, AI-powered cameras, AI-powered spam filters, AI-powered navigation, AI-powered customer service. AI-powered everything.

Eventually this argument will go the way of the photography argument, the Photoshop argument, the digital camera argument, and every other argument that started with “this isn’t real” and ended with “this is normal.”

A year from now, maybe less, large parts of this essay will feel outdated because the culture will have moved on to whatever new thing we’re supposed to be afraid of.

And honestly?

Good.

I would much rather spend my time writing stories than defending the existence of a tool.

So if this essay ages poorly, I will consider that a victory.

It means the future arrived.

Hi, I’m Elle Abbott, and thank you for spending part of your day with me. Whether you agreed with every word, argued with half of it, or found yourself somewhere in the messy middle, I hope this article gave you something worth thinking about.

More than anything, I hope it encouraged a few creators to stop apologizing and start building.

If you’d like to stick around, I’d love to have you. Most days I’m not ranting about AI, I’m writing fantasy, romantasy, painfully slow-burn romance, ridiculous parody, and the occasional emotional catastrophe disguised as fiction.

Subscribe if you enjoy laughing, feeling things you weren’t emotionally prepared to feel, or spending time with people who take storytelling seriously but themselves a little less so.

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There is something I find endlessly amusing about the writing community: We are the people who build characters from the ground up — merchants who can talk their way out of anything, politicians who negotiate kingdoms, con artists who read a room in three seconds flat, healers who know exactly what someone needs before they ask for it.

We write confrontation, negotiation, seduction, persuasion, and the kind of slow-burning trust that takes three hundred pages to earn. We construct entire human psychologies and make them breathe on the page.

And then we sit down to tell someone about our book and suddenly we’re convinced we don’t know how to talk to people.

I’ve watched this happen over and over in the writing community — the same confession on repeat: I’m terrible at marketing. I hate sales. I avoid confrontation. I’m not an entrepreneur. And every time I read it, I want to gently ask: have you met your own characters lately?

Here’s what I know, and I know it from two directions. Before I was a writer, I spent decades in sales — retail, commercial, and insurance. I had real training, real quotas, real pressure. And after all of it, if you asked me to distill everything I learned into a single sentence, it would be this: the only thing that ever actually worked was genuine human connection. Asking questions, listening, and helping solve the problem in front of you. Everything else was noise.

Then I became a writer and I realized I’d been doing the same thing the whole time — just with different tools.

You have too. You just haven’t flipped the script yet.

The reason this myth persists — that writers are bad at the business side of things — is that marketing has a branding problem. The word conjures something pushy and performative. The used car salesman. The dreadful cold call. The follow-up email that starts with just circling back. Nobody wants to be that person, least of all someone who got into writing because they care deeply about authentic human experience.

But that version of sales is bad sales. It doesn’t work and nobody respects it. What actually works looks nothing like that. What actually works is presence. It’s the willingness to slow down in a world that is screaming at everyone all the time and actually ask: what do you need?

Your attention is currency.

In a landscape where ten thousand messages are competing for someone’s focus every single day, the person who stops and genuinely listens becomes unforgettable — because their attention is focused on connection, not performance. That’s it. That’s the whole secret of sales, condensed. And if you’ve spent any time at all crafting characters that readers fall in love with, you already understand — in your bones — how that works.

The skill is not missing. The connection to the recognition is.

Let me give you a different lens.

The one most writers have on when they hear the word marketing looks something like this: a room full of strangers, drinks in hand, everyone performing, and you standing at the edge wondering how to get out. Nobody wants to be in that room. I don’t blame you for not wanting to be in it.

Take that lens off.

Put this one on instead: everyone you encounter is a character.

I’m a photographer, so I think in frames — but this works whether your visual language is cinematic or not. When you walk into any space, physical or digital, and you start seeing the people around you as characters you haven’t written yet, something shifts. You stop performing and you start noticing. You ask different questions. You slow down. And people — real people, not demographics, not target audiences — will tell you everything you need to know in the first fifteen seconds of whatever they start talking about. What they’re worried about. What they’re proud of. What problem they’re circling. What they cannot stop thinking about.

That’s not a sales technique. That’s what you already do when you’re building someone on the page.

The lens swap is this: instead of asking how do I reach readers, you ask who out there reads what I write and writes what I read? And then you go find them — not to broadcast at them, but to actually be curious about them. Let them talk. Ask what they’re working on. Ask what keeps them up. You’re not gathering data. You’re meeting the people who are going to feel, when they eventually find your book, like you wrote it for them. Because in some ways, you will have.

I spent over a decade trying to build a photography business through social media — TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, grinding every platform the algorithm handed me. I showed up. I created. I wasn’t invisible. But I was competing with people who were better at performing, and algorithms reward performance over presence. I was broadcasting into a space that didn’t slow down long enough to actually listen, and the numbers showed it.

What finally built something real wasn’t the content. It was the experience. The clients who booked with me got everything — nurturing before, during, and after the shoot. I was their biggest cheerleader. I helped them breathe through the nerves, helped them see themselves as genuinely beautiful. I gave them more than photos. I gave them a moment of being truly seen. And those people came back. They left long, five-star reviews. They sent their friends. They talked about it in ways no caption ever could — because you can’t caption a feeling.

Then something shifted.

I had spent years building a photography business — the brand, the clients, the reputation — and my writing had lived entirely in nonfiction. Women’s empowerment. Consciousness. The kind of metabolized wisdom you spend years accumulating and then try to hand to someone else. But somewhere near the end of 2025, I had a realization: everything I was trying to teach, fiction could show. A reader can feel tension move through a character in a way that bypasses every defense that goes up when something already sounds like a lesson. The experience of truth lands differently than the explanation of it.

So I pivoted to fantasy. Because I love fantasy, and because the world needed one more romantasy writer desperately. But the pivot meant nobody knew me as a writer. I had no audience for long-form fiction. No platform. No runway. I was starting over in every meaningful sense of the phrase.

That’s why I started a Substack. Mid-February, from scratch, with approximately two friends who had accounts that were practically inactive. No imported audience. No ads — you can’t run them on Substack. No purchased followers — you can’t buy them either. Just me and a body of work and the same tools I’d spent a career building, applied to a completely different room.

Twelve weeks later: over four hundred subscribers, top five in rising fiction, twenty-three paid subscribers, and more genuine engagement than anything I built in a decade of algorithmic grinding. DMs. Real conversations. People writing back like we already know each other — because in the ways that matter, we do.

And the only thing I’m doing differently is exactly what worked in those photo sessions: present, curious, cheering people on. Not trying to sell anything. Just giving people the space to be interesting — because they always are. We just almost never slow down long enough to let them show us.

That’s what community actually is. It’s just nurture at scale.

Your attention is valuable currency, and the real question is who you’re spending it on — and whether the space you’re in is built for the kind of slow, real connection that actually converts. Not converts in the transactional sense. Converts in the sense that someone goes from a stranger to a reader to the person who texts their friend at midnight: you have to read this.

Now. Let’s talk about the skills you’ve been told you don’t have.

Building a readership is not that different from building a character. Start with your reader — not a demographic, a person. Who is going to pick up your book and feel like it was written specifically for them? What does her life look like? What does she reach for when she needs to escape? What keeps her up at three in the morning? You’ll end up asking fifty questions, and somewhere around question fifteen you’ll realize: this is just character work. You already know how to do this.

Grab your notebook. Start making notes. Build an avatar of this person the way you’d build a character — because that’s exactly what they are. What do they read? What are they afraid of? What do they want that they’d never say out loud? What problem are they trying to solve this week? Once you know her, you build language that speaks directly to her. Not at her — to her. And then you put that language into the world not as broadcasts, but as invitations.

Here’s a practical example, since I live in the fantasy space: I know that fantasy writers — myself absolutely included — will disappear into worldbuilding spirals instead of writing the actual story. I have lost entire weekends to mapping the political history of a continent that appears in exactly one paragraph. So when I write a note about that particular spiral, the response is immediate. Fantasy writers recognize themselves in it instantly. They feel seen. They engage. Those are my people. I found them because I knew exactly what they were doing, because I was doing it too.

You have a version of that. Every genre, every niche has its specific flavor of chaos. Find yours and write about it honestly.

Then show up and reply. Read what people write back to you and respond like a human being who is genuinely interested — because you should be. Every writer who engages with what you’ve written and feels something is telling you they want more. Those are your people. Go be with them.

One more tool that doesn’t get talked about enough: the doorway piece.

A doorway piece is simple: you solved a problem. Maybe you finally cracked your story structure. Maybe you built a system for writing through a creative block. Maybe you found a tool that changed how you outline. Whatever it was — you struggled with it, you solved it, and now you have a process. Write that down and publish it. Teach the solution. That piece becomes a door that people walk through into your world, and once they’re in, they’re reading your fiction too.

For fiction writers specifically: your creativity is a performance asset, and you’re probably underselling it. Use AI image generators to create visuals of your characters and share them. Give a glimpse of a backstory — not the whole thing, just the part that makes someone lean in. Talk about your worldbuilding process not as a data dump but as a behind-the-scenes moment. The interesting fragment. The detail you’re proud of. The thing that surprised even you when it appeared on the page. People love that. It grabs attention, it invites comments, and it shows the creative mind at work — which is, frankly, more interesting than most content online.

Also: it’s okay to slide into DMs. Especially with new subscribers. A short message — just thanking them for subscribing and asking what caught their eye — goes a long way. Don’t talk about yourself. Ask about them. What do they write? What are they into? They’ll remember the conversation because they got to be the interesting one. People love to talk about themselves, and most platforms give them zero invitation to do so.

The consistency piece is just systems, and systems are just decisions you make once so you don’t have to keep making them.

On the days when ideas arrive fast — and they will — write them down and bank them in your drafts. Schedule them out so something is always going into the world, even when life gets loud and the creative well goes quiet. Then use the smaller pockets of time not to create, but to connect. Reply to comments. Show up in other people’s work. Leave the kind of response that proves you actually read what they wrote. You don’t have to be brilliant every single day. You just have to be present enough, often enough, that people know you’re real.

There’s one more thing I want to address, because I see it constantly and it breaks my heart a little.

There are writers whose entire plan for their book hinges on one outcome: the agent, the publishing deal, the moment someone in a position of power decides their work is worth investing in. And I understand that dream. It’s a real dream and it deserves respect.

But here’s what I need you to know: publishers today are far less likely to take a chance on a book from a writer who hasn’t already started building their own platform. They are navigating the same difficult market you are. Many books that do get published don’t perform the way anyone hoped. And even if you land the agent, even if the agent lands the deal — you are now handing your creative work to people who may ask you to cut the chapter that matters most to you, add something that doesn’t feel true to the story, reshape your book to fit a market you didn’t write for. You hand them the IP. You hand them the control.

I want to stop on that word for a second. IP. Intellectual property. The worlds you built, the characters you invented, the magic systems, the lore, the voice that is entirely and only yours. In today’s digital landscape, that IP is a business. It can be licensed, serialized, bundled, adapted, expanded. You can sell direct. You can build an audience that belongs to you — not to an algorithm, not to a publisher’s marketing budget, which, by the way, is shrinking. The advances are smaller. The marketing investment from publishers is smaller. They are taking fewer chances on debut authors than ever before. What you are being offered when you chase the traditional deal is less than it used to be. And what you are giving up is everything you made.

That’s not an argument against traditional publishing for everyone. It’s an argument for knowing what you’re trading before you trade it. Your IP is among the most valuable things you will ever produce. When you start seeing it that way — not just as a book you hope someone will want, but as an asset you own and can build on — something shifts. It stops feeling like a lottery and starts feeling like a business. Your business. One you already have the skills to run.

Your success has always been about will versus way.

The higher your will, the more ways open up — and there are more ways available to independent authors right now than at any other point in the history of publishing.

You wrote a book.

I want you to sit with that for a second. Less than one percent of the world’s population has done what you’ve done. The patience alone — the willingness to stay inside something difficult and strange and uncertain for months, sometimes years — is not a normal human capacity. It is extraordinary. Most entrepreneurs, the ones writers seem to think have all the skills they’re missing, wouldn’t last two weeks inside the process of writing a novel. The discipline you’ve already demonstrated to finish a book is more than most business owners ever develop in a lifetime.

You are not missing skills. You are missing the belief that the skills you have transfer.

Here’s what I know after two decades in sales and years of building a creative business: good salespeople don’t push. They ask questions and they solve problems. And even when they can’t solve your specific problem, they make you feel heard enough that you remember them long after the conversation ends.

You have been doing this your entire writing life. Every time you write a character someone recognizes themselves in. Every time you build a scene that makes a reader feel less alone in the world. Every time you sit down and try to make something true enough that a stranger will feel it and say it felt real.

That is connection. That is presence. That is — whether you’ve called it that or not — exactly what great sales has always been.

You don’t need ten audiobooks on marketing strategy. You don’t need to become someone you’re not. You only need to believe that the thing you’ve already spent years getting good at is the thing. And then you need to point it outward.

You already have everything you need.

You always did.

Hi. I’m Elle Abbott. I wrote all of the above, and I meant every word of it.

I’m a fantasy author and couples photographer based in Las Vegas, which means I spend my life either capturing the way people look at each other or inventing entirely new worlds for them to get lost in. I serialize atmospheric fantasy fiction here — stories built from the inside of a character out, slow and immersive and the kind that linger after you’ve closed the tab.

If any of this felt like something you needed to hear, the best thing you can do is stay. Subscribe, pull up a chair, and let me know what you’re working on. I genuinely want to know.

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I have been thinking about Brienne of Tarth for years— persistently, the way you think about something that got underneath your skin and rearranged something.

I think Brienne of Tarth has always haunted me because she is not written like a fantasy archetype. She is written like a wound, and not a symbolic one — a real one, the kind that women carry quietly for years before they even develop the language to name what they are carrying. The exhaustion of waking up one day and realizing the world has already categorized your body before you ever got the chance to decide who you were going to become. A kind of grief that slowly, practically, has one adapting themself into usefulness because usefulness is so much safer than the open wound of rejection.

Martin understood something about women in Brienne that most writers never even get close to touching — the interior structure of a person who was handed a wound early and built an entire life around finding the most dignified way to carry it. And once you see that in her, once you understand what he actually built beneath the armor and the oaths and the battles, you cannot unsee it. It changes how you read her. It changes how you read a lot of things.

She is, in my estimation, one of the most devastating characters in the history of the fantasy genre. And it was never because her story arc was the cleanest or her ending the most satisfying, and it isn’t in the show, where the writers eventually lost the thread of her. It’s because what George R.R. Martin built in her, and what Gwendoline Christie gave her in the translation from page to screen, is something rarely attempted and almost never achieved: a character whose entire existence is a wound, and whose wound is the world’s failure— not her own.

She is criminally underrated.

And I think the reason she is underrated is the same reason she was never properly seen within the story itself. The world looked at her and decided it already knew what it was seeing.

The Trap

Here is the thing people miss about Brienne of Tarth: she was not born to be a warrior. She was born a lord’s daughter. Highborn. Raised inside a world with a very specific script for what she was supposed to become— soft, marriageable, beautiful by Westerosi standards, destined for a hall, a husband and the kind of dignity reserved for noble ladies.

She wanted that script. This is the part that breaks me every time. Brienne of Tarth— the woman who fights like a siege weapon, who takes men apart with terrifying precision, who is described in the books as a kind of physical force of nature— wanted the songs, the honor, the romance and the beauty of being seen as a woman. In the books, she remembers herself as not fit to be son or daughter, which is seven words that contain the whole of her tragedy. She was not raised outside femininity. She was raised inside it and then expelled.

