Category: the writing life

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A Victim’s Advice

In my upcoming novel, our protagonist is Dr. Simon Fethullah, a forensic psychiatrist who worked for the FBI. Shot on the job, he retires to the wilds of Montana with his wife Carla and his faithful dog, Stefano.

Simon helped put the Rainy Day Cannibal away, but the serial killer has disciples. Though behind prison walls, the killer’s reach can still find Simon. Add in a dead presidential press secretary and a kidnapped girl. Now you’ve got Where The Night Takes Us, a rocking psychological thriller that plays with the blurred limits of time and memory. (The query is on submission to agents.)

A Brief Excerpt from my Next Crime Thriller

To deal with what his wife calls his post-apocalyptic stress disorder, Simon takes his therapist’s advice. After a dark realization, he makes the following notes on his phone.

How to Slow Time’s March and Live Longer and Better

1. Eat healthier and in reasonable portions.

2. Move more and lift weights.

3. Prove Denise wrong by enjoying rural life.

4. Play with my dog more.

5. Watch less social media and talk to Carla more.

6. Be more social. (Be real. I won’t do that.)

7. Read more books. Maybe write another book.

8. Do not shoot self in head.

9. Shoot someone else in the head when they come for us.

10. Eat more legumes.

Stay tuned!

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I Am Cursed

In my neighborhood, there is a cursed place. Today, that location is a new sushi restaurant. Before that? A Burger Factory. Before that? A forgotten string of failures. A new renter arrives with fresh ideas and colossal hope. After a year or two, another restaurateur takes up the challenge and shoulders the curse. Why anyone invests all their life savings in a restaurant is a mystery to most. To anyone who does not share the dream of making unappreciated food for an oblivious public, it is madness.

I would never invest in a restaurant, but I understand the passion for the risk.

Some clods don’t think writing a book is “real work.” They devalue the effort and call it a hobby. Some even want it all for free. It’s just typing, after all, right? Hell, in weak and depressed moments, I’ve called it an expensive hobby! When a reviewer says, “I don’t understand why this book isn’t a bestseller,” all I can say is, “Me, neither, man.”

And how many people really have the time, energy, and attention span to read anymore? Is this really a job or a fairly pointless compulsion? What kind of fool wasted months or years to compose a novel?

Here, I raise my hand. I’m that kind of fool. I don’t know if my next book will be a smash hit, but I enter into every story with that same hope. It’s madness, really.

Here's the kind of fool I am.

A peek into how my workday began

After only a few hours of sleep, I think I woke up around 3:30 a.m. I lay in bed with wild thoughts about Where The Night Takes Us. The manuscript needed an extra kick to get the grand seduction going. It’s a dance to draw readers in, and the steps were not quite right yet. I deleted a chapter yesterday to speed up the pacing. I added something crucial to the beginning yesterday, too. Satisfaction eluded me. What else would make the recipe sweeter?

Gave up on sleep at 4 a.m.

The nagging sense that I’d lose some sugar made me crawl out of bed and to my laptop. More words, particular and well-chosen, had to get written before I could lose the thread. I had to sew some seams and make the presentation more appetizing. Perfection is always out of reach, but at least I can make it more right.

Officially, Where The Night Takes Us will be my thirtieth novel. I’ve been here before. The energy behind the compulsion to get it published is always the same. Years ago, a novelist’s house caught fire. He braved the flames to reenter the burning building to save his manuscript. I get it, but it’s madness, isn’t it?

Anyway, I caught the words before they could slip away. If this is a curse, I must enjoy it. When the manuscript is fully baked and out of the oven, I hope you’ll enjoy my madness.

It is now 5:15 a.m., and my brain is buzzing. I may as well stay up and keep cooking. Somewhere out there, I have to believe hungry readers are waiting for my next concoction.

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Today’s Agenda & Something You MUST taste

I got to the grocery store early for more yogurt because I found a fake cheesecake recipe you’ll want to eat every day, all day (below).

Crossword (Done! I abhor cross words, but I love crosswords.)

Read more of The Children of Men. Damn, this is a good book.

Study French.

Workout at home today (kettlebell, mobility, balance, bodyweight exercises, stationary bike, boxing, & lots of squats).

I am working through the third draft polish of Where The Night Takes Us. (Greatest challenge: timeline logistics.)

Now, to that fake cheesecake that’s going to blow your mind:

1 cup plain high-protein yogurt

1 egg

1 tablespoon cornstarch

splash of lemon and/or lemon zest

Optional: sweetener

Mix it up, slam it in a ramekin, bake at 350 for 12 minutes, review Vengeance Is Hers and/or join the review team for Where The Night Takes Us, and enjoy!

