Welcome to the first monthly recap of the DeLouisional Society!

(I plan to post monthly recaps from here on out to help keep you, Dear Reader, updated on what I’ve been up to and any content coming soon.)

For this July 2026 recap, we’ll cover:
1. Recent Content
2. Coming Soon!
3. The Community Growth Plan
4. My Burnout & Recovery
5. Shoutouts!

📰 Recent Content

This month, I posted a few articles:

Fiction Articles:

1. ✉️ My Last Sincerely | A Short Story

   An epistolary short story about a writer losing his mind because he feels disconnected from his readership.

2. ⚔️ Preview: PL4YS | My Play Collection!

   Featuring my beloved comedy play “Lick vs Twiddle", a poetic battle between an explorer and a hungry goblin. (Also published by the Wilder Things literary magazine.)

3. 🍌 Preview: Monkey Business | Chapter 1

   The first chapter of my sci-fi thriller novel about genetically modified apes.

Nonfiction Articles:

1. 🔥 Let’s Recover From Burnout

   A guide on how to identify and recover from burnout.

I also republished my play collection book, PL4YS, with a new and improved cover, and the DeLouisional Society Merch Store is back up and running if you’re interested in some DS apparel!

⏳ Coming Soon!

As for content coming soon, I have 3 updates:

🪦 Run From Grave Acres
My YA horror novella, Run From Grave Acres, will be coming out soon as an eBook. It is about 17,000 words, or 70 minutes of reading, and the beginning of the story will be available to read for free as a post. The rest will be available on Amazon for cheap. Run From Grave Acres is about three Iowan high schoolers who decide to, on Halloween night, visit a farm that’s supposedly still haunted by the slain couple who ran it long ago. Things get a lil’ creepy, to say the least.

📕 Editing! | Refine Your Editorial Workflow
As for my nonfiction book on editing, Editing!, I am still editing it (ironically). I’m not yet sure when it will be out… but I will update you by posting notes as I make progress. (Shouldn’t be more than a few weeks ‘til publication.) The wait will be worth it, I assure you, as the book will allow you to improve and optimize your editing workflow like no other book I’ve ever encountered! (And I know so because man, I’ve read a ton of books on editing!)

📚 A Fictional Series
As much as I love to write nonfiction, I recognize it’d be better to wait to write more writing advice until after I’ve written and published many, many short stories and novels. Therefore, I’ll be transitioning from mostly nonfiction writing back to fiction, and I’ll be doing so with a fictional series. On what exactly, I’m not quite sure yet, but I think it will be my best path forward toward writing full-time and building a loyal audience, as further explained in…

📈 The Community Growth Plan

This month, our Substack community hardly grew in subscribers (+1). I’m looking to turn things up a notch going forward. Not long ago, from May 17th to June 11th, we saw rapid growth from 13 → 35 subscribers (+22), and I’d like our community to grow like that again!

During that period of high growth, I posted about 5 nonfiction articles on writing advice, and I posted about 90 notes on writing advice, writing and reading in general, personal life stuff, and other people’s content.

During this last month of low growth, I posted 4 articles of mostly fiction, and I posted only 13 notes.

Since all of my article posts got minimal engagement (thanks for reading and engaging with them if you did!), it seems that the large disparity in note-posting caused the significant difference in subscriber growth.

Therefore, I’m reinstalling the Substack app on my phone, and I’m committing to posting more notes again—at least 1-2 solid notes per day of my usual, positive and helpful note content. This increase in notes should reach new readers and grow our community bit-by-bit, one like-minded person at a time.

⚠️ The DeLouisional Society “Bottleneck Audit”

Last week, I performed a “bottleneck audit” on DeLouisional Society and my work as an author to determine what might be holding us back. Here’s the conclusion I came to:

“The DeLouisional Society requires either a bigger backlist or a book series to run paid advertisements profitably.”

I will soon have 5 total books available for purchase: Monkey Business, Run From Grave Acres, The Dead Weight, PL4YS, and Editing! However, none of these books form a series, and the first four are only loosely related in that they are all speculative fiction written by me. Therefore, according to my research, it is very likely unprofitable for me to run a paid ad campaign marketing my books, as readers are highly unlikely to purchase multiple loosely related books.

To overcome this bottleneck, I’ll begin writing a series of speculative fiction books as soon as I’m done publishing the two books I’m currently wrapping up. While my currently available 5 books form a solid backlist, a series of closely related novels should allow me to run a paid ad campaign profitably—and such campaigns will bring into our community a significant number of new readers.

In the meantime, I will keep growing our community by posting more notes, publishing more articles, and finishing up the work-in-progress books!

🔥 My Burnout & Recovery

Admittedly, community growth and content progress were slower this month because I got very burnt out trying to hasten my editing of Editing! The project has been difficult to finish neatly, and working on it too much at once left me unable to work well cognitively for nearly two weeks.

Since that forced break, I’ve started writing again (much more sustainably), and I’ve gotten better at prioritizing the deep rest that my body and mind so desperately need.

I am still recovering from burnout, so as I proceed, I must be careful not to overwork and end up so burnt out again!

📢 Shoutouts!

To end off this monthly DeLouisional Society Recap, I’d like to shout out two people:

Firstly, the author who inspired this article’s format: and their July Recap! I recently started reading the first book (free) of their series about a telepathic alien working as a private detective in the 1930s, and I highly recommend you check it out if the premise piques your interest! Thank you, , for doing all of the inspirational work you do.

