For the misfits, the ones who create instead of follow.
We don’t do idle chatter. We don’t shrink in the face of noise.
The Standout Creatives Manifesto

That’s what this place is about. But it didn’t start that way.

This publication was formerly called Standout Authors.

It made sense at the time. I was helping writers with their books, launch projects, and systems around their creative work. The audience was clear. The message was focused.

But something kept happening.

The people showing up weren’t just authors. They were writers, designers, entrepreneurs, photographers, podcasters, and people who didn’t even consider themselves “creatives”.

They all had one thing in common: they were people trying to figure out how to do work that actually matters to them. Not in a, I am trying to change the world way. In a, I finally discovered what kind of life I want to live way.

Underneath almost every conversation was a bigger question than “how do I market my book.”

It was: how do I build a life I actually want?

That question is what this publication is really about. So it’s time to evolve. Standout Authors is now The Standout Creatives (which also happens to be the name of one of my podcasts). It’s a broader home for anyone doing creative work and trying to build something meaningful around it.

That doesn’t mean I’m no longer working with authors. In fact, that means I get to work with more types of authors.

A Little About Me

My name is Kevin Chung.

For 17 years I had a stable job, my dream house, and a life that looked great on paper. I was also a designer, a marketer, a podcaster, and someone who kept telling himself he’d get to the creative work someday.

Someday kept getting delayed.

On Valentine’s Day 2025 my wife Anita and I sat at a Mexican restaurant, while everyone around us had a romantic evening, and made a list that changed our lives. Six months later we sold our house, sold most of what we owned, and moved to Costa Rica.

I’m not telling you to move to Costa Rica.

I’m telling you that the life you actually want is closer than it feels and the creative work you keep putting off is exactly what leads you there.

That’s what this publication is about.

Where Are You Right Now?

You feel the gap but haven’t made the leap yet.

You’ve built a life that looks right on paper. Stable job, decent money, all the things you were supposed to want. But something feels hollow. You know you’re capable of more. You just haven’t figured out what more looks like yet.

My mission and creative manifesto for ’s Global Zine Project:

The Standout Creatives

The Standout Creatives Manifesto: Your Art, Your Way

Read more

a year ago

I used to hide from my creative potential, now I’m going all in on it:

The Standout Creatives

Why I Hide

Thanks to Bridget Baker and her Write Sh*t Mondays for the prompt…

Read more

2 months ago · 12 likes · 14 comments · Kevin Chung

I was on my friend Christi’s podcast where I talk about what living a creative life really looks like:

The Standout Creatives

What Building a Creative Life Actually Looks Like Right Now. My Interview with Christi Johnson

Read more

5 months ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Kevin Chung

You’ve decided something needs to change

You’re in the middle of it. Maybe you’ve already made a bold move or you’re about to. Either way the old life isn’t working and the new one isn’t fully built yet. You need both inspiration and practical help.

Why your creative dreams are worth pursuing:

The Standout Creatives

Why Your Unfulfilled Dreams Are the Biggest Risk

Standout Authors: A Standout Creative Business Publication is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

Read more

5 months ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Kevin Chung

Why I started Standout Reinventions:

The Standout Creatives

Introducing Standout Reinventions: Unless You're Flying Through Space, You're Ready.

It’s never too late to get started…

Read more

3 months ago · 9 likes · 10 comments · Kevin Chung

The beginning of my series talking about my move from Florida to Costa Rica and the foundation for my upcoming memoir:

The Standout Creatives

We Weren’t Unhappy But We Left Anyway

We weren’t burned out. We weren’t lost. But something didn’t feel quite right anymore. On paper, our life in Florida looked solid—steady jobs, a house we’d made our own, routines that worked…

Read more

a year ago · 9 likes · 9 comments · Kevin Chung

You’ve made the leap and now you need to build

You’ve committed. Now you need to finish things, show up consistently, and build systems around your creative work so it actually sustains you.

Advice on how to stop censoring yourself and let your creativity guide you:

The Standout Creatives

Take it or leave.

“Just give up, it’s shit…

Read more

3 months ago · 7 likes · 3 comments · Kevin Chung

How to transform your quirks into a superpower:

The Standout Creatives

Beyond the Manuscript: How Self-Published Authors Can Transform Quirks into Profitable Books

Photo by Samantha Hurley…

Read more

a year ago · 3 likes · Kevin Chung

I am amplifying voices who usually don’t get the spotlight. These people have made the leap, see how:

The Standout Creatives

Standout Authors Unbound: Amplifying Underrepresented Voices

Standout Authors Unbound amplifies the voices of underrepresented writers and indie authors to disrupt an industry that rewards conformity over authenticity…

Read more

8 months ago · 9 likes · 8 comments · Kevin Chung

Subscribe now

What We’re Building Here

The Standout Creatives explores creative work that matters and building a life that matches. Everything I do can help you on your creative journey.

Standout Authors Unbound

Learn from the writers and indie authors who have made it through the trenches and see how their journeys can help you on yours.

Standout Reinventions

Learn from others who have reinvented themselves and see how you can live the life you’ve been dreaming of.

Standout Creatives

Learn how other creatives stand out in a world that is trying to make us all shrink and see how you can standout as a creative.

We Are All Creative (Updated Version Coming Soon)

52 weeks of inspiration showing you can live your best creative life.

Untitled Memoir (Coming Soon)

The story about how my wife and I sold everything, left Florida, and moved to Costa Rica to build the creative life we always dreamed of and see how the lessons I learned can help you through your creative journey.

Stay Connected

The Standout Creatives is a place to help you stop living by default and start building the life you actually want to live.

Become a paid subscriber to access *Creativity Parties (coming soon), early releases of my upcoming books, and honest writing about what it actually takes to build a creative life by design.

Subscribe now

Note: This is not a hustle culture publication. You will not find advice about posting seven times a day or optimizing your personal brand for maximum engagement.

