🔥 Campfire Conversations As the sun sets and stories come to life beneath the stars, let the books you read spark something more: connection. Each tale—from forest creature fables to interplanetary adventures and dragon-led revolutions—offers a starting point for conversations that can ignite wonder, reflection, and laughter across generations. Pull up a log, pass the marshmallows, and dive into questions like: Which character surprised you the most—and why? What choice would you have made in their place? Where did the story touch your own life? What does it mean to stand up for something, or someone? This summer, let reading be more than a solo journey. Let it become a shared adventure—one that spans ages, perspectives, and the space between hearts. Around the fire, with one author’s voice as your guide, discover how stories can bring families together in ways that last long after the last page is turned.

With more than twenty years behind me as an indie author ( read about that here ), I can confidently say: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Why bring this up now? Because lately there’s been a renewed wave of conversation about the challenges of marketing indie books in a publishing ecosystem still shaped—if not dominated—by traditional models. Every so often, we see a localized seismic shift—like BookTok, before monetization restored the old order and perhaps even pushed us further back. But the broader landscape remains unchanged: we live in an attention economy, and its gatekeepers have made one thing clear—it’s pay to play. Once, platforms offered organic reach. Content mattered. Effort could sometimes compensate for budget. But those days are vanishing. Social platforms have entered their late-capitalism phase: squeeze creators for every drop of value, extract revenue, and wait for the next migration wave. For many—likely most—indie authors, money is tight. Time...

Welcome back to Stone and Signal.  If you haven't heard the first episode yet you can find information on Episdoe 1 here.  The Podcast Links Edpisode 2 on YouTube Episode 2 on Spotify The Essay The Transcript      Tales That Touch The Earth Photo by Nitin Arya: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photography-of-book-page-1029141/ I didn’t plan to write this. Like many of the stories that find me, it arrived less as an idea and more as an ache. A pressure behind the ribs. Not urgent in the way headlines are urgent, but persistent, like something just below the surface asking to be named. In times of upheaval—personal, planetary, or both—I return to stories. Not the ones engineered to soothe or distract, but the ones that stay. Stories that don’t demand to be decoded, only lived with. The ones that surface years later in the pause before sleep, or on a quiet walk, or in a moment of grief when no facts will do. These are not stories of escape. They are stories of retur...