Secondly, I’d like to thank my dad, , for being the first and so far only paid subscriber of the DeLouisional Society! Every pledge like his brings me one step closer to writing books full-time, and every pledge makes our community that much more capable of growing, supporting others, and improving the world with our creative contributions!

Thank you so much, Dear Reader, for taking the time to read this recap and check up on the state of the DeLouisional Society. I hope to see you again soon.

Sincerely, your writer friend,
LeDavid DeLouis

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Let’s Recover From Burnout

by LeDavid DeLouis

“If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.”
—Banksy

Modern hustle culture encourages us all to work, work, and work—and then work some more—until we arrive at a dream-like state where we can finally relax and enjoy life.

I know because I’ve tried to reach that dream, many times, only to find myself amidst a nightmare riddled with fatigue, apathy, poor sleep, panic attacks, and severely reduced productivity despite working longer hours. (Almost as if I’m a biological human being who requires rest to perform optimally.)

It’s in such a nightmare that I find myself now, as I recently made the mistake of pushing myself too hard for too long, ignoring all the warning signs that stacked up enough to eventually knock me out of the whole dang race. The race that, if sprinted instead of marathoned, results in the very enemy of this here article: Burnout!

Burnout (noun)
Emotional, mental, and|or physical exhaustion from prolonged, mismanaged stress.

(I adapted this definition slightly from that of Psychology Today.)

Common Signs of Burnout

• fatigue and emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion

• cynicism, anger, irritability, headaches, and muscle tension

• anxiety and dread regarding work or responsibilities

• apathy and dissatisfaction

• desire for poor coping mechanisms like drugs, alcohol, and food misuse

• reduced motivation and productivity

If you’re currently suffering from burnout, you should keep a list of your personal warning signs so that you’ll recognize onsets of burnout in the future. For example, here’s a list of my specific signs of burnout:

• face-picking, acne, and eczema flares

• poor sleep and long, unplanned naps during work hours

• procrastination by scrolling and TV binging

• feelings of lack and self-doubt

• urges for relief via alcohol, junk food, and sexual content

• my creative work feels uninspired and forced

• brain fog and trouble concentrating and remembering details

When I notice multiple of these telltale warnings, I know to reassess my workload to avoid the severe consequences of full-on burnout and return to the healthy work cycle.

The Healthy Work Cycle

While burnout results from overcommitment and poor stress management, healthy work balances working with adequate, necessary rest.

1. Plan your work by setting realistic, sustainable goals.

2. Work toward the goals, accumulating stress.

3. Rest to offload the accumulated stress…

(Note that good planning is the key to balancing the stress of work and de-stressing of rest!)

The Burnout Cycle

If you don’t manage your stress with adequate rest, you’ll end up severely burnt out and unable to handle even simple, easy tasks.

1. Excitement!
   We set high, unrealistic expectations and overcommit to an unsustainable workload.

2. Stress!
   The stress of the workload quickly accumulates, and we push through warning signs to keep up.

3. Burnout!

   The stress eventually debilitates us, forcing us to rest or suffer exponentially worse.

4. Rest!

   We necessarily retreat from our unsustainable commitments to relieve the extreme stress.

Without stress-rest balance, you will, like me, repeat this burnout cycle time and time again, swinging recklessly from high highs to deeply depressive lows.

What follows is an awesome analogy that exemplifies why to embrace a sustainable workload.

The Axe Analogy of Burnout

“If I had 6 hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first 4 hours sharpening the axe.”
—Abraham Lincoln

Imagine that you are a lumberjack with an entire forest of responsibilities to cut down. To do well, you ought to swing your axe when it’s sharp and sharpen your axe when it’s dull.

Burnout results when you try to “get ahead” of yourself by swinging your axe more and sharpening it less, even when the blade is dull. This makes sense to us in the short term because, before your very eyes, you make more progress in less time. Factor in the long-term consequences, however, and you’ll realize that sharpening your axe today will make it much more efficient tomorrow—allowing you to actually get more done in less time, and with less effort. This is especially true when the axe you're working with is so damn dull that it just bounces off of even the thinnest of tree trunks, making little to no progress despite your maximum effort.

If you feel like the following, then your axe is probably…

• Great! → Super Sharp

• Good → Sharp

• Okay → Decent

• Bad → Dull

• Burnt Out → Very Dull

The Burnout Recovery Plan

To recover from burnout quickly, you ought to minimize stress, maximize rest, and add back stressful commitments once you can handle them—once your axe is sharper.

Step 1: Minimize Stress
Write out two columns labeled “Necessary Stressors” and “Ideal Stressors.” Then list all of your stressful commitments in the appropriate column. It’s important to recognize that you are burnt out because you committed to more stressors than you can realistically, sustainably manage. Recovering from burnout requires dropping some commitments to increase necessary rest. Once your stressors columns are complete, delay all Ideal Stressors until you can manage them well.

Step 2: Maximize Rest
With the time, energy, and resources that would be spent keeping up with Ideal Stressors, do more restful activities. Your body will finally process the accumulated stress that should have been offloaded bit by bit during breaks of adequate rest. You can always commit to more once you are well-rested, but it is much more difficult to commit to less when you are severely stressed. That’s exactly why a sustainable balance between stress and rest (a.k.a. an anti-burnout lifestyle) is so important!

Step 3: Balance Rest and Stress
Otherwise, accumulated stress will continue to work against your goals, and you will often be utterly exhausted and overwhelmed, incapable of handling your day-to-day work and responsibilities. (Much like a tired lumberjack swinging away with an axe that’s useless ‘til it’s sharpened.)