Because her body was tall, strong, broad, and by her world’s narrow measure, wrong.

So she did the only rational thing available to a person who is rejected from one identity and capable of inhabiting another: she built herself a life where her body became useful instead of humiliating. She became a knight—and not because she lacked softness but because softness had nowhere safe to live.

And this is the trap Martin constructed so precisely it still makes me flinch: she was seen as too masculine to be treated as a lady, but because she was female she couldn’t be accepted as a knight. The world had placed her in a category it refused to name, and then punished her for existing in it. She was mocked for stepping into armor by the same society that had already rejected her as a lady. There was no version of Brienne the world was prepared to simply see.

Her story is not a warrior’s story. It is a woman’s story — a woman wearing armor because it was the only place her body was allowed to become useful instead of wrong.

The Man Who Saw Her First

When Jaime Lannister first encounters Brienne, he does what the world always does: he tries to place her in a category. He mocks her, tests her, circles her identity looking for a seam he can use.

But she doesn’t fit, and so eventually he stops trying.

What Jaime Lannister sees in Brienne, and this is the quiet genius of their arc, is the version of himself he might have been if the world hadn’t twisted him. She believes in honor without reward and she keeps her word when it costs her everything. She doesn’t perform knighthood— she is it. And Jaime, who spent his entire life being called Kingslayer in contempt, who built his worth entirely on a golden reputation he no longer believed in, looks at her and sees something he had stopped thinking existed: incorruptibility.

He respects her not out of pity, but out of understanding.

The bath scene— Season 3, the moment he breaks open and tells her the truth about killing the Mad King — is the turning point of their entire relationship. He is stripped of armor, literally and otherwise. He tells her what he has never told anyone: that he killed a tyrant to save a city and has been branded a villain for it ever since. And she listens. She believes him. In that moment, she stops seeing a label and starts seeing a man who made an impossible choice and paid for it for the rest of his life.

But watch what happens to Brienne in that scene. Watch the shift. Because she softens— in a way we haven’t seen before. She holds him as he collapses. She stops operating in duty mode for the first time, she engages not as a knight sworn to a task, but as a woman who can hold another person’s truth. It expands her and allows us, maybe for the first time, to see the woman underneath the role she has been forced to inhabit.

And before that scene, before the bath, before any of the tenderness— there’s the capture.

Season 3, Locke’s men, the moment that might be the most important in their entire arc and the one most often passed over in favor of the more cinematic beats.

Brienne is grabbed. Dragged. The threat of rape is immediate and real and the men are completely capable of following through on it. They mock her body. They reduce her to something subhuman. She cries out— this is not the composed, stoic Brienne of other scenes. This is a woman on her very edge, and that distinction is everything.

Jaime doesn’t reach for a sword, he is also tied up. He calculates instead. He tells the men she is highborn, worth a ransom, valuable untouched. It is survival language, not romantic language— but underneath it is something more precise: he understands exactly what is at stake for her. Not just her body, her identity or her dignity. This is the last intact piece of who she is in that world and he intervenes.

This is the first time Jaime does something genuinely honorable with no audience, no reward, no benefit to himself. Not for glory or applause, just: I will not let this happen to her.

And then he pushes too far trying to manage the situation, and Locke punishes him, and they cut off his hand. The hand that made him the greatest swordsman in the kingdom. The thing his entire identity was built on. He saves her from being violated and loses the thing that defined him.

Before he ever touched her, before he ever knighted her, before any love— he chose her dignity over his own power.

What the Books Did That the Show Could Not

The show made Brienne strong. The books made her cost something.

In A Feast for Crows, Brienne is traveling through the Riverlands, alone, exhausted, still honoring an oath in a world that keeps punishing her for it, when she runs into Rorge and Biter. What follows is not a clean duel. It is dirt and blood and panic. She fights outnumbered, wounded, already depleted. She kills Rorge. Then Biter gets to her— literally biting into her face. Physically, grotesquely, with teeth.

This is the moment where Brienne is stripped of every identity except one: not a knight or a lady or a symbol or an idea— just a woman trying to stay alive.

The books give her this very human moment that the show’s aesthetics couldn’t accommodate: consequence. Your honor will not protect you, your skill will not make everything clean. Your body is still vulnerable and then— this is the deeper, more painful layer— her face, the very thing the world has spent her entire life rejecting as wrong and ugly and too much, is literally attacked. That is not accidental writing. It’s the kind of precise thematic construction that turns character injury into narrative meaning.

And doesn’t disappear, she survives— broken, bleeding, changed, but still herself. And this is where the books deepen her beyond what the screen version achieved: not into the archetype of the strong female warrior, but into something more complicated and more true. She became more aware of what it meant to have a body that could be broken and chose to keep going anyway. She had decided something about who she was going to be and she wasn’t willing to let even this take it from her.

Two Weapons Recognizing Each Other

Season 4, Episode 10.

Brienne finds Arya, and the Hound is standing between them.

What follows is not a duel or elegant kind of fight that gets set to swelling music and slow-motion choreography. Their fight is brutal and exhausting and deeply, almost uncomfortably personal— two people dismantling each other with everything they have, and neither of them walking away clean.

Sandor Clegane is one of the most physically dominant men in the series. He is feared and genuinely dangerous. He is defined, across multiple seasons, by a reputation for brutality that people treat as a fact of nature. And then Brienne beats him— visibly, undeniably, and the reason it matters isn’t simply that a woman beat a man— it’s that she exists entirely outside his framework.

Sandor has categories for people. Knights. Lords. Killers. Prey.

Brienne doesn’t fit any of them, and that dislocation — the fracture of encountering someone his mind cannot properly file — is part of what makes the scene so remarkable.

There is also something unspoken between them that I have never been able to fully shake. Both outcasts. Both defined by violence. Both operating, underneath all of it, from a moral code the world never rewarded. He hates illusion and sees things as they are. She believes in honor anyway, even when the ideal doesn’t exist. They are cynicism and devotion standing across from each other and in a different story, that tension becomes something raw and complicated and deeply human. Not necessarily romance but a mutual recognition: the quiet acknowledgment of someone else who survived becoming what the world demanded.

Brienne wins this fight because she has fully committed to the role the world forced her into and mastered it beyond anyone’s expectation. The tragedy is that the role only existed because she was never allowed to be seen otherwise.

The Man Who Thought She Was Magnificent

There is one more contrast worth naming, and it lives in the red-haired wildling who spent multiple seasons making his admiration for Brienne loudly, persistently, embarrassingly known.

Tormund Giantsbane is not a villain. He is brave and loyal and genuinely, sincerely besotted with her— the actor who plays him has said the love is real, not comedy. And Tormund does something no one else in the story does: he looks at her body, the very body the world has spent her life mocking, and finds it magnificent. He pursues her openly, without shame.

She wants nothing to do with him.

This is not cruelty on her part, and it is not vanity. It is something more precise and more revealing. Because the reading of Brienne that the world tends to make is that a woman like her should be grateful for any attention. That her standards, like her femininity, should be proportional to how the world rates her. That a rough, unpolished, wild man who thinks she is beautiful should be exactly what she is looking for.

But Brienne was born a lord’s daughter. She wanted the songs, the honor, the dignity of being seen as a lady. And no amount of exile from the feminine script changed what she was actually reaching for. She was drawn to Jaime Lannister— complicated, dangerous, questionable Jaime, because he met her where her inner life actually lived: in honor, in complexity, in the tension between who a person is and who they are trying to become. Tormund offered her desire. Jaime offered her recognition.

She never lowered herself, not once. And that, too, is the mark of a woman who always knew exactly what she was, even when the world refused to agree.

Being Chosen

Near the end, before the long night, before the dead arrive, Jaime knights her.

This matters more than anything else in their arc, maybe more than anything else in her arc. He does it publicly, in front of witnesses, in a moment where the formality of it costs him something. He places her exactly where she always belonged: as a knight, full and complete. You are what you have always believed yourself to be.

And then, they make love. And I want to be clear about what this is and what it isn’t, because the misread is important.

This is not pity or charity. Jaime at this point has nothing left to perform for. He is facing death and he has lost everything. He is no longer the golden knight, no longer Cersei’s orbit, no longer any of the identities he spent his life managing. What he gives Brienne in that scene is the one thing he has left: genuine choice, and chooses her.

For Brienne, this is the first time she has been desired like this and she admits she has never slept with anyone before. The first time she has been seen as both woman and warrior without one erasing the other. Watch her body language in that scene. The hesitation. The openness. The vulnerability. For one of the only times in the series, the armor drops low enough for us to fully see the woman underneath it.

And then he leaves, he goes back to Cersei, and this is the devastation that I think the show intended even as it fumbled toward it: Brienne represents who Jaime could be. Cersei represents who he has always been. He cannot hold the transformation. He cannot stay inside the version of himself she called forward.

I have watched this happen in life— a man standing at the edge of who he could become, with someone who already believes in it and choosing, instead, to go back to the toxic situation. It is one of the more painful things to witness and Martin understood it well enough to write it with precision.

Brienne becomes stronger because of him. Jaime becomes weaker because he cannot stay in the version of himself she called forward.

The Lannister Who Got to Win

Ask any Game of Thrones fan to name their favorite character and Tyrion Lannister comes up over and over again. There is something irresistible about him— the wit, the wine, the refusal to be small in a world that built its entirety around diminishing him. He is the underdog who outthinks the room. The man everyone underestimated who turned that underestimation into power.

And he deserves every bit of that love, he’s a magnificent character.

But I want to hold him up next to Brienne for a moment, because the comparison reveals something the story never quite says out loud.

Tyrion Lannister was born a dwarf into a world that considers dwarfism a curse and a shame. He was rejected by his father, mourned by his family, mocked by virtually everyone who encountered him. His body was the first thing people used against him, and they used it ruthlessly. By every metric Westeros had available, they wanted to show him he was born wrong.

So was Brienne.

Same world. Same nobility. Same physical body that the world read as a deviation from what it should be. Same intelligence, same moral complexity, same defiant refusal to become what the mockery wanted them to become.

And yet.

Tyrion had the Lannister gold. He had Jaime’s sword arm at his back. He had a father whose power was so absolute that even his contempt came with protection. He had the political machinery of the wealthiest family in Westeros behind him even when that family wanted nothing to do with him. And here is the distinction worth making clearly: Brienne was not poor. Tarth is a wealthy island, and Lord Selwyn was a respected lord. She came with money and with a name. But in Westeros, a woman’s wealth is not a tool she gets to wield— it is an asset she holds in custody until a husband arrives to absorb it. Tyrion could spend his gold to purchase room in the world. Brienne’s gold was waiting for a man to come claim it along with her hand. Same nobility. Wildly different leverage.

And beyond the gold, beyond the name, beyond the machinery— Tyrion had something else. Something the story almost never makes explicit because it is so baked into the world it goes unquestioned:

He was a man.

When Tyrion decided not to apologize for existing, the world had a category for that. Difficult. Eccentric. Dangerous. Brilliant. It cost him enormously— his life was not easy, his suffering was real, and the story never pretends otherwise. But there was a road. There was a version of the narrative in which Tyrion Lannister found his place, wielded his power, and became one of the most consequential figures in the realm. And he did. By the end, he was Hand of the King. Twice.

Brienne made the same decision Tyrion made— I am what I am, and I will not perform smallness for your comfort and the world did not make her eccentric or dangerous or brilliant.

It made her a problem.

Because the world of Westeros, like most worlds, has always known what to do with a man who refuses to shrink. It has systems for that man. It has stories for that man. It calls him a hero, eventually, or at least a legend. But a woman who refuses to shrink? A tall, strong, unapologetic woman who will not audition for femininity, who will not make herself easier to look at, who simply insists on being exactly what she is without waiting for permission? The world does not know where to place a woman like that except at its edges.

This is why Tyrion is everyone’s favorite and Brienne is criminally underrated. Not because he is better written— I would argue she is the more devastating creation. Not because his arc is richer— hers contains more genuine tragedy. But because we, as an audience shaped by the same world the story is reflecting back at us, know how to root for the man who defies his limitations. We have been taught to find that story satisfying.

We have not been taught, nearly so well, to recognize the woman doing the same thing beside him and to understand that the reason her story ends differently has nothing to do with her and everything to do with the world that was never willing to let her win the same way.

Tyrion Lannister found a world willing to absorb him. Brienne of Tarth never did.

The Most Feminine Thing She Ever Did

There is one more thread worth pulling, because it reframes everything that came before it.

Brienne of Tarth was the sole heir to Tarth. She had a father who loved her. She had a name, a title, a seat that was technically hers by birthright. She could have fought for it. Could have demanded her place as Lady of Tarth, forced the world to accommodate her, battered against every door that the Westerosi system of gender and inheritance kept closing in her face.

But that path, the demanding, the forcing, the pushing against every current, that is not a feminine path— that is a siege.

Feminine energy does not force. It receives. It finds the opening that already exists and moves through it with grace rather than battering down the wall. And the door that was already open for Brienne, the role that required no performance, no apology, no daily war against a world that refused to see her, was the sword. The training yard. The oath. The armor did not transform her into what she was meant to be. It simply gave her a way to survive in a body the world had already decided was wrong.

Watch Tyrion Lannister claw his way into every room. Watch him spend his gold and his wit and his family name and his sheer relentless will to force the world to make space for him. That is extraordinary to witness, and we love him for it. But it is a particular kind of hard-won, costly, grinding forward motion.

Now watch Brienne. Watch her stop forcing herself toward a version of womanhood the world had already denied her and step instead into the role that asked the least amount of self-erasure. A quiet, almost elegant decision to inhabit the shape of life that made the most sense for who she was.

She didn’t claw her way into the world. She found the one door that opened easily and walked through it. And in a story full of characters spending themselves to breaking trying to force their place in the world, that quiet pivot— that willingness to receive the role her body was already suited for rather than wage war to force open the one the world was withholding, is perhaps the most genuinely feminine move in the entire series.

That is not the absence of femininity— that is what femininity looks like when it has finally stopped apologizing.

What I Wanted to Say to Her Through the Screen

I need to step inside this for a moment, because that is where this article actually lives.

I was fifteen years old, a little under six feet tall when a friend of mine— a seamstress who worked for the forest service and who made historically accurate Renaissance costumes— agreed to take me to the Renaissance fair and make me something to wear. She assumed I would want a wench dress or a maiden gown— I insisted on being a warrior. I wanted a tunic, leather boots, chainmail, armor, a sword.

Not because I didn’t want to be feminine, but because in the world I was living in, the way my body read to everyone around me made femininity feel like something I wasn’t allowed to claim. I was tall. Stronger-built. Automatically categorized as something other than soft. And so I reached for the role where my body could be an asset instead of an apology.

My friend said something to me that day that I wasn’t ready to hear: oh, you absolutely can be feminine. Femininity isn’t about the shape of your body— It’s about your softness.

It went over my head completely. It took me two decades to actually land in what she meant.

After that Renaissance fair, I wore dresses to every one that followed. I was reaching for something I didn’t have the language for yet. It took years of healing— real, unglamorous, sometimes brutal work before I understood that the softness my friend was describing wasn’t a physical category. It was a way of moving through the world. A way of creating. It was the thing underneath the armor that the armor was protecting.

