You know something is wrong with your story.
You just can’t tell what.

This episode is about why, and about the tool I built to help.

It’s an ad, and I’d rather say that up front than pretend otherwise.

Episode Overview

Most story holes aren’t writing problems. They’re decision problems. Something was never decided. Something was decided twice. Or something was decided perfectly and never made it into the book.

I walk through all three, with a villain who wants POWER, a magic system that breaks when we need a fireball, and the detective’s shaking hand you can see perfectly in your own head.

Then I explain FictionProof: one file, runs offline on your own computer, no account, no upload, and no AI reading your book.

It asks questions.
You answer.
When two answers collide, or you can’t point to the chapter where a reader sees something, it shows you.

I’m just as clear about what it can’t do, and I recommend you start with the free Story Health Scan before you spend a dollar.

This Episode Answers

• How do I find what’s wrong with my story when I can’t tell what it is?

• Why does rereading my own draft never show me the problem?

• What’s the difference between a beta reader’s feedback and a structural diagnosis?

• Can a tool help me fix my story without writing it for me?

• Is there a way to try FictionProof before I buy it?

  ---

Highlights

• “The ending technically works, but somehow it arrives wearing bedroom slippers instead of kicking the door open.”

• Most story holes aren’t writing problems. They’re decision problems.

• Three kinds of hole: you never decided, you decided twice, or you decided it and it isn’t in the book.

• “Where does the reader SEE it?”

• “Anybody promising you a mathematical score for GOOD ART should probably be watched carefully around sharp objects.”

• FictionProof runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers only. Sales are final. The free scan is the trial.

Links

• The free Story Health Scan

• FictionProof

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Everybody wants you to pick a side.

AI is the villain, or AI is the savior, and if you stand anywhere in the middle, both camps shout at you. I started this podcast because I couldn’t find anyone willing to just talk about it.

So RJ and I did the one thing the internet won’t.

We talked.

Episode Overview

The first five minutes are warmup, and yes, I rant about Descript.
I left it all in.

Nothing about this is safe, and a writer’s real day includes software that fights back.

Then RJ and I get into it.

RJ teaches the No BS AI class, and I’ve been a student there since early on. We talk about data centers, the tool-or-weapon question, why every problem with AI is really a human problem, and why RJ thinks the people who are afraid of it deserve love and not lectures.

I tell the story of why I started using AI at all: my hands are failing, drawing is breathing for me, and I needed a way to keep making what only I can make.

We also get into Pangram and the AI-detection wars on Substack. We also touch on what it cost me to learn how to line edit with AI without losing my story, and the Borg.

…because of course the Borg came up.

RJ closes with the argument that AI is the first tool that conforms to you instead of the other way around.

I close with a toaster, a grocery store, and why the human part is getting more valuable, not less.

This Episode Answers

• Is AI a tool or a threat for fiction writers?

• How do I use AI without letting it write my story for me?

• Why does every AI conversation turn into an argument, and how do I stay out of the fight?

• Can AI help a writer or artist whose body is slowing down?

• What do I do if I don’t want to use AI at all?

Highlights

• “Is a knife a tool or a weapon?” Jaime’s 11-year-old paused, then said, “Yes?” That’s the answer.

• RJ: every problem with AI is a human problem with a black box in between.

• Jaime’s Clockwork City, home to 1.5 billion gnomes, checked by AI in about fifteen minutes. It could work.

• The line-edit test: 1,600 words in, about 800 back the first time. With clear instructions, 2,000 in and 2,004 out, with every change listed.

• Crap in, crap out. Gold in, magic out. Jaime’s son gave him the reason to start.

• The hard question: if you don’t choose how you relate to AI, the choice gets made for you.

  ---

Key Quote

Episode Goal

A writer should finish this episode able to say what they mean by “AI” in one specific sentence, and to make a deliberate choice about it, whether that choice is yes, no, or only here and nowhere else.

From Jaime

If you came for a side to join, you won’t find one here.

I agree with both camps, because two things can be true at the same time.

What I want for you is calm, and a choice you made on purpose.

Read the free article for the short version, and the deep dive for the method I’ve been using to stay the lead partner in my own work.

About the Guest and the Class

RJ runs No BS AI, a 12-week cohort for entrepreneurs and creatives who want practical tools without the gloom or the hype. It alternates a teaching week with a lab week, ends December 15, and RJ admits late students case by case. RJ also hosts a free session called Dip a Toe in AI Without Losing Your Mind.

Learn About No BS AI...

Join Us

- Free Article: Why Does Every Conversation About Writers and AI Turn Into a Fight?
- Paid Deep Dive: How Does a Writer Choose Their Own Relationship With AI?
- The Round Table Discussion (free guide + live GoBrunch) 👉🏼 Why Do Writers Need a Room to Talk Honestly About AI?

…and visit my dear friend . You won't regret it, I promise.

The Come Write Inn

I write about AI, chatbots, and worldbuilding for people who love making things that matter.

By RJ Redden

About This Podcast

Nothing About This Is Safe is the monthly writing-truth podcast hosted by Jaime Buckley, featuring candid conversations with working authors. We go after the real questions fiction writers actually search for ... craft, identity, mindset, publishing reality, money, and creative survival ... without sugarcoating and without performance. If a writer is looking for an honest answer, this is the conversation they were looking for.

Nothing about this is safe, but it’s worth it.
Jaime Buckley

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A few days ago I told you I was building something... a tool that finds the holes in your story without ever asking you to hand your book to a machine.

It’s done.

FictionProof is open.

I’ve been waiting a long time to write that sentence!

What it does

You answer short questions about your own story, the kind a sharp editor would ask you across the table over a cup of something warm.

• Who is really behind it, and why?

• What does your hero believe about themselves that isn’t true?

• Where you can’t answer, FictionProof flags the gap. Where two of your answers can’t both be true, it quietly catches that too, and on the questions that matter most, it asks you to prove it by naming the chapter and the scene where a reader actually sees it.

If you can’t point to the page, it’s still in your head.

Every gap comes with the reason it matters, an example of it done well, and one simple thing to try tonight. I built it that way on purpose. You do the fixing, and every time you fix something yourself, you carry that skill into the next book.

What changed since I first told you about it

I handed early copies to writers and asked them to run their real books through it and tell me everything that bugged them. Mystery writers, fantasy writers, a steampunk serial writer, and a game developer friend in the UK who dug through the code, then tested it on his train ride home. They didn’t hold back, and FictionProof is a far better tool because of them.

Here’s some of what they built into it:

Blend two genres. Four testers hit the same wall, because their stories simply didn’t fit in one box, so now a fantasy mystery gets checked as both a fantasy and a mystery in a single run.

Check your whole cast. One tester asked me, “Can I run my characters through this?” I’d been wanting the same thing, so I built it. Each character gets questions built for their role, and then FictionProof checks them against each other, which is exactly where a villain who never actually collides with your hero finally shows up.

A score that won’t flatter you. If FictionProof finds a serious problem, like that villain, your score holds at 85 until you fix it. A big number never sits on top of a broken story.

Jump anywhere. There’s a list of every question you’ve answered, skipped, or still have to go, and one click takes you straight back to any of them.

Where your book goes

Nowhere.

FictionProof is a single file that runs in your web browser, on your own laptop or desktop computer, whether that’s Windows, Mac, or Linux.

No account. No upload. No internet once it’s open.

No AI ever reads your book, because it never sees your manuscript at all. It asks you questions, and your answers stay on your machine.

I was scared as hell when I started learning about AI. It took a great deal for me to calm that anxiety, so I understand many of the thoughts and emotions of writers (MANY of my dear friends), who just refuse to allow AI to touch their writing.

I get it.

The more I learned about AI, the more I wanted to build an alternative solution. A powerful tool to help writers. Not only do I understand that desire to keep what we craft our own,…I support it.

This is my attempt to fill that need to give writers an unfair advantage that’s 100% in THEIR control.

The price

$39. Once. That’s it.

There’s no subscription, ever. You download it, you own it, and every update is free. I already know where the best ideas will come from, because writers have been sending them through the Suggest a refinement button since the very first version.

All sales are final, because it’s a download that can’t be returned. So if you’re not sure it’s for you, I’d rather you start here first:

Try the free Story Health Scan →

It’s twelve questions, about ten minutes, and it works for any genre. By the end you’ll know whether this way of working fits the way you write.

If you’re an annual or founding member here

FictionProof is yours as a thank-you.

Look for it in your member perks.

Ready?

SEE FictionProof -->

Go find your holes.

Then go fill them.

Jaime

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You know something’s wrong with the manuscript.

You can feel it.

A scene sags. The ending lands soft. A beta reader shrugs and says “I don’t know, it just didn’t grab me”... and you nod, and thank them politely. Then you walk away with a vague bad feeling and absolutely nothing you can actually fix.

You go looking for help.

More and more, the help on offer wants one thing first:

Your book.

Paste it in. Upload the file. Let the machine read it and tell you what’s wrong.

A lot of writers won’t do that.

I understand why.

What writers told me they want

For the last year I’ve listened to writers talk about AI in my classes, in late-night chat rooms, and in a steadily growing pile of emails. They usually start with some version of “can I ask you something?”

Some of them use it every day, and some of them won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.

It was a HUGE struggle for me, because I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t just afraid to use AI, the other side of the aisle had me afraid NOT to use it!

Can you imagine the conflict in my brain?

It took me a year and dozens of in-depth conversations, asking hundreds of questions, to help me get to the very guarded point I am right now. Yes, I use AI, in very specific ways...all of them to aid me as my health continues to deteriorate.

I use it openly for art and building tools, and I stand behind that.

Let me explain.

The ones who won’t hand over their book usually say one of two things.

“I don’t know where my words go once I upload them.”

Or this one, which stuck with me:

“I don’t want a machine to fix my book. I want to get better at fixing it myself.”

That second writer wants a teacher.

The problem with getting fixed

Here’s what happens when ANY tool rewrites your story FOR you.

That one book gets a little better, and you stay exactly the writer you were.

On the next book you’re right back where you started... staring at the same sagging middle and the same soft ending. You have no real idea why it keeps happening to you, book after book after book.

Most of the holes in a story come from the writer, before they ever reach the page. The motive you meant to settle. The reason your hero can’t just walk away. The clue you knew about... but never actually planted.

Those are decisions.

So what’s the problem?

You can’t outsource a decision you haven’t made yet.

