Lately, I’ve been asking myself a hard question: How am I supposed to find my readers in all this noise?

Because everywhere I turn, I see formula-driven tropes dominating the shelves. Reverse harems. Revenge-mate melodramas. Dark romances that read more like Lifetime movies with fangs than lived-in stories about human resilience.

And layered on top of that is AI — engines that can spit out endless variations on the same tropes, reshuffling familiar beats faster than a slot machine. A new “book” can appear overnight, not because a writer wrestled with it, but because someone told a program: give me more of what’s already selling.

So here I am. Fifty years of studying story structure, mastering craft, learning how to carve arcs that breathe and bleed — and I feel drowned out. Not because my stories don’t matter, but because they don’t slot neatly into what algorithms reward and pirates steal.

And that’s the gut punch: finding my work, my blood-on-the-page work, on piracy sites. Watching it spread for free while sales struggle. Being told it’s “a compliment.” No — it’s not. It’s theft. It’s being hollowed out from both ends: formula flooding the market, piracy draining the reward.

I don’t write candy-bar melodrama. I write meals — layered, messy, complicated stories where scars don’t vanish in the epilogue, where healing is jagged, where love is forged not in spectacle but in fire and choice.

But how do I put that kind of work in front of readers when the loudest voices are built on repetition, not resonance?

How does craft compete with the slot machine?

I don’t have a neat answer. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe the point isn’t to compete, but to keep carving the kind of stories that last after the sugar high fades. Maybe the question isn’t whether I can be louder than the noise, but whether I can still find the readers who want more than noise.

That’s where I am tonight: tired, questioning, but still holding the ember of a truth I can’t let go of.

Because if I’ve learned anything in fifty years of storytelling, it’s this: the fads burn hot and fast, but the stories that matter — the ones that linger — are always the ones written from scars, not formulas.