This is why I wanted to jump through the screen and give Brienne a pep talk every single time I watched Game of Thrones, because I recognized her wound from the inside in a way that was almost uncomfortable to sit with. I knew the exhaustion of performing competence because softness didn’t feel safe enough to show. I knew what it felt like to be seen as a category first and a woman second, to walk into a room and feel the world make its assessment of your body before you had spoken a single word.

But I also wanted to shake her sometimes, because I could see how powerful she actually was long before she could fully see it herself. I could see the woman standing just underneath the wound — the one who no longer needed anyone’s permission to occupy space, the one who could have stopped apologizing entirely if the world had simply left her alone long enough to become her. And I knew, even before I had the language to articulate it clearly, that her armor was never proof that she lacked femininity. It was proof that the world had failed, consistently and completely, to make room for her.

What the World Is Actually Afraid Of

The world was not afraid of Brienne because she was too masculine. The world was afraid of an unapologetic version of Brienne.

A tall, strong woman with insecurities is manageable. She can be mocked into smallness. She can be shaped by the wound. She will eventually look down, apologize for the space she takes up, make herself easier to categorize. The world knows exactly what to do with a woman who doubts herself— it simply confirms the doubt and watches her shrink.

But a tall, strong woman who has decided she is exactly what she is? Who walks into a room and does not wait for permission to occupy it? Who does not perform weakness to make other people comfortable? That woman is genuinely terrifying. Threatening a system the way explosives threaten to detonate— threatening in the way truth is threatening, because she dismantles the entire system just by refusing to apologize for what she is.

Brienne was always almost that woman. You could see it in her bearing, in the way she moved, in the code she held even when the world gave her nothing back for holding it.

But the wound kept her just far enough from it. The wanting to be seen as a lady. The flinch, still present, when someone looked at her the wrong way.

What wrecks me— what has always wrecked me— is not what she was, it’s what she was standing at the edge of. One decision away from putting the wound down and walking forward as herself, completely, without apology, without audition, with no need for permission. A woman who needed nothing confirmed because she had already confirmed it herself.

That woman would have terrified Westeros.

And yet there is another layer to Brienne that makes her tragedy even more precise, because she did not become that unapologetic woman completely. Not all the way. What she chose, underneath the armor and the oaths and the terrifying physical capability, was something that looked a great deal like the good girl path wearing a warrior’s disguise. If her body made her unacceptable as a lady, then she would make herself useful instead, honorable instead, disciplined instead. She would bind herself so tightly to oath and duty and service that the world would eventually have no choice but to find somewhere to put her.

And it worked, to a degree — she was knighted, respected, even admired by the end. But there is something quietly heartbreaking in sitting with that truth, because Brienne’s survival depended, at least in part, on making herself legible to the very system that had wounded her in the first place. She didn’t dismantle the framework. She found a way to be accepted by it. And while that is an extraordinary achievement, it is also the thing that kept her standing just outside the fullness of who she could have been — the woman on the other side of the wound, the one who needed no system’s permission, the one who would have walked into every room already whole.

She never quite got there and that gap, between who she was and who she was right on the verge of becoming, is where the devastation lives. Martin gave us the wound so precisely, so completely, that we can feel the shape of the woman on the other side of it. The fully healed version of her who walks into a room and owns it.

We keep watching because we keep hoping she’ll get there. We keep grieving because the world, fictional and otherwise, has never been very good at leaving that woman alone long enough to let her arrive.

A Final Word -- For the Writers

Whether you have ever watched a single episode of Game of Thrones or read a single page of George R.R. Martin’s work, this article was always for you.

Because what I have been doing this entire time— pulling apart the fabric of Brienne of Tarth, tracing the wound, mapping the relationships, pointing at the moments where the narrative does something almost unbearably precise, is not fan analysis. It’s craft study. It’s sitting in front of one of the most powerfully constructed characters in the history of fantasy fiction and asking: how did he do that, and what can I learn from it?

Of all the characters in Game of Thrones and there are many magnificent ones, many devastating ones, many that earned their place in the permanent conversation about what fantasy can do, Brienne of Tarth was the only one who never broke.

Not once. Through capture and mockery and violence and exile from every category the world tried to put her in, she held her honor. She kept every oath. She believed in what a true knight was supposed to be even when every true knight around her proved the ideal was a lie. In a story built on moral collapse, on the corruption of power and the failure of good intentions, she is the single thread that holds.

And Martin embedded all of that inside a character the world inside the story could not properly see. That is not an accident. That is genius.

The reflection happening in her character, the way her story maps onto the experience of real women who have been told their bodies make them the wrong kind of person, who have armored themselves because softness wasn’t safe, who have had to earn ten times over what their male counterparts were simply handed— that reflection is what separates a good character from an unforgettable one. The best fiction does not invent human experience. It recognizes it, holds it up and says: I see this. I know this shape. Let me show you what it looks like from the inside.

I am a tall woman. I have been categorized differently by the world my entire life. I found Brienne and I recognized her wound before I had language for my own. That kind of writing— the kind that reaches across the page and finds the reader in their specific, private, unspoken experience, is what we should all be reaching for.

Not only has it changed how I build a story, but it has changed how I understand what great characters do. They don’t just live inside their stories. They change the way you build yours.

Brienne of Tarth is one of the greatest characters ever written in this genre. Overlooked. Underrated. Constructed with a precision that, once you see it, you will never stop seeing.

Hi I’m Elle Abbott, and thank you for reading my article.

As someone who is nearly six feet tall myself, and someone who has photographed hundreds of women through boudoir work, I honestly don’t believe women are ugly nearly as often as the world insists they are. Especially tall women.

So below, I generated a few images of what Brienne of Tarth might have looked like if she had been allowed to fully embrace the lady side of herself instead of spending so much of her life hiding inside the knight armor. Turns out, she is beautiful.

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There is a moment — and if it has happened to you, you will know exactly the one I mean — where time splits in two.

You are standing in a bathroom, or sitting on the edge of a tub, or leaning against a cold wall, and you are holding something small in your hand. And then the world changes. What you see, and what you feel — the immediate, cellular, wordless knowing that you are not alone in your body anymore.

In that moment, you became a mother.

Not when you held a baby, not when a doctor confirmed anything, not when you told anyone and not even when nine months passed and something small and impossibly whole arrived in the world.

Right then.

Because in that moment, something extraordinary happened that our sterilized, clinical world has no adequate language for: a soul chose you. It came. It attached — not just to your uterus and biology — but to your spirit. And you began, immediately and without instruction, to build a life in your mind for that little being. You begin dreaming about the birthday parties, what they’ll look like, the sound of their laugh, and you began to prepare the nest before you even knew what kind of bird would come to fill it.

That is not a symptom or hormones.

That is the oldest magic there is.

The world is very comfortable honoring mothers when there is a physical child to point to. When the proof is walking around, asking for snacks, drawing pictures on the walls. The world understands that kind of motherhood.

But there is another kind. And she is sitting somewhere today, bracing herself for Sunday.

She has losses that don’t have names in most cultures. She has due dates she still remembers. She has a room that was never painted, or a name she never said out loud, or a moment she has replayed ten thousand times trying to understand what she was supposed to have done differently.

She is a mother, and tomorrow, the world will largely forget to tell her so.

I know her because I am her.

I have two angel babies who didn’t make it in. And for years, Mother’s Day was something I white-knuckled my way through — numbing it out, escaping it, fighting with the people I loved because I didn’t know what to do with the ache of being unseen. I remember one Mother’s Day in particular where I got in a fight with my husband and left the house. Couldn’t stay inside my own life for the weight of it.

When we resolved it, I asked him for one thing. Just one: honor me on Mother’s Day. Take me to dinner. Bring me flowers. Say the words. Because I am a mother too — of two souls who passed through me like light through a window, brief and complete and real — and I needed someone to say it out loud.

He did, and it mattered more than I can tell you.

Motherhood is not a condition. It is not a biological checkbox. It is a crossing — a threshold that once walked through, changes the terrain of you permanently.

There is a reason pregnancy has been understood across every ancient culture as a spiritual initiation. The body becomes a vessel. The woman becomes, for a time, something closer to a ferry of souls — a being who partially removes herself from the physical in order to become the channel through which another comes through. She moves between worlds. She carries the tension between what is and what is not yet. She holds an entire universe inside her, one that is not yet ready to be seen.

We were never taught to speak about this in these terms. We were given cold rooms and clipboards and fluorescent lights and told that this was a medical event. A condition to be managed. We were told to track weeks and weights and cervical measurements — and none of that is wrong, none of it is unnecessary — but something essential was stripped from the ceremony of it.

Women were not told: you are not just a body doing a thing. You are a door.

And the womb — that void inside every woman — is not just anatomy. It is an oracle. It is a creative power so extraordinary, so threaded with mystery, that I believe the entire architecture of a world that diminishes women is built on a single unconscious fear: what would happen if she actually knew what she was capable of?

Creating life is the most powerful act in this universe. It is the literal reflection of God. God creates life. Women create life. Women grow it, birth it, feed it from their own bodies, and then spend the next two decades pouring themselves — financially, emotionally, physically, spiritually, everything — into the long work of raising a human being. Every meal. Every holiday. Every birthday cake with the right theme and the right friends and the small details only a mother notices, because she has been cataloguing her child’s loves the way astronomers catalogue stars: carefully, devotedly, from unconditional love.

And it always matters.

I wrote a book about the grief of pregnancy — Born from the Ashes — for exactly this kind of mother. The one who is carrying a creation that was interrupted. Because that’s what loss is, when we’re honest about it: it’s creation energy that was set in motion and never completed. It doesn’t disappear and it doesn’t dissolve. It lives in the body as grief because the body knows something was begun that did not finish.

In that book, I give mothers like us actual things to do — dozens of rituals, ceremonies, and tangible practices for moving that grief outside of the body and into honoring, into remembrance and into the kind of beauty that is the only thing worthy of what was lost.

Grief doesn’t have to stay locked inside you. It can be transmuted. I know because I have done it — not once, but again and again, in the slow and ongoing work of choosing to let love be larger than loss.

Which brings me to tomorrow.

I had planned to release The Unforced Descent at the end of the month. But something in me said no — said now — and I have learned to listen to that voice.

The Unforced Descent is a Harmonic Record: a story paired with an original song, born from the world of Aethara. It is the story of a woman who has traveled a great distance to find a crone — a healer with a gift so rare it borders on the mythic. She has had many losses. She does not understand why. And she has heard, in whispers, that this woman knows a song.

A song that clears a barren womb. A song that calls in a soul.

Calling in a soul is not something we talk about in modern pregnancy culture. But I believe — in every fiber of my being, in a way that is not theoretical or poetic but known — that it is real. That women have always had this capacity. That the womb is a listening instrument as much as it is a physical one. That souls do not simply arrive by accident — they are called. They are chosen. And they choose back.

We were just never taught that.

The Unforced Descent is the truest magic I have ever held in my heart. Of everything I have written in the Harmonic Record series, this is the one that feels least like fiction and more like remembering a truth.

It will be in your inbox tomorrow — the song and the story together — on Mother’s Day.

For every mother with her children around her. For every mother whose children live only in her heart. For every woman who has wondered if the longing she carries is a door, or just a wound.

I believe it is a door.

Happy Mother’s Day, to every woman who has ever loved something she was not guaranteed to keep.

That is the definition of a mother.

Elle

P.S. — If you are carrying grief that lives in your body and has nowhere to go, my book Born from the Ashes was written for you. It is full of things you can actually do — not just feel. You can find it here.

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Last year I shot seventy weddings.

Seventy. In Las Vegas. Which means I have seen things. I have witnessed a bride arrive on a mechanical bull. I have photographed a groom crying harder than anyone I have ever seen cry in my entire life, including funerals. I have stood in 109 degree heat on the Las Vegas Strip in full photographer gear and smiled through it like a professional, because that is what I am.

Nothing prepared me for this.

The booking was simple. Four hours. Party bus. Flamingo. That was the entire scroll of the prophecy and I read it without fear, because I am a veteran of the party bus. I know its rhythms. I know its rituals. I know the exact moment the shot glasses on the bead necklaces come out and I position myself accordingly.

I asked one question before I arrived. One.

How big is your party?

Fifty-five people, she said.

Fifty-five.

I want you to understand that fifty-five people is not a party. Fifty-five people is a battalion. Fifty-five people is enough souls to populate a small village, elect a mayor, and still have people left over to form a dissenting political faction. I have attended concerts with fewer attendees. I arrived at the Flamingo and found them exactly where you find fifty-five people — absolutely everywhere, spilling across the valet circle like a glitter explosion at a fireworks factory, loud and luminous and already vibrating with the energy of people who had decided, collectively, that tonight was going to be legendary.

I was already tired.

The bride was beautiful—and—she was on her phone. The groom was with his friends. They stood near each other the way neighboring countries stand near each other — aware of the border, mostly respecting it, not particularly warm about the arrangement. I asked several times if they wanted couples shots before we boarded. We got two. Two. In the grand tapestry of wedding portraiture, two pre-bus couples shots is the artistic equivalent of being handed one crayon and told to paint the Sistine Chapel.

I did what I could.

Party Bus One carried the bride, the groom, and everyone under thirty with something to prove.

Party Bus Two carried the parents, the grandparents, and every person who had long ago made peace with their own mortality.

I belonged on Bus Two. I knew it in my bones. I am a woman who goes to bed at a reasonable hour, who keeps herbal tea in her bag, who considers silence a luxury and not a punishment. But I am also the photographer, which means I follow the bride, which means I boarded Bus One and accepted my fate with the quiet dignity of a soldier walking into a battle she did not choose.

The party bus did what party buses do.

Within four minutes, a man was hanging from the ceiling rails doing something that could generously be described as acrobatics and less generously described as a lawsuit waiting to happen. The stripper pole in the back had three separate visitors before we cleared the Flamingo parking lot. Shot glasses on bead necklaces were being passed around like holy communion at a church where the gospel is tequila and the congregation has absolutely no chill.

I was taking photographs. I was thriving at taking photographs, actually. This is my element. Chaos is light and light is everything and I can find a frame in a hurricane.

Then a man appeared.

He was holding a drink vessel that I can only describe as a weapon. Three feet tall. Hourglass shaped. The kind of tourist souvenir that Las Vegas sells specifically to people who have briefly lost their connection to the concept of consequences. It was filled with something frozen and aggressively colored and it had a straw the length of a small child’s jump rope.

He put it in my face.

In front of everyone.

Now. I don’t drink. But I am also not a monster, and the entire bus was watching, and there is a social contract that exists on a Vegas party bus that even the sober must honor or risk becoming the reason the energy dies. I am many things. I am not a vibe killer.

I took the straw. I drew slow. I let the tiniest ribbon of sugar slush touch my lips — mostly ice, barely alcohol, exactly as I suspected — and I pulled back.

The bus erupted.

Fifty-four people cheering for one tiny sip of watered down tourist slush at seven o’clock on a Saturday night. I have never felt more like a gladiator who just spared a lion.

Our destination revealed itself as we turned downtown.

A club.

An actual nightclub. With a DJ booth and a dance floor and lights engineered specifically to make everyone look like they are having the best night of their lives whether they are or not. The kind of place where the music doesn’t just play — it occupies you. It moves into your chest cavity and sets up residence and does not ask permission and does not pay rent.

I walked in wearing red.

Everyone else was wearing black.