Restful vs Stressful Behaviors

Make a list of your behaviors that tend to significantly de-stress or stress you. For example, here are mine…

Restful Behaviors:

• light exercise

• sleeping early, sleeping in, and naps

• meditation, prayer, and journaling

• singing and dancing to music

• eating and drinking healthily

• reading

• listening to educational podcasts

• spending time with family and friends

• frequent outdoor work breaks

• sometimes watching TV

Stressful Behaviors:

• day job duties

• intense exercise

• administrative work like performance reviews, budgeting, paying bills

• ruminating

• arguing

• scrolling or binging food or TV

• sometimes socialization

• sometimes writing, and especially editing

If it is hard to determine whether something is truly restful or stressful for you (like, say, watching a horror movie), then a safe way to find out is to ask yourself: “Do I want to do this right now, and will it leave me feeling better?” Because if you don’t want to do it, or if it will leave you feeling worse, then it’s almost certainly contributing to your burnout.

Alternatively, you could ask yourself: “Does the thought of this behavior make me feel ‘AH!’ like I’m anxious, or ‘Ahhhhh…’ like I’m relaxing?" (Even though I like horror movies generally, they tend to make me quite anxious, so they’re a poor coping mechanism for burnout.)

In Conclusion

We all have some particularly annoying trees in our forests of responsibilities that we’d prefer to chop down soon, but that doesn’t mean we should (stupidly) skip out on sharpening our axe when it comes time to. After all, rest is an idyllic, important aspect of the human condition that we should deeply appreciate. Not neglect or despise, even if hustle culture encourages us to.

So please, Dear Reader: take care of yourself, and rest well.

Sincerely, your writer friend,
LeDavid DeLouis

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You Only Need 1,000 True Fans

by LeDavid DeLouis

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
—Kurt Vonnegut

Many writers mistakenly believe they need to be a New York Times bestseller to write full-time, and that their work needs universal appeal to sell enough copies to support their lifestyle. But in reality, a writer only needs some loyal fans to support their craft, as Kevin Kelly explains in his essay “1,000 True Fans” (which you can read fully at https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/).

Here’s a simple version of the math behind the claim:
A “true fan” is someone who will support you financially so that you can continue to do your work. Let’s say your true fans contribute $100 per year, or about $8.33 per month—less than half of a standard Netflix subscription currently. This is a reasonable amount we can expect a true fan to contribute regularly, so long as you are providing them more than $8.33 in perceived value per month with your content or impact.
If you gather 1,000 of these true fans and maintain them with your work, then they will contribute $100 x 1,000, or $100,000, per year. After subtracting modest expenses, this income provides a living wage with which you can pursue your artistic dreams full-time.

Consider that there are approximately 8,300,000,000 humans on our planet, and that the number of people with whom your work can resonate deeply is growing by about 190,000 (net) people per day. 1,000 true fans is about 0.00001% of the world’s population, or 1 in 8,300,000 people. Limited to America, that’s 0.0003% of all Americans, or 1 in every 342,000.

Chasing current market trends or trying to appeal to everyone’s tastes at once will leave you feeling inauthentic, burned out, and disheartened.

Instead, build up a loyal fanbase and have faith in that “rare but there” portion of the population with preferences like your own: those 1,000 true fans who would absolutely love to support your one-of-a-kind work!

Sincerely, your writer friend,
LeDavid DeLouis

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Editing Kills Chaos

by LeDavid DeLouis

Note: This is a chapter from my upcoming nonfiction guide:
Editing! | Refine Your Editorial Workflow. Enjoy!

Khaoz

“Order is a law of nature; Chaos is the torment of man.”
—antagonistically adapted from Henry Adams

Throughout our universe, there are two opposing forces battling: Khaoz and Order. And as mere mortals, we are caught between them.

Khaoz noun
The natural force and state of disorder, confusion, and unpredictability that causes us harm.

Though this may be the first time you’re hearing of “Khaoz” as I spell and describe it, I assure you that you are already more than familiar with the force because of its many powerful effects on your (and everyone else’s) day-to-day life.

I have carefully chosen to refer to it as “Khaoz” and not the traditional term “chaos” because I don’t want you to think of this force in the traditional sense, as something inanimate and vague. I’d rather you, like me, develop a visceral disgust of Khaoz, so you can better recognize its infinite tendrils of negative influence that permeate our world.

You are alive today because your ancestors tended to mistake a rock for a bear, but never a bear for a rock, because the latter mistake would get them quickly killed. In the same way, I want you to recognize, tangibly, the hungry, dangerous force of Khaoz.

The term Khaoz should sound harsh to you because of the Bouba-Kiki effect, and its spelling should seem disconcerting, like it has been misspelled. I intend these effects because Khaoz ought to be recognized as bad, and something we’re to work against.

Khaoz is both a force and state, and the adjective for it is “khaotik.” A singular instance of Khaoz is a “kain,” and multiple instances are “kainz.” (Notice again how the spelling of kainz may inspire discomfort...) A useful mnemonic to remember this term is: “a pain, a stain, a kain.”

I primarily derived the word kain from Celtic and Welsh traditions, where it means “warrior” or “battle.” In Scottish and Old English, “ane” means “one,” and that denotes that each kain is a single instance of Khaoz. The term is also a reference to the Biblical Cain, whose name in Hebrew is “Qayin”, which means “possession” or “spear.” This Cain was the world’s first murderer, according to the Bible, when he killed his brother, Abel, out of jealousy and anger after God favored the offering of Abel’s best flock over Cain’s crops. The weapon Cain used to slay his sibling is unspecified, but a rock is one of the popular theories.