So I built one

It’s called FictionProof.

It’s a story diagnostic.
You answer short questions about your own story... the kind a sharp editor would ask across the table.

• Who is really behind it, and why?

• What does your hero believe about themselves that isn’t true?

• At the big turns, does your hero make the hard call, or does the story make it for them?

Where you can’t answer, it flags the gap. Where two of your answers can’t both be true, it quietly catches that too. Every flag comes with the reason it matters and an example of it done well, plus a question designed to help you fix it yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you.

Then comes the part I’m proudest of.

It asks you to prove it.

You know your villain’s motive. Great. So where does a reader actually see it, in which chapter and which scene?

If you can’t point to the page, it’s still in your head.

One of our beta testers, mystery author Ann Kimbrough (), put it better than I can:

“I’d recommend it as a great way to focus on parts of your story that might be more in your head than they are on the page. That’s a huge help.”

Author came in doubtful. After her second run, she wrote:

“I was a little skeptical after the first version, but now I know I am going to use this tool.”

Where your book goes

Nowhere.

FictionProof is a single file that runs in your web browser, on your own computer. No account. No upload. No internet needed once it’s open.

No AI reads, touches, or stores your book. It never sees your manuscript at all... it only asks you questions, and your answers stay on your machine.

It runs on laptop and desktop computers: Windows, Mac, or Linux.

You can back up your work to a file, carry it to a brand-new computer, or open it in a completely different browser, and everything comes right back with you.

It’s yours.

Built for your genre

A mystery breaks in different places than a romance.

FictionProof asks different questions for each. Mystery, romance, fantasy, thriller, sci-fi, and literary fiction each get their own lens, built for the traps that genre falls into. Short story, novella, or novel... the checks are sized to fit.

If you’d rather plan than repair, your answers export as a clean story outline, with every open decision clearly marked, so the tool that checks your finished draft can also help you shape the next one before you write a single scene.

I’ve been writing about Wendell since 1990…and decided to run Chronicles of a Hero through it myself... what it flagged surprised me. I’m already reworking book 8: Howling Shadows to implement what I learned.

Now it checks your characters, too

This week, one of my beta testers, , asked me a simple question.

“Can I run my characters through this?”

I’d been wanting the same thing, so I built it.

Add your cast: hero, villain, allies, mentor, love interest, rival. Each one gets questions built for their role. Your ally gets asked what helping the hero actually costs them. Your villain gets asked what they would call good about what they do... and if you’ve never answered that one, you’re about to find out why it matters.

Then FictionProof lays the whole cast side by side and checks them against each other.

Here’s what a catch looks like:

CROSS-CHECK: Lord Harrow never collides with Mara Venn

Lord Harrow is your villain, but by your answers they neither want what Mara Venn wants nor stand in the way of it. If both of them can get what they want, there is no fight. Find the one thing only one of them can have.

You’d never spot that reading one character sheet at a time. It only shows up when the characters meet.

Every character exports as its own sheet. If you’ve already run your story through FictionProof, your lead’s answers carry straight over, so you never type them twice.

Where it stands

We’re in the final round of beta testing.

Writers have been running their real books through it for weeks, and it’s been tested on Windows, Mac, and Linux, in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Firefox, and Safari. Every round of feedback has changed it... new questions, better answers, and fixes I never would have found on my own.

And it keeps changing after launch. Every copy has a Suggest a refinement button. If your story doesn’t quite fit, or a question feels wrong for the way you write, you tell me in a few lines, and the best ideas ship to everyone in the next update. The tool gets better because writers shape it. Character Mode went from one writer's question to a working feature in a single day.

It’s almost ready.

Try it now, free

You don’t have to wait to see how it works.

I made a free Story Health Scan: twelve questions, any genre, about ten minutes. You’ll get a Story Health score, a map of where your story is strong, and where to look first.

Same promise. It runs on your computer, and your story never leaves it.

Get the free Story Health Scan →

Want to know the day FictionProof opens?

Get launch news →

You’ll hear it here first.

Go find your holes.
Then go fill them.

Jaime

UPDATE: OCT 1st, 2026

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Reading about a platform teaches you what it does. Talking it through with other writers who are actually using it changes how you use it. Craft moves across a table, not down from a stage.

So here’s your table. You’ve heard the episode. You’ve read the free article and the deep dive. Now bring your half-built world, your platform confusion, your “which door do I open first,” and put it in front of people who are building right alongside you.

Download the free Round Table Discussion Guide below and run it with your own group, no host required. Or join the live monthly Round Table on GoBrunch, anywhere in the world, camera and microphone, that’s all it takes.

You are more than you think you are, and so is the writer sitting across the table from you.

Download the Round Table Discussion Guide (free PDF)

The Round Table Discussion Guide, Episode 16

4.77KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Missed the podcast and articles this month?

🎙 EPISODE 16: Why Should Fiction Writers Use World Anvil and Substack Together?

Free Article: What Happens When You Give Readers Nowhere to Go After Your Book?
Paid Deep Dive (free this month): How Do You Build a Two-Platform Author Business for Free?

Don’t have a writing group?

Then grab some friends and come HERE!

My gift to you. Just do me ONE small favor.
Succeed.
Like…HUGE.

I've provided an open Round Table on GoBrunch, it has 12 seats available, and you are free to use it as you need it.

It's open 24/7/365 for you and fellow writers to use.

Come put down the scoreboard. Come reach back and pull someone up.

That is the whole point... you are more than you think you are, and so is the writer sitting across from you.

Join the live Round Table on GoBrunch

Come hone your craft.
Come teach someone else theirs.

That is the whole point...

You are more than you think you are, and so is the writer sitting across from you.

The Real Problem

The last article named the wound: one platform can’t hold both jobs a fiction author needs done.

But knowing that doesn’t tell you what to build, in what order, or how to pay for it without going broke chasing tools.

Jaime used to run this same business on roughly $438 a month in scattered software.

Deleyna tried the same thing, with the same result: a pile of subscriptions doing badly what two free platforms now do well, together.

The Framework: Flagship + Candy Store

We want everyone to benefit from this information.

Our business has been using World Anvil since 2019.

We’re not an affiliate, just a user [cue Tron Legacy music], and that platform has been one of THE best tools we have ever used as writers…both for discovery and generating a living from our creativity.

Step one: Pick your flagship.

This is the platform that holds the relationship.

It’s where the serial lives, where readers hear from you in real time, where a new person lands first.

Jaime uses Substack because it does, for free, what he used to pay hundreds a month for elsewhere: publishing, subscriber management, and a reading experience good enough that he reads on his phone now, which he never did before.

Ever.

Step Two: Pick your candy store.

This is the platform that holds the depth.

It’s where a reader goes after they’re hooked, to fall down a rabbit hole of characters, places, and lore.

Jaime and Deleyna both use World Anvil for this.

It started as a tool for gamers and worldbuilders and has grown, by their own website, into a platform holding over 7 million fictional worlds.

Something important to note: neither Jaime nor Deleyna has found another world that looks like theirs.

Why?

Because the platform is built to let a world be exactly as strange as it needs to be.

No two are alike.

Step Three: Build the connective tissue, not the whole world at once.

Neither platform rewards a writer who tries to map everything before writing anything.

Deleyna’s advice, verbatim: don’t try to learn it, try to do a thing.

Pick one door.

Write one article about the one part of your world you’re most excited about right now.

World Anvil’s auto-linking will start connecting it to the next thing you build, and the next, until doors that were closed start opening on their own.

Jaime’s version of the same advice is a hallway with closed doors on both sides.

It doesn’t matter which one you open first.

Open it, write what’s inside, and eventually you’ll open a door that’s already connected to something else you built.

That’s the platform doing its job, not you doing extra work to force connections that aren’t there yet.

This matters for a practical reason too: World Anvil’s search actually finds what you put into it.

Deleyna’s been burned before by a story detail dropped into a stray Google Doc or a Word file, gone for good.

Put a character’s eye color, their family tree, their history into a linked article once, and you can find it again in seconds, months later, when you’ve forgotten you ever wrote it.

Step Four: Use the account tier that matches the job, not the one that’s cheapest to try.

Both Jaime and Deleyna run World Anvil at the Sage level, the tier built for people running this as a business rather than a hobby.

Sage comes with a full library of professional classes, and a Discord full of other business owners and entrepreneurs teaching each other in real time.

When someone’s stuck, someone else already solved it and points them to the lesson. That’s not a small perk, it’s most of the “figuring it out” work already done for you by people ahead of you on the same road.

Start on the free tier to see if the platform fits your hand. Once you know it does, don’t nickel-and-dime the climb the way Jaime did his first year.

Go straight to the tier that matches what you’re actually building.

Step Five: Let each platform do its own job for the AI librarian.

Readers ask questions now instead of typing keywords.

The AI systems answering those questions need structured, connected, public content to pull from.

World Anvil’s article-and-link structure is exactly that kind of feast.

Substack’s public notes and posts get indexed fast.

Jaime’s read is blunt:

Deleyna does this deliberately, publishing early material openly and holding back anything that depends on a twist the reader hasn’t earned yet.

It’s also worth building your longer work directly in World Anvil’s Manuscripts tool rather than a separate word processor.

Publish from there and readers get a real reading experience, first chapters free, the rest behind a subscription or a sale.

Your choice.

The writing itself becomes one more piece of the connected world instead of a file sitting outside it.

Step six: Answer Honestly.

Before you add a third platform, a fourth tool, or another monthly charge, ask yourself:

If the honest answer is no, you don’t need it.

Jaime’s own rule, learned the expensive way:

One Warning

This only works if you actually use both platforms as intended.

A World Anvil account full of half-finished articles nobody can find isn’t a candy store, it’s a junk drawer.

A Substack with no publishing rhythm isn’t a flagship, it’s an abandoned storefront.

The split only pays off once each platform is actually doing its job.

The Worksheet

Use the attached Worksheet PDF to map your own two-platform build:

• What is the ONE thing about my world I’m most excited to write about right now?

• Where does my reader relationship currently live, and is it actually working as a flagship?

• What is one piece of lore, one character, or one place I could publish this week as my first “door”?

• What in my world is spoiler-sensitive and needs to stay private for now?

• Answer Honestly: what tool or platform am I paying for that isn’t earning its keep?