I want to be clear that I did not choose red as a statement. I chose red because it was windy and my red blouse was long sleeved and it matched my Vegas themed jeans and I thought we’d be outside and I grabbed what I grabbed. But standing in that club, in my red top and my Las Vegas playing card jeans with the sparkles, holding a five pound camera above my head, surrounded by a sea of black-clad twenty-somethings doing shots like it was a competitive sport — I was not invisible. I was, in fact, the most visible person in the room. A cardinal in a murder of crows. A lighthouse nobody called for.

I kept working.

The parents sat down when we arrived. They ordered drinks. They ate their food. And then they did something that I found both deeply admirable and mildly heartbreaking — they simply watched.

Still as stones at the edge of a river. Sipping slowly. Wearing the expressions of people who have lived long enough to know that some rivers just have to run where they run. Mom watched her son do a body roll on a table. Dad watched two groomsmen simulate things that should not be simulated at a wedding reception. Grandma, bless her, was simply present — a witness to history, unmoved, eternal.

I identified with the parents completely. I sat with them in spirit while standing on a bench with my camera over my head trying to get the shot.

Our bottle service attendant— Five-foot-ten. Blonde. Lips that did not arrived in the room before she did, announcing themselves — full, magnificent, injected to a scale that suggested whoever did them was working from a different set of blueprints than the rest of us are using. From the waist up she wore a black t-shirt, normal, unremarkable, the kind of shirt a person wears to run errands. From the waist down she wore fishnets and a thong. Just a thong. Cheeks out, completely, for the entirety of the evening, moving through the crowd with the unbothered confidence of a woman who has long since stopped caring what any of us think and honestly I respected it enormously.

Grandma was three feet away.

Nobody said a word.

This is Las Vegas.

My arm was screaming.

My feet were having a full conversation with my spine about working conditions and neither party was happy.

I do not drink water on wedding shoots because I will not use a club bathroom. I have seen club bathrooms. I know what happens in club bathrooms. The floor situation alone is enough to make a person rethink hydration as a concept. So I wait. I always wait. My mouth was dry. My joints were filing formal complaints. I looked at the clock.

Eight o’clock.

I had to be there until ten-thirty.

I nodded the way soldiers nod at things they cannot change, turned back to the dance floor, and lifted my camera again.

The garter toss happened somewhere in the middle of the evening and I will say this — it was the most intimate moment I witnessed between bride and groom all night. He got on his knees. He went under the skirt. He emerged triumphant, garter in hand, flushed and grinning, and for just a moment he was completely, entirely present with her. He kissed her. Once. Maybe twice.

Then he tried to turn her around and grind on her and she declined, so he did it to his best friend instead.

Romance is a many-splendored thing.

By ten o’clock the math was becoming undeniable.

The groom had consumed, by my conservative estimate, enough alcohol to drown a small horse. He had eaten nothing. The body, which is a patient and forgiving instrument for most of the evening, had reached the end of its patience. I watched him reach for a slice of pizza from the tray on the table.

He could not grip it.

I want you to feel the weight of that sentence. A grown man. His wedding night. A piece of pizza just sitting there, doing nothing, asking nothing of anyone — and he could not pick it up.

His bride, to her credit, grabbed it for him. Placed it gently in his hands. The transfer was completed. And then began what I can only describe as the final boss level of the evening — the pizza-to-mouth sequence. His hand moved in slow, searching circles, the slice orbiting his face like a satellite that had lost its coordinates, grazing his chin, missing his lip, coming around for another pass. The airplane that cannot find the runway. The ship that cannot find the dock.

His wife guided him in.

He got the bite.

I documented none of this because I am a professional and also because I was watching with my entire body and forgot to take the picture.

He was escorted outside shortly after.

His friends materialized around him the way good people do in a crisis — fast, wordless, purposeful. Someone produced a large red leather chair that looked like it had been plucked from the set of the Godfather and was waiting its whole life for exactly this moment. Three men lowered him into it and he landed the way a very large sack of flour lands when it finally gives up — complete, total, full-body surrender to gravity.

The grocery bags appeared.

Double-lined. Triple-lined. Held open with care. His friends formed a loose circle around him, a shield wall of loyalty and slightly impaired judgment, blocking him from the general public’s view. And then he paid his dues to the evening.

I stood back about eight feet away when his mother appeared at my elbow.

He’s married now, she said, with the serene detachment of a mother who had decided, in this exact moment, to formally close a chapter. His wife can handle this.

She paused. “You probably shouldn’t photograph that.”

No, I agreed. Probably not.

She wandered back inside when the red light found him.

I don’t know whose idea it was to put a red light there. I don’t know what it was for or why it existed in this corner of the universe on this particular night. But it fell on him like a spotlight in a painting — dramatic and warm and completely, devastatingly perfect. His friends stood around him like dark silhouettes, shadows stretching long across the pavement. He was bent forward over the bag, illuminated in deep crimson, and the whole composition was so painterly, so operatically human, so utterly Las Vegas —

I took the picture.

I took it fast and quiet. I took it because some moments demand to be kept, out of reverence for the beauty of a human being at the absolute bottom of the arc. There is something tender about being cared for. Even like this. Especially like this. His people showed up, held the bag, stood the watch and did not leave.

That counts for something.

Getting him to the party bus required three men and a lifting technique that suggested at least one of them had moved furniture before. They carried him the way pallbearers carry something precious and slightly unwieldy, and they laid him down on the party bus seat with a gentleness that genuinely moved me, and someone — I don’t know who — tucked something around him.

The bus ride back was silent.

Fifty-four people who had, one hour ago, been a writhing, unstoppable force of wedding energy — silent. The music was off and the lights were dimmed. We floated back through the Las Vegas night like a ship returning from a battle it had technically won but emotionally lost, and I sat with my camera in my lap and my aching feet flat on the floor and I felt, strangely, at peace.

I found the bride before I left.

Congratulations, I told her. You’ll have your photos in about four weeks.

She thanked me.

I walked to my car and drove home.

I drank an enormous amount of water, had some broth, and lay down in the dark, and I thought about how every wedding is its own civilization — with its own customs and its own gods and its own way of marking the day two people decided to belong to each other.

This one worshipped loudly, at the altar of tequila, in a nightclub downtown, with a thong-wearing bottle service angel standing watch.

Far be it from me to question anyone’s religion.

I got the shot.

Elle Abbott is a photographer, fiction author, and witness to the full human spectrum of Vegas shenanigans.

She has shot nearly 100 Las Vegas weddings in the last 18 months and expects to recover from this one by sometime in the fall.

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There’s a particular kind of fury circulating on the internet right now. You’ve seen it. Maybe you’ve even felt the pull of it — the notes, the posts, the comment sections on Substack, the breathless declarations that AI is killing writing, killing art, killing something sacred and irreplaceable.

And I understand the feeling underneath it. I do.

But here’s what nobody in that conversation seems to want to say out loud:

A significant portion of the books you’ve read in your lifetime were written by someone whose name never appeared on the cover.

The Ghost in the Machine Was Never AI

Before we talk about artificial intelligence, let’s talk about the industry that’s been quietly operating on a ghost economy for the entirety of its existence.

Ghostwriting is not new. It is not radical. It is, in many genres, the standard.

The estimates, pulled from publishing industry insiders, land somewhere uncomfortable:

- 50–70% of nonfiction books are estimated to be ghostwritten or heavily assisted

- 50–90% of nonfiction bestsellers may involve a ghostwriter

- 50%+ of all traditionally published books, by some estimates, involve ghostwriting, co-writing, or heavy editorial intervention

- Even in fiction — the sacred ground — roughly 10% involves ghostwriting, and that number climbs considerably when you account for co-writers, uncredited collaborators, and what the industry calls book doctors.

That celebrity memoir you bought at the airport? Very likely not written by the celebrity.

That business book by the thought leader you admire? The odds are not in their favor.

That influencer’s debut novel? You already know.

Nobody is in the comments screaming about that. Nobody is writing passionate notes about the inauthenticity of a memoir that was voiced into a recorder and handed off to a professional writer to shape into something readable. Nobody is calling for transparency from the author who had a brilliant idea, hired a brilliant craftsperson to execute it, and put it into the world.

Because the ghost is invisible. That’s the whole point. That’s why they’re called ghost writers.

What a Ghostwriter and an AI Prompt Actually Have in Common

Here’s what strikes me about the AI conversation: the anger is always aimed at the tool, never at the hand.

When someone uses a ghostwriter, they communicate the idea. They control the narrative. They shape the characters, determine the arc, decide what gets said and what doesn’t. They then take that work, claim it, and send it into the world. And we celebrate them for it. We buy their books. We put them on podcasts.

When someone uses AI as a writing tool — prompting it, shaping it, directing it, rewriting it, layering their voice back into it — suddenly we’re supposed to clutch our pearls?

The spectrum of how a book gets made has always been wide:

→ Pure ghostwriting (author contributed the idea, maybe some interviews)

→ Heavy collaboration (author and ghost, blurred lines)

→ Book doctoring (another writer comes in to restructure someone’s manuscript)

→ Developmental editing (sometimes so extensive it rewrites the book)

→ Solo authorship start to finish

→ AI-assisted drafting (author shapes, prompts, rewrites, controls)

That spectrum has always existed. Only the last tool on the list is new.

The question was never who wrote every word. The question was always whose story is this. Whose vision. Whose truth. Whose thing got put into the world.

My Dad, and the Book That Almost Didn’t Survive

I want to tell you about my father.

He’s a man in his eighties now — a Vietnam veteran with a doctorate in chiropractic, two master’s degrees, and a mind that never quite fit the world it was given. He loved learning so much that after he retired, he went back to school and took creative writing classes at a junior college he was wildly overqualified to attend.

He was a captain in the Army. He ran operations in Vietnam. His military record, for three years, was impeccable— until he was injured in the battlefield, earning him a Purple Heart Medal. He understands things about logistics, physics, and organized systems that most people don’t have the framework to even think about.

Around two years after 9/11/2001, he was at a restaurant with my brothers when the TV showed the towers falling. He had been off the grid — no television, living quietly, doing his thing. He had never actually watched the collapse in real time.

And he went into shock.

Because he knew physics. And he knew that buildings don’t fall like that.

What followed was years of research — interviews with physics professors, recordings, documentation, rabbit holes that most people would never go near. And then he wrote a book. He rewrote it. He worked on it the way someone works on something that matters.

And then he brought it to his creative writing class.

The room went silent. Not the good kind of silent. The kind where a group of people collectively decides that the easiest thing is to pretend they didn’t hear you. He was ostracized. Quietly, efficiently, completely.

And I watched my father — this brilliant, decorated, complicated man — put the manuscript down and walk away from his dream.

He gave it up.

I never stopped being angry about that. Not at the students who didn’t know what to do with him. But at the way the world has always treated the people who are doing the thing while everyone else manages their comfort.

Here’s the ending of that story, and it’s the one that matters:

Someone showed my dad ChatGPT. And he started writing again.

Being a man in his eighties, his fingers don’t move like they used to, his eyes tire faster, his body has its limits—but someone put a tool in his hands that gives him hope, a real chance to finally get his book into the world. And as his daughter, I am not interested in hearing why that tool is illegitimate.

The Ones Doing the Screaming

Let me be honest with you about something, and I say this with zero cruelty intended:

A disproportionate number of people leading the charge against AI writing tools are people who have not yet written the thing.

Often have the MFA and the idea. They have the Notes app full of fragments. They have the identity — I am a writer — without the completed manuscript, without the published work, without the thing out in the world.

And I understand that too. Writing is hard. Publishing is brutal. Putting your real work in front of real people and asking them to care is one of the most vulnerable acts a human being can perform.

But the discomfort of that vulnerability doesn’t become more legitimate when it’s aimed at a tool.

Less than one percent of the world’s population has written a book. That number is not small because the bar of authentic authorship is high. It’s small because finishing is hard, and publishing is harder, and most manuscripts never leave the folder they were born in.

The person using AI to get their story out of their head and into the world — and then shaping it, living in it, claiming it — is doing something that the manuscript-in-the-folder crowd has not yet done.

A Note on Pen Names, While We’re Here

Authors have always worn masks.

Female authors used male names to be taken seriously. Male authors used female names to reach different audiences. Both used completely invented personas to protect themselves, to experiment, to separate one genre from another. Some of your favorite authors are not who you think they are. Some of the books you read twenty years ago — the ones you still think about — were written by someone whose real identity you’ll never know.

We didn’t call that inauthentic. We called that publishing.

What Actually Matters

Here’s what I keep coming back to:

The story is yours or it isn’t. The vision is yours or it isn’t. The thing that gets put into the world either has your soul in it or it doesn’t — and that has never, not once, been determined solely by whether you typed every word yourself.

My father’s book about 9/11 — whether he finishes it by hand or with ChatGPT helping him find the structure — is his. The years of research are his. The courage it took to say the thing nobody wanted to hear is his. The fact that he put it down and now, in his eighties, is picking it back up — that is entirely, unmistakably his.

The ghost of writers past has always been with us. They helped build the industry that now wants to draw a clean line between legitimate and illegitimate creation.

It’s a little late for that conversation.

Put the thing into the world. However you do it.

That’s always been the only thing that mattered.

Who’s behind all this?

I’m Elle Abbott — writer, photographer, and someone with very little patience for the myth of solitary creation.

I’m interested in how books actually come into the world. The real process. The messy one. The one that includes collaboration, intervention, revision, and now, increasingly, new tools people aren’t sure they’re allowed to use.

I also happen to be the daughter of a man in his eighties who started writing again because of one of those tools.

That tends to clarify my perspective.

If you’re here for nuance instead of outrage, and reality instead of performance…

Stay.

I also write embodied, atmospheric fantasy — stories built from the inside of a character outward, where what you feel matters as much as what happens. The kind of fiction that lingers a little, asks something of you, and doesn’t rush to explain itself.

I serialize my work here — releasing stories in pieces, the way they unfold — and I’d genuinely love to share them with you.

Welcome to Aethara.

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Something happened in fantasy and the industry is still busy writing its obituary while readers are out there building shrines.

Before we even get into why this is happening, it’s worth looking at the scale of it. Romantasy isn’t a niche. It’s a $600+ million segment of the publishing industry, generating over $610 million in sales in 2024 alone, with tens of millions of copies sold in a single year. Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series has sold more than 75 million copies, while newer entries like Fourth Wing have sold millions and become some of the fastest-selling novels in decades. Fantasy as a whole surged over 40% year-over-year, driven largely by this exact subgenre.

This isn’t a trend at the edges. It’s the center of gravity shifting.

A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fourth Wing didn’t just sell well and they didn’t just find an audience— they created something older and stranger than a readership — they created obsession cycles. Readers didn’t finish and move on. They finished and pulled someone else in. They finished and started again. They argued in comment sections at midnight, built TikTok altars to fictional men, and carried characters around in their bodies like something beautifully unresolved.

That’s not a market trend. That’s a different kind of reading entirely.

I know because I lived it. Embarrassingly, enthusiastically, zero regrets.

I grew up inside fantasy — the kind that made the real world feel like a poorly decorated waiting room. And then, somewhere in my adult years, the door went stiff. I’d pick things up, put them down, wonder vaguely if I’d just outgrown it. Which felt like a tragedy but also, honestly, an inconvenient amount of shelf space freed up.

Then I found The Name of the Wind and the door cracked open again. Rothfuss writes with a specific kind of ache — lyrical, restrained, a story told from deep inside someone’s chest. It reminded me what prose could feel like when it actually trusted the reader to feel something.