What you will find is honest writing about creativity, reinvention, and what it actually takes to build a life the life you actually want.

If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re in exactly the right place.

*Creativity Parties are low-pressure gatherings where creative people reconnect with their work, connect with other amazing creatives, break through roadblocks, and actually have fun doing it.

Standout Authors Unbound amplifies the voices of underrepresented writers and indie authors to disrupt an industry that rewards conformity over authenticity.

What if you knew exactly what you were supposed to do with your life, and the hardest part was just waiting long enough to do it?

made the decision to be a writer when he was eight years old. He read a book called The Orphan Boy and something clicked into place.

He self-published his first two novels, learned the craft the hard way, collected rejections, and kept going anyway, because for Kern, being an author wasn’t the end of his aspirations. Being a traditionally published author was.

In this conversation, Kern talks about what it really takes to grow as a writer, why self-publishing was one of the best decisions he ever made, and what the publishing industry actually responds to, because it’s probably not what you think.

Highlights

Rejection is part of the education.

Most people treat rejection like a stop sign. Kern treats it like a step in the process. He collected them and kept writing anyway.

He even put himself back through school because an agent took the time to tell him everything he was doing wrong. Instead of ignoring the advice, he leaned into it.

“The very first agent I sent the book out to read the first three chapters, loved it, [so I] sent him the rest of the book. And he signed me in three days.”

Nothing changed except the quality of his writing. That’s it. No new connections. No better timing. No lucky break. Just someone honest enough to tell him he wasn’t good enough yet.

Sometimes progress requires rejection.

The romantic image and the real one.

There’s an image people carry around of what a writer’s life looks like. A lake house. A typewriter. A glass of hard liquor.

But romance and reality have to coexist if you’re going to make writing a career.

“If you do take writing as a career and not a hobby, then it’s a job. So you have deadlines and you have rejections and you have clients and you have editors and you have publishers, agents, and you have to budget and you have to manage your time and manage your money.”

The passion is what gets you in. The discipline is what keeps you there. Knowing the difference between writing from love and writing from commitment is one of the most important things a working author can figure out.

Don’t compare your chapter one to someone else’s chapter ten.

Publishing has a way of making you feel behind. Someone debuts at nineteen and the book takes off. Someone signs with a major publisher on their first query. If you’re not careful, those stories stop being inspiring and start feeling like evidence that something is wrong with you.

“Being very careful not to compare yourself, because… a good portion of it comes down to timing. You don’t know what trend the industry’s on. You don’t know what people’s reading habits are gonna be when you put out your book.”

Timing is real. Luck is real. Neither of them are in your control. What is in your control is the quality of what you’re writing and the decision to keep going. Focus on your path. Build your endurance. Write enough books until things start working out.

Subscribe now

Self-publishing taught him everything traditional publishing assumed he already knew.

Before Penguin. Before Scholastic. Before the agent and the book deals, there were two self-published novels and a crash course in what it actually means to be an author in the world.

“Self-publishing gave me an idea of what it felt like to have a readership, even though it was super tiny. It still gave me an idea of what it meant to satisfy a reader, what it meant to communicate with a reader, how to take criticism, how to market to a specific audience.”

Self-publishing didn’t slow him down. It built him up. He learned how to connect with readers before he had a publisher doing it for him. So when traditional publishing came calling, he wasn’t starting from scratch. He was arriving prepared.

Quality is the only thing that cuts through the noise.

The saturation was already intense before AI. Now it’s something else entirely. And in that environment, the only thing that reliably separates one book from the next is whether the book is genuinely good.

“The main way to separate yourself is through quality. If there’s a surefire way, and I think the foundational way, is to write something that is undeniable. So captivating that people feel like they have to read it.”

Word of mouth is still the most powerful force in publishing. Not ads, algorithms, or a perfectly timed launch campaign. Books move when someone tells people to go read a book. And the only way to earn that is to write something captivating.

That takes time and honesty about where you are in the craft. It takes the willingness to keep getting better even when you think your work is good enough.

Community is what got him across the finish line.

Kern had the manuscript and agent interest. What he didn’t have was the confidence to send his book out. That came when a fellow Canadian author, Fawn Parker, read his first three chapters and told him it was time to send it out.

“She gave me the confidence to really just push it and put that book out. And that’s how I got my first publishing deal.”

All it took was one conversation with someone who believed in the work enough to tell him.

Publishing can isolate you but community brings you back to yourself.

Subscribe now

Your title is marketing. Your cover is marketing. Everything is marketing.

When Kern wrote Is There a Boy Like Me? he was intentional about every single word of the title. He wanted the word boy in there. He wanted a specific reader to pick it up off a shelf and feel like it was written for them.

“Parents were sending me screenshots on social media, DMs with their son holding up the book saying he saw the book in the store and it felt like it was him. He saw himself just on the cover, on the title.”

That’s not an accident. That’s craft applied to marketing. For an author without a massive platform, every element of the book is doing promotional work. The title, the cover, the first line, the back cover copy all pull the right reader in.

Being intentional about all of it, from the very beginning, is what gives an unknown author a fighting chance.

Start talking about your book before you think you should.

Kern has three books coming out in consecutive seasons and he’s been talking about them all year. He doesn’t need a publicist tell him to do it. He understands that readers need time to hear about something, sit with it, forget it, hear about it again, and eventually decide to buy it.

“As soon as you have the idea of it, you should market. As soon as you’ve written something, people should know that you’re writing a book when you’re writing the book. It is really, really, really hard to get a reader.”

There is no such thing as too early. There is only too late. The authors who sell books are the ones who treated marketing like part of the creative process not an afterthought that happens after the manuscript is done.

Start now. Talk about it now. Let people into the process. By the time the book is out, they’ll already feel like they’ve been waiting for it.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Kern Carter has been at this since he was eight years old. Five books done, three more on the way. And he feels like he’s just now hitting his stride.

