Ink vs Algorithm: The Writers' Pod

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.Josh spent a decade of hour-long gym commutes listening to physics and philosophy audiobooks, and slowly built his own original theory out of it. His core claim: reality isn't made of things, it's made of measurements. Every time anything, a person, a thermometer, a particle, makes a distinction between one state and another, that act of measurement is what pulls raw, unconstrained information into the ordered, causal world we actually experience. Mookie, a lifelong physics obsessive in his own right, meets him step for step, and together they build the idea out from quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's cat, through Max Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis and Stephen Wolfram's Ruliad, all the way to the multiverse, the anthropic principle, and why an AI can be fluent and intelligent without ever actually experiencing anything at all.What makes the conversation land, though, is watching two genuinely curious, credential-free thinkers, a marketing consultant and a gymnastics coach, work through ideas usually reserved for physics departments, purely because they can't stop wondering about them. They test the theory against the Moon (does it keep bending spacetime if nobody's around to measure it?), against free will, against the meaning of consciousness itself, and land, unexpectedly, on something warm and human: that no matter how mathematical the universe turns out to be, what actually matters is still love, family, and the people sitting across from you.The GuestJosh Adam is a gymnastics coach and the author of The Measurement Mind, a book blending physics, philosophy, and original theory on the nature of consciousness and reality. He lives in the Chicago area with his wife and two sons.More from Josh, including his book: https://www.themeasurementmind.comTap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 deeply, spectacularly unglamorous trip to student health services that Mookie still remembers in vivid, wincing detail decades later.The story is Cheepnis in action, the philosophy Mookie laid out a few episodes back on Bald and Bloviating: Zappa, Nietzsche, and the idea that the most humiliating, unpolished, can't-believe-that-happened moments of a life make for the best art we can create/ No developmental editor cutting the adverbs here, no sanding off the embarrassing edges, just the real, ridiculous, occasionally gross truth, told the way it actually happened.And then, without losing a beat of the comedy, Mookie goes somewhere he hasn't quite gone before on the show, peeling back what else was really happening in his life during this exact stretch of reckless, twenty-something chaos, expressed the way he thinks storytelling is supposed to work: not to fix anything, just to turn it into something worth telling.The Short StoryTap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 isolated in Southern California, and a hard-won sense that his writing has finally earned the confidence it took decades to find.The story itself picks up a thread Mookie's been pulling all season: that the most chaotic, humiliating, out-of-control experiences of our lives are exactly the ones worth telling, not despite the mess, but because of it. The harrowing tale centers on a bartender Mookie liked a little too much to manage properly, the quiet ways enabling someone can start to feel like loyalty, and a single shift where every bad habit Mookie let slide finally came due at once. He tells it in the roman à clef tradition where real events, real people, compressed and shaped for maximum impact, and insists every beat of it  happened, down to sending it years later to the real person it's about and getting back a giggling, unprompted confirmation.Mookie closes with an honest look at his own process, why reading his own work aloud makes him a sharper writer every time, and where this story fits into a planned sequel to Greg's Gift he's already hungry to write.The Short StoryThe NovellaTap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 energy they'd use for celebrity news.The story's real target goes beyond the tragedy itself, and implies the strange, almost comic speed with which people absorb someone else's death and keep right on living theirs. Within minutes of hearing the details, the office is already back to flirting, drink plans, and petty jealousy, genuine sympathy flickers for a sentence or two before getting steamrolled by the far more urgent business of the banal everyday. Mookie's upfront afterward describes how the story is true, pulled directly from his own early thirties, temping and adrift in Chicago's John Hancock Building, refusing to grow up in any conventional sense. That admission opens into the real heart of the episode: his theory that the most excruciating, humiliating periods of a person's life are precisely the richest material a writer will ever get, and that financial recklessness, chronically broke, still creating anyway, isn't the wrench in the works, but the engine of it. He traces his own arc from cringing at his early, overwrought Medium posts to fully owning his voice now, volume and unevenness included.The Short StoryTap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 entities most people don't, and the sketch diary she'd kept of them for years, which vanished during a move in 2014 and reappeared, completely out of nowhere, from a stranger on Facebook exactly one day after she found herself missing it.That diary became