A khaotik kain is like one warrior of Khaoz in the battle between it and Order, as each kain permanently alters the rest of history and the entire universe—which we believe to be true because of Chaos Theory, a.k.a. “The Butterfly Effect.” Each kain is Khaoz gaining territory, more “possession” of our reality, and thus a kain is akin to a spear-point being driven into each of us.

Examples of Khaoz and kainz you’re familiar with include:

• the 7 Deadly Sins: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, Sloth

• unwanted distractions, procrastination, bad habits

• “Writer’s Block,” typos, imperfections, lies

• disorderly conduct, vandalism, arson, theft, fraud, embezzlement, robbery, DUIs, assault, rape, suicide, murder

• bills, traffic, brain fog, obesity, unwanted fat, rude remarks

• stress, anxiety, depression, self-doubt…

And on and on. If it is generally “bad for you” and your ideal life lacks it, then it is almost certainly Khaoz, khaotik, or a kain.

(In Steven Pressfield’s books, he refers to a similar concept called “Resistance.” Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act also refers to another similar concept that he calls “interference.”)

I encourage you to develop a person symbol for Khaoz and kainz that will resonate deeply with you, whether that symbol be a person, place, or thing. For example, you may personify Khaoz as Christianity’s Satan or Hell, or a monster from literature, like H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu or Stephen King’s IT. The Ancient Egyptians depicted Apophis, a deity of chaos, darkness, and fire that opposed order, light, and truth, as a vicious, colossal serpent. Apophis was fought by their deity Set before Set himself became a god of chaos and deserts, storms, disorder, violence, and foreigners. Norse mythology features Jörmungandr, a.k.a. the apocalyptic World Serpent, who grows so large as to surround the entire world and bite his own tail.

I imagine Khaoz to be an invisible, incomprehensibly demonic and eerie spider titan that crawls along webs amidst the shadows and cracks of our reality, forever vengeful because the universe and life’s existence disrupted its otherwise endless slumber in the perfect, peaceful, primordial abyss. The spider titan speaks in guttural, chittery tongues that appear to our mortal ears sweet and loving, like a siren song drawing us all closer to personal Hells we ourselves create. And we lose a small piece of our higher selves when we inevitably slip-up and follow that song, which guides us like flies to a web waiting to ensnare us, and where the arch-backed arachnid waits to feast on our flesh.

I think of Khaoz to this absurd degree because, while my symbolic concept of the force may be imagined, the consequences and harm of Khaoz are utterly real. And to prevent them, there must be something more tangible for us to fear and fight against.

So give Khaoz an abhorrent face and a body you’ll remember as you go on to kill it.

Order

“Even in perceived chaos, there is order and pattern. A cosmic undercurrent running through all things, which no story is immense enough to contain.”
—Rick Rubin

Thankfully, we have the universal force of Order to defend ourselves from the harm of Khaoz. Order that we may wield or support in this battle of life we live.

Order noun
The natural force and state of organization, understanding, and function that enhances our existence.

The force of Order supports us and our work as a positive, coherent feature of consciousness and life that naturally desires to grow in essence. Like a mother breastfeeding her daughter, or like a father teaching his son to hunt, so that they may all thrive and proliferate as both individuals and a family.

Order wants us to bring about more Order because Order is the preferable state for conscious life, and it is only conscious life capable of discerning the fluctuations of energy and matter in our universe. Naturally, the universe is like one great being sick with Khaoz, and the conscious beings of that universe ought to heal it via Order just as cells of the human body try to heal us of diseases, so that we and all of our cells will more so thrive in our shared being.

(Are we so naive as to believe that we are the highest form of consciousness that exists in the universe when we ourselves are made of trillions of living cells and bacteria, and despite our coming together, much like cells, to form super-human teams, families, corporations, nations, and the human race, all so much more capable of thought, feelings, and actions than us as individuals?… Gee, I sure hope not.)

Unlike Khaoz, I have decided to refer to Order in its traditional form because I wish for it to feel familiar and comforting, and because, likely, you already understand Order quite intuitively. After all, it is Order of consciousness that we tend to chase all day every day, though we may do so incorrectly by falling for the pleasure trap-tricks laid by Khaoz.

The adjective for Order is “orderly,” and instances of Order are “ords.” A useful mnemonic to remember this term is: “an award, an accord, an ord.” I derived the word ord from Latin “ordinem,” which means “row, line, rank; series, pattern, arrangement, routine.” Ord is also an Old English noun that means “point, spear-point, beginning, source, vanguard,” stemming from the Proto-Germanic “uzdaz” that refers to the sharp tip of a weapon, or the edge of something.

As instances of Order, ords oppose kainz, and you may find joy by, like me, identifying and appreciating them in your day-to-day life. For example, you may think to yourself, “Ah, that’s an ord!” when you’re running late to work but all of the traffic lights you encounter turn green before you reach them, or when a friend you’ve been missing unexpectedly reaches out to you, or when a pleasant day’s warm, bright sunshine softens your worries. All of these are tangible instances of the universe physically aligning with your desires in a positive, orderly way!