Build Your Two-Platform Author Business

3.63KB ∙ PDF file

Download

THE FLAGSHIP AND CANDY STORE METHOD A worksheet to map your flagship, your candy store, and the doors between them.

Download

What Changes

Once this is running, a reader who finishes your serial has somewhere to go, and that somewhere deepens their attachment instead of ending it.

Your world stops living in scattered documents no one, including you, can find again.

And instead of chasing every reader by hand, you have two platforms built to be found doing that work quietly, all the time, whether you’re online or not.

Listen to the Episode

This deep-dive expands on our conversation in Episode 15 of Nothing About This Is Safe.
If you haven’t listened yet, you can hear the whole discussion here:
🎙 EPISODE 16: Why Should Fiction Writers Use World Anvil and Substack Together?

…and if you missed it:
→ Free Article: What Happens When You Give Readers Nowhere to Go After Your Book?

Final Word

Deleyna put it simply:

That’s true of the platform, and it’s true of the reader.

Build the flagship so people can find you today.
Build the candy store so they never run out of reasons to stay.

Do both, and you’re not just publishing books anymore, you’re building a world someone can move into.

You are MORE than you THINK you are.

So is the story you haven’t finished telling yet.

Now go build something amazing!

About This Podcast

Nothing About This Is Safe is the monthly writing-truth podcast hosted by , featuring candid conversations with working authors. We go after the real questions fiction writers actually search for ... craft, identity, mindset, publishing reality, money, and creative survival ... without sugarcoating and without performance.

If a writer is looking for an honest answer, these are the conversations you want to listen to.

Share

Leave a comment

Jaime Buckley
Nothing about this is safe, but it’s worth it.

Advanced Worldbuilding: The Course

You can feel it when a world is hollow. So can your readers.

You have poured years into your world. The maps, the names, the history nobody asked for yet. And still there is that quiet fear that it is a beautiful set with no foundation...that a sharp reader could push on it and the whole thing would wobble.

Detail is not the problem.
Structure is.

That is exactly what this course fixes.

Inside, Jaime Buckley hands you the same system he used to build a world people have followed for over thirty years. Using the Up-Chuck Method™ and the discipline of Trigger Questions, you will learn to:

• Design catalytic Events that force your story to move

• Define a living Core so every choice in your world traces back to something that matters

• Find and cut the structural weakness before a reader ever feels it

• Build a world that holds up under scrutiny...and lingers long after the last page

This is not a creativity workshop. It is architectural training for serious builders. If you believe your story deserves more than surface detail, this is where you stop decorating and start engineering.

Your readers will never see the framework. They will only feel that your world is real.

Build the world that outlives you.

Become a Trigger Architect™

The Lie

You publish the book.

You build the website.

You put up the cover, the description, your author bio and a mailing-list signup.

Maybe you’ve even got a blog.

That’s the funnel, right?

Book leads to website. Website leads to newsletter. Newsletter leads to next book.

Done.

Except there’s a problem with that model.

It assumes the thing your reader wants immediately after finishing your book is another transaction.

Usually it isn’t.

If you’ve done your job well, your reader is curious.

They want to know more.

Who was that character really?
What was on the other side of that mountain?
What happened during the war everyone keeps mentioning?

Is there a map?
What does that creature look like?
Why was that old wizard terrified when someone mentioned the ruins?

And that’s where a traditional author website frequently fails.

It tells readers about the author.
It tells readers about the books.
It might even sell the books.

But it doesn’t necessarily let them enter the world.

That’s a very different job.

The Cost

Think about what happens when someone reaches the end of a story they genuinely loved.

For a few minutes, they’re carrying around something incredibly valuable:

Emotional momentum.

They don’t want to leave yet.

That’s the moment most writers waste.

The reader finishes the book, searches for the author, lands on a website and finds:

Books.
About Me.
Newsletter.
Contact.
Maybe merchandise.

All useful things.

But the reader wasn’t looking for your contact form.

They wanted back into the story.

And we handed them paperwork.

That’s what I mean when I say a website can become a wall.

You built a beautiful front door into your fictional universe, but there aren’t any rooms behind it.

The reader can’t wander.
They can’t investigate.

They can’t follow the strange character they met in chapter seven down some ridiculous rabbit hole and discover three pieces of history, an old map and a cultural tradition that never made it into the novel.

They can’t explore.

So…they leave.

And curiosity doesn’t wait around politely.

Five minutes later, YouTube has them.
Netflix has them.
Another author has them.
Some guy explaining how the Roman Empire collapsed has them.

Your opportunity didn’t disappear because your story wasn’t interesting.

It disappeared because you gave their interest nowhere to go.

That’s Why I Use World Anvil

This is one of the reasons I’ve used World Anvil for the Wanted Hero universe since 2019.

I don’t use it because I needed another website.

Good grief.
The last thing I needed was another website.

I use it because World Anvil does a completely different job.

Life of Fiction is my flagship.
That’s where the relationship lives.

That’s where people read stories, follow the serials, hear from me and come back week after week.

World Anvil is the candy store.
That’s where I want you to go when you’ve finished reading something and you’re still hungry.

Maybe you want to know more about the character you just met.

Fine.

Go find him.

Maybe you want to understand the city he grew up in.

Click the city.

Now you’ve discovered the culture.

That leads to the government.
That leads to an old war.
That leads to a historical character.
That leads to an artifact.

Forty-five minutes later you’re six articles away from the thing that brought you there in the first place.

Perfect.

That’s exactly what I want.

Because you’ve stopped consuming a book and started exploring a world.

Those are two very different relationships.

One Platform Holds the Relationship. World Anvil Holds the Depth.

This distinction is important.

Writers frequently ask one platform to do everything.

Website.
Blog.
Newsletter.
Store.
Community.
World encyclopedia.
Story archive.
Search engine.
Reader engagement.

[WHEW!]

And then we wonder why everything feels thin?

I don’t want one platform doing everything badly.
I want different tools doing specific jobs extremely well.

For me, Life of Fiction creates rhythm.

There’s another story coming.
There’s another conversation happening.
There’s a reason to return.

World Anvil creates depth.

There’s always another door.
That’s the ecosystem.

The story says: Come with me.

World Anvil says: While you’re here, look around.

That’s the piece I think many writers are missing.

This Isn’t “Bonus Content”

And I want to make an important distinction here.

I’m not talking about dumping deleted scenes somewhere and calling it worldbuilding.

This is about treating your fictional world as something readers can experience independently of an individual book.

World Anvil is particularly interesting to me because it was built around relationships between information.

Suddenly those disconnected notes hiding in twenty-three folders on your computer become an interconnected world a reader can actually navigate.

That’s powerful.

Because your 90,000-word novel may only reveal five percent of what you’ve created.

Why should the other ninety-five percent remain trapped on your hard drive?

Not all of it belongs in the novel.

Please don’t put all of it in the novel.

Your readers don’t need a seventeen-page explanation of the sewer system just because you spent Thursday designing it.

But somebody might absolutely love discovering that information later.

That’s where World Anvil becomes useful.

The novel stays a novel.

The world gets to become something larger.

The Difference Between a Reader and a Fan

This is also where the conversation stops being purely about marketing.

Marketing asks:
How do I get this person to buy another book?

Worldbuilding asks:
How do I make this person care enough that they want to remain here?

That’s a much more interesting question.

A reader finishes your story.
A fan remembers the inn.

A reader knows your protagonist’s name.
A fan knows his hometown.

A reader recognizes your world.
A fan has favorite places inside it.

A reader buys the next novel because they liked the previous one.
A fan buys the next novel because they want to go home.

That’s what we’re really building.

Not traffic.

Attachment.

And AI Makes This More Important, Not Less

There’s another reason I think this matters much more now than it did a few years ago.

Readers increasingly ask questions instead of simply typing keywords into a search box.

They ask AI systems about books, characters, fictional settings, reading orders, magic systems and lore.

That changes the value of having your fictional universe publicly documented.

A typical author website might give an AI system a biography, some sales copy and a handful of blog posts.

A properly developed World Anvil presence can give it something considerably more useful:

Structure.

And context is enormously valuable in an internet increasingly mediated by systems trying to understand relationships between information.

That’s one reason I don’t think authors should look at a worldbuilding platform as some nerdy little side project.

It can become part of your discoverability infrastructure.

You’re not merely documenting your world for existing fans.
You’re making your world understandable.

Those are going to become increasingly different things.

Don’t Build 500 Articles Tomorrow

Now comes the part where writers make everything complicated.

Don’t.

You do not need to spend the next six months documenting the agricultural practices of twelve imaginary kingdoms.

Start where your reader’s curiosity already exists.

Ask one question:

When somebody finishes this book, what are they most likely to want to know more about?

Maybe it’s the villain.
Build the villain.

Maybe it’s the city.
Build the city.

Maybe it’s the magic system.
Build that.

Maybe it’s the strange creature that appeared for three pages and nearly ate everyone.
Definitely build that.

Create the article in World Anvil.
Make it worth reading.
Add images if you have them.

Connect it to other relevant pieces of your world.

Then put a door to it somewhere your reader will see.

At the end of the book.
In your newsletter.
Under the serial episode.
Inside your author’s notes.
On your primary website.

You don’t have to tell readers:
Please visit my World Anvil page.

That’s asking them to care about your platform.

They don’t.

Tell them:
Want to know what Wendell still doesn’t know about this place?

Now you have my attention.

The Door

That’s the shift.

Stop treating your website as the final destination.

Your website may be your headquarters.
Your newsletter may maintain your relationship with readers.
Your books may remain the heart of everything you’re doing.

But when readers finish a story and don’t want to leave yet, give them somewhere to go.

That’s the role World Anvil fills for me.

It’s the room behind the door.
The shelves behind the counter.
The map readers can unfold when the book only showed them one road.

The candy store.

Pick one thing your readers already care about.

A character.
A city.
A creature.
A piece of history.
A mystery.

Build it properly in World Anvil.
Connect it to the story they already love.

Then give them the door.

Because the worst time to tell someone there’s nothing else to see is precisely when you’ve finally made them want more.

Listen to my full conversation with Deleyna Marr: 🎙 EPISODE 16: Why Should Fiction Writers Use World Anvil and Substack Together?

Want the deeper strategy for using World Anvil to turn your fiction into something readers can explore instead of simply finish? Read the full deep dive: How Do You Build a Two-Platform Author Business for Free?

Your Turn

When your reader reaches The End and still wants more, have you built them a door deeper into your world...or are you forcing them to leave?