her book, The Adventures of a Sketch Diary, and Colleen walks through some of what's in it: sylphs, satyrs, and a genuinely unsettling personal encounter with a duende, a small, physical creature she watched steal a pair of socks from her late uncle's closet and knew, on instinct, not to follow. Mookie and Colleen dig into where these experiences might come from: Jung's archetypes, the idea of a "thinning veil," and whether these entities represent something genuinely external or a very old, very human way of processing the unexplainable.What ties all of it together, the entities, the art, the feeling that something else is present, is a kind of sensitivity most people have trained themselves out of. Mookie frames it as something that was never really about belief in the first place, but about lived experience, and the same creative openness that lets someone tap into and express what they're feeling, whether that's through art or through encounters like Colleen's. That same idea becomes the emotional center of the conversation once the topic turns to 2020. Colleen traces a direct line from pandemic isolation to a lasting breakdown in empathy, patience, and basic human contact, in her own family and everywhere she looks, and argues the same capacity, the willingness to actually feel another person's presence, drives both her entities and her fractured relationships. Mookie connects it back to why he started podcasting in the first place, a very Socratic argument that real understanding only happens face to face, never through a screen. They land together on something genuinely simple as the antidote: slow down, look people in the eye, and remember that everyone else is struggling too, the same open-hearted attention that let Colleen see sylphs and satyrs in the first place.The GuestColleen Coffman is a semi-retired special effects and makeup artist for stage and film, and the author of The Adventures of a Sketch Diary, published by Hangar 1 Publishing. Her film work includes Nailbiter and The Stylist, and her stage credits include productions with the Kansas City Ballet.Get the book:https://hangar1publishing.com/products/the-adventures-of-a-sketch-diaryTap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 spirals that the acclaimed novelist seemed to have predicted decades early. That generational gap consisting of two readers separated by almost thirty years, arriving at the same obsessive body of work from opposite ends of American history, is the engine running underneath this compelling conversation. And Pynchon rewards their long-haul, cross-generational reading, because the same handful of obsessions recur across his entire fifty-year bibliography, deepening each time. Boundary and duality above all: the line between animate and inanimate running through V., the split between the elect and the preterite — and a stark black-and-white racial duality — driving Gravity's Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon's literal and figurative obsession with the lines humans draw across land, people, and ideas. Underneath all of it sits Pynchon's vision of paranoia, entropy, and authoritarian control, ordinary people caught inside what Mookie calls a "labyrinthine hellscape" they can never fully discern. From that foundation, the conversation turns personal and sharp. Mookie stakes out a provocative claim: Pynchon's male protagonists (Benny Profane, Tyrone Slothrop, Zoyd Wheeler, Doc Sportello) are neutered on purpose, stripped of agency, cultural precursors of Cold Play, the Star Wars sequels, and other cultural disasters, while his women (Oedipa Maas, Maxine Tarnow) are the ones actually driving the drama. Matthew complicates that instinct, arguing the loser protagonists are avatars for collective helplessness under a system too vast to fight, not failures of nerve. They debate whether Against the Day is self-indulgent Pynchon competing with his own literary heir David Foster Wallace, trade an uncomfortable personal story about meeting DFW in person, and land, finally, on the biggest question of all: whether Pynchon, underneath the conspiracy and the entropy, is reaching for something transcendent. His most sprawling novel ends, after all, on a single word: grace.Fair warning, this episode of Ink vs Algorithm goes full inside sports on Pynchon. If you've read him, buckle up. If you haven't, it might just be the push you need to start.The GuestMatthew Nelson is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) at the University of St Andrews, working under supervisor Gavin Hopps. His thesis research concerns the theological implications of Thomas Pynchon's fiction, investigating how Pynchon's postsecular work questions both secular and religious constructions of reality, and situating it within the Gothic literary tradition — specifically American Gothic, alongside Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 fills exactly one notebook per victim and physically cannot bring himself to write a second page, no matter what he witnesses. That's the origin story for a career that's since spanned psychological thrillers and personal-development nonfiction, self-published since 2012 — most recently Fake It Till You Make It: The Science of Feeling Rich, with Let It Be Easy next.Mookie and Natalie discuss how the comparison trap and a lack of "time affluence" is what truly makes people feel poor, wealth instead described as the freedom to spend your hours how you want. Natalie unpacks a genuinely useful reframe: satisfaction is a cheap emotion (a candy bar gives