Other examples of Order and ords you’ll recognize include:

• the 7 Heavenly Virtues: Chastity, Temperance, Charity, Diligence, Kindness, Patience, Humility

• focus, discipline, good habits

• the flow state, improvements, perfection, truth

• laws that effectively prevent human acts of Khaoz

• relief, relaxation, energy, fitness, compliments

• pleasure, safety, happiness, confidence…

And on and on. If it is generally “good for you” and your ideal life contains it, then it is almost certainly Order, orderly, or an ord.

Just as I encouraged you to symbolize Khaoz, I also recommend you envision Order as a person, place, or thing. For example, as the Christian concepts of an all-loving God or Heaven, or the fundamental Stoic principle of Logos. Or Order to you may be the relationship you share with a beloved pet, or your dream life with all things as best as they possibly could be. I symbolize Order as a Heaven within which I, friends, family, pets, and all the other conscious beings of the world are able to thrive and coexist in creative harmony, with ample love, resources, time, energy, appreciation, and a variety of experiences.

Whether such a state of being is physically possible or sustainable in our reality is a matter worthy of deep philosophical contemplation and scientific experimentation. But regardless, we ought to strive to bring such Order about, and to enjoy ourselves on our journey toward that hypothetical destination, because, really, what’s a preferable alternative?

By supporting Order and suppressing Khaoz, we directly enhance our universe and conscious experiences of it.

Khaoz vs Order

Khaoz noun
The natural force and state of disorder, confusion, and unpredictability that causes us harm.

Order noun
The natural force and state of organization, understanding, and function that enhances our existence.

To summarize, both Khaoz and Order are universal forces that permeate our reality, and it is our duty as conscious, creative beings to support Order and suppress Khaoz. Both are subjective—“What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly,” as Charles Addams said—yet meaningful because of their profound effect on the quality of our conscious experiences.

(One may argue that transcending experience itself is more important than supporting Order, but I’d argue that transcendence is also Order, just of the self or consciousness rather than the “external world,” which our consciousness is a part of.)

Here are more examples of Khaoz and Order side-by-side to further solidify the two opposing forces and their aspects in your long-term memory:

Interestingly, Khaoz trends toward a state of perfect Order over great spans of time via entropy, erasure, and ultimate oblivion, assuming that our current understandings of cosmology and the Heat Death of the universe are accurate. As conscious beings affected by dynamic matter, energy, and time, however, we’ll want to maintain a minimal amount of Khaoz to avoid perfect Order, which seems to be a null state devoid of any life or consciousness.

Our Influence

“The task of art today is to transform chaos into order.”
—antagonistically adapted from Theodor W. Adorno

As incredibly capable, conscious beings, our behaviors have widespread effects on the lives of so many others and the Khaoz or Order they too will experience.

For example, consider the self-immolating terrorists who crashed passenger planes into the Twin Towers and injected immense Khaoz, death, and destruction directly into the lives of thousands of victims. Hundreds of millions of people still suffer today because of the tragedy’s lasting grief and horror.

Oppositely, Norman Borlaug, “the father of the Green Revolution,” is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation with his development of semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to world peace by increasing food supply, and in 2009, the Executive Director of the World Food Programme, Josette Sheeran, stated that Norman “saved more lives than any man in human history.”

Recognize for a moment the incomprehensible difference in khaotik and orderly impact these few men had on the world today, especially on the lives of those innocent victims who were forced to plummet or burn, and on the hundreds of millions of beneficiaries who’d have slowly starved or fought to death without Norman’s life-saving agricultural work. These few men’s past actions will continue to ripple out and affect the rest of human history for all-time.

(I have cited two extreme examples, against which you may mistakenly deem editing merely trivial, or even inappropriate… However, it is precisely these extreme benefits of Order or consequences of Khaoz that eventually arise from our cumulative, daily, more mundane behaviors, such as editing.)

…

Now consider your favorite author and the sense of pleasure you experience when reading their works. A skilled author brings Order to our usually khaotik consciousness as we spend hours reading, understanding, and enjoying their writing, to where they may seem like a distant, lifelong friend. That author whose work you love may also be like a friend to millions of others, resulting in an immeasurable, positive impact on the world. An author’s influence, whether beneficial like Borlaug’s or terrible like the terrorists’, also ripples through all the rest of time and reality.

As does, of course, your influence, because any decision you make alters the universe in a manner that physically cannot be undone. You cannot unbrush your teeth, or unsay an insult, or re-eat a meal. “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man,” as Heraclitus said, because the small, seemingly innocuous effects of our behaviors—like brushing our teeth, speaking our minds, and eating our meals—compound, continuously changing us and all of the complex world, similar to how a tiny butterfly’s wing flaps may alter the cascading variables of weather to cause or negate a cataclysmic tornado.

You have the opportunity to flap your wings such that a tornado won’t appear, as you’re able to suppress Khaoz and support Order with behaviors like editing your written works. To carefully curate your writing, refine away imperfections, and purify a piece according to your subjective vision of Order is, therefore, literally life-changing work.

…

How might our world be if no one edited, ever? And how might we get along if our laws, instruction manuals, textbooks, white papers, academic journals, holy texts, masterpieces of literature, screenplays, documentaries, nutrition labels, advertisements, and nonfiction guides had never been edited, or had been poorly edited? Our day-to-day lives would be unrecognizably more khaotik and painful, and so much less civilized and beautiful, without the editing efforts of many.

Thus, I pose to you: As a curative crusader and a literary legionnaire blessed by modern life’s amenities and information access, will you take up this call to cultivate your editorial prowess and kill, word by word, the wicked viciousness of Khaoz that plagues our written works?