Optional: top with berries.

You’re going to love it.

If you like 1984, The Burning Library, It Can Happen Here, or A Different Drummer…

You’ll love Citizen Second Class.

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This is What I Do for Us

You feel the world is chaotic.

You’re right.

Fishing boats that could never make it to the United States from Venezuela are blown up. The killers don’t even know who they killed. Outlandish claims are used to justify colonialism and tyranny. Old allies are threatened while old enemies are embraced. People who seemed smart are working toward a future that values AI over human beings. Dumb and bigoted monsters spew hate-filled sophistry. Christian identity is placed above actual Christian values. Journalists who don’t ask follow-up questions become abused stenographers. Upholding the law is only for the lowly. Judgment is left to future historians instead of the courts. Dangerous users are protected by the powerful, and the helpless have no voice. A buffoonish conman with dementia has the nuclear codes.

This is not a complete list.

Q: What will 2026 bring?

Ar: More of the same.

Q: What can we do?

A: Hold on.

The same hate that brought the haters together will tear them apart. Their incompetence is the root of their failure. As the former cult members are betrayed by their champion’s false promises, they will peel off. Whistleblowers will find their breath. Former true believers will discover they have a spine after all. Eventually, many who voted for him will pretend they’ve never heard the name. When he comes up, they’ll look away and try to shift the conversation to anything else.

One day, we’ll look back and ask, “Why didn’t we have to wait for them to implode? Why didn’t the courts stop him? Why didn’t everyone laugh in his face? Where were you when the veil fell from everyone’s eyes? Why were you so quiet?”

About Me

I write fiction. I don’t like bullies. I trust science and distrust authority. I try to keep my worries to the things I can control. I escape into fiction by reading it and writing it.

About You

If you don’t agree, you won’t like my work, and we definitely should not be friends. Until you have your road to Damascus moment, that’s the way it is.

If you are a reader who feels as I do, we should be friends, and you’re going to love my books.

~ I am Robert Chazz Chute, the winner of fifteen writing awards. I pen crime stories, psychological thrillers, and apocalyptic epics, and I remain defiant.

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Social Media Priorities and the Trouble with TikTok

First, a quick update, because you have to eat your meat before you get your pudding.

November was a very productive month for me. I’m flirting with a repetitive strain injury with all the time at the keyboard, but it’s really paying off. I participated in the ProWritingAid Challenge (the replacement for NaNoWriMo) and finished the first draft of my next thriller. It’s about a retired FBI forensic psychiatrist whose past comes back to haunt him. I’m plowing through the second draft now and loving it. More on that in the new year.

This fall, I started up the Vocab Menace Series, putting out videos every day. I LOVE WORDS! I love learning their origins and playing with ideas and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I will continue, but not every day.

Evaluating Social Media

For years, I posted regularly on my writing blog (ChazzWrites.com). That was helpful early in my publishing career. I connected with some wonderful authors and made allies. Eventually, I decided it was best to consolidate my posts on my author blog and only post when I had something new and trenchant to say.

I found that posting everywhere (Bluesky, YouTube, Threads, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, TikTok, and the Book of Faces) takes a lot of time. Not all those platforms are worth the energy I invested.

My take on social media is below, but for a view from all angles, read Enshittification by Corey Doctorow.

And this is the link to Mr. Doctorow’s piece on Medium titled Too Big to Care: Enshittification is a Choice.

My impressions of the usefulness of social media platforms (your mileage may vary):

I find the user interface for Bluesky and Threads unfriendly. The people are nice, but the platforms are not where they need to be yet. Discoverability is an opaque enigma wrapped in a burrito of mystery.

YouTube is good. Eventually, YouTube might pay me actual money.

One of the most active content categories on Medium is writing. Put that in your keywords, and people will look. Medium’s interface is cool, but following and connecting with people there is probably more useful than dedicating too much time to post every day. Because they are so alike, I feel similarly about Substack. I’m posting less on Medium now, more on Substack.

I’m not looking for a job or writing business books, so LinkedIn is a waste of time and energy.

I like Instagram. As a news source, I find many of the creators I follow there provide thoughtful commentary.

For the authors out there, BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

As for Facebook, you can have a lot of followers, but your audience is far too throttled. They want you to pay to have your content seen. There are many ways it’s problematic. However, I connect with my inner circle of readers there.

I enjoy Facebook for my fan page and hope they never delete it. That happens sometimes, and when it happens, you probably won’t even know why. As a writer hoping to sell my work, it’s always best for me to have my own platform that can’t be ripped away.

The trouble with TikTok

TikTok has really fallen in terms of usefulness and tone. I used to be addicted to political debates there, but my favorite content creators left the platform. Others are competent, but very repetitive. Mostly, the live debates are angry people talking over each other. (Oh, and don’t forget the racist trolls. Lots of those.)