you satisfaction), but excitement is the signal worth chasing, and she now protects a chunk of every weekend for decisions based purely on what excites her, not what's productive. They dig into resistance, too — not as a signal to quit, but as something to interrogate honestly: is this hard because you're avoiding growth, or because it's genuinely wrong for you?The back half turns into one of the more candid conversations about writerly voice this show has had. Natalie has ghostwritten for celebrities, written financial marketing copy, and wandered through enough professional "voices" that she now deliberately writes throwaway pages — sometimes just to delete them at the end of the day — purely to stay in touch with what she actually sounds like underneath all the client work. Her own friends, when asked, consistently prefer her earliest, least-polished books, because they sound the most like her.That sets up the AI conversation. Natalie's framework is sharp and specific: she'll let AI handle anything a computer reads — SEO headers, metadata, GEO optimization — but nothing a human reads. Research, yes, with primary sources double-checked by hand, because in her experience it's right maybe 40% of the time. Actual prose, never. Her broader bet is genuinely optimistic: because readers invest real hours in a book, they're better judges of quality than viewers or listeners skimming video or music, and as AI slop floods every category, human voice becomes the differentiator, not a liability.They close out with hard-won, unglamorous marketing tactics: Goodreads giveaways, BookBub ads, reverse giveaways, and Natalie's own backlink-building site for indie authors, plus a real warning about the increasingly sophisticated scam emails targeting self-published writers with fake agents, fake award nominations, and fake TV deals. Instead: be real, and keep writing! The GuestNatalie Saar is a journalist and writer based in Los Angeles, California. She has been telling stories to anyone who will listen since she was able to talk. After years of consuming true crime content, she developed a love of thrillers. Her stories feature everyday situations — but with an added twist. “Becoming 1% Better” is her first work of nonfiction, born out of a love of general curiosity about how we can better ourselves and treat those around us better. It's a finalist in the Chanticleer International Book Awards (CIBA) for Mind and Spirit Non-fiction.  By day, she works as a marketing writer and content strategist; she also runs The Indie Authors, a site built to help self-published writers get discovered. Her Websites & Bookshttps://nataliesaar.com/The Indie Authors Project https://www.theindieauthors.com/ Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

 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 fiction, the mechanics of why LitRPG works where traditional YA fiction hasn't, describe the genre's video-game style "system" that tracks stats and rewards competence, and why stories of everyday heroes overcoming adversity resonate. They also discuss why publishing quietly stopped wanting male protagonists and how a teacher's assumption about "who the good readers are" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by age fourteen.Then the conversation turns to Malory himself, and how he went from burned-out day job to full-time author in four years. His professional writer's journey started on Royal Road, the crowdsourced fiction platform where he serialized a chapter a day. There he learned the hard way to write rapidly, consistently, and with good quality, while thousands of strangers picked apart everything wrong with every word. That brutal, real-time feedback loop is where he actually learned to write, and where the deadline discipline got hard-coded: break the schedule, lose the audience.His craft sharpened further through Raconteur Press's themed anthologies: a Buck Rogers pulp month, a hardboiled noir month, each with a hard word-count ceiling that beat the ramble out of his prose and made his longer 100k+ word litRPG series tighter. He talks through his actual process: 5 a.m. starts, treating writing like "another nine-to-five," not waiting for inspiration, nor taking days off because he might not feel it. Malory also shares lessons learned from co-writing, hitting Audible's 40-hour sweet spot for readers doing long American truck hauls, and why he now has several ongoing series plus new ones signed for next year.Malory and Mookie also get philosophical, and wrestle through the paradoxes and illusions of the "tortured genius" myth. For Malory, writing is a contract with an audience, and being responsive to readers isn't selling out, it's the job. That leads into the AI reckoning hitting litRPG, and why Malory's shifted away from pure pen-name anonymity toward doing more podcasts and interviews. He understands that human readers are most responsive to human writers, especially ones with a real track record fueled by their lived experience, not LLM matrix math. For Malory, writing is about deadlines, discipline, writing for a younger version of himself, and an older version of his 9-year-old son. For you, this podcast provides inspiration, best practices, and a rare glimpse into the world of creativity, publishing, and creative success. The GuestMalory is a lifelong sci-fi and fantasy fan writing LitRPG and Progression Fantasy, books built on strong characters, action, and snark. His philosophy: write fun stories people actually want to read, because the world needs more escapism. That