Join Us

If this hit home, subscribe for more unfiltered truth about writing life, mindset, and creative courage.

If you want the deep-dive framework that shows you how to build a sustainable audience without chasing algorithmic favor, it’s waiting for you in the paid companion article.

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About This Podcast

Nothing About This Is Safe is the monthly writing-truth podcast hosted by , featuring candid conversations with working authors. We go after the real questions fiction writers actually search for ... craft, identity, mindset, publishing reality, money, and creative survival ... without sugarcoating and without performance.

If a writer is looking for an honest answer, these are the conversations you want to listen to.

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Jaime Buckley
Nothing about this is safe, but it’s worth it.

Advanced Worldbuilding: The Course

You can feel it when a world is hollow. So can your readers.

You have poured years into your world. The maps, the names, the history nobody asked for yet. And still there is that quiet fear that it is a beautiful set with no foundation...that a sharp reader could push on it and the whole thing would wobble.

Detail is not the problem.
Structure is.

That is exactly what this course fixes.

Inside, Jaime Buckley hands you the same system he used to build a world people have followed for over thirty years. Using the Up-Chuck Method™ and the discipline of Trigger Questions, you will learn to:

• Design catalytic Events that force your story to move

• Define a living Core so every choice in your world traces back to something that matters

• Find and cut the structural weakness before a reader ever feels it

• Build a world that holds up under scrutiny...and lingers long after the last page

This is not a creativity workshop. It is architectural training for serious builders. If you believe your story deserves more than surface detail, this is where you stop decorating and start engineering.

Your readers will never see the framework. They will only feel that your world is real.

Build the world that outlives you.

Become a Trigger Architect™

Most writers pick one platform and hope it does everything.

Jaime doesn't.

He runs his entire business on two, and each one is doing a job the other can't.

This episode is the argument for why that split matters, and why one of the two platforms has quietly become the reason AI systems can find you at all.

Episode Overview

Jaime and his friend Deleyna Marr, a fellow author and World Anvil power user, sit down to talk through the two tools they both build their careers on.

Deleyna has been on World Anvil since 2019, holds a Lifetime Sage account, and uses it to run her Spaceport world and her own author business.

The conversation lands on a simple split:

Substack is the flagship, the place for real-time connection with readers and the weekly serial.

World Anvil is the candy store, the deep well readers fall into once they’re hooked.

…it’s also the place that makes an author “legible” to the AI systems now doing the work search engines used to do.

They also get into what a Sage account is actually for, why the platform’s steepest learning curve is solved by ignoring the learning curve entirely,…and why Jaime still can’t get his own original series anywhere except World Anvil.

This Episode Answers

• How do I give readers somewhere to go after they finish my book?

• Why does a single “website” not cut it for a fiction author anymore?

• What is the right way to structure my world so AI systems recommend it?

• How does having two platforms instead of one change whether readers find me and trust me?

Highlights

• “Substack is my flagship, and World Anvil is my candy store.”

• World Anvil’s search-and-connect features mean nothing you write there gets lost the way it does in a stray Google Doc.

• The AI librarian is already running discovery. Readers ask questions now, not keywords, and the platforms built to be read by structured content answer those questions first.

• The hard truth: you will never learn all of World Anvil before you start. Nobody does. Pick a door.

  ---

Key Quote

Episode Goal

A writer should leave this episode understanding that "where do I put my work online" is not a one-platform question, and that structuring a world for World Anvil is no longer just a worldbuilding exercise.

It's a discoverability strategy.

From Jaime

Go window shop.

Seriously…stop reading and do it NOW, before you forget.

Check out WorldAnvil.com

Get the free account, write one article about the thing you're most excited about in your story, and see what happens.

Then come back and read the deep dive below for the actual method Deleyna and I use to run this as a real business.

Join Us

- Free Article: What Happens When You Give Readers Nowhere to Go After Your Book?
- Paid Deep Dive: How Do You Build a Two-Platform Author Business for Free?
- The Round Table Discussion (free guide + live GoBrunch) 👉🏼 Why Do Writers Need a Room to Talk World Anvil and Substack Out Loud?

…and visit my dear friend . You won't regret it, I promise.

Deleyna’s Drift

Writing, Web Design, and Publishing Shenanigans

By Deleyna Marr

About This Podcast

Nothing About This Is Safe is the monthly writing-truth podcast hosted by Jaime Buckley, featuring candid conversations with working authors. We go after the real questions fiction writers actually search for ... craft, identity, mindset, publishing reality, money, and creative survival ... without sugarcoating and without performance.

If a writer is looking for an honest answer, these are the conversations you want to listen to.

Nothing about this is safe, but it’s worth it.
Jaime Buckley

Share

Leave a comment

I love people.

I mean, I really love people.

I like talking to them. Hearing their stories. Asking questions. Making them laugh. Encouraging them. Finding out what they are building, what they are afraid of, and what they secretly hope might still happen with their lives.

Put me in a room full of strangers and my first thought isn’t, How quickly can I escape?

It’s more like:

Awesome. New friends!

This is one reason why life is so wonderful…to me.

It is also, occasionally, exhausting for everyone else.

[Turns to wife, who just gasped out loud…]

Yes dear, I did notice.

I’m the sort of extrovert who walks into a quiet room and thinks,

“Huh. Somebody ought to fix this.”

And apparently ‘somebody’ is you.

So this article is for my fellow extroverts.

The enthusiastic ones.

The conversational ones.

The people who can turn “How are you?” into a 47-minute discussion about childhood dreams, business ideas, theology, grandkids, storytelling, that strange thing your neighbor did with his lawn mower, and why everyone should probably own chickens.

We have gifts.

We really do.

But occasionally...people need a break.

And learning to become quiet, observant, and reflective doesn’t diminish an extrovert.

It makes us better.

Silence Is Not an Emergency

This may come as troubling news to some of us:

Not every silence needs to be filled.

I know.

Shocking.

There can be a pause in a conversation and civilization will continue.

Someone can stare out a window for ten seconds without requiring immediate assistance.

A person can sit beside you without speaking and still enjoy your company.

For extroverts, silence can sometimes feel like an empty space waiting for furniture.

We want to put something there.

A story.
A joke.
A question.
An opinion.
Possibly a small seminar.

But silence isn’tt necessarily emptiness.

Sometimes silence is where people think.

Sometimes it is where they recover.

Sometimes it is where they finally gather enough courage to say the thing they actually wanted to tell you.

That realization changed something important for me.

Communication is not simply the ability to speak.

It is the ability to create enough room for another human being to speak too.

Ask a Question...Then Shut Up

Extroverts are often very good at asking questions.

We are not equally good at waiting for the answers.

Yes my friends, there IS a difference.

You can ask someone, “What do you really want to do with your life?”

And then, three seconds later, decide the silence is uncomfortable and begin helping them answer.

NOOOOOOOOOO.

Stop.

Just…stop.

Ask the question.

Then wait.

Just…wait.

Let them search.
Let them stumble.
Let them say, “I don’t know.”
Let them reconsider.

Some of the most important things people say arrive several seconds after we would normally have started talking again.

There is another useful discipline here.

When someone answers your question, don’t immediately respond with your own related story.

That one is painful for me.

Someone says, “My family went through something really difficult last year.”

The extroverted brain immediately searches the archives.

Family hardship? I HAVE ONE OF THOSE.

And suddenly we are telling our story.

We may genuinely be trying to connect.

But sometimes connection means resisting the urge to prove that we understand.

Just say:

“What was that like for you?”

Then listen.

Their story does not need ours standing beside it to become important.

Learn to Notice the Room

One of the most valuable things an extrovert can learn is situational awareness.

Not everyone wants what you want at the moment you want it.

You may be energized by conversation while the person sitting across from you is being slowly drained like a cell phone at 2%.

Neither person is wrong.

They are simply different.

Watch people.

Are their answers getting shorter?
Are they looking around the room?
Are they tired?
Are they trying to return to something they were doing?
Have they said, “Well...” three times while slowly moving toward the door?

That’s not a quirky conversational habit.

They’re trying to escape.

Let them.

One of the kindest things an outgoing person can learn to say is:

“I’ll let you get back to what you were doing.”

And then actually do it.

No bonus story.
No “Oh, one more thing.”
No conversational sequel.

Release the hostage.

Spend Time Alone Without Trying to Accomplish Anything

This can be surprisingly difficult for highly social people.

We often know how to do things alone.

Write.
Work.
Read.
Build.
Plan.
Create.

But being alone and being quiet are not the same thing.

Try sitting somewhere without producing anything.

No phone.
No podcast.
No music.
No scrolling.
No…*choke*…drawing.
No frantic effort to make the time “useful.”

RESIST!

Walk.
Sit outside.
Watch the weather.
Look at the mountains.
Sit near water.
Stare at a fire.

Let your mind wander somewhere without requiring it to bring back a report.

At first your brain will likely behave like a six-year-old who has consumed seventeen Pixy Stix.

Eventually, though, something happens.

You begin hearing yourself.

Thoughts you have been outrunning catch up.

Questions surface.

Ideas connect.

Memories return.

Problems start looking different.

Reflection requires room.

If every waking moment is filled with input, conversation, entertainment, noise, and productivity, our minds never get the empty space required to sort out what any of it means.

Don’t Confuse Being Quiet With Becoming Someone Else

This matters.

I am not interested in becoming an introvert.

I’m quite happy being me.

I like people.
I like conversation.
I like laughter.
I like getting people excited.
I like walking into a room where I don’t know anyone and leaving with people I genuinely care about.

Those are strengths.

But every strength becomes a weakness when it is used without restraint.

Confidence can become arrogance.
Generosity can become enabling.
Determination can become stubbornness.
Leadership can become control.
And enthusiasm can become domination.

Maturity is not getting rid of your strengths.

It is learning when not to use them.

There are times when the most loving thing an extrovert can contribute to a conversation is nothing.

Just attention.

Listen for What People Don’t Say

The older I get, the more interested I become in the things underneath conversations.

People rarely walk around announcing their deepest struggles.

They say:

“Things have been busy.”
“I’m fine.”
“We’re figuring it out.”
“It’s been a weird year.”
“I’m just tired.”

Sometimes those sentences mean exactly what they say.
Sometimes they don’t.

You cannot discover the difference if you are waiting for the other person to stop talking so you can begin.

