Writer Resolution 2026: Wield The Weapon That Is You

It’s never precisely easy to be a writer — professional or otherwise. I mean, it’s easy in the sense of, hey, anybody can open a word processor and start (fiercely or methodically) putting a story down on the page, one mad word at a time. But it’s also quite hard: you have to reckon with a difficult industry, a lack of respect and recognition from the non-writers in your life, a schedule that surely isn’t conducive, a dearth of proper places to actually sit down and make the words happen, and so forth. Writing always, always feels like an act that vacillates wildly between the Herculean and the Sisyphean — always difficult, sometimes triumphant, sometimes you’re pancaked by the boulder you’ve been shoving up the hill for days, weeks, months, years.

But I also think that, oof, ooh boy, 2025 has really hammered the nails in, hasn’t it? Hammered those fuckers in deep.

It’s like, okay —

First, the world sucks, and it’s hard to push through the wall of pulsating snarge just to find some clean runway in which to take off and get some clear skies for a nice writing day.

Second, everything is getting more expensive, which often means doing more non-writing work, which leaves precious little time for the writing work.

Third, I dunno that book sales are down, but the industry is certainly seeming harder on some folks this year — maybe this is just what I’m seeing, but I know a lot more authors in this past year who have had real difficulties with the industry (not the work, but the industry). Difficulties getting published, difficulties with advances, difficulties getting attention above the noise. It doesn’t help that film and television is in such a weird place, which makes it harder to secure any additional money from the random book option — and foreign rights sales seem down, too, for most folks I know.

(And again, this is all as costs are going up.)

Fourth, trends seem to be dominating more — and this isn’t a knock against the writers or readers of those trends, but rather a knock against publishers who really, really are leaning harder than ever on said trends. (Always a fraught path. Every trend is a bubble, and every bubble is fit to burst.)

Fifth, the itchy death rash of generative AI and LLMs continues to pop up everywhere, its digital blisters uglying up everything they touch. The value of writing is under assault by the shitsucking techlords that are cramming it into everything, and it’s further under assault by the users of AI, users in the truest sense who gladly fetishize ideas while dismissing the work and effort necessary to create great things.

In a lot of ways, this is pretty demoralizing. It’s hard not to feel like this is overwhelming — even insurmountable.

But I want to present and preserve some optimism here — and not because I feel obligated to tap-dance so as to not leave you feeling absolute pants-shittingly sad on the cusp of a new year, but because I honestly possess this optimism, and it’s optimism in part that comes from what I wrote the other day (the open letter against the open letter against AI blah blah blah thing).

It goes a little something like this —

AI is not intelligent. There is no sentience there. There’s no there there. It offers no real mind, no real cognition, certainly no imagination. And we know this because the way it was and is built requires that the shitsucking techlords steal all our crap and feed it into the plagiaristic artbarf machine. Seriously. It doesn’t come up with anything on its own. It only has what it has taken. It offers nothing of its own. It offers everything of ours. It’s a comedian who can only steal jokes. It has no humor, and no understanding of humor. It doensn’t understand anything. It doesn’t know anything. Because, drum roll please, it’s not intelligent. It’s not human.

AI will never be better than you or me. It will never be better than the sum total of human art and existence. It can only be behind, beneath, lesser. It will always be trying to catch up, to pilfer and thieve, to quickly gorge itself on the meals we make and then throw it all back up again as if it’s a culinary master. But it’s no master. It’s not even an apprentice. It’s just a really fancy Xerox Machine — a haughty Lorum Ipsum generator.

It doesn’t have what you and I have.

We’re most compelled by — and affected by — original work. And I understand here that original is fraught as an idea. In a lot of ways, nothing is ever original. Everything has, in its way, come before. And therein you might think, well, that’s how the AI gets us, innit? If nothing is original, it can just scoop it all up and reprocess it accordingly, and produce “new” things ad infinitum. We’re cooked. But there is a factor of originality in the things we love and that factor is always, always, always the lens through which the thing is seen. And that lense is the storyteller. The storyteller or tellers who tell a tale, whether we’re talking book or film or song or music video or painting or whatever, is the unique factor. They are the original and crucial part — a keystone that locks the whole thing together. Perspective matters. Experience matters. The arrangements we choose or are obsessed by really fucking matter. Put differently, we lend our imagination — an imagination forged in the fires of our experiences and our traumas and our opinions and our families and friends and and and — to the work, and that cannot be reproduced. Not by AI. Not by other writers. Not by any force in the known universe. Not to get all writers are special snowflakes on you, but maybe we are special snowflakes. Maybe we are each a uniquely crystalline configuration.

And this isn’t just about AI, either — this is about publishers who want trends, this is about filmmakers who want to make films. Some of the most amazing things are always the things that set the trends, rather than the things that follow them. And looking at movies this year, it wasn’t the Repeated Franchise Work that really sang. It was Sinners, it was Weapons, it was Sirat and One Battle After Another and Black Bag and the Baltimorons.

What I’m trying to say is: we’re going to fucking win.

We, the people — we, the humans — are going to fucking win.

I want to say it again and you say it with me:

WE ARE GOING TO FUCKING WIN.

