Whenever I talk to a new prospective client, I promise to write down how I collaborate with my clients…but it’s hard to quantify because there’s so much variety in both subject matter and process. My personal commitment is to meet each client where she or he is and help them in the unique, idiosyncratic way(s) that they need.

This post is intended to describe many of the typical ways that I have worked with novelists in the recent past. I’ve been doing this professionally (part-time) since 2020 and full-time since January 2026, so I know it can’t—won’t be comprehensive. But it’s pretty representative.

What You’re Writing

Of course, everybody’s working on a different thing, but here’s some representative stories that you and I are collaborating on together right now:

1. In the First Century A.D., a reluctant king-for-a-year fights to keep an invading legion from building a bridge across the river that has protected his people for generations while struggling to honor his dead queen’s fledgling religion (established in the first book of the series) by preventing a new cult led by his brother from arising and learning how to love again. [Epic Alternative History War Romance]

2. After defeating his wicked aunt and reopening a long-broken portal (in the previous book), a young magical cat ventures into the ancestral realm of his ancestors where his loyalties are torn when he is beset by competing factions led by his sister, his friends, his long-lost kinfolk, and his not-so-defeated wicked aunt while he struggles to learn master the magical birthright passed down to him from the creator of all cats. [Epic Tween Contemporary Fantasy]

3. A woman whose family is threatening to commit her to a mental institution if she doesn’t marry the man who claims he can cure her alleged psychiatric disorder fights to learn the truth about her abilities to see and manipulate and bend dimensions of reality to her will and stay with the alien visitor who loves her…if he can prove he’s real. [Dark Domestic Woman-in-Danger Thriller]

4. A few centuries in the future, humanity has been relegated to being merely a kept species inside a few managed enclaves on Earth, cared for and provided for by our bipedal android post-human replacements. One human girl, reared among post-humans as the heir to govern the entire solar system, is forced to choose between saving the human resistance, including her biological mother (a terrorist) and the human boy she has come to love, by overthrowing the post-human order by enslaving the post-humans or preserving the benevolent but unequal status quo that leaves humanity in its zoo-like conditions. [Young Adult Transhuman Science Fiction]

5. A magical outcast, disowned by his family and thought dead, is just trying to get by as a go-go dancer in Vegas and enjoy a few little pleasures in life when he stumbles onto the truth of a multi-millennia-long curse cast upon his bloodline by vampires (including his erstwhile protector and mentor) to protect themselves at the cost of causing a looming ecological apocalypse on Earth. Will he be able to reclaim his family’s lost druid power before the end of life as we know it or at least get a steady boyfriend? [Queer Urban Fantasy Romance]

6. Veterans of the forgotten war in Korea are struggling to rebuild their lives after their horrific experiences in concentration camps when the U.S. Government reactivates them and puts them on trial for crimes allegedly committed while they were prisoners of war. [Historical Domestic Crime Thriller]

7. A nerdy high school student at one of the most competitive magnet high schools in New York struggles to cope with his father’s death, the complexities of growing up in the ‘90s, and a fraught relationship with his unusual mother while fighting for justice for his friend who was wronged by the huge Wall Street firm where he’s an intern while struggling to maintain straight A grades to get into the college of his dreams. [Historical-ish Domestic Drama]

8. The characters in a video game figure out that they’re being controlled by outside forces, but only some of the time. They embark on a quest to upset the balance of power and manipulate their immature, controlling players into being better human beings through the power of gameplay. [Epic Fantasy Gamelit]

9. A thirty-something attorney gets her dream job at a big Dallas law firm after she agrees to plan her childhood best friend’s society wedding of the year and struggles to be the maid of honor her friend deserves while keeping the new love of her life a secret: her best friend’s father. [Contemporary Forbidden May/September Romance]

10. The White House press secretary has been keeping secrets—her own and the President’s—while enjoying the privileges of being a well-connected political player in Washington D.C. when everything goes hilariously wrong in one cataclysmic night that could bring down the entire government unless she can overcome her own narcissistic greed. [Contemporary Political Satire]

