The Difficulty: Creativity, Meaning & the Hard Work of a Life

The difficulty in life is the choice. And this week the choice came fast: an hour before we sat down, a tree took a lightning strike around the corner, dropped a branch on a woman’s car, smashed a transformer, took out the block. Genesis’s people — Josh, Kyle — ran toward it and pulled her out. Then they walked over and made a podcast about the creative life. That’s the register of this second epi...

There’s the feeling of standing on the edge of everything and nothing at once. So much that might happen. So much that could happen. And nothing has happened yet. You can feel your whole life leaning forward, and you can also feel that today, right now, for all your efforts, nothing’s changed. Sometimes joy and sadness in the same hour. The almost. We’ve been taught to treat the almost like a wait...

Host Chad Prevost and co-host Genesis launch the first live happy-hour episode of The Difficulty from Home Bar in downtown Chattanooga, inviting listeners to join Fridays and describing the city as a creative crossroads. They discuss Chattanooga’s “animal” vibe, then welcome Chicago-based curator/artist LaRon Dittoe, who works in finance and commits to a monthly creative practice through gallery s...

The difficulty in life is the choice. And every choice is a crossroads. This week’s Working Writer roundup covers three stories that land on the same square, plus an announcement I’ve been sitting on. 1. Simon & Schuster relaunched Pocket Books as a home for indie and hybrid authors. One of the oldest names in American paperback publishing, rebuilt around signing successful self-published writers...

Five things that actually moved in publishing this month, and what to do about each. The Authors Guild puts hard numbers on why author income keeps slipping, Audible forces a year-end decision on audiobook royalties, FSG opens a no-fee $15,000 fellowship (deadline July 6), book discovery starts shifting from search to AI, and the indie bookstore "death" turns out to be growth. The channels you don...

How many books on your shelf were actually finished (if they were even began)? This episode is about a different kind of book: short on purpose, beautiful enough to keep, written from the far side of a hard turn for the person standing in it now. A case for concentration over padding, and the first look at Crossings, our new short-form line. Find us at crossroadspublishing.group. This is a public...

Homer gives us a woman who weaves a shroud by day and unravels it by night, holding off a house full of suitors. We call it stalling. Homer calls it devotion. This one is for anyone whose truest work looks, from the outside, like waiting: the patient no, the thing left undone on purpose, the refusal to finish on someone else's terms. Find us at https//:www.crossroadspublishing.group. This is a pub...

I did an episode a few weeks back on Jasmine Sun’s provocations about independent writing in the AI era. One of those provocations: the value of polish is going down, and the value of personal style, charisma, and weirdness is going up. AI is very good at polished prose. AI is bad at voice—the particular moves only this writer would make, the typos the writer would have caught but didn’t, the meta...

TL;DRToday we open the doors. Crossroads Publishing Group—a hybrid publisher of serious nonfiction in Chattanooga—announces the Crossroads Commons, our founding membership. Three tiers; fifty lifetime Founder spots, ever.• Join the Commons → crossroadspublishing.group/commons• Publish with us → crossroadspublishing.group/engagements• The catalog → crossroadspublishing.group/catalog• Questions → ch...

This is one of the slower Saturday episodes—no announcements, no news. Just a piece of the book I’m writing, read and thought through out loud. It starts on Circe’s island, where Odysseus’s men have already been turned into pigs. It passes through Dante’s hell, where the greedy push boulders forever, and through Midas’s palace, where a father reaches for his daughter and finds cold metal. And it e...

Monday’s episode last week was about green-lighting yourself, refusing to wait for institutions to validate your work. Today we go one layer deeper. Green-lighting yourself does not mean publishing whatever you’ve got. It means doing the editorial work seriously, on your own behalf, so what you publish is actually ready. Editorial direction is more specific than most writers think. Here are six qu...

WHAT’S EMERGING AND WHAT IT MEANS The question is shifting from “should writers use AI” to “what kind of writing is worth doing.” Tim Moon argues the shame regime around AI use is making honest conversation harder. The Atlantic piece shows the detection question is real but temporary — and the deeper question is what’s lost when the thinking that produces writing goes away. Ramachandran shows the...