But it was A Court of Thorns and Roses that broke me back open completely.

Parts of it read YA to me, I won’t lie. But something else was happening underneath the plot that I couldn’t argue with, no matter how many literary opinions I had about it. It was emotionally forward in a way I hadn’t encountered in fantasy before. It wasn’t decorating the story with feeling — it was building the story out of feeling. And the spice, handled with enough restraint to land rather than shock, did something unexpected: it made the stakes feel real in my body, not just in my head.

I didn’t put it down. I didn’t pause between books. I stacked them and devoured them and emerged slightly wild-eyed, blinking at my TBR like it had personally wronged me by being so long.

And eventually, quietly, I started writing.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s information.

Emotion Is the Structure Now

For a long time, the architecture of fantasy looked like this: plot carries the story, world-building earns the reader’s respect, and emotion shows up at the appointed moments to make you feel appropriately moved before the next chapter of political intrigue resumes.

Emotion was the garnish. Lovely when done well. Optional when not.

That model isn’t dead — but it’s no longer the only one that works, and it’s certainly no longer the one that’s winning. Something shifted, and if you’re a writer trying to understand why certain books disappear into the cultural bloodstream while others, beautifully constructed and technically impeccable, quietly vanish — this is the shift worth understanding.

The new model doesn’t use emotion as decoration. It uses emotion as load-bearing wall.

The tension between two characters isn’t something that happens between plot points. It is the plot. The unresolved longing, the almost-touch, the conversation where everything is said underneath the words being spoken — that’s not filler while we wait for the battle scene. That’s the reason the reader is still awake at 2am.

Think about what music does.

The sound of music— the way it lands in the body before your brain has finished deciding what it thinks.

Percussion hits the chest. Literally. You feel it before you hear it, sometimes — a thud against your sternum, a pulse in the soles of your feet. Bass moves through you like weather. Strings pull upward, tugging somewhere behind the ribs in a place that has no clinical name but that every human being recognizes. A single sustained note in the right register can feel like an electrical current moving through the nervous system — energy you didn’t have thirty seconds ago, suddenly just there, borrowed from sound.

And that’s before it even gets emotional.

Because music doesn’t just energize. It meets you. It finds you in your worst pain and either soothes it or validates it — and somehow, mysteriously, both of those feel like relief. It can carry you out of yourself entirely, take you somewhere you’ve never been but that feels, inexplicably, like memory. It can make a Tuesday afternoon feel like the opening scene of something significant. It can make you cry in your car over nothing — or over everything — and leave you feeling more yourself than you were before you pressed play.

None of that is happening in the lyrics. Or not only there. A poem on a page can be devastating and still leave you in your chair. Music gets you on your feet, or on your knees, or somewhere in between — because it isn’t working on your mind. It’s working on your body. The sound itself is the delivery system.

This is why music is the closest thing we have to a universal language— because everyone has a nervous system. And a nervous system doesn’t require translation.

The new wave of fantasy figured out how to do this on the page. Not to describe emotion from a tasteful distance, or frame it carefully for the reader’s consideration. To deliver it the way a song does — directly into the body, before the analytical mind has time to approve the transaction. To make the chest tighten and the breath change and something unnamed move through the reader before they’ve consciously decided whether the book has earned it yet.

Once you understand that, the “why” of Romantasy stops being mysterious. These books aren’t just emotionally resonant. They’re operating on the same frequency as the songs you can’t skip — the ones that find you before you find them. And readers, like everyone who has ever been wrecked by four minutes of sound they didn’t see coming, never stood a chance.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

The Camera

The great hall was vast, its ceiling lost somewhere in the dark above the torchlight. Stone columns lined the walls at intervals, each carved with the sigil of a different noble house. Guards stood at the doors. The long table held the remains of a feast — bones and bread rinds and overturned cups. At the far end, a man sat alone, his chair pushed back from the table, one hand resting near a goblet he hadn’t touched.

The Body

She smelled the feast before she saw him — grease and wine and the particular sweetness of something burnt at the edges. The hall had emptied hours ago. She knew because she’d been counting the silence, checking it the way you check a wound to see if it’s still bleeding.

He was at the far end of the table. Not eating. Not drinking. His hand rested near a goblet like he’d forgotten it was there, or like setting it down had been the last decision he had the energy to make.

She didn’t move toward him. She wasn’t sure her legs would agree to it.

Same room. Same man. Same moment.

One version shows you a hall. The other puts you inside a body that is trying to decide whether to cross it.

That’s the difference. And once you feel it, you can’t unfeel it. You start noticing it everywhere — in the books that hook you and the ones that don’t, in the scenes you reread and the ones you skim.

The camera scans. The body inhabits.

Readers raised on this kind of writing don’t tolerate the camera for long anymore. It’s not that they’ve become impatient — it’s that they’ve been given something better and their nervous systems know it.

Emotion isn’t extra. It never was. We just forgot to make it structural.

Readers Are the Marketing System

There was a time when a book’s fate was decided in a relatively small room by a relatively small number of people who had very strong opinions about what the rest of the world deserved to read.

Picture the velvet rope. The clipboard. The gatekeeper in an excellent blazer who has read Ulysses twice and will absolutely let you know that — right before he decides your book isn’t quite right for the current market.

A publisher acquisition meeting. A review in the right publication. A placement on the right shelf in the right store. The gatekeepers held the gate with the energy of people who had never once considered that the gate might not be the point.

That system didn’t collapse overnight. It just slowly became irrelevant while everyone inside it was still writing memos about it and calling that a strategy.

Here’s what replaced it: the reader.

Not the reader as passive consumer, politely receiving what the industry decided was worth their time — hat in hand, grateful for the recommendation. The reader as force multiplier. The reader who finishes a book at 1am, makes a twenty-second video about it with slightly unhinged energy and bad lighting, and accidentally sells four thousand copies by Thursday. The reader who writes a Substack post dissecting chapter seventeen with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb. The reader who starts a private Discord server that becomes more active than most book clubs have been in the entire history of book clubs, including the ones with wine. The reader who loves a character so completely, so permanently, that they tattoo them on their body — a sigil, a line, a name inked into skin as if to say: this one stays.

Readers aren’t just consuming anymore. They’re curating, evangelizing, and sustaining.

Because here’s what changed that nobody fully talks about yet: books don’t fade anymore. They cycle.

Under the old system, a book had a window. Publisher attention, marketing spend, review coverage — all of it concentrated into a launch season, and then the machine moved on to the next thing whether your book was finished finding its audience or not. A book that missed its window was largely done. A quiet little tragedy, wrapped in a beautiful cover, remaindered into oblivion.

Now? A reader group keeps talking. A Substack post goes out six months after publication and walks the book straight into a new pocket of readers who’d never heard of it. A BookTok video filmed in someone’s car at a gas station — no ring light, no plan, just genuine feeling — hits the algorithm and suddenly the book is more alive than it was at launch, pulling readers in like a current that doesn’t care what the publishing calendar says.

The book stops being a product with a shelf life. It becomes a shared emotional experience. And those don’t have expiration dates. You can’t put an emotional experience on remainder.

This is why ACOTAR is still selling years after publication. This is why readers who discovered Fourth Wing last month feel the same urgency as the ones who read it on release day. The emotional charge doesn’t discharge. It gets passed, reader to reader, like something too good — and frankly too unhinged — to keep to yourself.

Publishers didn’t build that system. They couldn’t have. You cannot manufacture that kind of sustained aliveness from a marketing department, no matter how good the campaign is or how many influencers you pay to hold a book near a window in flattering afternoon light while looking wistful.

Readers built it. Because the books gave them something to carry.

Which means the writers who understand this — who are building inside this new system intentionally, not politely waiting for permission from the old one — are sitting on leverage that simply didn’t exist a decade ago.

I’m one of them. Building here, on Substack, with you, is not a consolation prize for not having a traditional deal. It’s a different game entirely. One where the reader is the publisher, the curator, and the distributor all at once.

The gate is still there. It’s just that nobody’s staffing it anymore.

The Backlash Is About Control, Not Taste

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Open any literary forum, any traditional publishing discussion, any comment section where someone has dared to mention Romantasy with genuine enthusiasm, and you will find them. The dissenters. The concerned. The people who want you to know, with considerable patience, that what you’re enjoying isn’t real fantasy.

It’s too emotional. It’s poorly constructed. It’s not serious literature. The prose is weak. The magic systems lack internal logic. The romance is overwrought and the heroines make questionable decisions and frankly where is the political complexity and have you considered reading Tolkien.

Here’s what I want to offer, gently but without apology: that conversation is not about taste.

It’s about control.

For decades, the value of a fantasy novel was measured against a set of criteria that rewarded a very specific kind of intelligence — structural complexity, prose restraint, world-building depth, narrative architecture you could diagram on a whiteboard. These are real skills. They matter. Nobody is arguing otherwise.

But they are also criteria that are easy to gatekeep. You can point to them. Measure them. Argue about them in academic language with people who share your framework. You can be objectively right, or at least defensibly right, in a way that keeps the authority concentrated in the hands of people who know the rules.

Emotional writing doesn’t cooperate with that system.

You cannot objectively measure whether a scene made someone’s chest tighten. You cannot diagram longing on a whiteboard. You cannot peer-review the specific quality of an almost-touch between two characters who have been circling each other for three hundred pages. Reader response — visceral, personal, wildly inconvenient — refuses to be ranked by people who didn’t feel it.

And that is what’s actually threatening.

Not the spice or the swooning or the fictional men with suspiciously good jawlines and complicated trauma responses. What’s threatening is that value itself is migrating — from craft purity to reader impact. From is it well made to did it wreck me in the best possible way and did I immediately force it on everyone I love.

The old scoreboard is still up on the wall. But nobody’s looking at it anymore.

When a “technically inferior” book outsells a “beautifully written” one by a factor of ten and sustains a reader community for years afterward, it doesn’t mean readers have bad taste. It means the scoreboard was measuring the wrong game.

That’s not a comfortable realization if your entire authority rests on knowing the rules of the old one.

But Longevity Requires Both

Here’s my one caveat. And I mean it sincerely, because I think it matters.

Emotion alone is not enough to make a book last decades.

It will make it sell. It will make it spread. It will make readers film unhinged videos about it at midnight and press it into the hands of unsuspecting friends like a personal mission from a higher power. But the books that become permanent — the ones that live on shelves for thirty years and get pulled down and reread and handed to daughters and recommended to strangers on trains — those books have something else underneath the feeling.

They have bones.

Structural integrity. A prose voice that holds up on the fifth read. Thematic depth that reveals itself slowly, the way a good secret does — not all at once but in layers, each one earned. Characters whose contradictions make sense in retrospect even when they confused you in the moment.

The Name of the Wind wrecked me emotionally. It also has architecture I could study for a decade. That’s not a coincidence. That’s why it still lives in my body the way it does.

The books that only deliver feeling without structure are the ones that burn bright and cycle fast and eventually lose their charge. The emotional hit stops landing on the third read because there’s nothing underneath it holding the weight. They were fireworks — magnificent, consuming, gone.

The books that last are the ones that hid the scaffolding so well you thought it was just feeling.

That’s the standard worth building toward. Not emotion or craft. Not feeling or structure. Both. Always both — with emotion leading and craft making sure the whole thing holds when someone leans on it.

This is why I write the way I write. Feeling first, always — but with bones underneath that I’ve thought about carefully and built with intention. The reader should never see the architecture. They should just feel held by it, the way you feel held by a well-made chair without ever thinking about joinery.

The goal isn’t to write a book that makes someone cry. The goal is to write a book that makes someone cry and that they’re still thinking about three years later wondering why it hit them so hard.

That’s the thing worth chasing. And it requires both hands.

The Question That Gives You Leverage

So here’s where I land after all of this.

Romantasy didn’t rise because readers got less sophisticated. It didn’t take over because standards dropped or because the algorithm rewarded mediocrity or because people stopped having the attention span for real literature — a sentence I have read approximately one thousand times and which has never once been true.

It took over because it answered a question that readers had been asking quietly for years without quite knowing how to ask it.

Can a fantasy novel make me feel something real?

Not intellectually impressed or respectfully engaged. Not the polite appreciation you give a technically accomplished thing that left you slightly cold. Something real — in the chest, in the throat, in the part of you that is still fourteen years old and desperate to be understood by a story.

The books that answered yes didn’t just find an audience. They found a hunger.

And here’s the thing about hunger — it’s extremely good market research.

Instead of reacting to Romantasy’s explosive growth with opinions about whether it deserves it, the more useful question — the one that actually gives you something to work with — is simply why is this working?

Why does unresolved tension keep readers awake when a perfectly executed battle scene doesn’t? Why does a single loaded glance between two characters generate more reader conversation than three chapters of intricate political maneuvering? Why do people reread the almost-kiss twelve times and skim the prologue that took six months to write?

Answer those questions honestly and without defensiveness and you don’t just understand the market. You understand something true about how human beings are wired to receive story. And that understanding is leverage — real leverage, the kind that doesn’t expire when the trend does.

Because Romantasy as a trend will evolve. It always does. The specific flavor changes, the aesthetics shift, the fictional men get slightly different jawlines. But the underlying hunger — for stories that live in the body, that make the emotional stakes feel as real as the magical ones, that trust the reader to feel something without apologizing for asking them to — that doesn’t go away.

That’s the signal worth tuning to.

Not just because of sales, but because it’s what readers have always actually wanted, and the industry is only just catching up.

I’ll be here, writing from inside that resonance, talking about what it looks like in practice — the craft of it, the structure of it, the strange and specific joy of building something that holds.

If that’s the conversation you’re looking for, you’re already in the right place.

A note on who’s writing this.

I’m Elle Abbott — author, photographer, and someone who has been living inside emotional intelligence quietly for most of my life. The feeling-first approach isn’t a theory I landed on. It’s the operating system I was already running before I had language for it.

Now I get to bring that voice here.

I’m the Keeper of The Warden’s Archive — a Substack built around Aethara, a world of song and resonance and the kind of magic that lives in higher frequencies. I’m preparing the world for The Warden series: for the Unicornis Alata, for the Wardens who protect her, for the slow-burn devotion at the center of all of it.

The stories I write here — novellas, world fragments, small pieces of Aethara released before the series arrives — are built on exactly the principles this article describes. Feeling first. Structure underneath. Nothing performed.

If that’s the kind of fiction you’ve been looking for, or the kind of craft conversation you want to be inside of, you’re already in the right place.

The Archive is open.

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I was twenty years old the first time I met Dr. Jenkins.

He taught organic chemistry at the junior college I was attending in San Diego — the one I never quite finished because algebra and I had a fundamental disagreement about my future, and Europe was calling. He was in his early thirties, smart in that quiet academic way, and he had a crush on me that he made absolutely no effort to hide. We’d run into each other on campus and there was chemistry — the kind that isn’t on any syllabus.

I had a boyfriend. Nothing happened.

But on my twenty-first birthday, my boyfriend wasn’t out-of-town, and Dr. Jenkins offered to take me out. I said yes. We went bar hopping. I got absolutely obliterated — it was my twenty-first birthday, which is legally required — and at some point a bartender handed me something called a stoplight. Three shots stacked like a traffic light. Red, yellow, green. I don’t know what was in any of them. I drank all three. That was not the last drink of the evening.

Before the night ended, he drove me through a Jack in the Box drive-through, and I ordered the largest, greasiest double cheeseburger on the menu and I ate every single bite of it. To this day it is the best burger I have ever had in my life. I don’t know if it was the food or the alcohol or some combination of divine intervention, but that burger saved me. Dr. Jenkins watched me eat it and said nothing. Nothing happened that night either. He was a gentleman.