drive led him to write his first Boy's Own Adventure for his son, chasing the golden age of classic heroics. Winner of the 2026 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award, he's partnered with Aethon Books, Legion Publishers, LitForge, and Soundbooth Theater, plus regular anthology work at Raconteur Press. Outside writing and doctoral research, he's rereading Terry Pratchett or watching England's cricket team collapse again.His Websitehttps://maloryauthor.com/Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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'd left behind decades earlier.What began as simple health updates for friends and family evolved into a deeply personal memoir, Inhale, Exhale, Survive, a story that explores the intersection of trauma, illness, resilience, and the struggle to retain agency inside a healthcare system that can often leave patients feeling powerless.Mary shares how writing became both a survival mechanism and a form of service, helping her process her experience while creating a roadmap for others facing serious illness. Along the way, she and Mookie dive into the rise of the empowered patient, the role of AI and online research in modern healthcare, the challenges of navigating complex medical systems, and why understanding your own condition may be one of the most important forms of self-advocacy.The conversation also veers into the craft of writing itself. From the limitations of "show, don't tell" dogma to the flood of AI-generated content reshaping publishing, Mary and Mookie debate what makes writing truly human—and why authentic storytelling still matters in an age increasingly dominated by algorithms.Part memoir, part writing workshop, part exploration of survival itself, this is a conversation about finding meaning when life veers off script, reclaiming your voice when circumstances try to take it away, and transforming adversity into something that can help others feel a little less alone.Mary Rose can be found on Substack, where she writes about life, illness, healing, and patient advocacy. Her upcoming memoir, Inhale, Exhale, Survive, chronicles her journey through cancer, trauma recovery, and the enduring power of storytelling.The GuestMary Rose is a retired owner of a production company who has shifted from high-tech marketing stories to personal essays and memoir. Her work explores survivorship, early childhood trauma, and the life built on the other side of serious illness. Her memoir, in the final editing stage, traces the unexpected collision of unresolved childhood trauma with a multiple myeloma diagnosis and the stem cell transplant that followed. She writes two Substack publications. In Love Heals, her weekly essays are attracting a devoted readership drawn to her unflinching honesty and spare, grounded prose. In Myeloma Fighters, she co-authors with medical experts to create medical content that bridges the gap between emerging science and the people living within it. She also facilitates a myeloma patient and caregiver support community.On Substack:https://maryrose23.substack.com/https://myelomafighters.substack.com/ On Instagram & Threads: @maryrosewriterTap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 Schuster built the first true superhero during the Depression, only to lose control of Superman to businessmen who turned their creation into a global empire while the creators themselves struggled for recognition, stability, and dignity.Their conversation goes beyond comic book history into an honest discussion about what it means to be a creator in any era. Mookie and Bill connect Jerry Siegel’s fight to modern writers battling algorithms, AI scraping, scam publishers, vanity presses, content overload, and the impossible economics of attention. They dig into why talented creatives so often get crushed by the business side of art, why perseverance matters more than raw talent, and why most writers fail long before the quality of their work ever has a chance to matter.Bernhardt also shares hard-earned lessons from publishing more than 67 books across legal thrillers, historical fiction, poetry, children’s books, and writing instruction. He breaks down the reality of finding agents, surviving rejection, building a readership, networking without becoming disingenuous, and treating writing like an actual profession instead of waiting around for inspiration to strike.They also discuss a strong emotional thread: how creators are fueled by this tension of living chaotic, vulnerable, financially unstable lives behind the scenes. Bill's research even took him into Jerry Siegel’s childhood home — the literal room where Superman was born — and he captures that eerie feeling of standing inside the physical birthplace of modern mythology.If you’re a writer, artist, indie creator, comic fan, or just somebody trying to build something meaningful in a world designed to commodify everything, join them for part publishing war story, part creative survival guide, and part cautionary tale about what happens when imagination collides with money and power. The GuestWilliam Bernhardt is the author of over sixty books, including the Daniel Pike legal thriller series (#1 best-selling novel The Last Chance Lawyer). His previous works include the bestselling Ben Kincaid series, the historical novels Challengers of the Dust and The Florentine Poet, three books of poetry, and the Red Sneaker books on fiction writing. In addition, Bernhardt founded WriterCon Programs to mentor aspiring writers. WriterCon hosts an annual