Sincerely, your writer friend,
LeDavid DeLouis

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Platonic Idealism

“The first draft of anything is shit,”
and
“All writing is rewriting.”
—Ernest Hemingway

Writing is creation, while editing is curation.
But what exactly does that mean, to “curate”?

The word “curate” shares its roots with the Medieval Latin noun curatus: “the one responsible for the care of souls,” and Old French curacion: “the treatment of illness.” Thus, to curate a written work is akin to caring for its soul and treating its perceived illnesses.

A written work’s conflicting soul and illnesses arise from a discrepancy between what we can possibly imagine and what we’re able to construct in reality. Plato describes this phenomenon in his Theory of Ideas (also known as his Theory of Forms, Platonic idealism, and Platonic realism) as the result of two disparate realms: the day-to-day reality we experience that I’ll call the Physical World, and a higher theoretical plane that is of the timeless, absolute, unchangeable essence of all things, known as the Ideal World. The written work’s soul is its flawless essence that exists only in the Ideal World, and the written work’s illnesses are an inherent (though mitigable) result of its existence in our Physical World, which is a sort of sea of dynamic energy, matter, and time that doesn’t conform well to pure Ideas.

For example, you can easily imagine a perfect circle, or a perfect triangle, because our minds understand the conceptual essence of these shapes. However, a truly perfect circle or triangle has never been brought forth in the material world because of our reality’s limitations. All of our circles and triangles are merely approximate replications of the perfect circle and triangle because our versions are of imprecise energy and|or matter subject to time’s entropy. Another example is beauty, which is an essence that cannot be held in our hands but can be recognized as an essence or aspect of other things. Beauty, therefore, is a perfect, imaginary Idea which physical things seem to possess or lack. Lastly, think of a dog. Any dog you know in the real world is, in some manner, distinct from every other dog in the world. And yet, all dogs share some fundamental “dogness,” whether the dog is an Armant, a Bully, a Chihuahua, or a Zerdava. Do you consider coyotes and wolves, in essence, to be dogs too?

There exists in the Ideal World an Idea of what our written work would be if it were perfect, according to our individual wishes (which also change as we do). And then there exists the written work in reality, with its flaws we wish to fix. Editing and curation are important because they are the means by which we take our imperfect work and make it less flawed, to make it just a little more like the perfect, Ideal version that only exists within our conscious mind.

…

Quality vs Quantity

“It is quality rather than quantity that matters.”
—Seneca

“Excellence comes when we balance quality with quantity.”
—Amit Ray

Imagine that your written work is not a collection of words and phrases on pages. Instead, think of it as a personal museum of rocks and minerals you collected by hand. Which of the two following museums would you prefer?

On your first attempt, you decide to hoard every rock and mineral that you ever encounter to build the world’s most comprehensive collection. After many years of collecting, you succeed according to that metric, and your museum thus contains seemingly infinite sorts and pieces of rocks and minerals. It contains adakite, agpaitic rock, andesite, alkali feldspar granite, ankaramite, anorthosite, aplite, argillite, arkose, anthracite, amphibolite, adamellite, appinite, aphanite… Well, I won’t bore you with an entire list, but if you can imagine a rock or mineral, you’ve got it somewhere there in your museum in equal amounts to its natural abundance. Accordingly, if you took all of your rocks and minerals and put them into one large pile, you’d have a monotonous mountain of gray, black, and tan gravel with very rare exceptions hidden throughout it. In other words, a handy resource for a construction site.

Now imagine that all the rocks and minerals are returned to the earth so that you can begin again, and that this time, you decide to carefully curate (or edit) what to keep, what to leave. After many years of re-collecting, you have a much smaller museum inventory, but each piece is unique and more meaningful to you.

Displayed atop a row of authentic Ancient Roman marble pillars holding clean, protective glass cases with velvet cushion bottoms are…

• A small but brilliant diamond, clasped by your grandmother’s wedding ring.

• A handful of pristine birthstones sitting together, one for each of your family members.

• A gold coin that originated from a friend’s Olympic medal.

• A neat tray featuring all of the mineral sources of periodic table elements.

• A lightning-formed fulgurite, like a thunderbolt’s shadow you can wield with both hands.

• A skipping stone saved from the waterfall where you proposed, or were proposed to…

Such pieces go on and on—though you have only a few dozen rather than the messy heap of the indistinguishable thousands that were your first museum attempt.

This second, smaller collection seems a fine mineral menagerie worthy of bodyguards, public appreciation, and maybe even admission fees—even though it objectively contains so many fewer pieces.

When you write and edit a written work, you’re choosing between these two extremes, to some degree, with your collecting of words and phrases instead of minerals and rocks. Your duty as an editor is to simply weigh each word, each sentence, each aspect of the work like you would a rock or mineral in hand, and to ask yourself: “How much do I dislike, like, or love this? Is this worth carrying, or worth its space and attention among the rest? Will this strengthen my collection, or will this just dilute it? Will this become a distraction, a focal point, or a complement to another piece? And will this require polishing before presentation?”

Since writing and editing are subjective, the answers to these key questions will come to you more effortlessly with practice, as you continue to define and refine your tastes and standards, and as you learn to better envision and replicate the perfect, theoretical versions of your written works. Only by doing this duty of editing and curating our initial, lackluster attempts at written works can we treat their illnesses, discover their ideal aspects, and bring forth their glorious souls.

Sincerely, your writer friend,
LeDavid DeLouis

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You Should Serialize Your Nonfiction

by LeDavid DeLouis

If you’ve ever written nonfiction, then you know it can be a long, hard, lonely ordeal without an end in sight. That’s why so many of us writers start a nonfiction piece, like an entire book, only to quit after we’ve sunk even days upon days into carefully crafting it.