I tucked that whole chapter away and didn’t think much about it for the next decade.

Ten or eleven years later, I moved back to San Diego briefly for some photography work with a health institute. I was in the best shape of my life. Genuinely. I looked incredible and I knew it. For reasons I can only attribute to nostalgia and curiosity, I reached back out to Dr. Jenkins.

He hadn’t changed much. Same sweet, quiet energy. Same job at the same junior college. Same apartment. There was something endearing about that — a man who simply found his life and stayed in it. We had coffee, caught up, and decided to go on an actual date.

“Let’s go kayaking on the bay,” he said.

I thought: that sounds perfect. San Diego bay, a kayak, maybe some sunshine. Romantic, even. He said he’d bring champagne. I said I’d meet him there.

I arrived to find him standing on the grass with a bottle of champagne and an old duffel bag.

No boats. No kayaks. No rental counter. Just the bag.

It was the kind of duffel bag that looked like it had survived multiple world wars. I don’t mean that as a compliment. I mean it appeared to have been manufactured sometime before my parents were born and had lived a very hard life since then. I stared at it. I stared at him. He was completely unbothered.

“It’s right there,” he said, pointing to the bag.

We sat on the grass, knees touching, drinking champagne while he explained that the bag had been a gift from his father. Then he unzipped it and dumped the contents onto the ground.

It was a pile of sticks.

I want to be precise here: it was a pile of sticks. Like the children’s game — a cascade of thin wooden rods in a heap on the grass of Mission Bay, surrounded by normal boats operated by normal people who had simply gone to a store and purchased or rented a watercraft like the rest of civilization.

I finished my champagne.

What happened next I can only describe as a kind of magic I was not prepared for. Dr. Jenkins, organic chemistry professor, sat cross-legged on that grass and assembled a boat. An actual boat. It had a frame and a hull and a tiny little sail and two seats and, I am not making this up, a Jolly Roger. A little pirate flag, right at the top of the mast, snapping cheerfully in the San Diego breeze.

Merlin himself could not have done it with more quiet confidence.

Now. I should tell you about me at this point in time.

I am six feet tall. I had just come out of knee surgery. I was in excellent shape but I have long legs and wide hips and I am, to put it plainly, not a small person. I was also wearing my favorite casual outfit — a purple yoga set covered in hearts and swords and swirling designs with little rhinestones catching the light, with a matching hoodie. I looked good. I felt good. I was ready for a date, not a docking challenge.

Getting into that boat was the first test. My hips did not fit the way hips are supposed to fit into a seat. There was wiggling. There was maneuvering. There was a very real moment where I thought we were going over before we’d even left the shore. But I got in. I was in. We were doing this.

The sky had gone grey by then. The champagne was gone. We pushed off from shore.

Mission Bay is a beautiful body of water. It is surrounded by restaurants and parks and sailboats and powerboats and people having a genuinely lovely time on the water. We floated among them in our stick boat with our pirate flag, going approximately the speed of a leaf. My legs were already starting to cramp. My hips were pinned. Every time a wake from another vessel rolled through, the whole thing shifted in a way that felt deeply personal.

Other boats kept passing us. Their passengers would look over, look at the Jolly Roger, and laugh. Not subtly. Openly, joyfully, the way people laugh when they encounter something they will be telling their friends about later.

I smiled for a few selfies. I tried to find the romance in it. I genuinely tried.

There was no romance. There was only the bay, and the sticks, and my numb legs, and the pirate flag.

Getting out was worse than getting in.

By the time we came back to shore, I couldn’t feel anything from the knee down. There was no graceful exit from that boat — not for anyone, and certainly not for a tall woman with a healing knee who had been folded into a wooden accordion for the better part of an hour. I stepped into the water. My cute purple outfit got soaked from the knees down. I nearly tipped the boat, which made Dr. Jenkins visibly irritated.

He didn’t say anything. But I could feel it.

He dragged the boat up onto the grass and began the process of taking it back apart and returning it to the duffel bag. The zipper, at this point, would not fully close. The bag was too old. It fought him. He lost. He gave up on the zipper and loaded the whole thing onto a dolly — also ancient, also visibly exhausted by its continued existence — and we started walking back toward the parking lot.

“Just stay behind me,” he said, “and warn me before the back wheel flips.”

I want to pause here and really sit with that sentence.

Warn me before the back wheel flips.

I watched that wheel. I watched it with focus and intent. The problem was that it gave no warning whatsoever. It would be rolling along perfectly fine — straight, normal, cooperative — and then it would simply decide to flip ninety degrees sideways with no preamble and no indication that it was considering doing so. There was nothing to read. There was no pattern. The wheel had its own agenda and shared it with no one.

It flipped. I said nothing because I had nothing to say. He stopped. He turned around. He yelled at me.

Not a little. He yelled. Frustrated and annoyed and fully expecting that I should have somehow predicted the mechanical failure of a dolly that was older than our entire acquaintance combined.

And just like that, the entire day rearranged itself.

I said nothing. I smiled. I thought: tomorrow is not happening.

We had plans for the next day. I’ll leave it at that. He was expecting to come over to my apartment. I had been, until approximately forty-five minutes prior, looking forward to it.

We reached the parking lot. He loaded his pile of sticks and his ancient duffel bag and his traitorous dolly into his vehicle — the same vehicle he’d been driving twelve years ago, now twelve years older, doing its best. We said goodbye. He smiled like a man with plans for Saturday.

He called the next day. Then again. Then a few more times after that.

I didn’t answer.

He didn’t know where I lived. And that, as they say, was that.

I have thought about Dr. Jenkins a few times over the years — not with regret, exactly, but with a kind of fond bewilderment. He was genuinely sweet. He loved that boat. He brought champagne and a pirate flag and assembled a vessel from raw materials with his bare hands because that’s just how he showed up for a date.

There’s something almost admirable in that, if you look at it from a certain angle.

I just couldn’t look at it from that angle while my outfit was wet and a stranger on a speedboat was laughing at the Jolly Roger.

Some doors close gently. Some close because a wheel flips sideways with no warning and the man yells at you about it.

Either way, they close.

Hi, I’m Elle Abbott—photographer by day, fantasy author by night, fueled by coffee and a love for a good story.

Sometimes the stories are fiction.

Sometimes… they’re not.

Most of the time the stories come with a song. This one was so utterly ridiculous it had to be a country song.

Worst Date Ever

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Worst Date Ever

Ran into a guy I used to know,

Same quiet smile from years ago,

We got coffee, caught up a bit,

He said, “Let’s hit the bay—take a boat out, get into it.”

Said he’d bring champagne, keep it light,

I said, “Yeah… that actually sounds nice,”

So I show up thinking this might click—

He’s standing there… with a bag of sticks.

No kayak rack, no rentals around,

Just him and that bag on the grass by the ground,

He unzips it slow like it’s no big deal,

And dumps it out like something real.

I’m sitting there with my champagne glass,

Watching him build something out of that,

Piece by piece, click by click—

Man built a whole boat outta sticks.

Not a joke.

Not a trick.

A whole damn boat

From a pile of sticks.

Two little seats and a tiny sail,

And I swear to God he tops it off—

With a pirate flag nailed right to the rail.

Now I’m thinking maybe I misread this,

Maybe this is some kind of… thing people do,

But there’s boats all around with normal folks—

And then there’s me… climbing into that with you.

I’m six feet tall with a bad right knee,

Trying to fold myself into geometry,

Got stuck halfway, thought we might tip,

But somehow I made it onto that ship.

We push off slow, barely moving at all,

Every little wave feels a little too tall,

People passing by start laughing quick—

At the girl in purple on a boat of sticks.

Should’ve left.

Didn’t quit.

Just kept floating

On that pile of sticks.

By the time we made it back to shore,

I couldn’t feel my legs anymore,

Stepped in the water, soaked my clothes,

Nearly tipped the whole thing over my toes.

He didn’t say much, but I felt that shift,

Like somehow I’d done something wrong in it,

Then we’re dragging it back with this busted rig—

That wheel had a mind of its own, I swear it did.

He says, “Stay back—tell me if it flips,”

I’m watching that wheel like I’ve got a gift,

But there was no sign, no warning, no clue—

That thing just turned like it wanted to.

It flips.

I blink.

He turns around—

And starts yelling at me like I missed something big.

And that…

was the moment.

We made it back, loaded up his car,

Same one he’d had for years by far,

He smiled like we had plans to keep—

Like this whole thing didn’t just run that deep.

He called the next day.

Then again.

I let it ring.

That was the end.

Now every now and then I think of it—

That pirate flag… and that pile of sticks.

You’re stuck. Not because you don’t have anything to say — you have too much to say and none of it is coming out right and so you’re just.

Sitting there. Staring at the thing.

Rearranging the same paragraph like furniture in a room you hate.

That’s not writer’s block. That’s overthinking with a literary degree.

The fix isn’t more planning. It isn’t a better outline or a cleaner desk or waiting until you feel ready, because — and I say this with love — you are never going to feel ready.

The fix is to stop trying to write the thing.

Play this song. Loud. Move if your body wants to move. And then write something that has nothing to do with what you’re working on. Write the weird memory. The conversation you can’t stop replaying. The thing you’d be embarrassed to show anyone.

Write it messy. Write it wrong. Write it like no one is watching — because right now, no one is.

You’re not unlocking the chapter. You’re just moving the energy. And energy that’s sitting in your chest like a stone cannot get to the page until you shake something loose.

The song knows how. Your body knows how.

Now your hands just need to catch up.

Just write it.

Just Write It (poem)

Write it raw, with your hands still shaking,

no clean lines, no careful making.

Write it messy, let it spill,

ink like blood with a stubborn will.

Write it undignified, don’t pretend,

mascara running, breaking the end.

Write it crying in parking lot light,

too much truth for the middle of night.

Write it in darkness, write it in ache,

write it in all the rules you break.

Write when the silence starts to hum,

when the real things finally come.

Write it on paper, rip it through,

write it in lipstick staring at you.

Write on glass where breath still clings,

let your reflection read your things.

Write in Notes with your thumbs too fast,

autocorrect lying—don’t make it last.

Write in fragments, write in sound,

write what’s lost and what you found.

Write it spoken, voice gone thin,

crack it open, let it in.

Write the bones—the bare, the true,

the thing beneath the thing you knew.

Write the meat, the tender bite,

write the sweet that feels like light.

Write the ugly you made behave,

write what you buried, what you saved.

Write the dirty, sharp and wild,

write the woman, write the child.

Write the heat you tried to hide,

write it laughing, mortified.

Write the sadness, heavy, slow,

the kind that doesn’t let you go.

Write the weight that sits at three,

with no name and no decree.

Write the devastating part—

the almost end, the breaking heart.

Write the thing that should’ve killed

but left you breathing, bruised, and filled.

Write it loud, a crashing wave,

take the space you never gave.

Write it noisy, bold, and bright,

a living, breathing, holy fight.

Write it soft, a secret kept,

a lullaby you never slept.

Write it safe, a quiet plea,

from who you are to who you’ll be.

Write it now—don’t hesitate,

not when it’s clean, not when it’s great.

Write before the morning steals

all the sharp and sacred feels.

Before the world can make you small,

before you second-guess it all—

Just write it.

The bone. The breath. The fire. The you.

The only thing that’s ever been true.

…and because I’m exactly that woman—here’s a song.

A Writer’s Anthem

Hi, I’m Elle Abbott—photographer by day, fantasy writer by night… sometimes 2am. This is my little corner of the internet where words dance, stories unfold, and Aethara lives—a world built on frequency, song, and resonance.

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That hour — the quiet one, before the world has any claims on me — is the most protected part of my day. I open Substack the way other people open a window. Something about the light. Something about the reset. I scroll through the writers I follow looking for fantasy, which is what I want most, which is what I write, which is the world I want to live in at 7 AM with both hands wrapped around something warm.

I found a prologue. I started reading.

Within four sentences I was inside a blood ritual — bodies, hanging, dripping, the particular descriptive precision of a writer who wanted me to feel the wrongness of flesh at the cellular level — and my stomach turned before my mind caught up, the way your body flinches before you’ve identified the threat, and I was holding imagery I hadn’t agreed to carry.

I closed it. Set my phone down. Looked out the window for a minute.

That’s not a criticism of the writer. I want to be clear about that from the beginning, because this article has the potential to be misread and I’d rather not let it. Dark fantasy is a legitimate genre with a massive, devoted audience and writers who do it brilliantly. Gore, ritual, body horror, blood sacrifice — these are valid tools. They create specific, powerful effects that other modes of writing cannot. There is nothing wrong with writing them.

There is something worth discussing about dropping them on a reader in paragraph one, without warning, on a platform where people are checking in over breakfast.

Here is the word I keep coming back to: consent.

Not in a litigious sense or accusation. Just as a simple truth about what the reading experience actually is — which is an invitation. You are asking someone to enter your world, to let your images into their nervous system, to carry your story in their body for the duration of the read and sometimes long after.

Most of the time that invitation is implicit and fine. But there are categories of content where implicit isn’t enough.

Graphic violence. Ritual sacrifice. Body horror. Sexual violence. Gore.

For these, the reader deserves a threshold. A sentence at the top. A single line that says this piece contains graphic depictions of blood ritual or content warning: body horror — something that lets the person on the other side of the screen make an informed choice about whether this is what they want to hold today, in this hour, in this particular state of their nervous system.

Because readers are not passive anymore. They are choosing — not just what to read, but what to let in. What to carry. What to do with their attention, which is a finite and personal resource. They are making those choices consciously, on platforms like Substack, where fiction arrives the same way the news does — unannounced, in a feed, between one thing and another.

Give them the threshold. Let them step over it on their own terms.

I want to tell you something about my own work, because I don’t get to make this argument without it.

A month ago I published a Harmonic Record story — The Midwife — that included a breech birth. I wrote it with care. I researched real midwifery. I wanted the scene to be grounded and true and I was proud of what I’d written.

One of my readers is a former medical professional. He left a comment that said he’d had to put the piece down. That it had pulled something up in him he wasn’t prepared for that morning.

I hadn’t left a disclaimer.

I didn’t think to. I was so inside the craft of the scene that I didn’t step back far enough to ask what it might land like for someone carrying clinical memory of that exact experience.

I went back and added one.

I’m telling you this because I am not standing above this conversation. I am in it. I made the exact error I’m describing, with a reader who trusted me with his morning the same way I trusted the writer I found this week. No one is exempt from this. The instinct to protect the work can blind you to the reader on the other side of it.

This is not about softening dark fantasy. It is not about sanitizing fiction or deciding that certain stories shouldn’t be told. The darkness in literature exists for profound reasons — to metabolize what we cannot metabolize in life, to witness what we would otherwise look away from, to make meaning from violence and grief and the body’s most difficult hours.

That work matters. Those writers matter.

I am only asking for one sentence at the top.

Because the difference between a reader who enters your dark world prepared and a reader who closes the tab and doesn’t come back is not the quality of your writing. It’s whether they felt invited or ambushed.

Invite them. Even into the hard things. Especially into the hard things.

A threshold is not a barrier. It’s a door.

And a door, handled with respect, makes people more willing to walk through — not less.

If you write dark fantasy, horror, gore, blood ritual, or body horror on Substack — I am not your adversary. I subscribe to writers across the full spectrum of this genre and I intend to keep doing so. I’m asking for one line. You can write the darkest thing imaginable. Just tell me first.