We’re it, man. We’re the reason for the season. Everything that has ever mattered (in the human world, not the natural world, to be clear) comes from people. Individuals and communities. Not from machines, not from corporations, but from people and communities who not only have ideas but the wherewithal to pursue those ideas with effort, commitment, learning, and sheer teeth-gritting bloody-mindedness. I want you to feel that in your bones. I want you to feel the power you possess as a person in this world who tells stories. We’re going to what?

We’re going to win. How?

I want you to tell those stories. Your stories. The ones that matter most to you — not the ones that feed machines, not the ones that feed companies, but the ones that feed you, and by proxy, the audience beyond you.

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In a sense, most of my annual resolutions are probably some version of this: write who you are, fuck trends, get weird, and especially this year, fuck the machine. But this year I want you to not only implement that but also to do it with hope in your heart and spite in your teeth. I want you to be the best, weirdest version of yourself you can be. Turn off all your sad bummer imposter worries, shut down your doubts. Demolish the guardrails and kick over the road closed signs. Get weird with it. Get YOU with it. I want to see that on the page. We all want to see that on the page. No AI can do what you do. No AI can be who you are. No trend needs to inform the work. You are the trend. You are your own genre. Fuck it all. None of that shit matters. It’s all something that someone else made up. Rip that shit out of your heart and your guts and your head and fingerpaint with the viscera on the page. Put you there. In the words. In between the words. Make choices. Wield yourself.

That is how we win.

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I’ll tell you, briefly, the thing that got me to this optimism — it wasn’t just my post the other day, but it was in combination with something else.

It was the news that Scott Hawkins is finally writing a second novel.

(It’s called Blacktail, and it’s out in fall 2026.)

I am an acolyte of his first book — The Library at Mount Char, which you should definitely read if you haven’t, and you should do so with minimal investigation. It’s a super weird fucking book, in the best way possible. I often say that it vibes like if someone took an urban fantasy conceit and wrote it as the proper horror that conceit really is. The story is truly its own thing. I could not have written that book. You could not have written that book. And for damn fucking sure the artbarf machine could not have written that book. Only Scott Hawkins could have written it. And he did write it.

And that’s a special magic.

He did write it.

How fucking glorious is that? He wrote it. It exists. Nobody else could’ve done it but him. AND HE DID IT. We have it! We get to have this book that he chose to write. And that’s true of so many books! So many books that are the sole product of their authors not just in the literal sense but in the deeper, metaphysical sense. Nobody out there is writing a Hailey Piper or Eric LaRocca book besides Hailey Piper and Eric LaRocca. Nobody else could have written Paul Tremblay’s Cabin at the End of the World or CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly or Nat Cassidy’s Mary or Premee Mohamed’s Butcher in the Forest. Nobody out there is Le Guin or King or Poppy Brite or Josh Malerman or Tananarive Due or Robin Hobb or John Scalzi or friends of mine like Kevin Hearne, Delilah Dawson, Adam Christopher. No other book is The Starless Sea or Hap & Leonard or Brown Girl Dreaming or Annihilation or or or or or — like, I have to pick a place to stop here because I could do this for days. Days! Weeks! Endless lists of books that could’ve only been written by the writers who wrote them — writers who did write them and now we have them. We have these books. We have these books.

WE HAVE THESE BOOKS

That’s a miracle — but not a rare miracle. A miracle like a sunrise, or a strange cloud, or a weird bird. A miracle that happens often, that maybe we don’t appreciate enough. It’s special. Stories are special. Storytellers are special.

Machines aren’t special.

Publishers aren’t special.

None of the bullshit that drags us down is special.

But the work — the work and what the work produces — is absolutely special.

And we are absolutely going to fucking win.

So, I just want you to vibe that shit. I want you to feel good about that. I want you to feel powerful in this regard. We have all these books and the very best, the absolute zenith, of what a machine can do with these books is steal them and photocopy them into some weaker, sadder version. It can never make anything better than the things it takes. The machine is weak. The machine doesn’t have ideas. It doesn’t do work. It has our ideas, our work. That means something. It wouldn’t steal what we do if what we do wasn’t special.

That means you get to go be special.

That means you can write the weird thing, the big thing, the thing only you can write. That means you get to make miracles. That means the AI can’t do what we do because the AI doesn’t know what we do. The more we reject trends and formulas and tropes, the more the AI can’t pin us the fuck down. The more we duck and move, feint and dodge, the more the machine can’t track us. We cover ourselves in the mud of our own creation so the Predator cannot find us.

So, consider that your resolution.

Wield the weapon that is you.

Get weird with it.

Make something the machine can only steal and reproduce shittily.

(And above all else: do not use the tool of our enemy. No gen-AI, no LLMs. Not for nothing. Be human. Write for humans. Human-authored, human-edited, human-designed, human-marketed work. Editors, narrators, designers, cover artists, marketers. People all the way down. Do not feed the machine.)

We have these books.

We have you.

We are going to win.

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All right.

That’s it for me, I think —

I want to say thanks to all of you who come here and who read this stuff, and furthermore, who are kind enough to share it. Storytelling, I am oft to note, is a call in the darkness and we hope to hear someone, somewhere, call back. And this blog is that, too. It’s me in this dark place, shouting, hoping someone is there to hear, and that someone is there to shout back. Thanks for being there in the dark with me. In 2026, let’s shout in the dark together.

Or, put differently:

FREE YOUR SPIRIT YAMS

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(Oh, and buy my books or I perish in the abyss, please and thank you.)

(Also, last year’s resolution is here if you care to read it.)