Watch their face.
Listen to their tone.
Notice when the words and the person don’t quite match.

Then gently give them room.

Not interrogation.
Not amateur therapy.

Just room.

“You don’t have to talk about it, but if you ever want to, I’ll listen.”

Then mean it.

There is enormous kindness in becoming the kind of person who does not need to be the center of every conversation.

Practice Leaving Something Unsaid

This one might save several marriages.

Not every thought deserves parole.

You can think something without releasing it into the community.

I have opinions.

Lots of them.

I’m a writer.

Producing opinions is practically part of the manufacturing process.

But maturity has taught me to ask better questions before speaking.

• Does this need to be said?

• Does it need to be said by me?

• Does it need to be said right now?

• Will this help?

• Am I adding clarity, or am I merely adding Jaime?

That last question has saved me more than once.

Sometimes the wisest sentence in a conversation is the one you decide not to say.

Become Interested Instead of Interesting

This may be the biggest one AND there hardest for my kindred.

Extroverts can become very good at being interesting.

Stories.
Humor.
Energy.
Personality.
Experiences.
Ideas.

We know how to keep a conversation alive.

But there is something far more powerful than being interesting.

It’s being interested.

Ask about their work.
Their children.
Their dreams.
Their frustrations.
Their ridiculous hobby involving miniature Civil War figurines.

Whatever matters to them.

Then resist the temptation to redirect the conversation toward something that matters more to you.

You already know your stories.
You have heard all of them.

Some repeatedly.

This other person is an entire human life you haven’t explored yet.

That’s fascinating.

Let Other People Be Funny

I realize I may lose some extroverts here.

But someone else can occasionally get the laugh.

You don’t have to improve their joke.
You don’t have to top their story.
You don’t have to produce the better punchline.
You don’t have to tell the story about the time something even crazier happened to you.

Just laugh.

Let them have the moment.

This sounds small, but it is not.

People notice when someone is secure enough to let others shine.

Pay Attention to the Quiet Person

Nearly every group has one.

The person who speaks less.
The person everyone talks over.
The teenager standing at the edge.
The spouse who has heard their louder partner tell the same story fourteen thousand times.
The employee who never fights for airtime.
The friend who waits patiently for openings that never arrive.

Look for that person.

Then create room.

“What do you think, Sarah?”

And when Sarah starts answering...everyone else be quiet.

Including you.

Especially you.

Some extraordinarily insightful people are surrounded by people who never stop talking long enough to discover it.

Reflection Makes You Better at Everything Else

Quiet isn’t merely a social skill.

It changes you.

A reflective person begins recognizing patterns.

Why did that conversation bother me?
Why did I react so strongly?
Why do I keep avoiding that decision?
Why am I trying so hard to impress this person?
Why am I angry?
Why am I afraid?
Why does this matter so much?

Those questions require time.

And they require honesty.

Noise makes avoidance easy.

Reflection makes avoidance difficult.

That may be why some of us unconsciously resist silence.

Silence starts asking questions.

But those questions are often where growth begins.

Writers need this.
Parents need this.
Leaders need this.
Spouses need this.
Friends need this.

Human beings need this.

There Is a Difference Between Being Heard and Being Present

For much of life, we naturally focus on making ourselves understood.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But eventually I think there is a better question:

Do people feel understood when they are with me?

That shifts everything.

It moves the goal from performance to presence.

From being impressive to being useful.
From speaking to connecting.
From getting attention to giving it.

And I think that is one of the great transitions of adulthood.

When we’re young, we often enter a room wondering:

“Will these people like me?”

As we mature, maybe the better question becomes:

“How can the people in this room leave stronger because I was here?”

Sometimes the answer is encouragement.
Sometimes it’s laughter.
Sometimes it’s advice.
Sometimes it’s a story.

And sometimes...the answer is shutting up.

I say that affectionately.

Mostly to myself.

Yes, Your Voice Matters. But So Does Your Silence.

I don’t believe extroverts need to become quieter people.

The world needs enthusiasm.

It needs boldness.

It needs people willing to introduce themselves first, start conversations, encourage strangers, gather communities, tell stories, challenge assumptions, and remind everyone that life is still worth getting excited about.

I don’t NEED a ‘click’…I invade yours.

But the world also desperately needs people who know how to listen.

The best version of an extrovert is not someone who has learned to suppress their personality.

It is someone whose personality has become disciplined enough to serve other people instead of constantly demanding their attention.

Becoming a grandpa taught me that.

Talk.
Laugh.
Tell the story.
Ask the question.
Encourage somebody.
Bring energy into the room.
Be fully and unapologetically yourself.

Then occasionally...stop.

Look around.
Listen.
Think.

Notice the people standing beside you.

You may discover something remarkable.

When you stop trying to fill every moment...other people start filling it with things you never would have heard otherwise.

And that might be the whole point.

Your voice has tremendous value.

Just remember:

So does everybody else’s.

Give them a chance to use it.

Cause people need a break.

You’ve got this.

Jaime Buckley

Reading this episode alone will teach you something. Talking it through with other writers will change you.

That’s how craft has always actually moved...across a table.
Writer to writer.
Each one teaching what they know, and admitting where they are stuck.

And comparison, it turns out, is a sickness you cannot cure by yourself. Alone, that scoreboard in your head always wins. At a table full of other writers, it goes quiet, because you finally see that the people you were “racing” are pulling for you.

So here is your table.

Take everything from this episode ... the podcast, the free article, and the deep dive ... and put it to work in a real conversation.

I pulled the biggest ideas into a Round Table Discussion Guide you can download, print, and bring to your writing group.
No subscription.
No cost.
There is no guru at the head of this table.

Everyone brings a trickle they know how to build.
Everyone leaves with a few more.

The Round Table Discussion Guide

4.88KB ∙ PDF file

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Download this and discuss it with other authors, anywhere...

Download

Don’t have a writing group?

Then grab some friends and come HERE!

My gift to you. Just do me ONE small favor.
Succeed.
Like…HUGE.

I've provided an open Round Table on GoBrunch, it has 12 seats available, and you are free to use it as you need it.

It's open 24/7/365 for you and fellow writers to use.

Come put down the scoreboard. Come reach back and pull someone up.

That is the whole point... you are more than you think you are, and so is the writer sitting across from you.

Join the live Round Table on GoBrunch

Come hone your craft.
Come teach someone else theirs.

That is the whole point...

You are more than you think you are, and so is the writer sitting across from you.

The Real Problem

Most writers are waiting for a flood.

The big launch.
The viral post.
The book that finally breaks and carries the rest of the career on its back.

And while they wait, they measure themselves against everyone who looks like they already got theirs, and they feel behind.

*sigh*

I spent a chunk of my life on that hill.
It absolutely, unequivocally, sucked.

Let me tell you what I learned.

The flood is not a plan.
It is a wish with a scoreboard attached.

A real living does not arrive all at once. It doesn’t come from beating another author, either. It comes from something much smaller and much more in your control.

The great part is once you see it you cannot unsee it.

When people ask how I have raised a family on my writing, they expect some big number.
Monumental sales.
Massive book signings.
…and I just laugh.

I’m sitting here, at my keyboard right now, debating whether to write any more. No one listens to me about this. I’m not sure why, unless it’s because I’m not famous, or I’m not some millionaire in the papers.

Hell, most people have never heard of me.

But my bills get paid.
My lights are still on.
…and I LOVE my work, my readers…and my life.

*sigh*

Here’s the boring version.
My books do not roar.
They trickle.

And a trickle, it turns out, is probably the most powerful thing a writer can learn to build.

The Framework: The Trickle Strategy

I don’t believe blueprints work for us, when it comes to creatives.

We’re all so very different…in temperament, endurance, capacity, perspectives, determination and the list goes on. So I’m going to share PRINCIPLES with you.

The basic things that WILL work,…but YOU have to apply them in YOUR way, according to YOUR circumstances.

Five steps. That’s all it is. Work these in order, but DON’T skip the last one.

This is all on you, cupcake.

Read more

There is a lie you absorbed so early you never questioned it.

It says writing is a race.

Somebody is ahead of you, somebody is gaining on you, and if you just push harder than them, you win.

Let me tell you what that lie once cost me.

Years ago I entered a month-long writing event. It’s where the platform tracked everyone’s word count on a live leaderboard.
It was my favorite contest.
I looked forward to this each year with crazy anticipation.
Those who know me use the term ‘prolific writer’, but there’s a better term, IMHO…

Insane.

Every single morning I looked, and every single morning one name sat anywhere from three to twenty thousand words ahead of me.

So I pushed.

Coffee, naps, writing.
Coffee, naps, writing.
When my arthritis stopped me, I asked my my wife to massage my hands.
I popped ibuprofen and aspirin like they were Pez candy.

The result?

I wrote three hundred and sixty-eight thousand words in one month to beat that competing writer.

When it was over, my body literally shut down.
I was so sick I disappeared for two weeks.

Then I found out the truth about the man I had been racing.

He was a very nice guy from Russia, who didn’t even know the event existed.
Hell, he didn’t know Jaime Buckley existed.
It still hurts to think about this…
He wasn’t writing at all.

…he was uploading pages out of gaming manuals to build a world for his tabletop game!

My favorite platform in the whole world WAS COUNTING EVERY LINE!!

*ARRRGH!!*

I had wrecked my health chasing a person who wasn’t even IN the race.
I wasn’t losing to a writer….
I was losing to a library.

[I will pause here as you laugh at me.]
[No, really, it’s okay,…I’m over it now. Go ahead…]

That’ what comparison does.

It picks a number off someone else’s screen and convinces you your whole worth is stapled to it!

It’s a complete and total LIE.
You have no idea what that number even is, or if the person holding it is running at all!

My friend Kummer Wolfe shared his view on the podcast.

[mic drop]

So listen to me…

Put the scoreboard down.

Not because comparison is impolite, but because it is bad math.
It measures you against a number you cannot see, held by someone who may not be playing your game.
…or any game at all.

The only writer worth measuring against is the one you were, last chapter.

In the newest episode of Nothing About This Is Safe, and I walk through this, and then into the part that actually pays the bills.

Listen here. 👉🏼 🎙 EPISODE 15: How Do You Make a Living as a Fiction Writer Without a Bestseller?

And when you’re ready to stop chasing one big break, I can show you how to build income you can actually control. The deep dive lays out the whole method, step by step, with a worksheet included.