Who’s behind all this?

I’m Elle Abbott — photographer by day, fantasy author by night, and someone who thinks a lot about what it actually means to ask a reader to step into a world.

I live in Las Vegas, which is loud, bright, and overstimulating in ways that probably explain why I care so much about how stories land in the body. Not just what’s written, but how it’s received and what it asks you to hold.

I write atmospheric fantasy — slow burn, feeling-first, built from the inside of a character outward. I’m less interested in spectacle for its own sake and more interested in what changes you when you encounter it.

This space is where I write stories, yes — but also where I think out loud about craft, about reader experience, about the quiet contract between the person writing and the person reading.

If you’re here for depth, tension, myth, and the kind of stories that invite you in rather than overwhelm you…

You’ll probably like it here.

And if you ever have something to say — about the work, about your own process, about any of it — I read my comments. I answer more often than I don’t.

I’m not that mysterious.

Subscribe if you want to step into a world…

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INGREDIENTS

— 2 handfuls of 2am

— 1 metric ton of voice notes recorded while driving

— 2,000 words per day, plus or minus a breakdown

— 1 cup of writer’s cramp, unsalted

— 4 tabs of Wikipedia you never intended to open

— A pinch of totally manageable self-delusion

— 3 lbs of cold coffee, each mug abandoned at the critical moment

— 1 spiral of unresolved feelings about your protagonist

— Unlimited Post-it notes — theoretical, never applied

— 7 drafts of chapter one, each worse, then better, then worse

— 1 tsp of imposter syndrome (do not reduce)

— Several near-religious experiences in the shower

— 1 complete rewrite at chapter nineteen

— A fistful of deleted scenes you’ll never actually delete

— 1 running document titled “IDEAS - DO NOT OPEN”

— Innumerable 3am voice memos beginning with “okay so what if—”

METHOD

Step I — Preparation

Begin with a thought that arrives, uninvited,

at the precise moment your sleeping was nicely ignited.

Do not write it down. Let it marinate in dread.

By morning it’s tripled, catastrophic, and lodged in your head.

Brew coffee. Abandon coffee. Brew another cup.

Open your document. Close it. Open it up.

Stare at the blinking cursor — that smug, rhythmic thing —

type a sentence, hate it, eat something, and sing.

Step II — The Voice Notes

Now record yourself talking while operating a vehicle,

because inspiration is neither safe nor predictable.

Voice note one: “He looks at her — no, wait — she looks at HIM —”

Voice note twelve: you’re crying. The reason remains grim.

Voice note thirty: a full chapter, breathless, mid-highway,

transcribed at 2am in your own grammatical byway.

Voice note forty-one begins: “okay so what if the magic—”

and ends with a turn signal. The rest: forever tragic.

Step III — The Daily Word Count

Add two thousand words. Now add two thousand more.

It is fine that they’re bad. That is what revision is for.

Add a scene you don’t need — a whole subplot, a feast,

a character named Gerald who becomes, somehow, a priest.

Delete Gerald. Mourn Gerald. Bring Gerald back, changed.

Gerald now has a secret. Gerald is fully deranged.

Gerald becomes the antagonist. Gerald gets a love arc.

Gerald is optioned for TV. Gerald leaves his mark.

Step IV — The Research Phase

Now open one tab: historical sword techniques, medieval.

Open forty more tabs. The descent is primeval.

Learn the specific weight of a falchion. Learn the dyes

used to achieve that particular shade of your protagonist’s eyes.

Spend six hours on the etymology of one invented word.

Spend four on the mating habits of a specific bird

that appears in chapter three for exactly one line —

but god help you, that line is going to shine.

Google: can a person survive this? Then: how long exactly?

Then: is this too much blood? Then: what constitutes compactly—

—close all tabs. Make more coffee. The browser history

is a portrait of madness and narrative mystery.

Step V — The Writer’s Cramp

By now your dominant hand has developed opinions,

a personal grievance, and possible trade union minions.

It curls around the pen like a question in heat,

a claw, a comma, a creature refusing defeat.

Type through it. Your wrist is a metaphor now.

Your body is the manuscript. You are the plow.

You are the field. You are the harvest. You are the drought.

You are the farmer weeping. You are the crop. No doubt.

Step VI — The Spiral

Now open chapter one. All of it must go.

The voice was wrong. The tense was wrong. The flow —

you had no idea what flow was back then, poor thing,

back before you understood what sentences could bring.

Rewrite chapter one with the ferocity of the wronged.

It is now seventeen pages. It is gorgeous. It is prolonged.

It is also, your editor will mention, quietly, gently, with care:

three chapters. You weep in the shower. The drain doesn’t care.

Add a prologue. The prologue births its own mythology.

Now the prologue needs a foreword. The foreword wants an apology.

The apology is seventeen stanzas. One of them rhymes.

Delete it all. Start over. These are the times.

Step VII — The Manic Plateau

It is 2am on a Tuesday that began on Saturday.

You have consumed nothing but cold brew and a granola latté.

Something has broken open. Something has cracked wide.

The words are arriving so fast you can barely get out of their tide.

Five thousand words. Eight thousand. You have left your body.

Your fingers are strangers. Your outline was a hobby.

The characters have seized the wheel — you’re just the hands.

You are taking dictation from the promised lands.

The scene you thought was chapter twelve is now the heart.

The chapter you thought was the heart was just the start.

Gerald — Gerald — appears holding the final key.

You did not plan for Gerald. Gerald was always free.

Step VIII — The Post-It Prophecy

Cover every surface now in small adhesive squares.

Timelines, character wounds, plot threads, and players’ prayers.

Color-code the trauma arcs in coral, teal, and red.

Lose the one Post-it that contained the ending. Go to bed.

Wake up. It was stuck to your cheek the whole night through.

Three words: she lets go. That’s it. That’s the cue.

The whole book clicks into place like a bone snapping home.

You are shaking. You are weeping. You are utterly alone.

And it is magnificent.

And it is terrible.

And it is yours.

You do not sleep. You write. You write through all the floors

of consciousness until the manuscript is bleeding —

breathing —

pleading —

succeeding.

Step IX — The Boiling Point

Now crank the heat.

Increase to full rolling boil.

Send the draft to your most honest friend —

the one who will not coddle, who will not recoil,

who sends back fourteen pages of annotated truth

with a note that says: this is the one. I have proof.

Revise. Revise. Revise until the sentences glow.

Until each word earns its keep and the images flow

like something older than language, like something instilled —

like you were always writing this, always, always building

toward this single collection of pages, this weight,

this ridiculous impossible luminous thing called a book.

Stir continuously.

Do not look away.

Do not stop.

Not even for Gerald.

Especially not for Gerald.

(Gerald knows what he did.)

Step X — The Bake

Pour the whole impossible mess

into the vessel of your absolute best.

Every 2am. Every abandoned cup.

Every voice note. Every spiral. Every time you gave up

and came back. And gave up. And came back again.

Every cramp, every Gerald, every shower at 3am.

Every word you deleted.

Every word that survived.

Set the oven to everything you are.

Let it rise.

Yield: One Bestseller.

Serve warm, slightly broken, inexplicably beautiful.

Pairs well with a reader who needed exactly this.

Shelf life: indefinite.

Feeds: everyone who was waiting for it.

✦ Do not share the recipe. Let them think it was easy. ✦​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Bestseller Recipe

Elle Abbott writes mythic fantasy and stories born at 2am. You can find her at The Warden’s Archive, probably laughing at something she shouldn’t.

New to The Warden’s Archive? Start here → Welcome to Aethara

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The Bestseller Recipe (song lyrics)

Two handfuls of 2am, don’t measure, just pour,

A thousand little breakdowns and then maybe some more,

Cold coffee on the counter, yeah it’s third of the night,

Open up the doc—close it—open it—fight.

Got voice notes in the car like “wait—what if he—”

Then you miss your exit crying over chapter three,

Got a blinking little cursor with an attitude problem,

Type a line, hate it, snack, repeat, never solve ‘em.

Add a pinch of “I’m a fraud” (don’t you dare reduce),

And a spiral of emotions you refuse to produce,

Stir it slow, let it burn, let it ache, let it sting—

If it doesn’t break your heart, it won’t mean anything.

This is how you make a bestseller, baby—

Little bit of chaos, little bit of maybe,

Every sleepless night and every almost quit,

Every single moment that you almost lost it.

Bake it in the fire of “I don’t know if I can,”

Season with the ghost of a half-finished plan,

Serve it up raw, a little cracked, a little bruised—

That’s the kind of story people choose.

That’s the kind of story people choose.

Open one tab—now you’ve opened forty more,

Learning sword weights you don’t even use in chapter four,

Google “can they live?” then “how much blood is too—”

Close the tabs, make more coffee, start again, you do.

Now Gerald walks in—wasn’t even in the plan,

Now he’s got a secret and a cult and a van,

Kill him off—bring him back—give him love—give him rage,

Gerald’s now the villain and the heart of the page.

Your hand starts cramping, now it’s forming a union,

Your wrist is a metaphor, your pain’s the communion,

You are the harvest, the drought, the demand—

You are the story carving through your own hand.

This is how you make a bestseller, baby—

Little bit of madness dressed up as “maybe,”

Every draft worse before it gets divine,

Every single rewrite crossing every line.

Turn the heat up, let the whole thing break,

Let the characters drive, let the outline fake,

When it finally hits and the whole thing clicks—

That’s the sound of the story that sticks.

Post-it notes like prophecy, stuck to your skin,

Three little words that pull the whole world in,

“She lets go”—and suddenly you see—

It was never the book.

It was always you becoming free.

Five thousand words—eight thousand—who’s in control?

You left your body, you sold your soul,

Tuesday started somewhere back on Saturday—

You don’t eat, don’t sleep, just write anyway.

Gerald’s back. Gerald’s key. Gerald knew all along—

Gerald is the twist and the end of the song.

This is how you make a bestseller, baby—

Every broken piece turning into maybe,

Every time you stopped and then came back again,

Every quiet war that no one could defend.

Pour it out, every version of your name,

Every doubt, every loss, every flicker of flame,

Set the oven to everything you are—

And let it rise into something like a star.

Serve it warm.

Let them say it came easy.

Let them wonder how it looks so breezy.

But you know—

You know what it took.

It wasn’t a recipe.

It was a life…

that turned into a book.

It was a life…

that turned into a book.

A little flower. 🌸

It appears next to the profile names of people who have paid to support another writer’s work here. Sometimes for exclusive content. Sometimes for the deeper dive. And sometimes… not for any of that at all. Some of them aren’t even subscribed to get posts.

Just the flower. Just because they said I believe in this person.

I’ve been thinking about that flower a lot lately.

I’ll be honest with you about something. A few weeks ago I launched this Substack. I had no following, no publishing deal, no platform. Just sharing a world I’ve been building and stories I couldn’t stop writing.

This week I hit #19 Rising in Fiction.

When I looked at the other accounts rising in their categories — across every genre, every niche — I noticed they had one thing in common. Their paywalls were on. Every single one of them had made themselves available to be supported.

But most of them did not have the little flower.

There’s a difference. And I think it matters more than most of us realize.

A writer named Max Winter posted a note recently arguing that Substack’s economic model is fundamentally broken. His logic wasn’t cruel — it was actually pretty reasonable on its face. Why pay the a price for one independent writer that you’d pay for The New Yorker, which gives you dozens of the best professional writers, guided by seasoned editors?

It’s a fair question if you’re buying a product.

But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.

I replied to his note. He responded thoughtfully — acknowledged the counter-arguments, admitted he’d been one of the gatekeepers himself as a literary scout for a movie studio. He’d also been rejected by publishers for a novel he knew was good, turned away for reasons that ranged from arbitrary to absurd. He found his audience on Substack outside of corporate approval. His words.

He’s living the thing he’s skeptical of. Most of us are.

Here’s what I think Max’s framing misses:

We are not recreating the old publishing model. We are dismantling it.

For generations, the path to readers ran through a very small number of gatekeepers. Agents. Acquisitions editors. Publishers. Marketing budgets. Bookstore placement. If you didn’t fit the slot they had available — if your book was “too masculine” or “too niche” or “too strange” or simply not what they were already selling — the door stayed closed.

That system produced some extraordinary work. It also buried a staggering amount of it.

Substack isn’t a replacement for traditional publishing. It’s something weirder and more interesting: a direct line from the person making something to the person who wants it. No intermediary deciding whether your work deserves to exist.

Five million people on this platform are currently paying writers directly. For less than a cup of coffee a month. Five million people voting with small amounts of money on what writing is worth keeping alive.

That’s not a flawed economy. That’s a new one being born.

And here’s the thing about the flower. 🌸

It costs less than a gluten-free pizza. (I know, I know — but I’ve been eating gluten-free for years and that price point is real and it’s devastating.) I support a handful of writers here for less than that every single month. Writers whose work I want to exist in the world. Writers who are building something real, one chapter at a time, without a publishing house or a marketing budget or an editor telling them if they’re allowed to try.

When I pay into their paywalls, I’m not buying access. I’m participating in an ecosystem.

I’m saying: your work is worth something.

I’m saying: keep going.

That little flower next to my name? It means someone said that to me. And I cannot overstate what that means when you are a writer in the early days of building something, when the silence is loudest and the doubt is sharpest and you are deciding whether to keep showing up.

Someone put a flower there and said: I see you. I believe in you. Don’t stop.

You do not need to be wealthy to do this. You do not need to subscribe to every writer you admire. You don’t even need to read their paid content.

You just need to decide, once, about a handful of writers whose existence in your world makes it better — and turn on the support.

Not to make them rich or to receive something in return.

To be part of the reason they kept writing.

There’s a version of the future where independent publishing actually works. Where a writer building a world on Substack can make enough to keep building it. Where the gatekeepers don’t get to decide what stories deserve to exist.

Gatekeepers don’t disappear on their own. They get replaced when people stop asking permission.

But that future doesn’t happen automatically. It happens because enough people decide, with the cost of a pizza, to say I believe in this.

The flower is small. The signal it sends is not.

And if you’re someone who has a paywall turned on—but no flower by your name yet—this is your invitation to contribute back to the ecosystem you’re part of.

Find your one writer. Earn your flower. 🌸

And if you want to support what I’m building here in Aethara — the slow-burn romance, the serialized stories, the world that lives between the words — you know where to find it.

Thank you for being here.

And because I’m apparently this person now… there’s a song 👇.

— Elle

BUY ME A FLOWER 🌸

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BUY ME A FLOWER 🌸

You could read me for free (and I love you, it’s fine)

Lurk in the shadows, sip words like cheap wine

But somewhere between “this is good” and “I care”

There’s a tiny green button just waiting right there

It’s not a paywall, it’s more like a vote

A soft little yes in a loud, noisy world

Buy me a flower, it’s five bucks a month

Less than your latte, your impulse, your lunch

You’re not buying content—you’re keeping it real

You’re funding the stories the gatekeepers kill

Buy me a flower, watch what it does

Turns quiet creators to dangerous ones

If enough of us do it, we rewrite the game—

Substack gets spicy, and writers get paid

The New Yorker’s lovely, the edits are tight

But I’m building a world in the dead of the night

No boardroom, no budget, no “fit for the list”

Just me and a story that refuses to quit

You don’t need permission to say what has worth

You just need a finger and faith and five bucks

Buy me a flower, it blooms on your name

A quiet little badge that says “I changed the game”

Not for the perks, not for something to win—

But ‘cause you believe in the world I’m in

Buy me a flower, don’t overthink

It’s cheaper than doubt and stronger than ink

And if we all do it? Oh, just wait and see—

Writers go rogue, and the words run free

Call it OnlyFans, but for pages and prose

Where the ones with the fire are the ones who get chose

No middleman whispering “this one won’t sell”

Just readers deciding what stories do well

Buy me a flower, and I’ll keep the light

Writing at 2AM, night after night

You’re not just a reader—you’re part of the cause

Buy me a flower…

and watch what it does 🌸

Buy me a flower…

and watch what it does 🌸





In 2017, I found myself standing in a circle of strangers in the middle of what I can only describe as a sacred sexual shamanic something-or-other retreat.

