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6 days ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
Thank you for reading The Caffeinated Writer. Paid subscribers can listen to this post here. “The road you can talk about is not the road you can walk on.” Lao TzuEvery now and then my husband likes to remind me what I said to him the first time I ever rode in a car with him. A truck, actually. This was in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and we’d just met a few days before. He invited me to go for a drive, and about fifteen miles into the journey he asked why I was so quiet.
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2 weeks ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
If you’ve been on Substack for a while, you might be familiar with of The Author Stack. Nohelty’s thoughtful post on walking away from a taxing creative endeavor got me to thinking about how much we try to do, and how often these competing efforts lead to burnout. After deciding to end a program called Writer MBA, which cost him money and enormous amounts of time, Nohelty writes:In influence, we succeeded wildly. In money, we failed spectacularly.
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2 weeks ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
Good morning (or afternoon, or evening, depending on where you are). Have you poured your third cup of coffee yet? Substack has brought me a lot of peace and calm lately. Assuming you might enjoy a little piece and calm too, I thought I’d a few posts on the writing life that I’ve read and bookmarked recently. Today is Indie Bookstore Day! You know what that means: go to an independent bookstore in your community and buy a book or two! You know you’re going to be reading anyway.
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3 weeks ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
About once a month, my husband and I drive from our home on the Bay Area Peninsula to Haight Street, where he visits Amoeba Records and I visit The Booksmith. I head straight to the essay section in the back right of the main room. There, I read back covers and first pages until I find at least one essay collection to bring home with me. Last weekend, I found OPACITIES by Sofia Samatar.
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3 weeks ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
When I first started creating ebooks and paperbacks for my micro press, , formatting a book involved complicated html, clunky table of contents creation, and laborious conversion from Word to epub. Fortunately, the time-intensive process of formatting ebook and print book files is a relic of the past. All you need to create gorgeous, professional ebooks and paperbacks is one super-simple, user-friendly piece of software: Vellum.
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1 month ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
You probably already know that you need a literary agent to publish a book with most traditional publishers. You may also know that the best way to get the attention of an agent is through a referral. Agents are inundated with query letters, so if an author they already represent says, “You should read this manuscript!” they are more likely to take notice. Unfortunately, most writers who don’t know anyone in the industry submit queries through the slush pile.
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1 month ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
After searching for more than a year for a Hermes 3000 typewriter, I finally found one a few weeks ago in Mill Valley and brought it home. It’s a beauty, with a light touch and sturdy, spacious typeface. I’ve spent more time looking at the Hermes 3000 than typing on it. I did insert the paper in and bang out a few sentences, but honestly, it’s a little intimidating. When you write on a typewriter, everything seems so permanent.
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1 month ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
Thank you for reading The Caffeinated Writer. This post is adapted from my eight-week course, Plotting the Novel. I’ve been writing novels since the early 2000s, and I’ve never outlined any of them in the early stages. For the first seventy pages or so, I work from instinct and from the drive of the story itself. Instinct and narrative drive, however, will only take you so far.
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Feb 15, 2025 | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
By the time I met my literary agent in 2003, I had queried and been rejected by at least thirty different agents. Still, through persistence, a little luck, and a contest, I had published a story collection with University of Massachusetts Press and a debut novel with MacAdam/Cage, a small literary publisher in San Francisco that has long since gone out of business. Sales for both had been meager, which is common for university and small press titles.
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Feb 5, 2025 | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond |SOPHIA EFTHIMIATOU
In this post, I’d like to share why I have several Substacks, why you might want to maintain separate Substacks for different audiences (but not four, for the love of all things good and holy!), and what I’ve learned in the process. First off, as I’ve probably mentioned before, I drink too much coffee. See how stressed I am in the above photo? It’s because I was an expat in Paris during month six of the pandemic, sure, but it’s also because French coffee is way too small.