TikTok is a special case in some ways. BookTok can be great, but is often repetitive, covering the same few books (read: rarely mine). Also, some of the BookTok drama is ridiculous.

I would pursue book promotion there more avidly, but things are about to change for the worse. If you’re a Canadian author, sending review copies to the United States is expensive. To complicate things further for non-American authors, TikTok will soon become a walled garden, for the United States only. The details on that change are muddy, but when that happens, I won’t be able to reach my American readers through that platform. (That’s a shame. Most of my readers are from the United States.)

Conclusions

  1. When my American readers can only see other Americans on TikTok, the platform’s value will plunge even further.
  2. Between the forest of TikTok-friendly language and the suppression of posts meant to appease political actors and the new owners, TT’s once robust foundation will eventually sink into the shifting sands of irrelevancy.
  3. Unless another app rises in TikTok’s stead, the change in ownership will benefit Instagram.
  4. LinkedIn is for business. Not my business, though.
  5. If you post for self-expression alone, enjoy using whatever platform you like.
  6. From a time management perspective, don’t invest too much energy trying to post everywhere. It’s a lot to keep up with, and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
  7. For gaining visibility and leverage social media platforms, follow and engage with people you enjoy.
  8. Authentic engagement has more value than solely sending out signals.
  9. Agents and publishers are obsessed with follower count. They shouldn’t be. Follower count means much less than engagement.
  10. Social media is free to use for book promotion, but you get what you pay for. Author Jason Pargin posts excellent content. He has said that even with all his followers, that work does not translate significantly to a greater readership.
  11. There are plenty of book marketing strategies out there. Some gurus push complicated flow charts of funnels. They all enthuse about newsletters. Some content creators make money from sharing “the newest trick.” The solution to selling books may be going direct, going wide, learning how to advertise (and funding it), keyword optimization, consistent branding, or some combination of all of the above, plus something else. Answers abound, but social media alone surely isn’t the cheap, easy solution.
  12. You can’t make a viral video happen. Others choose that for you. I’ve gone viral once, but only because I made a lot of trolls angry. TikTok hid a lot of the nastiest comments because “the collapsed comments could be detrimental to your mental well-being.” Ha! As if my mental well-being was all that great to begin with! I could see the threats, and I had a peek. I just had to click on them to see the tidal waves of crash-outs.

    My question: If the platform’s AI detects mean messages suggesting harm to me, why doesn’t the platform ban those trolls?

    The hullabaloo hardly mattered in the end. The experience did lower my estimation of my fellow humans, but I didn’t respond to the trolls much. Arguing with fascists who are determined to be idiots is the ultimate waste of time. Always preserve your peace (between the punching Nazis thing, I mean).

    On reaching readers:

All social media platforms suppress your signal to some degree.

To break through all the noise requires time, talent, energy, editing, and savvy marketing. Consistency is paramount, but only if you have the time and energy. As much as I love posting Vocab Menace content, it was cutting into my writing time. To get the next book out, protect that time. Prioritize productivity.

My writing time and energy is paramount to me at present. That much is working. My next thriller will be released early in 2026. That’s a concrete achievement I can measure.

~ REMINDER: Buy your books for Christmas now so you can read them before you wrap them for others. Happy holidays!


FYI: All my work is available on Amazon. Endemic is available everywhere.

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How to Spot a Book Promotion Scam

Every day, another book marketing scammer hits our inbox. Lately, it’s two a day. The basic pitch is almost always the same. It goes like this:

1. We came across our book (Endemic, This Plague of Days, Vengeance Is Hers) and it is…

2. Insert a long, flattering, and flowery description of the book here. There’s enough detail, you’d almost think they read my work. What they’ve actually done is scrape social media and book reviews for their pitch.

3. The pitch is to market my work to their secret group of 2,000 readers or to their book club. Another variation is to act as a book marketing coach with all strategies conveniently provided by ChatGPT. (Sometimes they pretend to be a famous author who loves your books and is eager to pass on the name of their book promoter to help you out.)

Spot a Scammer

The first thing you may notice is that the grammar and syntax miss the mark. The sender’s first language is not English. That alone is not disqualifying, of course, but it’s not a good sign if they intend to market English books for you. When I turned down a chancer, they asked, “Why? Do you think I am scam?” (SIC)

The less sophisticated emails are more generic, and the template they’re using for mass emails is evident. (e.g. “I just ran across your excellent novel <<title of book>> by <<Author>>.)

For some reason, the name of the book promoter is often two feminine first names. Sarah Sally is excited to read and sell your book for you!

