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I DIDN'T STOP WRITING, I JUST STOPPED BLOGGING, AND THEN I BUILT A MACHINE THAT CAN PROVE IT (Plus: Yarn, A World Cup Conspiracy, And One Project I'm Putting Down)

August 2, 2026

A wall calendar for the month of July that has visibly given up on life, several days have been violently crossed out with a marker, one square just says “YARN” in enormous letters and is bleeding indigo dye onto the squares below it, another square contains a tiny soccer ball with a suspicious eyebrow drawn on it, a small robot in the corner is diligently transcribing every keystroke into a ledger labeled “PROOF (HE REALLY DID TYPE IT),” a sticky note is peeling off the bottom that reads “BLOG???” in increasingly panicked handwriting, a second sticky note underneath simply reads “you know why,” dramatic overhead office lighting, a single sad crockpot of dye simmering off to the side

It has been a dooooooozy of a month.

My last “real post” — as in, one that isn’t attached to the Patreon, more on that later — was on July 4th. And then I just kind of stopped writing blogs. I kept writing. I kept building things. I did not stop doing the work. I just stopped putting any of it here, for some reason.

I know the reason.

We’ll get to it. First, the month.

I have been reading (not just for the book club, though also for the book club), writing (again, not the blog), watching football (the cool kind), and dyeing yarn. It has been a lot. Let’s go in reverse order, because that’s the order it came out of my brain.

Yarn, Endless Yarn

Sarah and I have been very busy getting ready for a bunch of trunk shows — three of them next week alone — which means we have been dyeing an absolutely absurd quantity of yarn. Like, so much yarn. Quantities of yarn that make you re-evaluate your relationship with your kitchen.

It’s also that time of year where you pre-order your yarn for the holiday Gnome, and we still have somewhere around ten holiday boxes left.

So if you are so inclined, go check it out and support a small woman-owned business. That’s the whole pitch. No pressure, but also, the boxes are extremely good and there are only about ten of them.

A Brief Interlude In Which I Discuss The World Cup

WTF was that.

I am not saying that FIFA did everything in its power to hand Messi another trophy. But I am also not not saying that.

There were some absolutely amazing matches in this tournament — Cabo Verde, Morocco, genuinely thrilling stuff, and notably not from the US — but the real story was Spain. Not only did they win it, they allowed one goal the entire tournament. One. Across the whole thing. That is an insane sentence to type.

The best part of the final, though, was the commentary. You could hear the broadcast team come in absolutely locked and loaded for an Argentina coronation, and then slowly, over ninety minutes, adjust their entire emotional posture in real time as Argentina proceeded to do nothing whatsoever. It was a beautiful and educational experience. Sometimes the narrative just doesn’t show up and you have to talk for another hour anyway.

Writing, And The New Witch Hunt

Writing has been going steady, with one notable lull, and the lull happened because I fell down a hole.

That hole was AI-use allegations, which have turned into a genuinely nasty new kind of witch hunt that is hurting new authors — and, increasingly, established ones. I wrote about this back in May in your vibes are not evidence, and I stand by every word: we have to stop using vibes to determine whether something was written with AI. You need actual proof before you accuse someone of it. Not a feeling. Not a paragraph that reads a little too smooth for your taste. Proof.

Which is what finally pushed me to build the thing I’d been circling for a couple of months.

So I Built The Proof

It all comes from the amount of coding I’ve been doing. GitHub does a really nice job of tracking how many lines of code you commit on any given day, and that record — over time — can tell you a lot about whether a human sat there and did it, or whether it got mostly generated.

So why doesn’t that exist for writers?

Well. Now it does. It’s called Vellumproof, and it is amazing, if I do say so myself.

The gist: it captures words as you write them, showing how many you actually typed on a given day. It tracks pasted words versus typed words, which is genuinely useful. It’ll let you upload documents, though I’ll be honest and say that’s a bit of a red flag on your record — uploads aren’t properly tracked, and the whole point is the tracking.

It also does a time-lapse of your writing, which is the feature I’m most stupidly proud of. Digital artists have had time-lapse proof of their process for years and I have been quietly jealous the entire time. Now we get one too.

At the end you get a proof page with all the stats, and you can choose whether to turn the time-lapse on for anyone looking at it. Go poke at that one — it’s real, it’s mine, and you can watch the words show up.

The example on the Vellumproof homepage is a story I’ve actually been writing, and that’s the real writing — edits, false starts, the whole ugly middle. Pretty fancy, right?

I’ll write a proper deep dive on this over on the nervous blog soon, since that’s where the build stuff belongs.

What I’ve Been Reading

I went back to Dungeon Crawler Carl. I read it for the first time not that long ago, but given the current state of the world I needed something fun and ridiculous, and Carl delivers ridiculous on a reliable schedule.

I also read A Psalm for the Wild-Built and I’ll do a full write-up on that soon. I know this is a deranged thing to say about a cozy fantasy book, but it felt almost too cozy? I don’t even know what that means. I’m going to have to think about it for another few hundred words somewhere else.

And during one of our Yarn Adventures™ we ended up right next door to the Spicy Librarian in Denver, which is exactly as dangerous as it sounds. I picked up Bromantasy, a book whose cover I saw on Instagram and immediately added to my running list of books-I-should-read-based-purely-on-cover. Started it last week. It has been pretty magical so far. Everyone should read it and I’ll do a proper review once I finish.

Okay. Real Talk.

Here’s the reason.

Starting two large projects at the same time is a bad idea for me and my ADHD. Not “a challenge.” Not “ambitious.” A bad idea. I know this about myself. I have known this about myself for years. I did it anyway, because the thing about ADHD is that knowing the pattern and being immune to the pattern are two completely unrelated conditions.

So I’m going to be pausing the Patreon. Not killing it — pausing it. I just don’t have the bandwidth to do it properly and do the work of getting people to actually join it, and running it badly is worse than not running it.

Which is, more or less, the story of my life when it comes to projects. I am bad at marketing. I want to be really clear that this isn’t false modesty — I am genuinely, measurably bad at the follow-through part of marketing.

I am, however, excellent at coming up with marketing ideas. I have so many. They’re great. They live in a document. Nobody has ever seen them.

That’s the gap, right there. That’s the whole thing. And the blog silence was just a symptom of it — when I’m running past capacity, the first thing that falls off is the thing nobody’s waiting on, and for three weeks that was this.

Anyway. That’s what I’ve been up to for almost a month.

Go buy a holiday box, keep an eye on Vellumproof, and be gentle with yourself about the projects you’re putting down.