Ink vs Algorithm: The Writers' Pod

Mookie flips a familiar piece of career advice on its head: stay in your lane, the guidance handed to nearly every writer, marketer, and creator trying to build an audience. He builds the case around Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, tracing how Newton's absolute universe held for centuries until Einstein tore it apart at twenty-seven by rejecting Newton's core assumpt...

Mookie found Josh Adam the way both of them hoped strangers still could online, stumbling on one of his essays and immediately recognizing a kindred mind. Josh joins Ink vs Algorithm to talk about his book, The Measurement Mind , and fair warning: their discussion is one of the deepest, most unapologetically nerdy conversations the show has done, working through the actual nature of Reality itself...

Mookie's back on Ink vs Algorithm with another true story that's got no business being this fun to tell. This one's got a needle, a Southern-accented campus doctor barking orders, a soon-to-be Grammy winner squatting in the next apartment over, and a girlfriend who wanted him married before she wanted him gone: cocaine on the pizza counter, a robbery a month like clockwork, and one...

Mookie returns to Ink vs Algorithm for another solo reading, this one a true story from his nightclub-managing days in 1990s Chicago, and a companion piece to his published novella Greg's Gift. Before diving in, he opens with a real, honest check-in on where his head's at these days: five shows running in parallel, a self-described introverted extrovert New York City emigre now happily i...

Mookie steps away from interviews for a solo episode of Ink vs Algorithm , reading one of his own short stories straight from Substack. "The Jumper" is set in a Chicago high-rise insurance office in the early 1990s, where a temp worker watches his two office besties turn a woman's suicide into the day's juiciest gossip, trading grim, escalating details with the same giddy energ...

Colleen Coffman spent decades as a special effects and makeup artist, building monsters for haunted houses and horror films, working alongside actors like Wes Studi and Lou Diamond Phillips, designing wigs for the Kansas City Ballet. But on this episode of Ink vs Algorithm, she joins Mookie to talk about something stranger than anything she ever built for the screen: a lifelong habit of seeing ent...

Mookie's an "old veteran hoofer" Pynchon fan, having discovered the iconic author in the 1980s and obsessing ever since, while Matthew Nelson, now finishing his doctorate on Pynchon's fiction at the University of St Andrews, found him a different way entirely: at 14, in the paranoid, hypermediated fog right after 9/11, in a world already reshaped by YouTube and conspiracy spira...

Natalie Saar joins Mookie for another episode of Ink vs Algorithm to share how she writes three books a year while also working, starting with the story of how her first published novel came out of a panic attack. She wrote her way through the anxiety, read back what came out afterward, and realized there was a psychological thriller in it: a stalker with OCD so compulsive about order that he fill...

  Reading fiction has become "a girl thing," and an entire generation of boys now pay for it. Mookie sits down with UK author Malory (yes, one name — think Sting, but with lots of typing) to dig into why literacy stats are cratering for young men worldwide, and why the fix isn't more "important" books, it's fun ones they love to read.  They dig into a defense of pulp...

Mary Rose never expected a cancer diagnosis to become the catalyst for some of her most inspired and important writing. A former marketing executive, corporate storyteller, Mary Rose is a lifelong writer who joins Mookie to discuss her battle with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer that forced her to confront not only a life-threatening illness, but the childhood trauma she thought she&ap...

Acclaimed and prolific author William Bernhardt joins host Mookie Spitz for a wide-ranging conversation that starts with the tragic origin story behind Superman and spirals into something much bigger: the brutal collision between creativity, commerce, ego, exploitation, and survival. Drawing from his new nonfiction book The Superman Wars , Bill unpacks how teenage creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Sch...

In this episode of Ink vs Algorithm , Mookie sits down with cartoonist and writer Jeff Krell, the creator of Jayson: a comic strip turned graphic novel universe that started as pure survival and evolved into a living, breathing archive of identity, humor, and cultural change. Jeff didn’t break in through some polished pipeline. He got rejected, ignored, reshaped, and edited into existence. A local...

In this episode of Ink vs Algorithm: The Writer’s Pod, author Mookie Spitz breaks down the 2025 Indie Author Survey from Written Word Media: a rare, data-intensive look at how over 1,300 indie authors worldwide are actually publishing, earning, marketing, and growing their business. He also reviews his review from the Outstanding Creator Awards, and correlates the two to tie a bow around the benef...

What do Cornish miners, the Mayflower, the American Constitution, World War II, and rock ’n’ roll have in common? Cornwall! In this 7th episode of Ink vs Algorithm , Mookie Spitz has tea with Bert Biscoe—Cornish poet, songwriter, historian, former mayor of Truro, and cultural force of nature—for a sweeping, deeply human conversation about history, language, power, and poetry. Biscoe dismantles the...

What happens when a retired logistics expert decides to write a historical murder mystery set at the most politically unstable moment in late-medieval England? In this episode of Ink vs. Algorithm , Mookie Spitz talks with British author and comics veteran Mark Oldroyd about The Chamberlain’s Gambit , a fast-paced historical novel set in 1484, the final full year of Richard III’s reign and the dyi...

This episode of  The Writers' Pod drops you right into the mix: ideology, apostasy, 9/11, the collapse of the New Atheist movement, and the cultural schizophrenia of post-Trump America — all through the lived experience of Ali A. Rizvi, author of The Atheist Muslim and one of the few writers who actually paid the personal price for blasphemy in the 2010s. Over a sprawling, brutally candid and...

In this episode of Ink vs Algorithm: The Writers' Pod, Mookie Spitz sits down with poet and healthcare strategist Hudson Plumb, whose new collection The Art of Undoing (Finishing Line Press) has already become a bestseller. Their conversation revolves around rediscovery: how creativity can go dormant for decades, only to reignite when life strips you down to what matters. Plumb recounts his j...

In this episode of  Ink vs Algorithm: The Writers' Pod , Mookie sits down with TH Forest, the author of Twinkies and Beefcake , Descendants of the Gods , and the Matt & Ollie queer romance saga to explore the strange alchemy of fan fiction, grief, and desire that birthed her career as one of the most fearless indie voices in male/male romance. Forest didn’t plan to write MM love stories....

Welcome to Ink vs Algorithm: The Writers' Pod , a conversational laboratory where the creative mind and the digital machine collide. Hosted by Mookie Spitz, a novelist, podcaster, and manic ranter, this show dissects what it means to write, publish, and survive as an artist in the algorithmic age. Each episode showcases writers, thinkers, and creative bon vivants to explore the tension betwee...

Welcome to Ink vs Algorithm: The Writers' Pod , where flesh-and-blood writers face off against the machine age. Hosted by Mookie Spitz, himself a novelist, blogger, and ranter, this show dives headfirst into the creative chaos of 2025: an era where everyone’s consuming content, yet fewer seem to care who actually made it. Each episode brings conversations with his fellow writers, journalists,...