Your work compounds. Every book makes the next one better. The gap between where you are and where you want to be doesn’t mean your work is bad. It’s just the distance you haven’t covered yet.

“I feel like I’m just getting to my best writing right now. These next three books, regardless of reception, are the best three books I’ve written.”

Nobody told him to keep going. He just did.

If you’re an author with a story worth sharing, leave a comment and tell us about your work. You deserve the spotlight too.

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

What if the book you never planned to write became the business you were always meant to build?

Cathy Derksen didn’t grow up wanting to be an author. She wasn’t a writer. She’s dyslexic. Books weren’t even on her radar, let alone publishing them. But somewhere between a divorce, a career change, two teenagers, and a voice she couldn’t ignore, she ended up in a book. Then another. Then she started making them herself.

Today Cathy has contributed to twenty-four anthologies and created ten multi-author books of her own, giving over two hundred people the chance to become published authors for the first time.

In this conversation, she shares how it all started, what it really takes to coordinate a book with twenty authors from around the world, and why the multi-author model might be the most underrated visibility tool in a creative entrepreneur’s toolkit.

Highlights

The calling doesn’t always make sense. Listen anyway.

Cathy’s first chapter wasn’t planned. It wasn’t strategic. There was a book being put together called Emotional Intelligence, Mental Health Matters and something in her just knew her story had to be in it. She’d just come through a divorce, a complete career change, and the chaos of raising two teenagers through all of it. The dust was barely settling.

“There was just, I describe it like almost like a calling. There was this feeling in me that my story had to be in that book. I wasn’t allowed to say no to whatever this message was inside me.”

She thought it would be a one-time thing. That was her twenty-fourth book ago.

Not every next step comes with a clear plan or a logical reason. Sometimes it just comes with a feeling you can’t shake. The question isn’t whether it makes sense. The question is whether you’re willing to listen.

You don’t have to write the whole book. You just have to write your chapter.

One of the biggest lies the publishing world tells creative entrepreneurs is that becoming an author means writing eighty thousand words alone in a room until something coherent comes out. Cathy’s model dismantles that completely.

“I don’t forget though, my books are all multi-author books. So I’m only writing one chapter.”

One chapter. One story. One slice of your expertise, your journey, your perspective wrapped inside a book with nineteen other voices all pointing toward the same theme.

Subscribe now

Your story is a sample of your work. Treat it like one.

Cathy is deliberate about how she coaches her authors to write their chapters. It’s never just a personal essay. It’s always a combination: your journey, what you learned, and the tools or strategies that can help the reader move forward too.

“Someone reads the chapter, now they feel like they’re connected with you. They feel like they understand more about what you do, why you’re doing it. And then you’ve got that part where you’re giving your tips and strategies, which really is kind of a sample of what you do in your business.”

The reader sees themselves in your story. They trust you because they know you. And then they get a taste of what it’s like to work with you. The chapter does the work quietly, and the right people follow.

The book creates a deadline. The deadline creates momentum.

One of the most unexpected things Cathy sees happen with her authors is what the book unlocks beyond the writing itself. Suddenly there’s a launch date. A real one. And everything that’s been sitting on the back burner, the website, the LinkedIn profile, the social media cleanup, has to happen now.

“There’s a deadline… I need to get my website done. I need to get my social media stuff cleaned up and set up. So suddenly there’s this motivation to get all those things together. And so really what it’s done for their business is that it has accelerated and amplified everything that they were doing.”

A project in motion moves differently than the one that’s always “almost ready.” The book doesn’t just give you a chapter. It gives you a reason to show up fully and a deadline to complete it.

Twenty authors means twenty networks. All pushing towards the same goal.

The visibility math on a multi-author book is something most people don’t think about until they’re inside it. When twenty people from around the world are all promoting the same book at the same time, something happens that no solo launch can replicate.

“You’ve got 20 communities that are now connecting and overlapping and collaborating and tagging and liking and sharing. And so it really does become a wave of activity.”

Cathy’s books have hit international number one bestseller status on Amazon — not because of a massive ad budget, but because of twenty people with twenty communities all riding the same wave at the same time. The key, she says, is being ready when that wave comes. Your website, your profile, your offer all need to be in place before the launch, not after.

Subscribe now

Imposter syndrome shrinks when you’re not doing it alone.

Cathy is honest about what holds most people back from writing their book. It’s not time. It’s not skill. It’s the quiet voice that says who am I to think anyone wants to hear what I have to say.

“For most people, imposter syndrome is one of the big things holding them back. And so when you get started by participating in a multi-author book, now you’re working with a group of people. So you’re all going through that together.”

There’s something about doing a hard thing alongside other people that makes the hard thing smaller. You’re not the only one writing your first chapter. You’re not the only one scared of what people will think. And when the book comes out and someone you’ve never met tells you your story changed something for them, that’s the moment the imposter loses a little ground.

What becomes possible changes everything.

Cathy’s favorite story from her books is about a woman in her seventies who had spent her whole life feeling like an outsider. Too spiritual. Too different. Too much. She did one chapter in Cathy’s first book and got such a response that she couldn’t stop.

“In the three years since that first book was published, she has done two books with me, completed two solo books, and she started a YouTube channel. She went from someone who is just living like… she couldn’t tell anyone what she was really wanting to do — to someone who is now a four times bestselling author.”

That’s not a publishing story. That’s a permission story. And Cathy builds those, one book at a time.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Cathy didn’t plan any of this. Not the first chapter, not the ten books she’s created, not the two hundred authors she’s helped become published for the first time. She just kept listening to the voice that said keep going and built something real around it.

Her work is proof that you don’t need to write the whole book. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need one chapter, one story, and the willingness to say yes to the thing that keeps calling your name.

If you’re an author with a story worth sharing, leave a comment and tell us about your work. You deserve the spotlight too.