11. Caught in between titanic elemental forces and fighting to keep her daughters, her husbands, and her temple safe, one high priestess (who just ascended to the role in the first book) must defy not only the demands four other hostile temples but possibly will of the Goddess Herself in order to keep from being forced to make human sacrifices of those she holds most dear. [Dark Epic Reverse Harem Marriage Fantasy]

12. A young daydreamer and comic artist with a murdered father struggles through the high school in the ‘60s beneath the thumb of his tyrannical mother to earn kung-fu training with the irascible, chain-smoking old master down the street who might just turn out to be his father’s murderer in disguise. [Historical Coming of Age Crime Drama]

13. An introverted primate researcher pursuing her PhD in molecular neurology stumbles onto a notebook that reveals her predecessor was murdered. When every researcher, including her military-connected academic advisor, might be the real killer, she struggles to prepare to defend her thesis despite the mounting pile of bodies and the sexy detective bent on proving she’s a murderer. [Contemporary Amateur Sleuth Mystery Romance]

14. Following the dictates of prophecy, an archangel deigns to meddle in the affairs of Earth in order to save the prophesied angel of mercy from the harem of demons and devils that surrounds her (who “married” her in the first book) until he is forced choose between loving her and defying heaven. [Contemporary Paranormal Reverse Harem Romance]

15. A young girl trapped in an abusive ‘70s era Catholic cult struggles to find her own path between what her family of origin needs and what her heart desires in the outside world. [Coming-of-Age Domestic Cult Drama]

16. When a former anti-cult vigilante is forced to cooperate with a neighbor she loathes in order to prevent a resurgence of the most dangerous cult in the kingdom, the resulting roadtrip across the realm to the capitol crosses paths with her estranged sister, her long-lost lover, and an enemy she once thought she’d vanquished, putting her in the uncomfortable position of saving the king alongside her annoying new friend. [Epic Fantasy Crime Adventure Enemies-to-Friends Bromance]

17. When an eager-to-please high school student discovers that she’s been the unwitting victim of medical experiments by the corporation that founded and operates her hometown, she organizes a posse of her fellow victims to break into the research facility to expose the truth and bring down the mad scientists. [Young Adult Dystopian Science Fiction Heist]

How We Collaborate

There are three things about our work together that routinely come up. What will you be doing? How often will you be doing it? How much does it cost?

Shared Documents

There are lots and lots of shared documents. Some clients send me Word docx files. Some clients share Google Docs. Whatever you prefer is fine with me, as long as it’s digital. Nobody knows what S.A.S.E. is anymore.

There are lots of different tools that I’ll describe below. However, we only use the ones that you need. We’ll never create documents for their own sake. If they help you in your process, great! If not, we’ll skip those.

Ultimately, there’s really only one file that matters at THE END and that’s your novel.

Weekly Meetings

While I have worked biweekly with clients in the past, it’s my observation that those relationships are less than half as productive. What has worked best to keep consistent pressure, accountability, and forward momentum on a weekly basis.

If we need to skip a week or pause for a period of time, that’s OK. Life happens to all of us, but you’ll make the most progress when that’s the exception rather than the rule.

Right now, I use Zoom by preference. If you’d prefer another platform for some reason, I’m happy to discuss it. At the end of every meeting, I’ll send you the Zoom recording, transcript, and “ai” summary—unless you tell me that you don’t want a recording or the other artifacts. Some people don’t. However, many of my clients download the recordings and transcripts for later searchability and review. The artifacts stay in my cloud for about six to eight weeks before the oldest are deleted to make room for new ones.

I’m flexible on scheduling, since you’re my full-time job, but I am in the Central/US time zone and I’m under doctor’s orders to at least try to get eight hours of sleep.

Quarterly Commitments

One of the most common reasons that you hire me is to be your personal trainer and literary accountability person. For that reason, and for my own sanity and financial well-being, I ask all of my clients to retain me for twelve weeks at a time. I call it a quarter, but it’s literally twelve weeks.