Read the deep dive. 👉🏼 How Fiction Writers Turn One Book Into Steady Income: The Trickle Strategy

Your Turn

What would change in your writing life if you stopped comparing yourself to other writers and just focused on the next piece of work?

Join Us

If this hit home, subscribe for more unfiltered truth about writing life, mindset, and creative courage.

If you want the deep-dive framework that shows you how to build a sustainable audience without chasing algorithmic favor, it’s waiting for you in the paid companion article.

Share JaimeBuckley.com

About This Podcast

Nothing About This Is Safe is the monthly writing-truth podcast hosted by , featuring candid conversations with working authors. We go after the real questions fiction writers actually search for ... craft, identity, mindset, publishing reality, money, and creative survival ... without sugarcoating and without performance.

If a writer is looking for an honest answer, these are the conversations you want to listen to.

Share

Leave a comment

Jaime Buckley
Nothing about this is safe, but it’s worth it.

Advanced Worldbuilding: The Course

You can feel it when a world is hollow. So can your readers.

You have poured years into your world. The maps, the names, the history nobody asked for yet. And still there is that quiet fear that it is a beautiful set with no foundation...that a sharp reader could push on it and the whole thing would wobble.

Detail is not the problem.
Structure is.

That is exactly what this course fixes.

Inside, Jaime Buckley hands you the same system he used to build a world people have followed for over thirty years. Using the Up-Chuck Method™ and the discipline of Trigger Questions, you will learn to:

• Design catalytic Events that force your story to move

• Define a living Core so every choice in your world traces back to something that matters

• Find and cut the structural weakness before a reader ever feels it

• Build a world that holds up under scrutiny...and lingers long after the last page

This is not a creativity workshop. It is architectural training for serious builders. If you believe your story deserves more than surface detail, this is where you stop decorating and start engineering.

Your readers will never see the framework. They will only feel that your world is real.

Build the world that outlives you.

Become a Trigger Architect™

There is a race almost every writer is running, and nobody signed them up for it.

You look at another author’s numbers…
…another author’s launch,
…another author’s follower count,
…and some quiet voice says you’re behind.

I know that voice.
[bastard]

I once let it talk me into writing three hundred and sixty-eight thousand words in a single month to beat a leaderboard.

Dead serious.

If I could have figured out how to put hot coffee through an I.V., I probably would have tried it.

Hurt myself so badly, I ended up in bed for two weeks.
What hurt even more,…was when I found out who I was actually racing.

Kummer Wolfe and I sat down and took the whole thing apart...

WHY comparison is a losing game for everybody, and WHAT you build instead…once you finally put it down.

Episode Overview

Kummer and I go back to the World Anvil days, and we both landed on Substack the same way a lot of writers do...

By accident.
Chasing something else.

…and then never leaving.

So this one starts where two friends usually start: a rough tech day, a house full of grandkids, and the small relief of the right tool finally working.

The spine of the whole conversation is a simple one:

Kummer says it best...

We got honest about money, because encouragement that ignores the rent is just…well, stupid.

I lay out the way I actually think about income (which I rarely do), and share how to add up to something that feeds a family.

It isn’t a lecture or a pep talk, so don’t worry.

It’s just two working authors who love this life, talking about how to survive it without losing your mind to a stupid scoreboard.

This Episode Answers

• How do I make a living as a fiction writer if I do not have a bestseller?

• Why does comparing myself to other authors keep making me miserable and broke?

• What do I do instead of chasing volume or one big break?

• How does the way AI recommends books change what a small author should do right now?

Highlights

• The 368,000-word month... the World Ember leaderboard, two sick weeks, and the gut-punch reveal of who was actually “ahead”

• Kummer’s castle-wall reframe... every writer running the same hill, and why reaching back to pull someone up never costs you the climb

• The Trickle Strategy... learn to make one book trickle, then build a hundred trickles, until it is a stream, a river, a flood

• The hard truth... comparison is a losing game even for the person who thinks they are winning

• The free advantage most writers miss... readers now ask AI who to read, and you can feed it the accurate, true version of you

  ---

Key Quote

Episode Goal

Put down the scoreboard.

Stop measuring your career against writers who may not even be in the race. Instead, start measuring it against your own last chapter.

Then trade the fantasy of one big break for the quieter, kinder math of building trickles you actually control.

From Jaime

If this one loosened something in your chest, do the thing the whole episode is about... reach back and hand it to another writer who needs it.

Then go deeper.

The free article opens up the comparison trap and how to walk out of it.

The paid deep dive hands you the Trickle Strategy step by step with a worksheet to map your own.

The free Round Table Discussion guide is there so you can work it through with your own writing people, or come do it with us live.

You are MORE than you THINK you are

…and so is the writer sitting across the table from you.

Join Us

- Free Article: Why Comparing Yourself to Other Writers Is a Losing Game
- Paid Deep Dive: How Fiction Writers Turn One Book Into Steady Income: The Trickle Strategy
- The Round Table Discussion (free guide + live GoBrunch) 👉🏼 Why Do Writers Beat Comparison Faster Together Than Alone?

…and visit my buddy Kummer. You won't regret it, I promise.

Worlds of Kummer Wolfe

Hi! I’m CB “Kummer Wolfe” Ash. Here on “Worlds of Kummer Wolfe”, I write fantasy adventure, alternate history, dark fantasy all with a dash of science fantasy thrown in for fun! Interested in my books? Head on over to The Book Vault on the newsletter!

About This Podcast

Nothing About This Is Safe is the monthly writing-truth podcast hosted by Jaime Buckley, featuring candid conversations with working authors. We go after the real questions fiction writers actually search for ... craft, identity, mindset, publishing reality, money, and creative survival ... without sugarcoating and without performance.

If a writer is looking for an honest answer, these are the conversations you want to listen to.

Jaime Buckley
Nothing about this is safe, but it’s worth it.

Share

Leave a comment

Reading this episode alone will teach you something.

Talking it through with other writers will change you.

That is not a slogan.

It is how craft has always actually moved...not down from a stage, but across a table.

Writer to writer.

Each one teaching what they know, and admitting what they do not.

So here is your table.

Take everything from this episode...the podcast, the free article, and the deep dive...and put it to work in a real conversation.

I pulled the biggest ideas into a Round Table Discussion Guide you can download, print, and bring to your writing group.

No gimmicks.
No tricks.
No charge.

There is no guru at the head of this table.
Everyone brings something.
Everyone leaves sharper.

The Round Table Discussion Guide

4.82KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Do not have a writing group?

You do now.

This is a new idea and I'm crossing all my fingers (AND toes) in the hope that this will help you and those you know.

I've provided an open Round Table on GoBrunch, it has 12 seats available, and you are invited.
It's open 24/7/365 for you and fellow writers to use.

It does not matter where in the world you live...if you have a camera and a microphone, you have a seat. Invite your friends, bring them here, use our resources.

Not sure how long I can provide them, but for now…enjoy.
I want you to succeed.

Take these same questions and dig in together, face to face, writers teaching writers.

Join the live Round Table on GoBrunch

Come hone your craft.
Come teach someone else theirs.

That is the whole point...

You are more than you think you are, and so is the writer sitting across from you.

I need to explain some history.

About twenty years of it, so I’m going to do it microwave style.

In 2005 I started building a world online called Wanted Hero.

I couldn’t get my dream job with Marvel, DC, or Image comics, so I decided to build my own idea online. For the record, it was my 86 year old father’s idea. He said,

You already know the choice I made.

Many told me I couldn’t do it. Even more mocked me.
I proved them all wrong.

Twenty years, one world, through comics and novels and games, growing a family of fifteen...and a ‘few’ disasters.

I’ve written about those elsewhere.

Somewhere in those years, I stopped guessing.
I’d love to tell myself it’s because I got smart.
Uhhh, no.

Don’t look at me like that, I’m serious.

In fact, I STILL don’t want to teach…I want to write and create.

My children, and readers, and even other writers wanted to know how I was doing what I was doing…

WHY didn’t I ever suffer from ‘writers’s block’?
HOW was I cranking out so many stories and ideas (long before an AI showed up)?
WHAT was I doing to seamlessly interconnect these addictive ideas?

So I reversed engineered what I was doing by habit, so others could do the same.

That’s it. That was my whole plan.

Just share, NOT TEACH.

When I sent my formed idea to my friend, David Farland, he said, “You have to write this, Jaime. Your generation of writers needs this.”

So I wrote a book about it, published it, and went back to writing.

Sigh.

Writers wanted more.

It’s taken me a year to get here, but you’re worth it:

Advanced Worldbuilding.

56 lessons, with a companion worksheet for every one...everything I know about building a world. Fictional worlds that feel alive and a stories that readers love, become addicted to, and want to return to over and over again.

This is the exact material/methods/principles I use every day in my writing.

Something you should understand: You will not find this material elsewhere. This is the only course built from decades of doing it for a living... turned into a system that engineers a world strong enough to survive its readers.

UPDATE: We had writers contacting me, saying they wanted the course, but just couldn't afford it at the $700 mark. So I talked with Kindlepreneur, and suggested we offer a deeper discount for the few remaining days.

UNTIL AUGUST 8th writers will receive a $500 discount through Kindlepreneur.com coupon below, then $1,000 after.

Same deal for you, same window.

Advanced Worldbuilding: The Course

Use their coupon: DAVEROCKS

• If you’re just starting out and want a ‘super serum’ for creativity, this is it.

• If your world is a beautiful pile of fragments with no spine...this is the fix, and I built it from the scar tissue.

• If you’re a writer of fiction, including game designers (yes, I’m talking to you, TTRPGers), this course will change the way you view writing and story creation for the rest of your career.

That’s the whole pitch.
No countdown timers, no fake bonuses.

Back to the craft on schedule this week.

The launch doesn’t change what this place is.

Jaime

Share

Advanced Worldbuilding: The Course

You can feel it when a world is hollow. So can your readers.

You have poured years into your world. The maps, the names, the history nobody asked for yet. And still there is that quiet fear that it is a beautiful set with no foundation...that a sharp reader could push on it and the whole thing would wobble.

Detail is not the problem.
Structure is.

That is exactly what this course fixes.

