Ask ten readers what a book is and you will get ten metaphors and no definitions. A mirror, they say, or a door, or a passageway with footfalls behind it. The metaphors flatter the reader and obscure the object. None of them tell you what is sitting on your shelf, dark and patient, while you sleep. Here is the answer. A book is stored sun.
Today marks the eighteenth anniversary of the Boles Blogs Network gathering under a single domain. That formation date is 2008. Writing under one of the network’s earlier names, however, began much earlier, in 1996, when Go Inside Magazine opened a small storefront on a web that still ran on dial tone and patience. The full arc now covers thirty years, fourteen blogs gathered under the BolesBlogs banner, a sister site on SquareSpace launched during the pandemic, and a stubborn argument about what publishing ought to feel like when the writer answers to nobody but the reader.
Continue reading → Eighteen Years Under One Banner: The BolesBlogs Constellation at Thirty
You finish writing a book and the manuscript sits there, cooling on the screen like bread pulled from an oven. It is done. It is no longer yours. This is the part no one tells you about authorship: the moment the final sentence locks into place, the book begins its first death, because it has stopped being a living negotiation between you and the language and has become, instead, a fixed object. A thing. The writer’s relationship to the finished text is not unlike the relationship a parent has to an adult child who has just walked out the front door with a suitcase. You made this. You cannot unmake it. You are, from this point forward, irrelevant to its survival.
Continue reading → The Book Lives Three Times: How Seneca Got Reading Wrong by Getting It Right
I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.
Continue reading → The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf
Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.
Twenty years ago, I began imagining a story about three disabled teenage girls who discover they possess elemental powers. The idea stayed with me, growing and changing as I grew and changed, waiting for the right moment to be told. That moment has arrived. The EleMenTs Series is complete, and all three novels are now available.
Continue reading → The EleMenTs Series Is Complete: A Young Adult Fantasy Trilogy
Stop paying rent on your own words. For decades, writers were taught that “real” authors have representation, an agent, sometimes even a manager, as if legitimacy were a credential issued by an industry gatekeeper. That belief was formed in an older media economy: fewer publishers, fewer channels, slower production cycles, and a cultural aura around scarcity. In 2026, the belief is not merely old fashioned. It is often financially irrational, and for many authors it is the single most reliable way to give away a permanent slice of income that should remain theirs.
Hey, there! Welp, it’s that time of the year again — yes, time for us to ask for the indulgence of your continued, kind, support for this blog by buying our eBook — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 15 (2024) — to show your support so we may continue to publish this blog without advertising while still being able to cover our yearly, ongoing, online publication costs that include server space, hosting fees, and bandwidth payments. Yes, we live in a money world — even for free reading!
Continue reading → Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 15 (2024): Buy Now!
It’s that time of the year again — yes, time for us to ask for the pleasure of your continued, kind, support for this blog by joyously buying our eBook — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 14 (2023) — to show your support so we may continue to publish this blog without advertising while still being able to cover our yearly, ongoing, online publication costs that include server space, hosting fees, and bandwidth payments.
Continue reading → Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 14 (2023) is Now Here!
There’s nothing new in having established books censored. In 2011, I wrote about the concentrated effort to have Mark Twain’s books “rewritten” and “edited” without him. Today, there is a similar effort to “rewrite” and “edit” the fine work of author Roald Dahl. These reverse efforts, after publication, to quiet the writer’s voice through “social context” editing, is absolutely the same as burning books on a wood pyre — but with the excuse of protecting children. and of being sensitive to the new emancipation of provocative social norms.
Continue reading → The New Book Burning: Rewriting Roald Dahl
You must be logged in to post a comment.