writers conference, an annual cruise, small-group writing retreats, a magazine, plus free bi-weekly e-newsletters and podcasts. More than three dozen of Bernhardt’s students have subsequently published with major houses. He is also the president/owner of Bernhardt Books, which publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.In addition to his novels and poetry, Bernhardt has written plays, a musical (book and score), humor, children stories, biography, and puzzles. He has edited two anthologies (Legal Briefs and Natural Suspect) as fundraisers for The Nature Conservancy and the Children’s Legal Defense Fund. In his spare time, he has enjoyed surfing, digging for dinosaurs, trekking through the Himalayas, paragliding, scuba diving, caving, zip-lining over the canopy of the Costa Rican rainforest, and jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet. In 2013, he became a Jeopardy! champion.His Website & Bookshttps://williambernhardt.com/Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 paper cut his work in half and ran it anyway. An editor forced him to rethink storytelling structure from the ground up. Underground comics cracked open what was allowed, and suddenly there were no rules except the ones he chose to keep.What followed was a long experiment in character-driven storytelling. Jayson and his orbit of friends, which were often pulled straight from Krell’s real life, became a vehicle for catharsis, comedy, and eventually something more controlled: a way to step back, look at the past, and reshape it with intention.The conversation hits hard and true about what it means to be an indie creator: Why most creators are lying to themselves about “doing what you love”How underground comics gave more freedom than today’s “inclusive” mainstreamWhy characters get more interesting when you stop protecting themHow cartoons became a way of saying things you can’t say directlyAnd why self-publishing isn’t a fallback, but a way to control your own destiny Jeff also shares a blunt throughline: if you’re waiting to be discovered, you’re already losing. Krell built his audience one conversation at a time, throuigh conventions, hand-selling, face-to-face, and then watched the algorithm catch up later. His career success is less about nostalgia, and more about sheer endurance. JAYSON is about what happens when you keep showing up, keep drawing, keep writing—even when nobody’s paying attention—and then one day, you realize the work outlasted the noise. If you care about storytelling, comics, or just figuring out how to keep creating without losing your mind or your voice, then Jeff's story will inspire you. The GuestJeff Krell created the long-running gay-themed humor strip “Jayson,” which debuted in the Philadelphia Gay News in 1983 and enjoyed long runs in Gay Comix and Meatmen. Since 2005 Krell has been publishing original “Jayson” graphic novels including “Jayson Goes to Hollywood” and “Jayson Gets a Job!” In 2023, in collaboration with Sue Bielenberg, Krell debuted the all-ages Jayson spinoff “Arena Takes Manhattan,” a career girl humor comic starring Jayson’s sidekick Arena Stage. Krell also translates comics for famed German cartoonist Ralf König. His Workhttp://ignite-ent.comhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/0988357429/Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 benefits of following the rules — and the fun of breaking them. Mookie's solo pod isn’t aspirational nonsense or “write what you love and the universe will provide," but a clear-eyed tour through what really works (and what absolutely doesn’t) when you step outside traditional publishing and try to make it on your own. He walks through the survey’s most revealing findings, including:Why self-publishing now dominates the industry, and why that’s both a dream and a nightmareHow much indie authors actually earn (hint: most don’t quit their day jobs)The brutal truth about paid advertising and why top earners reinvest nearly half their income just to stay visibleWhy email lists aren’t optional, and how they’re the backbone of every sustainable indie careerWhich genres quietly make money (romance, paranormal romance, cozy mystery), and which barely move the needleWhy children’s books, literary fiction, and religious nonfiction struggle in the indie ecosystemThe uncomfortable correlation between catalog size and income (60+ books is not a typo for earning $10K per month and above)Why covers sell books, editing keeps readers, and “just publishing” is never enoughAlong the way, Mookie contrasts two kinds of writers:those treating indie publishing like a business; andthose (him included) writing for creative fulfillment, curiosity, and stubborn joyHe shares firsthand lessons from LA Comic Con, real conversations with successful indie authors, hard-earned mistakes from publishing Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine, and the uneasy tension between artistic integrity and commercial reality.If you’re:an indie author trying to cut through the noisea writer wondering why your book isn’t sellingan editor, cover artist, or marketer who wants to understand author behavioror a creative who loves the work but hates the hustleThis episode gives you facts, context, and empathy. Bottom line: You don’t have to play the game. But if you want results, you need to understand the rules, and jump into the ring in your own way. 2025 Indie Author Survey ResultsOutstanding Creator AwardsTap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 naive American understanding of Cornwall (not