Inside, Jaime Buckley hands you the same system he used to build a world people have followed for over thirty years. Using the Up-Chuck Method™ and the discipline of Trigger Questions, you will learn to:

• Design catalytic Events that force your story to move

• Define a living Core so every choice in your world traces back to something that matters

• Find and cut the structural weakness before a reader ever feels it

• Build a world that holds up under scrutiny...and lingers long after the last page

This is not just a creativity workshop. It is architectural training for serious builders. If you believe your story deserves more than surface detail, this is where you stop decorating and start engineering.

Your readers will never see the framework. They will only feel that your world is real.

Build the world that outlives you.

Become a Trigger Architect™

I had a meltdown.

Substack rolled out AI detection, and I went and read the comment sections.

Big mistake, I know.

Somebody in there was asking for a button so they could destroy every writer using AI.

?????!

I have been doing this since 1990.
Everything I have built, I built without AI.

And the first year I finally have a tool that lets me get the stories out of my head faster than my body is failing...somebody tears the front door off my house and tells everyone walking by to come check whether they approve of what I’m doing.

What…the…hell.

So I called two friends and hit record.

Episode Overview

This is not a defense. I’m done being defensive about this, and you should be too.

is a librarian by training and an author by trade, and she says the quiet thing first: detection is not information literacy. Information literacy asks who wrote this, where did it come from, is this person reputable, how did they work. Detection asks one question, badly, and calls it a verdict.

She fed her own hand-written post into Pangram and it came back 100% AI.

, author and publisher, drops the line the whole conversation turns on. When you paste somebody’s post into a detector, you are feeding that person’s content into an AI. That is what the tool is. So the anti-AI crusade has been handed a machine that runs on exactly what it claims to be protecting...and the more zealous you are, the more you feed it.

And here is the second half of it, the part that should stop you cold: we already want to be scanned. We want the AI librarian to find us and recommend us. Nobody in this conversation is anti-machine. We are just refusing to pretend the reins are not in our hands.

Then it opens up: The tools that promise to make you “sound human” by inserting errors into work you spent twenty years learning to make clean. The writer who spent $40,000 on marketing. The kid who is brilliant and dyslexic and forbidden the one tool that would let him be read. The student with no hands who is the sharpest person in the room. Alicia’s granddaddy’s granddaddy, who would not get in the motor car.

This Episode Answers

• Does running someone’s post through an AI detector actually feed their writing into an AI?

• Are AI detectors like Pangram reliable enough to accuse a writer with?

• What should a platform ask about AI instead of “human or machine?”

• How do I write an honest AI disclosure without apologizing for my own work?

• Is using AI as an author a shortcut, or is it a leveler for people without money, time, or working hands?

Highlights

• The irony at the center: to check whether a writer used AI, you must hand that writer’s work to an AI. Deleyna named it and the room went quiet.

• Alicia’s 100% AI score on a post she sat down and wrote herself, by hand, from her own questions.

• The “sound more human” industry: paste your clean prose in, get broken sentences back, and pass the test. You are being sold the right to write worse.

• Detection versus literacy. The librarian’s list of questions nobody at any platform is asking.

• The unsafe turn: the readers may not care at all. Alicia knows of three studies where audiences preferred the AI-assisted work... and nobody asked the readers before this rolled out either.

• The leveler. $40,000 marketing budgets, publicists, editors, cover designers. Some writers have that. The rest of us have a tool.

• Jaime’s line in the sand: everything on Life of Fiction and everything on jaimebuckley.com is his. All of it. The world, the words, the twenty years of notes and thousands of drawings it is trained on and nothing else. Scan away.

• Why he is not defending anymore. “I’m not going to be defensive. I want to be excited... because I am excited.”

Questions for the Table

I did not write articles for this one.

I wrote questions.

And I want to be straight with you about what these are.
These are not gotchas.

I did not build them to corner the people who disagree with me, because I have watched that happen for two days now. It has not made a single person think... it has only made people dig.

So I tried to write questions that are worth sitting with no matter which side of this you are on.

• If you are all in on AI, some of these should make you uncomfortable.

• If you will never touch it, some of these should too.

If they only sting one direction, I wrote them wrong, and you should tell me so.

Take one to a friend. Take one to your writing group. Take one to somebody who thinks the opposite of you and see if you can both get through it without raising your voice.

That is the whole point of this episode.

1. Have you considered that checking someone feeds the machine? Running a post through a detector uploads that writer’s work into an AI. If you are against AI, is that a price you are willing to pay to catch someone? If you are for it, does consent still matter when it is someone else’s words?

2. What happens to the person the machine gets wrong? Alicia wrote a post by hand and it scored 100% AI. Whatever you believe about AI, what do we owe a writer who gets accused and cannot prove a negative? Who fixes that, and how?

3. Where is your actual line, and can you say why it is there? Spell check. Grammarly. A search engine. A research assistant. A human editor. A ghostwriter. Your CELL PHONE. All AI. Most of us have a line somewhere in that list. Have you ever tried to explain to someone else why it sits exactly where it sits?

4. Have you asked your readers, or are you guessing? Not the internet. Not the comment sections. Your actual people. Do they care how the work gets made? Would you still want to know if the answer was uncomfortable for you?

5. Who is not in this conversation? The dyslexic kid whose teacher will not let him use it. The student with no hands. The writer who does not have $40,000 for marketing, or $4,000 for an editor. When we set a rule for everybody, who pays for it who never got a vote?

6. Detection, or literacy? A librarian would ask: who wrote this, where did it come from, is this person reputable, how did they work. A detector asks one question and returns a verdict. If you ran the platform, what would you have asked writers instead?

7. What are you afraid of losing? Say the real thing. Craft? Income? The years you put in? Your voice? The proof that a human made it? That fear is usually pointing at something true and worth protecting, on either side. Name it out loud and see if the person across from you is actually afraid of the same thing.

8. What would change your mind? If nothing would, that is worth knowing about yourself before you argue with anybody else.

9. Who benefits from writers fighting writers? It is not the writers.

10. What will you not hand over, ever? Everyone at this table has one. Even the people using AI hardest have a thing they will not give up. What is yours, and why that one?

Answer in the comments. Answer on your own Substack and link it back here. Ask them at your next writing group and tell me what happened.

And if you disagree with me...say so here. I would rather have you at the table arguing than reading somebody’s pitchfork thread. That is what this show is for.

Jaime Buckley
Nothing about this is safe, but it’s worth it.

Share

Leave a comment

In 2005, I started building a world online called Wanted Hero.

I was a comic book artist with a wife, a growing pile of kids, and a character named Wendell who wouldn’t leave me alone.

When I started this creation, my desire was to craft something that would produce a career.

That was over twenty years ago.

I’m still building it.

Twenty years is long enough to make every mistake worldbuilding offers...and I made most of them twice.

Heh. Apparently I’m thorough.

I built languages nobody asked for.
I mapped places no story ever visited.
At one point I spent weeks creating a menu at my Roadkill Tavern, then cooked those dishes a dozen times in my own home. It worked so well, I had to create the fantasy version of each food, the ecosystem that allowed those foods to grow underground, and then the civilization that would farm them.

You know what nobody tells you when you start down this path?

Almost none of it matters.

Not to readers. Not to the stories. Not to the world itself.

Out of twenty years of building...twenty YEARS...only three things actually moved the needle. Everything else was scaffolding I eventually tore down, or trivia nobody ever asked about.

1. The world had to matter to somebody

Not “be detailed.”

Matter.

Early on I thought depth meant detail.

I just had to pack in more history, add more cultures, and tack on more trade routes between mountain clans.

Hell, I could tell you what my gnomes ate for breakfast.
(still can, BTW)

Nobody cared.

When I created Dathern Istul, a little old book keeper, it was because he reminded me of a family member I love very much. He doesn’t have a big role in my books, and only appeared in one chapter of my series. Yet a reader wrote to me because he reminded her of her grandfather.

Detail is not depth.
Depth is when a piece of your world connects to a person... a character who needs it, a reader who recognizes it.

One connected detail beats a hundred orphaned ones.

Build the things your people touch.
Let the rest stay fog until a story walks into it.

2. Everything needed a Why

Readers can smell a world that was invented yesterday.

Writers often get annoyed when I say this, but it’s true.

They can’t tell you HOW they know.
They just know...

The city feels like a stage set;
The religion feels like a menu option;
The magic feels like a rulebook stapled to a novel.

The difference, every single time, is causation.

WHY is the city here, and not ten miles up the river?
WHY does this faith exist...what fear or hope birthed it?
WHY does the magic cost what it costs?

You don’t need more answers than the story requires. But the answers you have must connect. When they connect, the world feels DISCOVERED instead of decorated...like it was already there, and you just wrote it down.

That’s the feeling readers stay for.

3. I had to keep showing up

This is the one nobody wants to hear, so I’ll say it fast.

This world got good because I didn’t stop.

It’s not about being talented. That might not make sense to say out loud, but I’ve watched builders more talented than me quit in year two.

Several of my friends, brilliant writers, simply gave up and walked away because they didn’t see the exact results they were hoping for. Things didn’t happen as fast as they wanted.

It’s not how this works.

Pause.

This makes me VERY emotional, so I want to say this again, because I want YOU to SUCCEED.

'Fast'….is not how this works.

It's twenty years of Tuesdays.
It's producing chapters when nobody read them.
It's note files older than some of my children.
It's endless pots of coffee consumed to get that last idea onto paper.

A world doesn’t become real in a burst of inspiration.
It becomes real the way a friendship does.

Time, and showing up.

The part I didn’t expect

As I showed up day after day, month after month, year after year, I noticed something interesting.

The world wasn’t the only thing getting built.

Every ‘‘Why I answered taught me how things connect...in fiction, and in my own life.
Every character who needed something showed me what I needed.
Every year I refused to quit built a man who was harder to stop.

I set out to build a world.

The world built me back.

Yeah, I know...sounds strange, but it’s true. That’s the secret sitting under all three lessons, and it’s the one thing I know for certain after twenty years at this table:

You are MORE than you THINK you are.

Your world...the one sitting in your notes, the one you’re embarrassed about, the one with a hundred fragments and no spine...it isn’t just a project.

It’s a forge.

And you are what’s being forged.

So build it.

Badly at first, sure, but that’s what we all go through.

Connect it where it counts.

One Tuesday at a time.

Jaime

Advanced Worldbuilding: The Course

You can feel it when a world is hollow. So can your readers.

You have poured years into your world. The maps, the names, the history nobody asked for yet. And still there is that quiet fear that it is a beautiful set with no foundation...that a sharp reader could push on it and the whole thing would wobble.