Like any author, I need more reviews of my books. Several times, I’ve been approached by someone whose marketing plan would contravene Amazon’s terms of service. So, they get money, and I lose my account and livelihood? Great! For them.

More Tip offs

The salutation says, “Hi Author Robert!”

They have no website and no or very low presence on social media.

Their email is a generic Gmail address. (e.g. bestbookmarketing.au.bookbar.uk@gmail….)

They impersonate a real book marketer from a reputable company, but when you go to the real person, the contact info doesn’t match. When that happens, I let the impersonated person know.

HOT TIP #1: Always research by going to the source directly. Do not click a link within an email.)

In the past couple of days, I’ve received offers for deals on their book promotion for “the festive season.” It’s already December 3. A little late to pull together a helpful book marketing campaign for Christmas, isn’t it?

Some scammers are persistent to the point of aggression, sometimes even harassment. When I ignored one particularly relentless scammer, I suddenly got a one-star rating on my latest book. Can I be sure it was the suitor I rejected? No, but the timing was suspicious, and it hurt because the book has, as yet, so few reviews. After that, instead of ignoring scammers, I opted to reply with a polite but firm, “No, thank you.”

It’s exceedingly rare for authors to get approached for something they didn’t sign up for. Real book promoters simply work with authors who come to them, not the other way around. That stipulated, I have had a few entreaties from real agents, publishers, and book promoters. When that happens, I have to look at them really hard before I can take them seriously. That’s part of the problem.

The Danger

A new one this morning came very close to getting me. The pitch was good, but the sourcing didn’t pass. Anybody (including authors) can plug a prompt into ChatGPT and get the same book marketing advice as the scammers do. These people aren’t adding real value. The trouble authors face is not having the budget to overcome the noise. Getting a signal through to actual readers and reviewers is difficult.

Beyond wastes of time and money and the damage to the environment, these AI scam pitches harbor a deeper danger. They poison our media environment. AI hallucinations and deep fake videos erode trust. With the newest gizmo, Nano Banana, you can’t trust anything you see. I loved images from the James Webb telescope, but stopped sharing them because I couldn’t tell what was real, what was enhanced, and what was fake.

If an honest-to-goodness pitch comes along, it’s become an act of self-defense to treat all information with a skepticism that devolves to easy cynicism. If there’s clear video evidence of a politician doing something heinous, they’ll dismiss it with “It’s just AI!”

Can’t write a book on your own? Flood the zone with prompts to an AI that yields trite, soulless regurgitation.

When you use your media literacy and critical thinking skills, the scammer replies, “Who are you going to believe? Me? Or your lyin’ eyes!”

Writing for a living is hard. Waving away the gnats would be a minor strain were it not for their ubiquity.

HOT TIP #2: When in doubt of a sketchy email, check it out. Writer Beware has a searchable database to check out the names and reputations.

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The Publishers Weekly Review of Vengeance Is Hers

This is a big deal for me.

Chute’s thought-provoking crime thriller tells the story of Molly Jergins, a bright, restless teenager who grows up in the small town of Poeticule Bay, Maine, a tight-knit, picturesque village floundering and long dominated by a single powerful family. When Keith Faun, the town’s hockey star and the son of its most influential businessman, brutally assaults a younger boy and escapes punishment, Molly finds herself consumed with revenge fantasies. Her petty pranks soon escalate into a campaign to drive the Fauns out of town: she sabotages their family business and publicly damages their credibility, with each act calculated to chip away not only at their sense of untouchability but also the broader community that enables it.

At its core, this novel is an exploration of the insular dynamics unique to small towns—blind loyalty to old families, unthinking hostility toward outsiders, and reflexive protection afforded to their golden boys. What stands out most are not the creative revenge sequences but the way cruelty is normalized: a principal who dismisses violence, a sheriff more concerned with reelection than law enforcement, neighbors who carry on like it’s business as usual. Here, Chute (author of Endemic) pushes readers to consider whether such institutions can really be trusted with justice—or if it falls to individuals to enforce it.

This ethical dilemma is embodied most clearly in Molly herself. While she obviously cares about fairness, her obsessive tendencies leave readers questioning whether she is driven by justice or simply by her power to deliver it. The story’s pace sometimes falters under the sheer number of revenge plots, with these convoluted sequences limiting Molly’s character development—but she remains a complex, morally gray protagonist who readers will want to follow, if only to see how far she will go. Overall, those who are drawn to dark small-town noir will enjoy the clarity with which this gripping tale examines power and complicity.

Takeaway: Dark small-town thriller examining the blurred line between justice and obsession.

Comparable Titles: Gillian Flynn; Paula Hawkins.

Available on Amazon.