just hens) and rebuilds it as a hidden engine of Western history:• the Cornish pit stop that supplied the Mayflower and helped shape American governance• the miners and engineers who powered the Industrial Revolution and modern warfare• the cultural crossroads where Celtic identity, metal, and maritime trade converged• the American troops who transformed Cornwall during WWII—bringing jazz, technology, and flush toiletsFrom there, the discussion turns inward and personal. Biscoe traces his own evolution from rebellious teenage blues guitarist to poet-politician. He explores the uneasy but powerful alliance between art and public service, and why poetry is not a luxury but a tool: a form of pastoral care, persuasion, and meaning-making.Their chat then draws a sharp line between the art of persuasion and the racket of manipulation. Through Bert’s lens, figures like Barack Obama represent a tradition of rhetorical responsibility—language used to elevate, clarify, and move people toward shared purpose—while politicians such as Donald Trump embody its corrupted twin: speech designed to provoke, dominate, and extract attention rather than understanding. The distinction isn’t partisan, but poetic. One treats language as a civic duty, while the other treats it as a blunt instrument. And the difference, Biscoe argues, determines whether public speech builds societies or corrodes them.Along the way, you’ll hear:Why poets, politicians, priests, and physicians all do versions of the same jobHow language creates influence long after formal power fadesWhy poets don’t belong in garrets—and never really didA live poetry reading and an unfiltered look at Biscoe’s daily writing practiceA sharp critique of literary elitism and creative gatekeepingTheir conversation is part history lesson, part manifesto, part fireside rant, and is rooted in Cornwall, aimed at anyone who cares about words, culture, and how ideas actually move people. If you think poetry is irrelevant, politics is soulless, or history is settled, then this conversation will correct you.The PoetBert Biscoe is a Cornish poet, songwriter, local historian, playwright, and former Mayor of Truro, best known for his work rooted in Cornish identity, language, politics, and cultural activism. A bard of the Cornish Gorsedh with the bardic name Viajor Gans Geryow, he has published several books of verse and prose — including Maudlin’ Pilgrimage, Rebecca (1996), The Dance of the Cornish Air (1996), At a Wedding with Yeats in Turin (2003), Trurra (winner of a Waterstones award at the Holyer an Gof Publishers’ Awards 2012), Words of Granite, On Yer Trolley: Poems Made During Complete Bed Rest! (2008), and White Crusted Eyes: Tales of Par (2009) — and performs widely across Cornwall. A long-time independent councillor on Cornwall Council and later Truro City Council, he’s also chaired local heritage groups, written on Cornish history, and regularly performs poetry and songs that blend local political commentary with folk tradition. Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 dying embers of the War of the Roses. The book blends murder, political intrigue, and lived medieval texture—without drowning in costume drama or faux-Shakespearean fluff.Oldroyd walks through how the novel came to life: choosing a real historical vacuum to insert a fictional detective, grounding the story in real villages and castles that still exist today, and balancing accuracy with narrative momentum. The conversation ranges from Richard III, the Princes in the Tower, and collapsing institutions, to why historical fiction inevitably reflects modern anxieties about power, legitimacy, and populism.The discussion also tackles a topic writers can’t avoid anymore: AI. Oldroyd is blunt about how he used it—and how he didn’t. No ghostwriting. No plot generation. Just disciplined research assistance and copy-editing, the same way writers once used libraries, index cards, and paid researchers. The result is a novel driven by human judgment, character, and consequence—not algorithmic paste.They also take a candid look at the writing life after mid-career: finishing the damn book, surviving brutal beta readers, deciding between agents and self-publishing, and building a series without romantic illusions about fame or fortune.If you care about:Historical fiction that actually movesWriting craft without mysticismAI as a tool, not a crutchPower, legitimacy, and why history keeps rhymingThis one’s for you! Turning curious? Mark Oldroyd is currently seeking early readers and reviewers for The Chamberlain’s Gambit. The WriterI started collecting comics at age 10 or 11, that's 55 years ago! There were some big gaps for romance and kids... Started again in COVID, and decided to start selling to fund the hobby. Suddenly Comics has been going for about 3 years, with my main selling being on Whatnot and at the London Comic Mart.During the pandemic I also started producing videos about comics for YouTube, and I have a popular channel with over 2,000 subscribers. Here is the link https://www.youtube.com/@SuddenlyComicsHis NovelThe Chamberlain's Gambit is my first novel, a Historical Murder Mystery. In 1484 the War of the Roses have left England scarred and suspicious. When the staunchly Yorkist Lord of Bardfield is found dead with an arrow through his eye, the fragile peace of the region threatens to shatter. Robert Stone, a war weary chamberlain loyal to the Duke of Norfolk, is dispatched to uncover the killer. He expects to find a Lancastrian plot,, but the truth is far more personal, and