My posted rate (as of Saturday 13 June 2026) is $3,999/twelve-week period. I currently have two clients on scholarship, which is the maximum my soulmate and business partner will agree to. My rates are subject to change.

💫 I have a pretty big network of mentors, coaches, and editors that I have known for years and personally worked with on projects. If I don’t have availability, if my time zone is too uncomfortable, or my rate is too rich for your blood, I’d still love to talk with you so that I can figure out who else I can refer you to.

How We Work

There are four primary modes in which I collaborate with you week over week. I’ll talk about them roughly in order of story level from most strategic to most tactical.

Developing a Draft

One common way that I work with you is to read your current draft in sections every week, usually between five thousand and ten thousand words at a time, depending on the structure and quality of your draft.

The often happens when I do a free sample edit of your exist work and it’s clear from the quality of your draft that it’s not ready for a full developmental edit.

I will give you line-by-line feedback one section at a time of the draft and we meet every week to discuss any questions or concerns you may have.

Book Mapping

I don’t like the term “highest level” but it’s probably more clear than calling this level of story discovery “strategic.” From brainstorming concepts and product definition to cast design and trope exploration, I help you figure out what the shape of your story is and (more importantly) why you’re writing it.

This can include a variety of tools, including a purpose, some goals, a set of themes, cast design, a book map or series map, and other big picture puzzle pieces of world building for what I call meta, macro, and meso levels of story.

👻 For those clients who want me to do the primary work of story creation (a.k.a. ghostwriting), this is where we work week over week while I produce the novel for you. Most of my clients want to be novelists, though, so this just the typical starting point.

We may return to this mode from time to time as a sanity check when we discover new story elements or when we encounter unanticipated Resistance to remind us what we’re doing and why.

Narrative Pathfinding

Once we have the general lay of the land as it were, we can begin charting the course of the many different paths your story and plot will take across the landscape of the world you’re building and discovering.

At this level of story, we’re going to draft (and re-draft) a logline, a synopsis, a deeper and more detailed set (if you find them helpful—not every writer does) of cast design documents, character arcs, an increasingly detailed set of plots, structural tropes at the series/book/act/sequence/scene level which lays the increasingly richer detail on top of the map at the macro and meso levels. Some people call this outlining, but I think that’s too narrow a view of your process.

It’s possible that we touch on the micro level of scene design here, but not in the level of detail that you’ll need in the next phase.

Continuous Feedback

Once you start drafting scenes (which might be immediate, if you’re a discovery writer), you’ll be sharing them with me weekly. Quite often, you’ll be sending me several at a time, depending on how long each of your scenes are.

Sometimes, it will simply be a scene plan or a sequence of scene plans, but usually at this stage, you’ll feel confident enough and comfortable enough to just draft the narrative weave of story and plot for us to discuss.

My role here is to hold up a mirror (and other tools) to show you what your words are doing and ask if that’s on purpose, if you might consider some alternatives, and often how this sets up and pays off earlier and later parts of the larger narrative map.

This is the mode most writers think of when we talk about creative collaboration.

Intentional Practice

Every once in a while (or more often, if you wish), we’ll identify a scene type or a specific skill that you should practice. It could be construction of exchanges (beats) in a cycle (scene). It could be writing a specific kind of sentences, exposition, description, language, voice, or poetry.

This mode is most usually an assignment or prompt to work on for the week, but it could also be a brainstorming exercise or even revision practice. This typically takes the place of working on your novel for the week. Many of my clients use it to take a break from the challenge of drafting or when life is hammering too hard on their creativity or often just to refill the wellspring of their imagination.

I have some clients who start here and stay here until they feel like they’re ready to tackle a short story or novel.

Would you like help from a human?

Do you want a novel or do you want to be a novelist? I can help you with either. (Yes, I am willing to ghostwrite your book if you’d rather describe the story you want and pay me to do the hard work of producing the words. I promise that no “ai” will be used.)

I’m here if you need me (for story stuff). You are my full-time job now. Let’s chat about how I can help you write the book of your dreams.

⭐️ I did announce the big (for me) preorder, but in case you missed it:

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