I myself am at exactly that point—the dreadful “belly of the beast” middle—where the work is more difficult than ever. However, I refuse to quit! Instead, I’m pivoting to the process I outline in this short essay, which makes producing nonfiction much simpler and can actually result in a higher-quality manuscript. The serialization of nonfiction: why you should probably do it too, and how to do so effectively.

⚠️ Warning: ⚠️
(If you wish to serialize your nonfiction before publishing it traditionally, make sure to research the potential consequences of invoking your first publication right!)

Our duty as writers is pretty straightforward when we break it down. Essentially, we must write, edit, and publish. And if we do that enough over time, then we improve, and society might even pay us a little here and there to keep us keepin’ on.

Serialization is simply taking that three-part workflow and shortening it, from the length of an entire book to just one chapter, to reap many benefits. Whereas a less informed writer might struggle to write, edit, and publish 25,000 to 100,000+ words cohesively all at once (which I’ve found to be extremely difficult and complex, at times), a writer who takes advantage of serialization can write, edit, and publish that same book (or a better version of it) in much smaller, more manageable and potent portions. Like, say, 10 chapters of 2,500 words each, or 25 chapters of 4,000 words each, depending on the desired length of the final manuscript.

Assuming you decide to serialize, here are the benefits you can expect:

• Progress: If life prevents you from finishing your book, or if you change your mind about finishing it, then you will still have produced and made available some high-quality standalone essays.

• Simplicity: Dividing the work of the whole book into smaller portions simplifies your tasks and ensures that each chapter is useful even when isolated.

• Motivation: Your immediate finish line (“finish this essay” vs “finish this book”) is much closer and more attainable, increasing your motivation and focus.

• Professionalism: Writing, editing, and publishing more frequently can keep you on schedule and counteract perfectionism and the fear of criticism.

• Feedback: You can get feedback to implement before the book’s release, and you can see how your target market responds to your content.

• Variety: Switching between writing and editing frequently prevents your writing work from getting stale and boring (which often makes me fall out of love with even my passion projects!)

• Appreciation: Serializing doesn’t deprive your fans, friends, family, and wider audience of your content for weeks to months or longer! That is, unless you spend time and energy on additional content that, likely, would be better directed toward your book.

• Loyalty: Furthermore, your serialized content rewards your most engaged fans and frequent readers with early access to your newest writing—which makes them more loyal and strengthens your relationship with them!

  (Speaking of that… I greatly appreciate you reading this very essay, Dear Reader my friend!)

If you’re at all like me, then serialization seems 100,000% more appealing than trying, and seriously struggling, to write an entire nonfiction book all at once, utterly alone. That’s why I developed this simple step-by-step system to serialize your nonfiction book with minimal hassle:

The Nonfiction Serialization System

1. The Preparatory Work: If you don’t know yet what your nonfiction book will be about, then you can save yourself a ton of hardship by determining that now. I recommend writing an outline that includes both the overall goal for your book and a list of all of the topics you’d like to cover. Ask yourself, “What things do I want to teach my reader?” and list everything that comes to mind, even if you won’t use it all. I also like to outline my books by looking over comparable titles’ table of contents and “stealing like an artist” the best topics that I missed during my brainstorming session.

2. The Primary Workflow:

• WRITE one chapter as a standalone essay (short & simple = great!)

• EDIT that essay ‘til it’s ready for serial publication (like a Substack post)

• PUBLISH your essay for your audience, to grow and get feedback!

3. The Book Publication: Once you’re done writing, editing, and publishing all of the standalone chapters of your book, collect them, add any necessary transitions or supplemental material, and implement feedback. Then you’re ready to self-publish or ship your manuscript off to an editor! (Just make sure to remove the posts of the individual essays if they interfere with the book’s publishing rights.) If you’re able to make it this far, then you’ll be way ahead of the approximately 97% of writers who start a book but don’t finish. Likewise, you’ll be among the best of the very best because each of your chapters was strong enough to stand alone, you served and grew your audience, you received feedback, and, likely, you enjoyed the work much more by breaking it up into smaller, less stressful pieces!

With the entire step-by-step nonfiction serialization system laid out, along with the list of serialization benefits, I wish you, Dear Reader, the best of luck with your nonfiction writing, editing, and—hopefully serial—publishing! And if you appreciated this content or have a critique, please let me know with a comment, as I’d love to hear what you think!

Sincerely, your writer friend,
LeDavid DeLouis

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I hesitate to tell you within the context of this editorial guide that editing is unimportant… but there is some truth to it.

In fact, I didn’t even edit this book! (I’m joking, of course.)

In all seriousness, though, editing isn’t everything. A prerequisite to editing is to write or create, and sometimes, that alone is enough.

Imagine you have a young daughter who brings you a schooltime doodle. To love, appreciate, and display it on the kitchen fridge, do you need to critique the piece? Should your daughter have to put it through a revisional workflow to tweak the composition, solidify the lines, or try again not with crayons but markers or paint to enhance its saturation?

Or imagine that a loved one struggling with an addiction came to you for advice. Should you, before uttering a word, fully formulate, transpose, filter, and alter your thoughts such that when you speak, they’ll have maximal effect? After all, you’re trying to help them the best you can… but I bet you’ll prove a more effective, loving communicator if instead, you simply speak candidly, and compassionately, from the earnest depths of your heart.