far more dangerous. The roots of the murder lie decades in the past.His ContactEmail: [email protected]: @suddenlycomicsFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/mark.oldroyd.507YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SuddenlyComicsTap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 uproariously funny conversation, Ali and host Mookie Spitz trace the decade-long arc of Ali’s book: from its birth in the shadow of ISIS and the Charlie Hebdo killings to its strange afterlife in a world drowning in misinformation, outrage porn, and algorithmic noise. Ali explains, without irony, what it meant to grow up secular-minded in Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and how 9/11 ripped open the fault line between “Islam the ideology” and “Muslims the people.”You’ll hear:How the book blindsided both sides — the Western right that wanted to criminalize Muslims, and the Western left that infantilized them.Why separating humans from their doctrines matters now more than ever.How the internet accidentally secularized an entire generation, from Tehran to Karachi to Toronto.Why co-opting a religion terrifies fundamentalists more than leaving it.Why the atheist movement blew its shot by selling rationality and ignoring meaning.How Trump beat the Enlightenment with a story, not an argument.Why “making secularism sexy” isn’t optional — it’s survival.Why the human brain is (isn't!) a sophisticated LLM.And of course they can't help themselves, going all the way into the weeds: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, the Muslim ban, Obama’s shockwave election, ISIS fanboys, Woody Allen as the archetype of the secular Jew, Busy Beaver numbers as quasi-religious ecstasy, Denmark cartoons, Middle Eastern censorship, and how long-term memory might be the evolutionary engine behind humanity’s obsession with meaning.If you want polite NPR babble, this isn’t your show. If you want a raw, historically grounded, intellectually vicious tour through religion, identity, polarization, free speech, and the strange new world where everyone’s shouting but no one knows a damn thing, then welcome to the fifth installment of Ink vs. Algorithm.The GuestAli A. Rizvi is a writer, physician, and musician. He is the author of “The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason," and host of the Unlicensed Therapist podcast, and all-round sh*t disturber.His BookHis PodcastTap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 journey from promising young poet to full-time professional and father who stopped writing entirely for twenty-five years. Then came the pandemic: Zoom marathons, cabin fever, and a sudden need for meaning. From that isolation, he picked up his pen again. What followed was a renaissance: reworking poems he’d written in his twenties, submitting to journals, enduring rejection after rejection, and finally breaking through with several publications and winning a 2024 Founders’ Prize in RHINO Poetry for his poem “The Son.”Spitz and Plumb discuss how poetry sits at the intersection of music and thought, why ambiguity makes verse more alive, and how the best writing thrives in the tension between control and surrender.The Art of Undoing: How “undoing” — loss, reflection, and humility — can be a creative act in itself.Poetry’s Second Act: Why Plumb believes poetry is quietly resurging as the short-form art of our crisis age, and a return to lyricism in a time of noise.orm and Feeling: The influence of Lawrence Raab’s poetry class at Williams College, and how one comma in Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening changed how he reads every line.From Fatherhood to Freedom: How family, healthcare work, and grief deepened his writing rather than silenced it.The Discipline of the Weekend Poet: Why Hudson writes in intense weekend bursts, like “assembling a watch blindfolded,” until the poem suddenly “starts to tick.”The Poems: He reads several, including Vancouver Island Whale Watch, The Largest Thing, and The Son which exploring life, death, and renewal through precise imagery and emotional depth.The GuestHudson Plumb is a poet, playwright, and healthcare communications strategist based in New York City. His poetry has recently appeared in Humana Obscura (Issue 12), RHINO Poetry (2024 Founders’ Prize, Runner-Up), The Courtship of Winds, and Kaleidoscope Magazine, Exploring the Experience of Disability Through Literature and the Fine Arts. His poems have also been published in earlier issues of Webster Review, Missouri, and Kaleidoscope.The poems in The Art of Undoing guide through the strange, luminous terrain of what remains after separation—and what may take its place. While tracing a path through personal and collective tragedies, these poems remain attuned to the beauty that appears unexpectedly: a whale surfacing beside a boat, “clouds passing/between the fingers of a eucalyptus tree,” cormorants “popping up with sideways prizes.” Rather than retreat from the brokenness of the world, Plumb’s lyric meditations gather its fragments into forms of quiet restoration. In scenes shaped by a father’s death in Argentina, a mother blinking glass from her eye in a Sagaponack storm, or hermit crabs crawling toward improbable survival, Plumb reveals undoing not only as loss, but as the possibility of pause and renewal.Finishing Line Press | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedInTap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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. What started as Supernatural-inspired