If you haven’t seen it yet, talked about her book launch with me and a panel of friends:

She joined us a gain to talk about book journey, launch, and all the lessons she learned.

What if the hardest part of writing your book wasn’t the writing?

spent three decades avoiding the book she knew she needed to write. Not because she lacked the words. She had hundreds of thousands of them. But because the rules she’d absorbed about what a book was supposed to be kept getting in the way of the book she actually wanted to make.

Becky joined us on her publication day to talk about what it took to finally finish it, why she chose to self-publish, and what nobody tells you about the emotional weight of standing up and saying: I made this. Please read it.

Standout Authors: A Standout Creative Business Publication is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Highlights

The book took three months. And thirty years.

Becky is a journalist by training. Two degrees. Two decades of writing for publications, magazines, corporate clients. She knows how to write. That was never the problem.

The problem was the blank page and the belief that a book had to be 80,000 words of long-form narrative before it counted as real.

“A thousand words feels like a long post to me. You want me to write 80k?”

Two things finally broke the logjam. She used AI — not to write for her, but to help her ADHD brain make sense of a decade’s worth of content she’d already created. And she gave herself permission to write the book she actually wanted to read.

Skimmable, visual, and built in Canva.

Once she stopped writing the book she thought she was supposed to write, the whole thing came together in under three months.

The lesson isn’t about Canva. It’s about what happens when you stop letting imaginary rules run the show.

Self-publishing isn’t second best. It might just be better.

For a long time, Becky held a quiet belief that traditional publishing was the only path that really counted. Watching a friend navigate both routes changed that completely.

“I own my IP. I own my book. I get to bet on myself, believe in myself. I get to retain the money that I earn. I don’t have to earn back some advance to prove that it was worthwhile.”

Unless you have the platform that commands a serious advance, self-publishing gives you something traditional publishing rarely offers — full ownership, full control, and the freedom to make every decision yourself.

The rules were always pretend. You just have to decide to stop following them.

Promotion is the part nobody warns you about.

The writing was hard. The backend setup was complicated. But nothing prepared Becky for the emotional labor of the launch — weeks of talking about herself and her book, constantly, to anyone willing to listen.

“For an introvert, for someone who is conditioned as a woman to be small, to not be a burden, to not brag — it is amazing how challenging this period has been.”

This is the part Becky knows well. The part where you’ve made something real and meaningful and then have to stand up and ask people to care about it. It feels like too much. It feels like bragging. It feels like you’re bothering people.

Becky kept going anyway because she believes in the book. And that belief is the only fuel that actually works when the discomfort gets loud.

Subscribe now

You have to talk about your thing until you’re sick of it. Then keep going.

People in Becky’s life were still saying “I didn’t know you were writing a book,” after a month of nonstop promotion.

That wasn’t because of a lack of effort. That’s just how noise works now.

“We are the center of our own worlds, but no one else is. Everyone else has got their own stuff going on.”

The old rule was seven touchpoints before someone takes action. In today’s world, it’s probably closer to five hundred. The goal isn’t to stop when it feels like enough. The goal is to keep going until it actually lands with the people who need it.

Talk about it like your best friend made it. With that same ease. That same pride. Because if you believe in what you built, staying quiet isn’t humility — it’s doing your reader a disservice.

Gamify the process or it will drain you.

Becky built herself a custom interactive dashboard that tracks every podcast pitched, every sale made, every milestone crossed. Check something off and you get confetti. Sell a book and it makes a cha-ching sound.

“I really need some gamification. I need some fun or I will get depleted — because this is a long and hard process.”

For someone with ADHD and executive dysfunction, this is the difference between showing up and shutting down. And it’s a living example of what the book itself is about: building systems that actually work for your brain instead of forcing yourself into ones that never did.

You don’t have to do it the way everyone else does it. You just have to find the way that keeps you moving.

Promotion gets people to your work. Quality gets them to stay.

Becky is clear that the quality of what you write matters. But she’s equally clear that quality alone is not a marketing strategy.

“How many amazing books are out there that no one’s read? Not because they weren’t amazing — but because the author wasn’t willing to get out there and be proud of what they did and proud enough to get up on a soapbox and actually shout about it.”

She frames it as a triangle. Quality is one side. Promotion is another. When those two things come together, the third side becomes possible — the word of mouth, the wildfire, the thing that takes on a life of its own beyond your effort. You can’t control that third side. But you can control the first two.

Do the work. Then show up for it.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Becky’s book is about liberating your business from the rules and systems that were never built for you. And her entire launch was a live demonstration of exactly that.

She broke the format rules. She chose self-publishing. She built her own tools. She pushed through the discomfort of self-promotion and did all of it in a way that actually worked for her brain, her values, and her vision.

“I believe in my book. I wouldn’t have written it if I didn’t. This is part of my legacy. My dream is — what if this book is on library shelves long after I’m dead?”

That’s the kind of purpose that outlasts any launch window.

You can find Becky and grab the book at beckymollenkamp.com/book. And if your library doesn’t carry it yet, ask them to order it in. That one would genuinely make her day.

If you’re an author with a story worth sharing, leave a comment and tell us about your work. You deserve the spotlight too.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

Standout Authors Unbound amplifies the voices of underrepresented writers and indie authors to disrupt an industry that rewards conformity over authenticity.

What if your most winding career path was actually preparing you for your true calling?

didn’t follow a straight line to children’s book authorship.

She was a theater performer, designer, and tech professional. And finally came motherhood, the role that made all the others make sense: storyteller for the next generation.

In this conversation, Vicki shares how every creative detour shaped her voice, why children’s books need both heart and strategy to succeed, and what happens when you’re brave enough to start over in an industry that doesn’t make it easy.

Highlights

Every creative experience becomes material

Vicky calls herself a “serial creative,” and she means it as a strength, not a scattered identity.