Editing is unimportant sometimes, in cases like these, and that’s because editing can, at times, come between us and the content and|or our fellow people.

Editing one of your written works thoroughly may be one of the most rewarding actions you may ever undertake. And yet, many writers prove successful despite not editing (or at least, despite not editing in the traditionally understood sense). If other writers can achieve great success with little to no editing—though it is admittedly rare—then you can, too.

There’s no law of physics that necessitates editing, just as there is no scriptural commandment that says: “Thou must edit until at least the triplicate draft, or thou will forever burn in the inferno below!”

However, if you want to edit minimally without just “pushin’ shit,” you still need to work hard.

Writers who’ve succeeded with little to no editing were able to do so because, in most cases, they had years or decades of previous experience often reading, writing, receiving feedback, and, usually, editing. These literary activities differentiate our neural circuitry, develop into habits, and provide us an invisible wealth of knowledge that resides within our subconscious. The writers who’ve succeeded despite editing little or not at all were not able to do so because they were geniuses; they succeeded as a result of all their past practice and repetition of writing and editing.

They day-by-day developed a critical intuition—much like a sixth sense—that they could use in parallel simultaneity with their creative side.

A novice writer without that well-developed intuition may try to edit while they create, and likely, they’ll feel like they're trying to drive a car with one foot planted on the gas and the other stomping on the brakes. Lurching along awkwardly, uncomfortably, ineffectively. The novice writer would do much better to simply drive ahead, with steady progress, with a foot off the brakes unless a severe crash is imminent. Afterward, they can reflect on their mistakes and coolly return to where they started and retrace their route, cleaning up any messes they made along their first pass.

A more experienced writer, however, may be more like an F1 driver, with an F1 car that has an incredibly powerful acceleratory engine and braking system. The experienced writer may choose to fly along, switching rapidly between driving fast and breaking hard, seamlessly, with expert, nearly-automatic precision, to race to the finish line as efficiently and safely as possible. Of course, they could return to the start and clean up their messes too, but they may also have little to no messes to clean up because of their exceptional experience. They might be better off simply moving on to a new track, with new difficulties, than taking extra time to more deeply study or fix the relatively few mistakes that they just made.

There are endless examples of experienced writers doing so.

For example, Agatha Christie (“The Queen of Crime,” author of And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express) wrote Absent in the Spring in only three days, under her pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and she said she made only “tiny” changes to the original draft.

Isaac Asimov (“The Father of Robotics,” author of Foundation and I, Robot) is one of the most acclaimed and prolific writers in human history, and he claimed that his first drafts were essentially the same as his final copies, with only an estimated 5% of his text being changed. Any of his erratic keystrokes or spelling errors were left to copy editors.

Robert Heinlein (“The Dean of Science Fiction Writers,” author of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers), a contemporary of Asimov, felt similar, as he advocated for “Business Rule 3” in his essay “On Writing Speculative Fiction.” “You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.” He believed that editing could easily “kill the soul,” and he often submitted his first drafts unedited.

Eric Stanley Gardner (“The Fiction Factory,” author of the Perry Mason series) often dictated his novels to a team of secretaries because it was faster than typing, and he’d often complete the “writing” of a full novel in only a few days, immediately moving on to the next.

Mickey Spillane (“The King of Pulp Fiction”) considered his work a commodity that hardly required revision, so he barely edited beyond basic corrections. He finished his widely considered best work, I, the Jury, in only 9 days.

Please, allow me a couple more examples to drive this point home: you can eventually succeed with minimal editing.

Walter B. Gibson, (“The Wizard of Words,” author of 300+ Shadow novels) wrote about 1,660,000 words per year, or about 4,400 per day, typing so fast and consistently that he had to bandage his bleeding fingers to keep going. He often didn’t edit at all, moving from the end of one novel to the beginning of the next, though he sometimes took a few days off for his hands to recover.

Frederick Faust (“The King of the Pulps,” known primarily for his Western stories under his pseudonym, Max Brand) wrote over 30,000,000 words in his career, typing up to 10,000 words per day—hey, that’s also my personal record!—and almost never editing his prose, though he meticulously edited his poetry.

And last but certainly not least, Harlan Ellison (the leader of “New Wave” speculative fiction, and the winner of 8 Hugo Awards, 4 Nebula Awards, 5 Bram Stoker Awards, 2 Edgar Awards, and 2 World Fantasy Awards, among others) sometimes performed his writing in the windows of bookstores, taking a prompt from the audience (once a prompt from Robin Williams) and typing a complete short story with his type writer in one sitting. Then he’d take the pages to the window as he finished them, and some went on to win major awards without a single edit. He thought that if a writer was sufficiently skilled and “in the zone,” the first draft should be the final draft, and he famously wrote his masterpiece, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” in a single night and published it with almost no changes.

There are countless more instances of individual works that had massive literary and cultural impact despite having little to no editing, from Anne Frank’s Diary and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Emily Dickinson’s posthumously published poetry.

What matters most is not editing but the prerequisite act of creating something from nothing—the act of actualizing art, which begins in the abstract, metaphysical realm and ends here, in the physical, tangible world.

Editing is arguably the most fundamental tool that the writer may employ to improve their writing—but it isn’t everything.

Because editing isn’t even always necessary, as I’ve shown. Rather, editing’s utility depends on the writer’s skills, and the goals and|or purpose of their work.

I hope you enjoyed this rough sneak peek at my next book, comin’ soon! Happy reading and writing!
—LeDavid DeLouis

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