fiction during the lockdown spiraled into a universe of its own, blending gods, demons, and closeted Navy SEALs with tenderness, danger, and unapologetic sexuality. Her work walks the tightrope between lust and love, myth and reality, the sacred and the profane. All done without a single line written by AI.Mookie and TH dig into the cultural underbelly of writing queer intimacy, from the politics of sex positivity to the psychology of why so many straight women devour gay romance. They talk about growing up conservative, discovering queer spaces as sanctuaries, and channeling loss into liberation through storytelling. Along the way, they hit every corner of the creative process, from editing 300,000-word drafts down to something publishable, surviving #BookTok’s noise, and the daily, grinding hustle of being your own publisher, marketer, and community builder.At the core of her passion lurks the ghost of Tom Holdorf, THs late cousin and a 1990s New York fashion photographer lost to AIDS. His legacy of art, defiance, and beauty runs through every page she writes, and every author she hopes to lift through Holdorf Press, her indie imprint dedicated to real, human storytelling in an age of artifice.Their conversation is messy, candid, and moving — a love letter to writers who dare to tell the stories they’re not “supposed” to tell.HighlightsHow fan fiction led to a queer literary universeSex positivity, censorship, and the ethics of erotic storytellingThe legacy of loss: honoring an artist taken by AIDSBookTok for grownups — why relationship > reachIndie publishing secrets: ISBN protection, IngramSpark, and live eventsHow AI-free creativity is an act of rebellionThe GuestTH Forest lives in Massachusetts with her husband, sons, cats, Major Tom & Bowie, her German Shepherd, Freya, and one very loud macaw, Loki. She loves to cook, read, and listen to all genres of music (except country) and is passionate about the things that matter to her, like representation, inclusivity, and being an LGBTQ+ ally. She is also a shameless promoter of her novels and is happy to talk your ear off about them.Holdorf PressWebsite & Social ChannelsTap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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 between raw human imagination and the cold precision of AI.In the flagship episode, Mookie sits down with Julianne Webb — writer, opera singer, and daughter of Ziggy cartoonist Tom Wilson — to unpack a life steeped in creativity, chaos, and litigation. From growing up in a greeting-card empire to navigating family dysfunction, lawsuits, and a legacy of art and humor, Webb’s story is a masterclass in artistic survival.Their conversation veers from the 1970s suburbs to the frontlines of digital storytelling. Listen in for deep dives into process, mental health, memoir, and meaning — plus plenty of tangents involving baldness, babysitting certificates, rotary phones, and opera arias.What They CoverCreative lineage: Growing up the daughter of Ziggy creator Tom Wilson and a writer mother who was part of the design team for Strawberry Shortcake, Care Bears, and Holly HobbieArt & dysfunction: The beautiful chaos of a creative family that loved, fought, drank, and eventually sued each otherChildhood in the 70s: Rotary phones, Schwinn bikes, babysitting certificates, and pre-digital independenceThe lost art of growing up: What kids today miss without streetlights, landlines, and neighborhood tribesWriter’s block & imposter syndrome: Finding validation and courage through writing groups and creative communityMemoir vs. fiction: The blurred line between lived experience and art — exploring roman à clef storytellingActing and authorship: How opera performance informs writing — embodying characters and directing emotionThe tortured artist myth: Why struggle, madness, and pressure can fuel creativityThe publishing grind: The unfiltered reality of self-publishing, marketing, and the social media hustleTikTok epiphany: Going viral, getting hate, and learning that engagement beats perfectionCreative risk & controversy: The backlash that follows provocation — and why it’s worth itThe core writing philosophy: Eliminate pretense, abandon ego, and — in Mookie’s words — “STFU and let your story tell itself.”The GuestJulianne Webb is a classically trained singer, instructor of voice and piano, mom, wife, knitter, and writer currently residing north of Cincinnati. Her new memoir spans decades and chronicles such heady experiences as familial chaos, emotional thrill rides and questionable parenting, as well as fat farms, pennyfarthings, talking parrots, boarding school, culottes and serial killers. She sincerely hopes you will follow her on socials, listen to Mookie’s podcasts and buy Famous Father, Unknown Daughter, slated for release in May 2026.Her SocialsTikTokInstagramTap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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, novelists, publicists, creators, and discerning readers fighting to keep human storytelling alive in a world flooded by AI-generated slop. From the craft of writing to the crisis of attention, from the beauty of language to the blunt reality that most online words are now written by code, Ink vs Algorithm asks the only question that matters: Can the human voice still cut through the noise?Whether you’re a writer using AI as a research tool or a reader trying to tell real from synthetic, the podcast is irreverent, and unapologetically human.Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...