In Dante’s Inferno, the lustful are not burned. They are swept, a great relentless wind moves them endlessly, helplessly, no footing, no direction, just the next gust carrying them where it will. This week’s episode is a weekend reflection; slower, more meditative, less about publishing and craft and more about the soul-work questions underneath. Lust in its oldest, broadest sense—unrestrained wan...

Topics covered: A field report from week one of Crossroads Publishing Group—what’s coming in the door, what’s surprising, what’s confirming. What a hybrid press actually is. A working definition: a publisher where the author shares the financial risk via a fee (broadly $5K to $45K, depending on the engagement), in exchange for real editorial work, professional production, distribution under the pr...

Brooke Warner, the founder of She Writes Press, gave a TED talk in 2017 called “Green-Lighting Yourself” that I have been thinking about for years. The argument: the traditional creative industries, publishing and film and music, have shifted toward green-lighting only artists who are already famous or who have celebrity connections. The writers and filmmakers and musicians who refused to wait for...

When I was seventeen, I drove my parents’ conversion van home from a party with a six-pack in my system and a freshly-dented bumper on a stranger’s parked car. The officer who arrived at our house decided not to charge me with driving under the influence. He told me to go inside and sleep it off. I have thought about that night for thirty-five years. This episode is an essay reading. The material...

This week, two things in one episode. I sit down with Andrew Najberg, novelist, poet, editor at Symposium Magazine, co-owner and co-editor-in-chief of Aethon Books: Wicked House, college teacher, husband, father, and my Chattanooga neighbor. Andrew has five novels out, including The Mobius Door , Golotok , The Neverborn Thief , and Eat the Light , which dropped last month from Wicked House. He has...

In 1917, Virginia and Leonard Woolf set up Hogarth Press in their dining room with about forty pounds of operating capital. Five years later, Sylvia Beach published Ulysses from a Paris bookshop after every major publisher refused it. A few months after that, Hogarth Press published The Waste Land — another book the corporate houses had passed on. In a span of five years, two small presses founded...

Scott Bedgood started his career covering Little League games at the Tyler Morning Telegraph in Texas. Now Scott is a journalist, author, content marketer, and clean-comedy stand-up opening at The Ryman in just a few days. This is the first interview episode of The Difficulty, and Scott is the right writer to launch the format with. His through-line is storyteller, and the way he’s threaded that l...

Using Dante’s opening in the “dark wood,” host Chad Prevost frames midlife as waking up to being lost after sleepwalking through socially prescribed success, and reframes “abandon hope” as an instruction to stop relying on the old self and tools that created the crisis. He describes needing guidance beyond oneself, like Virgil leading Dante downward into the inferno to see the patterns that trap p...

If you're an indie writer paying attention to what's happening in publishing right now — this week was a tell. Three stories landed inside seven days. Each one pointed at the same answer. Episode 5 of The Difficulty — the first publishing-news episode in the new "How" lane. This week:— Audible's ACX royalty model is being discontinued. Authors must enroll in the new pooled, consumption-based model...

If you finish a paying assignment and feel, instead of relief, a kind of dull resentment — this episode is for you. Or if you sit down to the work that's been pulling at you for years, and the dishes suddenly need doing, the bills suddenly need paying — this is for you, too. Episode 4 of The Difficulty starts the Field Guide series with the foundational difficulty: the work that pays and the work...

I almost drowned on the Ocoee River. The thing that saved me wasn’t anything I’d thought to ask for. This is the first essay in the Saturday series at The Difficulty — longer pieces from a series I’ve been writing on Substack called The Descent, about the choices that shape a creative life. Saturday is for the essays that don’t fit the news-cycle pace of the rest of the week. Today’s is about how...

Episode 2 of The Difficulty. The hardest thing about indie publishing isn't writing the book. It's giving up the fantasy that the book will market itself. In this one I get honest about the ego defenses we run as creators when it's time to put work into the marketplace — the survivorship bias of the "no marketing" success stories, the isolation that breeds false certainty, the asymmetric gap betwe...

The very first episode of The Difficulty. A 50-year-old paperweight on my father’s desk turned out to be a line from a 1900 Irish play, and the seed of this show. What you’re getting on Mondays vs. Thursdays, what’s launching this week at crossroadspublishing.group, the founding-and-selling of C&R Press, the Terminus Magazine “just make it real” lesson, and the $4,000 bestseller campaign I almost...