Theater taught her character development. Design gave her visual thinking. Technology showed her interactive possibilities. Motherhood gave her purpose.

“I’m a bit of a serial creative. So I ended up here after I had kids of my own and decided I wanted to start writing books. After a long career of doing all kinds of different creative jobs.”

The creative life isn’t about finding one thing and sticking to it forever. Sometimes it’s about collecting skills until you find the project that needs all of them.

Stories always win with kids

Working at Google on products for children taught Vicky something crucial: no matter how sophisticated the technology, kids respond to character and narrative above everything else.

“In our research we saw how much character and story really engaged kids. So we were trying to help kids learn coding or become familiar with technology. but it always came back to story and character.”

This insight became the foundation of her transition. Technology could teach, but stories could transform. And transformation is what children’s books are really about.

From interaction design to children’s books

Vicky’s path from Google to picture books wasn’t as random as it might seem. Her background in interaction design actually prepared her perfectly for children’s literature. This is how she described her path:

“‘Well, we actually have an interaction design role in our consultancy, and we need to design a game. And since you have game design background, why don’t you come in?’ So I ended up getting into interaction design that way.”

Both fields require understanding user experience, engagement patterns, and how to hold attention. The medium changed, but the core skills transferred beautifully.

Subscribe now

Parenthood changes everything

Having children didn’t just give Vicky new subject matter. It gave her new purpose and a completely different relationship with storytelling.

“And I was having kids of my own. I was reading books to them. And so I just thought, I want to make one of these.”

Sometimes the most profound career pivots happen not in boardrooms or networking events, but in quiet moments reading bedtime stories and realizing you want to be the person creating the magic, not just consuming it.

Every experience feeds the work

What makes Vicky’s approach unique is how she weaves her entire professional history into her storytelling. Theater gave her character development. Design taught her visual thinking. Technology showed her interactive possibilities.

“This is what’s amazing about writing is that it kind of pulls from all of your experiences in life. So I feel like every piece of my life has played some role in the books that I create now.”

The creative career isn’t about finding your one thin. It’s about discovering how all your things work together to create something only you could make.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Vicky’s story proves that creative careers don’t have to follow traditional timelines or predictable paths.

If you’re a creative entrepreneur wondering whether it’s too late to pivot, too risky to start over, or too complicated to combine all your interests into something meaningful, Vicky’s story is your permission slip to try.

Ready to share your creative journey? Drop a comment and tell us about the winding path that led you to your current work.

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

In Part 1, talked about MOG antibody disease, Harry Potter smut, and why being yourself is the only filter that matters.

Part 2 is where it where the reinvention gets complicated — the book deal she wants badly, the gurus she’s done with, and what it actually costs to start from zero when you’ve already done it before.

Highlights

Wanting something badly doesn’t make it easy.

Sophia doesn’t pretend the path has been clean.

“I want a book deal so badly. I run into that conflict every single day, every word I write.”

She’s on her seventh novel. She has an agent. A Reese’s Book Club fellowship. Her last query had a 100% request rate. By every measurable standard, she’s at the top of her game.

And she still doesn’t have the deal.

So she asks herself three questions every time: Is it timing? Is it the market? Or do I suck?

She can only control one of those three. So that’s where she puts her energy.

Selling herself was easy, staying not so much.

Sophia can sell. That’s not in question.

She got a diversity scholarship to a counseling psych program. Left. Got a full ride to journalism school in New York. Left that too — after getting so sick from carrying 50-pound cameras as a 5’2” woman with no help that she coughed up blood.

What she took from all of it wasn’t failure. It was proof of concept.

She founded Wise Child Admissions Coaching, got kids into Ivy League schools early, landed a client a $100K scholarship. All because she knew how to get in the room.

“Huge part of traditional publishing — and self-publishing in a different way — is selling. And boy can I sell, baby.”

But she also learned something the pitch workshops don’t tell you.

Getting in the room doesn’t mean they’ll let you stay.

“People over-focus on selling because that’s easy to sell. Pitch workshops. But once you get that foot in the door, it doesn’t mean they’ll allow you to stay in the room.”

“Follow your bliss” is advice from people who can already pay their bills.

Sophia spent thousands on life coaches and guru programs that told her to redefine success.

“Stay away from that whole redefine success thing until you’re actually making money. And then you can start spouting that BS.”

She’s not abstract about it. She has infusion treatments every four weeks. Real bills. Real stakes.

“Only the top people making six figures off their Substack paid subscribers are going ‘follow your bliss, redefine success, stay in your own lane.’ I just want to be like: shut up.”

And the gendered version of it bothers her just as much. Gary Vee drops F-bombs and gives it to you straight. The woo-woo female version wraps the same advice in soft new age language and sells it to women at a premium.

Her actual advice: get your Maslow’s hierarchy first. Then talk about bliss.

Subscribe now

The algorithm is a fickle beast.

Sophia came back to Substack after six years off social media because publishers wanted to see a platform. Not because she wanted to be there.

“I would love to go back to the writing cave — ignore my best friends for a week — but I don’t feel like I can do that anymore.”

She has 15 days to three weeks before she drops out of the Apple and YouTube algorithms. The pressure is real and it pulls directly against the deep uninterrupted writing she does best.

She’s not pretending that tension doesn’t exist. She’s just living inside it and figuring it out in real time.

That’s what reinvention actually looks like from the inside.

Starting from zero is hard even when you’ve done it before.

Sophia has reinvented herself enough times to have a method. She calls it scorched earth: new website, new branding, new taglines, clean slate.

“I need that tabula rasa.”

She had a list of 500 to 600 people from a previous life in new-age astrology and life coaching. Lost it while she was blind and in a wheelchair. And then her ESP shut down her account.

“Constantly feeling like I’m Sisyphus and I’m back at the bottom of the hill pushing that damn boulder up all over again.”