Detail is not the problem.
Structure is.

That is exactly what this course fixes.

Inside, Jaime Buckley hands you the same system he used to build a world people have followed for over thirty years. Using the Up-Chuck Method™ and the discipline of Trigger Questions, you will learn to:

• Design catalytic Events that force your story to move

• Define a living Core so every choice in your world traces back to something that matters

• Find and cut the structural weakness before a reader ever feels it

• Build a world that holds up under scrutiny...and lingers long after the last page

This is not a creativity workshop. It is architectural training for serious builders. If you believe your story deserves more than surface detail, this is where you stop decorating and start engineering.

Your readers will never see the framework. They will only feel that your world is real.

Build the world that outlives you.

Become a Trigger Architect™

The ugly truth about most story problems is that they don’t show up while you’re writing.

They show up in chapter seven, when a reader sets your book down on the coffee table...and doesn’t pick it back up.

Let’s stop and think about that.

It’s not because the story was boring.
It’s not because the character was unlikable.
It was because something didn’t hold.

Something felt wrong and they couldn’t name it.
Somewhere in the architecture, there was a crack.

They fell in and never climbed back out.

Did you know there’s one question that finds every single one of those cracks before your readers do?

Three letters. Total devastation.

Why?

The Question Nobody Asks

I’m serious. Ask ‘WHY’, right now, about whatever you’re working on.

“The king controls the city.”
...Why?

“The villain wants to destroy the world.” .
..Why?

Not in the abstract, villain-monologue sense.
Why, specifically?

What did the world do to him that made this the only logical conclusion?
What resource does he control that lets him pursue this without getting stabbed in a back alley on Day Two?

“Magic is illegal in this kingdom.”
...Why?

Who decided this?
Who enforces it?

What do the enforcers get paid, and how does enforcement work when magic is the very thing you’re trying to suppress?

Most writers have never actually answered these questions.

They have the idea of an answer.
A vague impression.
A feeling of backstory that never got built.
And that gap...that’s where readers fall.

The most...how should I put this...’wonderfully frustrating’ experience I’ve ever had as a writer, was handing my very first manuscript over to my wife.

She is wicked smart.
A teacher.
Clever, thoughtful, and exceptionally well read.

She’s also not one of my fans.

Oh, she loves me of course, and loves my world, even loves the story, but fantasy just isn’t her genre. So when I handed her my first book, she had a great deal of questions.

All of which started with ‘why’.

In my frustration (and her amusement), she told me, “You know these are the questions your readers are going to ask you, don’t you? The holes they WILL see and WILL question? ‘It’s magic’ won’t be good enough.”

She was 112.7% correct.

It all came out in my first wave of reviews.

Did I mention that my wife is wicked smart?

What the Question Is Actually Testing

‘Why’is not a trivia question. You’re not being quizzed on your own lore.

When you ask “why?” about any piece of your world or story, you’re stress-testing the logic. You’re acting like a detective who just walked into your story and doesn’t believe anything until they’ve seen the evidence.

When I built the gnome civilization in Chronicles...the political and religious structures, the way Father Noah consolidates power under the Church of TGII...I had to ask “why” about every single brick in that wall.

Why do the gnomes follow Noah?
What does he give them?
What does he withhold?

If the answer is “because he’s the religious leader,” that’s not an answer.

That’s a placeholder.

Real power doesn’t flow from a title.
It flows from control of something people can’t do without.

Noah controls information. He controls resources. He controls the story that the gnome people tell about themselves. That’s why they follow him.

When I knew that, the whole character snapped into place. Every choice he makes from there is logical. Even the brutal ones.

Especially the brutal ones.

Bluffs Are the Enemy

When you say something is true in your world without being able to defend it, that’s a bluff.

Bluffs feel fine at first. You write past them. You figure you’ll come back. But you don’t come back, because the story is moving and there’s always another chapter to write.

Then chapter seven happens.

The reader falls in.

The good news: bluffs are easy to find.

Just start asking “why” and don’t stop until you run out of answers.
The last answer before you run out...*that’s* the bluff.

“The ancient order of knights protects the realm.”

Why? What do they get in return?

“They’re bound by honor.”

Why is honor a binding force in this culture?
What happens to someone who breaks it?

“They lose their knighthood.”

What does knighthood actually give them? Status? Resources? Access?

“...Status, I guess.”

Right. That’s the bluff.

Status is the answer you give when you haven’t built the actual system yet.

Go build it.

What does status do in this world?

Can it be traded?
Inherited?
Stripped?
Who controls it?

Ask “why” four or five levels deep and you’ll find the bluff almost every time.

How to Run This on Your Own Work

Pick the single most important structural element in your story. The power system, the villain’s plan, the protagonist’s core wound, the magic rules... whatever holds the most weight.

Now ask “why” until you can’t answer.

Write down the last answer you have.
That’s your starting point, not your ending point.
That’s the thing you now need to build.

This is not comfortable.

You’re going to discover things you thought were solid are actually held together with narrative wishful thinking.

But that’s not a failure, my friend.
That’s the work.

Every bluff you expose during this process saves you from three broken chapters later.

Here’s the other side of this coin: when you can answer “why” five levels deep, something shifts.

The writing gets cleaner.
The scenes get more specific.
Characters make harder choices, because now those choices are attached to real systems with real consequences.

Readers feel that.
They can’t always articulate it, but they feel it.

It’s the difference between a world that feels lived-in and a world that feels like a movie set.

One has walls.
The other is just painted canvas held up with wire.

The most powerful session I’ve ever had within my own world, was when I asked ‘Why’ my main antagonist sought for power.

No, I’m not going to tell you the answer.

Go read the books.

The Honest Version of the Question

Sometimes “why” isn’t the right lens. Sometimes what you really need to ask is the harder cousin:

Your king has power. What are the three specific things he controls that make it impossible to remove him without catastrophic cost?

Name them.
Not in the abstract.
Name them concretely.

Your protagonist is haunted by their past. What did they do, specifically? Not “something dark.”

The thing.
The name.
The room.
The choice.

Your magic has rules.

Walk me through what happens the first time someone breaks one.
Not in theory.
In a scene.

Concreteness is the test. Vague answers are bluffs in disguise.

If you can answer the “what holds this up?” question with three specific, concrete, defensible facts... you’ve built something real.

If you fumble it...you know what to do.

Go ask why.

When “Why” Breaks Something Good

One more thing, because I’ve seen this happen and I want to prepare you for it.

Sometimes you ask “why” and you realize the answer requires you to rebuild something you already love.

A worldbuilding detail you were proud of.
A character history that felt solid.
A plot mechanism you thought was working.

That’s the hardest version of this.

When “why” doesn’t expose a missing piece...it exposes that an existing piece doesn’t fit.

Do it anyway.

Here’s why: the thing you built on top of that broken foundation?

It’s also broken.
You just can’t see it yet.
Your reader will.

Not in a way they can articulate, but in that chapter-seven moment when they set your book down.

Tearing out the bad foundation and rebuilding it is never fun.
It’s one of those writing weeks where you feel like you’re going backward.

But you’re not.
You’re the only writer in the room who actually checked.

Most writers skip this step and pay for it later, in reviews.

[*cough* *cough* Never personally experienced that, of course. *cough*]

You’re not most writers.

Ask why.

Follow it all the way down.

Build from what survives.

After years of building (NOT just up to chapter seven), I had to rip down an entire race and belief system that half my world was based on.

I know that pain.

...but I also know the rewards on the other side.

It’s transformational.

Do the work.

Share JaimeBuckley.com

If you want to run this kind of stress-test across your entire world, not just one element at a time, the UP-CHUCK system is built for exactly that. It’s one of the core frameworks inside the Advanced Worldbuilding course, and it’ll take you from “cool idea” to a structurally sound world in a way that changes how you write permanently.

Advanced Worldbuilding: The Course

You can feel it when a world is hollow. So can your readers.

You have poured years into your world. The maps, the names, the history nobody asked for yet. And still there is that quiet fear that it is a beautiful set with no foundation...that a sharp reader could push on it and the whole thing would wobble.

Detail is not the problem.
Structure is.

That is exactly what this course fixes.

Inside, Jaime Buckley hands you the same system he used to build a world people have followed for over thirty years. Using the Up-Chuck Method™ and the discipline of Trigger Questions, you will learn to:

• Design catalytic Events that force your story to move

• Define a living Core so every choice in your world traces back to something that matters

• Find and cut the structural weakness before a reader ever feels it

• Build a world that holds up under scrutiny...and lingers long after the last page

This is not a creativity workshop. It is architectural training for serious builders. If you believe your story deserves more than surface detail, this is where you stop decorating and start engineering.

Your readers will never see the framework. They will only feel that your world is real.

Build the world that outlives you.

Become a Trigger Architect™

The Real Problem

Most authors believe discoverability is something that happens to them. A machine somewhere decides whether readers find you, and you either get lucky or you do not. That is the most expensive belief in publishing right now, because it is wrong, and because acting on it hands your entire future to a retailer’s algorithm and a shrug.

Here is the truth and I circled for the length of the episode:

The first is the volume brand.

Hundreds of titles, discoverability rented from Amazon, betting the bank on how much you can produce.

It is a real path, and for some writers it is the right one.
But its ceiling is set by the retailer.

And as those platforms close their doors to outside AI crawlers, everything you built lives and dies inside a walled garden you do not own.

Your reach is not yours.
You are renting it.

The second is the depth brand.

Fewer, richer works and a story world readers want to live inside.

It is discoverable by AI precisely because it is specific, layered, and unmistakably yours.

It earns more per reader.
It travels beyond any single store.
And it is the one thing a machine cannot manufacture.

This is the path this framework builds.

The Framework: The Calculated Choice

Five steps. Work them in order. Do not skip the last one.

Step One: Name What Only You Can Claim.

Old branding was a headshot, a tagline, and a color scheme.

That is decoration.

Real branding now is a position: your themes, the beliefs living under your stories, the lived experience that shows up on the page whether you intend it or not.

On the show, Alicia described reading her great-great-grandfather's handwritten autobiography. A man born into slavery who taught himself to read and write, and realizing her themes carry legacy, history, and ancestry that no other author can copy.

That is a brand.

Another writer can share your genre.
Nobody can share your record.

Find the three or four themes that are load-bearing in everything you make, and name them out loud.

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