I was not the archetype for this retreat. I did not own a single crystal. I had not yet met my spirit animal. I was wearing sensible shoes in a circle of people who had definitely not worn sensible shoes since 2003, and we were about to create what the facilitator called a sacred container.

I didn’t know what that meant. I was willing to find out.

The ceremony began outdoors. The air had that particular quality of a moment taking itself very seriously. People closed their eyes. Someone rang a bell. The facilitator began calling in the directions— north, south, east, west— in the kind of voice that makes you feel like you should be breathing differently.

Then the facilitator opened the floor— anyone who wished could call in their deity of choice.

First person who spoke — We call in Jesus.

Yes. Okay. Classic opener.

Then— We call in Buddha.

Good. Solid. Respectable.

We call in Kali.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

We call in the ancestors. We call in the angels. We call in the divine feminine. We call in Gaia. We call in Isis. We call in Archangel Michael.

The list kept growing. Each person enthusiastically participating and adding another deity. The energy kept building.

People were swaying slightly. Someone was crying already, which felt fast, but I respected the commitment.

The container was being constructed deity by deity, and it was enormous, and it was heavy, and everyone in that circle was holding it with both hands and their whole trembling reverent hearts and—

“SYLVESTER STALLONE.”

That was me.

I don’t fully know why. It arrived the way the best things arrive — not from thinking but from somewhere beneath thinking, that place where truth lives before it gets dressed up and made appropriate for company.

Two guys lost it immediately. The real kind of laugh, the kind that escapes before you can catch it. One of them doubled over. And for just a moment — just one unguarded, unscripted, completely absurd moment — the container cracked open and something real got in.

The facilitator recovered graciously. The ceremony continued. Sylvester Stallone joined the sacred circle alongside Kali and Archangel Michael, which honestly feels correct.

But I never forgot what happened in that crack.

I have spent a lot of time in spiritual spaces. Ceremonies, retreats, circles, containers of various shapes and theological commitments. I have sat with people who are searching for something — the lightness, the opening, the moment where the weight lifts and you remember what you actually are underneath all the performance of being a person.

And I have watched, over and over, the same thing happen.

People arrive serious. They arrange their faces into reverence. They speak in lower registers. They move slowly and deliberately, like the sacred might startle if approached too quickly. They build elaborate structures of intention and ritual and right behavior, and they hold it all so carefully, and they feel—

Something thin. Real enough in the circle. Gone by Tuesday— just long enough to send them back to the next retreat, and the one after that, chasing the feeling outside the circle because they couldn’t find it inside themselves.

And then, in the middle of all that careful searching —

Something ridiculous happens. Something unscripted and undignified and completely outside the container. Nobody planned it. Nobody called it in.

And the whole room cracks open laughing.

That’s when it arrives.

That’s when the thing they came for actually shows up.

Here is what I have come to believe, after years of sensible shoes in sacred circles:

The sacred is not stiff. It is not guarded. It does not require the correct posture or the appropriate facial expression or the right combination of deities, though it will meet you there too if that’s where you are.

It is alive. It is unpredictable. It hides in the belly laugh that breaks the tension — the ridiculous moment that pulls you out of your head and drops you back into your heart with a sound like a door unlocking.

Creation itself is a trickster. The same source that sings through the monks also giggles through the fools. The same force that built the galaxies absolutely put Sylvester Stallone in my mouth in the middle of a shamanic ceremony in 2017, and I have never once regretted it.

When you laugh — really laugh, the kind that escapes before you can make it appropriate — your nervous system releases control. Your body remembers how to be a body. Joy moves through you like a current and for a moment you are not performing anything at all.

That is not frivolous.

That is holy.

So let’s stop worshipping only in whispers. Let’s worship in laughter, in silliness, in the art that makes no sense but makes us come alive.

Because the sacred does not hide in solemnity.

It hides in absurd delight.

In the crack where laughter breaks the ceremony open and something real finally walks in.

Sometimes it arrives as Kali.

Sometimes it arrives as Archangel Michael.

And sometimes—

if you’re very lucky—

it arrives as Sylvester Stallone.

I’ll leave you with one more thing.

I write fantasy. My protagonist Alexandria (in The Warden series) sings — the kind of singing that moves through walls, bends light, does the things that magic does in worlds where magic is honest about what it is.

I wrote her a song about this exact thing. About the girl who laughed like something wild and uncontained. About joy as healing. About grief forgetting its gravity when the walls come down.

It got cut from the book.

Which feels right, somehow. The sacred doesn’t always make it into the official ceremony. Sometimes it lives in the out-takes, the almost-was, the thing that got left on the floor and turned out to be the realest thing in the room.

This is Alexandria’s song. She sang it before I knew I believed any of this.

Turns out she knew first.

Elle Abbott writes mythic fantasy, shamanic comedy, and whatever this is. You can find her at The Warden’s Archive, probably laughing at something she shouldn’t be.

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When We Laugh (Song lyrics)

I have known the quiet dark,

Rooms where no one speaks,

I have held my breath so long

I forgot I was the air I seek.

But you — you brought the noise back in,

The clumsy, holy, golden kind,

The sort of sound that shakes the dust

From every window in my mind.

[Chorus]

When we laugh, the walls fall down,

Light pours in without a sound,

Teeth like sunrise, hearts set free,

Grief forgets its gravity.

Spin me in that golden noise,

Healing hidden in our joy —

Smiles stitching broken air,

Breath by breath, we rise from there.

[Verse 2]

I was told to hold it in,

Be still, be small, be good,

But joy was never meant for cages

And I never understood

Why they feared the girl who laughed

Like something wild and uncontained —

As if a song could split the sky,

As if the dancing was to blame.

[Chorus]

When we laugh, the walls fall down,

Light pours in without a sound,

Teeth like sunrise, hearts set free,

Grief forgets its gravity.

Spin me in that golden noise,

Healing hidden in our joy —

Smiles stitching broken air,

Breath by breath, we rise from there.

[Bridge]

Let them keep their solemn prayers,

Their heavy crowns, their quiet rooms —

Give me bare feet on the stone,

Give me firelight, give me you.

[Final Chorus]

When we laugh, the walls fall down,

Light pours in without a sound,

Teeth like sunrise, hearts set free,

Grief forgets its gravity.

Spin me in that golden noise,

Healing hidden in our joy —

Smiles stitching broken air,

Breath by breath, we rise from there.

[Outro]

Breath by breath…

We rise from there.

The moment a woman falls in love is not when he says the thing. It’s not the declaration. It’s not the speech. It’s not the breathless confession in the rain or the carefully rehearsed “I’ve been wanting to tell you” over dinner. Those moments are satisfying. They’re not the moment.

The moment is before that.

The moment is silence.

It’s the man who watches you walk into a room and his breath catches and he says nothing. He feels it so much that the feeling is his to carry, not yours to receive. Not yet. Not until you’re ready. Not until the receiving won’t cost you something you’re still building.

That’s the moment. That’s where it starts. In the silence. In the restraint. In the particular, devastating, almost-invisible discipline of a man who has chosen to hold space instead of take it.

And women feel it. We feel it in our bodies before we can name it in our minds.

I didn’t always know this. For most of my life I thought I wanted the other version. The loud one. The one who said the thing, made the gesture, showed up with proof. I thought presence was boring. I thought silence meant absence. I thought if a man felt something and didn’t say it, the not-saying was the answer.

Then I met one who said nothing. Who held space for me without reaching. Who gave me presence instead of performance. And everything I thought I knew about love rearranged itself in about few short weeks. Eight years later I share a home with that man. I married him. He gave me silence that was full and space that was safe and the experience of finishing every sentence I ever started without once being interrupted.

He didn’t teach me what I wanted. He showed me that what I wanted had been wrong and what I needed had been standing quietly in the corner the whole time, waiting for me to stop looking past it.

So when I built a world — when I wrote a man who searches for a woman for ten years in silence and finds her in a forest and stops breathing and says “You’re here,” two words, ten years compressed into two words — I wasn’t theorizing. I was writing what I know. What my body learned before my mind caught up.

I’ve been thinking about why THAT man — the quiet one, the still one, the one who doesn’t perform — is the one who wrecks us.

And I think I finally understand it.

We live in a world that has taught men that love is a verb with an audience. Say the thing. Make the gesture. Prove it. Post it. Perform it. Love has become a production, and we’re supposed to be grateful for the performance.

But performance isn’t presence.

Performance is a man who tells you you’re beautiful because he wants you to know he noticed. Presence is a man who notices and holds it. Who carries the noticing quietly. Who lets the beauty of what he sees be HIS experience without making it your responsibility to respond.

That distinction is everything.

When a man performs love, the performance is about him. Look what I did. Look what I said. Look how I made you feel. The performing centers the performer. The woman becomes the audience. And the audience is always, on some level, being managed.

When a man is simply present — when he sits with you in silence and the silence is full, when he holds space for your storm without trying to fix the weather, when he watches you become something and doesn’t interrupt the becoming with his opinion of it— that’s a man whose love is expressed through what he DOESN’T do. The not-reaching. The not-fixing. The not-making-your-becoming-about-his-response-to-your-becoming.

That restraint is not coldness. I need you to hear me on this.

That restraint is the most expensive form of love a man can offer. Because it costs him everything. It costs him the satisfaction of being seen as the hero. It costs him the comfort of your reassurance. It costs him the relief of putting down what he’s carrying by handing it to you. He carries it. He holds it. He lets you grow without the weight of his wanting on your shoulders.

And we FEEL this. We feel it in our bodies. We feel it in the room when a man like this is near us. The air changes. His stillness is so intentional, so disciplined, so full of everything he’s choosing not to say, that the stillness itself becomes a frequency. A hum. A warmth that you can’t source but that you orient toward the way you orient toward a warm patch of sun.

I grew up watching women fall for the wrong version of masculinity. The loud version. The proving version. The version that says “I love you” early and often and uses the saying as a currency — depositing words into an account that he’ll withdraw from later when he needs something.

And I watched women who were smart and strong and self-possessed slowly diminish inside those relationships. And it wasn’t that these men were cruel. It was that their presence existed only in performance. When the audience left — when the doors closed and it was just two people in a room — the presence disappeared. What remained was a man who didn’t know how to sit in silence with a woman and let the silence be enough.

The silence was never enough for those men. The silence was uncomfortable. The silence needed filling. The silence needed a screen or a drink or a distraction or a problem to solve because the silence, without those things, was just two people and the two people had to actually BE with each other and the being was the thing they’d never learned.

Presence is not a skill most men have been taught. Presence is not valued in a culture that rewards noise. Presence is the quiet man in the corner who isn’t performing and who therefore must not be interested, must not care, must not feel — because if he felt something, he’d SAY it, right? That’s what we’ve been told. That silence means absence. That quiet means cold. That the man who doesn’t say it doesn’t feel it.

We’ve been lied to.

The man who doesn’t say it often feels it most. The man who holds the silence is holding something so large that language would reduce it. The man who watches you walk into a room and says nothing is not indifferent. He’s FULL. He’s so full of what he sees that the fullness has become a pressure and the pressure requires discipline to contain and the discipline is the love.

Women know how to listen.

That’s the thing. We’ve always known. Our bodies are built for this. We read rooms. We read faces. We read the space between what someone says and what someone means. We read the micro-expression, the half-second pause, the breath that catches before it becomes a word. We’ve been reading men our entire lives. Reading was safety. Reading was how we knew which men were safe and which men were performing safety.

And when we encounter a man whose silence is not empty — whose silence is FULL, whose restraint is not rejection but discipline, whose presence is not passive but the most active, most intentional, most generous thing he’s ever done — our bodies recognize it. Before our minds catch up. Before we can name it. Before we can explain to our friends why this particular man who barely speaks has made us lose our entire composure.

The body knows. The body always knows first.

The body says: this one is different. This one isn’t performing. This one is HERE. And the being-here is so rare and so real that the body responds to it the way dry earth responds to rain.

I wrote a man like this.

I didn’t plan to. He showed up in my head — quiet, controlled, patient in a way that wasn’t waiting for anything. Just present. Fully, devastatingly present. And I thought: this is the man I’ve never read in a book. This is the man women describe when they describe what they actually want, underneath the cultural noise about grand gestures and big declarations. This is the man whose love is architecture, not decoration. Whose devotion is structural, not performative. Whose silence is a cathedral and whose restraint is the most romantic thing I’ve ever put on a page.

He searches for a woman for ten years. Not because he’s assigned to. Because he believes she exists. Ten years of silence. Ten years of walking into clearings and finding them empty and walking out again and finding the next one. Ten years of faith that is not hope but something quieter. Something more like gravity. The certainty that she’s out there the way you’re certain that the ground is beneath you.

He finds her. And the finding doesn’t produce a speech. The finding produces two words.

“You’re here.”

That’s it. That’s ten years. That’s the whole love story compressed into the smallest possible container because the container doesn’t need to be large. The feeling is large. The words just need to open the door.

And the woman he finds — she spends an entire book misreading his silence. Because she’s eighteen and she’s never been loved before and her mind is running the same program most women run: if he felt it, he’d say it. The silence is the answer. The restraint is the rejection.

Her body knows better. Her body has been collecting evidence all along. The way his breath catches when she walks into a room. The way his hand lingers one second too long on her back. The way he knows how she takes her tea without asking. The way he eats eggs he hates for three weeks because she cooked them and refusing her care was architecturally impossible for him.

And he never interrupts her. I need you to sit with that for a second. He never interrupts her. She talks — and she talks a lot, this woman, she fills rooms with words the way she fills them with light — and he listens. Not the performative listening where a man is quietly assembling his response while your mouth is still moving. Not the patient listening that’s actually waiting for a gap. He LISTENS. The kind of listening where his body is oriented toward her and his eyes are on her face and whatever he was thinking before she started talking has been set down — fully, completely set down — because what she’s saying matters more than what he was holding.

Her body knows. Her mind catches up later. And when it does — when the silence finally opens and she sees what’s been inside it — the seeing is the most intimate moment in the book. More intimate than any kiss. More intimate than any confession. Because the seeing is not him giving her something. The seeing is him letting her IN. Into the silence. Into the fullness. Into the place where ten years of searching and a lifetime of discipline have been holding a space that was always, only, specifically shaped like her.

This is the love story I’m writing. Because the world needs a reminder of what masculine love actually looks like when it’s not performing for an audience.

It looks like a man who says nothing.

And means everything.

I’m Elle Abbott. I’m writing a fantasy trilogy called The Warden. Here in The Warden’s Archive I share the world around it — companion fiction, original music from the Harmonic Record, and the quiet architecture behind the story while it’s still being built.

If something in this post made your chest tight, you might be who I wrote it for.

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