She’s not sure scorched earth is the right method. But half-starts don’t work for her. She needs the blank slate before she can build.

Don’t blame yourself for starting over from scratch. That’s just how some people work.

Your darkest feelings are pointing at something.

Sophia doesn’t care about being positive. She wants you to be honest.

“Bitterness and spite and jealousy have been huge motivators for me. Just being so frustrated at my circumstances and then writing my way through that has fueled some of the most honest writing.”

Your darkest feelings are pointing at something.

“If you can radically accept all of yourself and all of your feelings, then you can accept all of your character’s feelings. And that will make you a stronger writer.”

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Sophia Chang is proof that rock bottom is just a starting point. Aerial acrobat. Wheelchair. Harry Potter smut. Reese’s Book Club fellow.

She’s still aspiring for superstar status. Getting there had nothing to do with being palatable. It had everything to do with refusing to stop.

Got a reinvention story of your own? Leave it in the comments.

Thank you Tomesha Campbell, Steena Hernandez, Meli’s World: Songs & Sketches, and many others for tuning into my live video with Sophia Chang!

Thanks to for the intro!

What if the secret to creative success isn’t your portfolio... but your people?

Melquea Smith is a children’s book illustrator and artist who creates clip art of black and brown kids.

Her journey from side-hustling artist to full-time creative is built on one foundational truth: community changes everything.

In this conversation, Melquea shares why the lone genius myth is killing creative careers, how she’s learned to create her own luck through intentional relationship-building, and what it really takes to survive the marathon of creative entrepreneurship when patience is basically a required skill.

Highlights

The marathon mindset separates survivors from quitters.

Melquea is refreshingly honest about what it takes to make it as a creative.

The glamorous overnight success stories we see on social media? They’re not real.

What’s real is showing up consistently, even when the work feels invisible, even when progress feels impossibly slow.

“I’m learning through all of this is that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And really it’s just like longevity, just outlasting everyone.”

Her story is proof that persistence trumps perfection every time.

Sometimes the only difference between the creative who makes it and the one who quits is one decides to keep going even when it gets hard.

But surviving the marathon isn’t just about persistence. It’s also about strategy.

Standing out means zigging while everyone else zags.

Most creatives hide behind their portfolios, hoping their work will speak for itself.

Melquea took the opposite approach.

She embraces podcasts, public speaking, webinars, workshops, and Instagram Lives. She does all the visibility work that many creatives shy away from.

“Right now I’m in my promotion phase where… people need to know that I exist.”

She understands something most creatives miss: talent without visibility does not get you noticed.

The goal isn’t just to create great work. The goal is to make sure people know your great work exists.

Subscribe now

You can’t be discovered if nobody knows you exist.

Melquea is in what she calls her “discovery phase”—that crucial period where building awareness matters more than perfecting your craft.

Because your ideal clients can’t hire you if they don’t know you’re available.

“It’s just our job as creators and marketers to just remind [people], hey, this exists.”

It isn’t about being pushy or salesy. It’s about consistent, generous visibility that keeps you top of mind when opportunities arise.

The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all. It feels like building relationships with people who genuinely care about your success.

Community amplifies everything you’re already doing.

Melquea has cracked the code on something most creatives struggle with: she doesn’t just create work, she creates advocates.

By building genuine relationships with other creatives and business owners, she’s created a network that does the heavy lifting for her.

“Other people will do that heavy lifting for you. They’ll share your work or repost your work without even asking.”

The magic happens when creatives genuinely support each other’s success.

When you help others win, they remember. When opportunities come up that aren’t right for them, they think of you.

Luck is just preparation meeting intentional outreach.

Melquea believes in making her own luck through relationship-building.

She reaches out to people in her network regularly, follows up consistently, and treats every connection like it could lead somewhere meaningful.

“You just never know what email will land into your inbox or DM on Instagram.”

We should avoid being transactional. We should create opportunities by staying genuinely connected to people.

The creatives who seem “lucky” are usually just the ones who’ve been planting seeds consistently, even when they couldn’t see the harvest coming.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Melquea’s story dismantles the myth that creative success is a solo journey.

Her path from side-hustling artist to full-time illustrator wasn’t built on raw talent alone. It was built on community, consistency, and the courage to be visible when it would be easier to hide.

She reminds us that the creative life isn’t just about making beautiful things. It’s about building the relationships and systems that help beautiful things find their way to the people who need them most.

What’s one way you’re building community around your creative work? Share in the comments.

What if your biggest breakdown became your creative breakthrough?

didn’t plan to become a poet.

Her journey began in beauty marketing. And she wrote consistently but never quite found her voice.

Then illness forced everything to stop.

In that stillness, something changed. Poetry emerged from fragments. Healing became creation. And the beginnings of her book were born.

In this conversation, Maya shares how trauma reshaped her relationship with creativity, why she learned to collaborate with the divine instead of forcing inspiration, and what it really takes to transform personal struggle into art that resonates.

Highlights

Illness can redirect your entire creative path.

Maya thought creativity was linear.

Put in the work. Get the inspiration. Achieve success.

When that didn’t happen, she felt like she was failing.

“Before I got sick, I had a very different relationship to creativity. I thought it was very linear. I thought if you just put in the work and the energy consistently, then you would get the inspiration and you would get the success. And when I didn’t see that happening, I felt like I was failing.”

Then her body forced her to stop.

Sometimes the universe interrupts our plans and we are forced to evolve.

Creativity is collaboration.

Maya discovered something most of us resist.

The best creative work doesn’t come from grinding harder. It comes from learning when to step back and let inspiration flow.

“I now see creativity as much more cyclical. Some days you’re meant to rest. Some days you’re meant to create. And I see it as a collaboration with spirit or the divine.”

She stopped trying to force words onto the page. She started trusting the process instead.

The result was poetry that felt authentic, healing, and deeply connected to something beyond her individual will.

