Once More, With Feeling

Under Your Spell

I grew up believing that care and skill mattered.

When I was five, I started programming simple games on a TRS‑80. Nothing about it was fast. I typed code, ran it, watched it fail, and then had to figure out why. Progress only came when I paid attention. Guessing didn’t work. Rushing didn’t work. The only thing that worked was staying with the problem until it made sense. That taught me, very early, that effort was not performative. It either produced understanding, or it didn’t. Those early lessons about attention and consequence have carried over into my work.

 

I’ve Got a Theory

Most of my adult life has been spent in tech publishing. The job required the same habits I learned as a kid: slow reading, checking assumptions, verifying facts, and arguing about whether something was actually true or useful. Disagreement was part of the process. So was friction. You were expected to justify decisions and defend conclusions.

That mattered because it meant the work had standards. The system wasn’t perfect, but it rewarded attention, experience, and judgment. And those standards have served me well, both in traditional publishing and in independent creative endeavors.

 

Learning to Slay

In 2006, I self‑published a children’s book that I wrote and illustrated. At the time, self‑publishing was widely dismissed as amateur. That perception mattered to me because I didn’t want the book excused or ignored.

So I treated it like a difficult problem. I read everything I could about publishing, design, and marketing. The Design of Everyday Things and Universal Principles of Design explained how people read and process information. Shameless Marketing for Brazen Hussies showed me how to talk about work honestly, without pretending quality alone would make it visible. None of these books was aspirational. They were practical and explained consequences. They showed me how to make deliberate choices.

That research pushed me toward the tools. I learned InDesign and Illustrator so I could control layout, typography, and illustration myself. I tested pages, adjusted spacing, rewrote captions, and redrew images until each choice felt worthy of inclusion. Every decision affected how a reader would experience the book. I wanted that experience to be intentional.

Baker & Taylor accepted the book. For someone unknown, that mattered. They were a two‑hundred‑year‑old institution with standards. Their acceptance wasn’t symbolic. It was confirmation that careful, skilled work could still be recognized.

They are closing now. When I heard the news, it felt personal. Not because a distributor disappeared, but because another system that once rewarded expertise is gone. That loss mirrors what I’ve watched happen across publishing for years.

While reality rarely explains itself, stories do by showing us how the chaos and the consequences unfold.

 

Going Through the Motions

In “Once More, With Feeling,” a supernatural force causes the characters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to sing their internal truths out loud. The opening number, “Going Through the Motions,” is Buffy’s confession. She is still doing her job. She is still fighting. But the work no longer feels connected to meaning. She is present in body and absent in purpose.

That song perfectly captures how I feel about my work.

I still make things: books, podcasts, software, small projects, and, most recently, something for authors and publishers (https://wickedlanternstudio.com/). I do the work correctly. I meet requirements. I genuinely care about the end result.

But the environment no longer responds to care. Deadlines matter more than clarity. Metrics matter more than judgment. And AI fills the space that used to belong to expertise. Originality costs time that the system does not reward. The labor continues, but it feels disconnected from outcomes.

The work still matters to me. But the systems around it do not.

 

Something to Sing About

As the episode continues, small actions ripple outward, old tensions surface, and choices once postponed come due. Everyone is caught in the effects of what they didn’t notice, what they didn’t say, or what they thought wouldn’t matter. There is no single villain. The damage comes from choices left unspoken and consequences long delayed.

The music doesn’t resolve anything; it simply exposes the consequences of what has already been set in motion. Everyone is confronted with the outcomes of choices they didn’t fully understand.

Publishing feels similar now. The problem isn’t a single bad actor. It’s a collective decision to value speed over understanding and volume over care. Everyone is participating. No one is fully in control.

Over time, the system eroded. Publishing shifted toward speed and scale. Content was shipped before it was fully understood. Context became optional. Accuracy became negotiable. Experience became interchangeable. The work didn’t change, but the conditions around it did. Care became invisible, then no longer required.

 

Where Do We Go From Here?

The final song comes after the spell is broken. The characters are alive. The crisis is technically over. But nothing is fixed. They stand together and ask what comes next, because survival does not equal direction.

That is where I am.

After decades of building skills, carefully applying them, and watching the institutions that once recognized that effort disappear, I don’t have a clear next step. The old incentives are gone. The new ones don’t reward the kind of work I know how to do well.

I don’t have an answer. I don’t have a framework. What I have is the same unresolved question the episode ends with:

Where do we go from here?