Happy Persian new year! And welcome to my author blog! The first day of spring struck me as a fine day to give birth to it.
I guess I should give somewhere an overview of who I am and what the hell I’m doing since this blog opens in medias res. I’m an indie fiction writer. That means I write books and self-publish them. My short story collections and novels are available on Kindle, Kobo, Draft2Digital’s friends, and Google Books. As of today I have published 11 books— literally I published #11 this morning; it’s called Lower Power. All of those books have come out since September 2025.
There are a couple reasons I’ve been able to achieve that and I’m more than happy to talk about them over and over on this blog. The most important factor is that I follow Robert A. Heinlein’s 5 business rules for writers and I use a compositional method that Dean Wesley Smith calls “writing into the dark.” Taken together, that means I discover the story as I go, and once I do, I don’t change it. Whatever I find out my brain wants to write that day, that’s what gets written and eventually published. That’s a good way to develop a habit of cranking out material even tough I have a mentally demanding full-time job. Now, some might say that forgoing outlines and rewriting must lead to some awful stories, and maybe it does, which isn’t really my business, but I probably learn more from just moving on to the next story than I would from fretting over the same one a bunch. I was a creative writing major in college and the program’s narrow focus on revision and realist literary fiction stifled my imagination for a long time. I’m a lot more productive this way now, and I’m having a lot of fun.
I started writing my first novel, A Good Creature, on February 16, 2025. I kept some cool statistics about that process that I will offer up some time for further analysis. Therefore, I consider 02/16/2025 the first day of my new life of writing into the dark. Like my writing sobriety date. It took me a few more months to manifest the confidence to actually self-publish stuff I’d written, which I finally did September 22, 2025 — that was my first short story collection, Final First. So I’ve been writing into the dark for 13 months now and I have 11 books to show for it. That’s not bad, but as my confidence improves my speed should as well. By the end of 2025 I had 8 books published, so if I publish 1 book per month I’ll have 20 by the end of 2026, and so far I am on track. 20 is a special number because Dean Wesley Smith says that once you’ve achieved that milestone you’ve probably attained discoverability on the online platforms that sell your books; i.e. they’ll actually start showing you to readers. Does it sound like 20 books is an impossible fuckton? Well, that’s what Heinlein’s Rules and writing into the dark are for.
Going from a blocked depressed kid to a dude having fun writing has been a profound emotional journey so I don’t just want to talk about my work on this blog. I also want to talk about theories, ideas, data, experiences, and emotions to possibly help other writers going through similar stuff. I want to talk about a lot of that stuff this very moment, but I should probably pace myself. I don’t want to treat my blog like homework. Also, I have to go begin book #12.
Nowruz-e mobarak!