Boredom is where breakthrough lives.

In a culture obsessed with constant motion, Maya found her creative breakthrough in deliberate quiet.

She learned to embrace boredom instead of fearing it.

“Part of my process is making time for boredom. and it’s so hard, you know, just sitting there essentially doing nothing. and I find for me it’s just easy to step outside of the home environment and just be outside, among the trees, among the birds, and just… be still. And that’s actually where a lot of the inspiration came for the book.”

Maya’s experience challenges our addiction to busyness.

Subscribe now

Sometimes others see things we don’t.

Maya didn’t even recognize her fragments as poetry at first.

“Looking back… I didn’t even identify them as poems. I didn’t know what it was. I just kept writing without thinking, okay, this is the first poem of my book and this is gonna be the last... It didn’t unfold that way for me.”

It took less than a year to write the entire collection.

But recognizing it as a book? That required other people.

Friends and early readers saw the potential and provided the external validation that motivated her toward publication.

Recognition led to momentum.

Once Maya committed to publication, everything accelerated.

From winning a scholarship in November to launching her book took less than six months.

“It’s actually less than six months from deciding to publish to now. And I wouldn’t recommend the short timeline.”

Her rapid progression shows what happens when you’ve been doing the internal work.

When you slow down, creativity teaches you to collaborate with the divine, and community helps you recognize what you’ve built.

Things can happen quickly because the foundation was already there.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Maya reminds us that our greatest creative breakthroughs often emerge from our most challenging moments.

Her journey shows what happens when you stop fighting your natural rhythms and start collaborating with them.

If you’re navigating your own creative transformation, share your story in the comments.

Standout Authors Unbound amplifies the voices of underrepresented writers and indie authors to disrupt an industry that rewards conformity over authenticity.

What happens when the stories you grew up without finally get written?

didn’t set out to change the romance genre. She just wanted to read a book where people like her existed. And when she couldn’t find it, she wrote it herself.

In this conversation, she shares how a bookmobile in rural Louisiana sparked a lifelong love of reading, why representation in romance is about more than diversity checkboxes, and what it really means to stop writing for the white gaze and start writing for yourself.

Highlights

A bookmobile that started everything.

Thien-Kim grew up in a small Louisiana town where her parents couldn’t afford to buy books.

Then one day, a library on wheels pulled up in front of her elementary school.

“I was just like, I could take these home and read them. I was flabbergasted.”

That moment cracked something open. She started journaling. Writing strange stories in middle school. And eventually, after becoming a mother and devouring romance novels to survive the sleep-deprived haze of early parenthood, she realized something was missing.

There were no books featuring people of color.

So she decided to write one.

When Thien-Kim started writing, she assumed that reading hundreds of romance novels meant she already knew how to write one.

She was wrong.

“The audience knows that there’s a happy ending, but you have to make the journey feel worth it. You got to put them through their ups and downs. And I think that’s the hardest part.”

A lot of writers think the genre gives them a shortcut. It doesn’t. It just means the bar for the emotional journey is that much higher.

Community is what gets you to the finish line.

Thien-Kim didn’t write her first publishable book alone.

She found a romance writing community online, joined writing sprints on Zoom, and leaned on beta readers who gave honest, generous feedback.

“When I got my book deal, everybody in this community was so excited for me. It wasn’t the, oh my gosh, when is it going to be my turn? They’re all just… a rising tide lifts all boats attitude.”

That’s the kind of community that changes everything. Not the ones that celebrate only their own wins. The ones that celebrate yours like it’s their own.

Subscribe now

You don’t need to write for the white gaze.

By her third book, Something Cheeky, Thien-Kim had stopped asking herself whether her work would be palatable enough for readers who didn’t share her background.

“I’m just like, I don’t give an F what people think. It’s going to be so Asian. If you don’t know something, you can Google it.”

That decision made Something Cheeky the book she’s most proud of. Because when she stopped holding back the most specific, most personal, most true parts of herself, that’s when the writing came alive.

The specific makes it universal.

Thien-Kim describes something in this conversation that most writers get backwards.

She intentionally creates communities of color in her fiction because she never had that growing up. And when you’re writing a scene set in New Orleans, or at a shared family-style meal, you don’t have to explain the cultural details to the reader. You just trust them.

“When I’m with a group of Asians, I feel like we don’t have to explain why we love food so much or why food is such an important way to share, not just sustenance, but connection and community.”

That specificity is the thing that makes readers feel most seen.

Subscribe now

Word of mouth beats the algorithm.

Thien-Kim is refreshingly honest about social media.

She’s cutting back because it costs more energy than it returns.

“The word of mouth is probably the best way to market your book. And it doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything because you’re just doing one-on-one.”

She’s prioritizing in-person connection, local writing community, and showing up for other authors in the ways people showed up for her. That’s her version of marketing. And it sounds a lot more sustainable than chasing the algorithm.

Embrace your weird.

When I asked Thien-Kim what authors can do to stand out, she didn’t hesitate.

“Write your weird. Embrace your weird. What makes you special? What makes you different? Put that in your writing.”

Her challenge to writers: make a list of everything you love and think makes you weird. Then figure out how many of those things you can put in your next book.

The more you lean into what makes you you, the more your writing becomes something no one else could have written.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Thien-Kim Lam writes romance that says: you deserve to see yourself in these pages.

Her journey from a bookmobile in Louisiana to three published novels with HarperCollins is proof that the most personal stories are often the ones that reach the furthest.

If you’ve been holding back the most specific, most honest, most weird parts of yourself in your writing, this episode is your permission slip to stop.

And if you’re an author with a story to tell, leave a comment and share your work with us. You deserve the spotlight too.

Thien-Kim’s “Pho-King Awesome” shirt and other merch: https://chopstixlove.threadless.com/

Standout Reinventions is where I document what starting over actually looks like from my move to Costa Rica, to the memoir I’m writing about it, and the conversations with creatives who’ve reinvented themselves too.

wanted to be the most famous person on earth since she was three years old.

She became an aerial acrobat, a working actor, and one of the world’s first iPod silhouettes.

Then MOG antibody disease started firing lesions through her central nervous system. Her vision whited out. Her legs gave out. And somewhere in the middle of all that, she started writing Harry Potter fan fiction.

Sophia definitely lives up to her title of reinventor: she’s a Reese’s Book Club Lit Up Fellow, podcast host, and self-described purveyor of Books, Biceps, and no BS.

In this chat she talks about what real reinvention looks like when it isn’t a choice. When it’s just what you do to survive.

Highlights

Reinvention is a survival mechanism.

Sophia doesn’t romanticize the pivot.

“Reinvention isn’t any of this for me. For me, it has always been forced change. A lot of us are forced into reinventing ourselves by circumstance.”

Before the disease she was a certified pole fitness instructor, a screen actor, and an aerial acrobat.

Then her vision started whiting out, a little more each day, until it was gone. Then came the wheelchair and the question nobody wants to answer: is this my life now?

For Sophia, rock bottom was just the starting line.

Smutty Harry Potter fan fiction led to a Reese’s Book Club fellowship.

When her eyesight started coming back, Sophia didn’t reach for literary fiction. She wrote spicy fan fiction because it was the only writing that felt freeing.

The Harry Potter angle started when she realized there were no Asian characters other than Cho Chang. So she created another Chang and built out the lore from scratch.

Eventually the story drifted so far from the source material that she realized she was writing her own novel.

“I created so much original stuff that I realized this is no longer fan fiction. I’m writing my own.”

That manuscript beat out over 800 applicants for the Reese’s Book Club fellowship.

Being yourself attracts the right people.

After six years completely off social media, Sophia came back to Substack.

When new subscribers arrived from a summit presentation, she tried catering to them. She answered every question and adjusted her tone.

They still unsubscribed.

“If I’m going to get unsubscribers, I would rather go down in flames. I would rather lose them because I was myself unapologetically.”

She decided if someone can’t handle one honest episode, they’re not going to buy her book anyway. So she leaned into her full self.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

What if the book you were meant to write has been sitting inside you for years and all you just needed someone to help you bring it out?

That’s the question underneath everything Anita Henderson does.

She calls herself the Author’s Midwife. And the more she explained what that actually means, the more I realized how perfectly it fits. She doesn’t write your book for you. She helps you bring it into the world the right way.

In this episode, she walks us through everything that means.

Highlights

The myth that almost every first-time author believes.

You write a great book. You upload it to Amazon. It finds its readers.

If only.

Anita has spent nearly 15 years watching that assumption cost authors dearly. Good content, she’ll tell you, is the floor. Not the ceiling.

“The core of a great book obviously is the content. If you don’t have that in there, then a pretty cover can only take you so far. But it is a compilation of inputs that makes a book really good.”

Structure. Story. Strategy. All three have to show up together. And most first-time authors only think about one of them.

What readers expect, even when they don’t realize it.

Here’s something Anita said that reframed how I think about nonfiction entirely.

Readers come to a book with invisible expectations. They expect the structure to make sense. They expect chapter two to follow naturally from chapter one. They expect you to close the gap between the lesson you promised and the one you actually delivered.

And if you don’t give them that, they feel it. Even if they can’t name why.

“You can tell me your 12-point process all day long, but if I can’t follow you and the structure isn’t there, then I’m confused.”

That confusion is the thing between your reader and your message. Remove it, and something opens up.

The moment she stopped working for other people for good.

Anita went back to corporate twice.

She’s honest about it. Cash flow dried up, the business got hard, and corporate looked safe. Both times she went back, and both times she left again.

The second exit was different. She hired a business coach who asked a simple question: what do you love? Writing and books, Anita said. And the coach told her something she hadn’t considered.

“You know, there’s people who teach other people how to write their books. That’s a thing? An author coach?”

She looked into it. She networked. She learned the space. Then she left corporate for the last time and built Write Your Life into what it is now.

Sometimes the business you’re meant to run is sitting right there in the thing you already know how to do.

Subscribe now

Why panicking is the most expensive thing you can do.

When revenue slows down, the instinct is to add things. New offerings. New platforms. A pivot. Something. Anything to make the numbers move.

Anita calls it out directly.

“We panic by adding new products. We panic by adding new platforms. We pivot when we shouldn’t, when we should stay focused on the thing we do best.”

And here’s what that panic actually does. It confuses the market. It confuses potential clients. And it closes off the momentum you spent years building.

The business you’ve been developing has a kind of gravity to it. When you scatter in every direction, you lose it.

Your superpowers are probably hiding in plain sight.

Anita has two superpowers she talks about that most people would overlook.

The ability to see the big picture and the small details at the same time.

And listening. Really listening to what a client isn’t quite saying.

“I need to hear what they’re not saying in a way.”

Neither of these sounds like a marketable skill on paper. But they’re exactly what makes her process work. They’re what lets her pull the right book out of someone who’s been sitting on the idea for five years.

Don’t downplay the soft stuff. It might be the thing that makes you irreplaceable.

The nine to twelve month process that changes everything.

This is where the conversation got specific in a way I think a lot of aspiring authors needed to hear.

Anita’s process at Write Your Life starts with a complimentary book strategy session. Then a VIP Day, six hours of structured conversation that generates the entire framework for the book, thousands of words of content pulled from the conversation itself.

Then months of writing, revisions, beta readers, final edits, cover design, interior layout, and book launch.

“Nine to twelve months from concept to completion, which is a drop in the bucket for most of my clients who say they’ve been thinking about writing a book for three to five, eight years.”

One year. That’s all it takes when you stop going it alone.

Subscribe now

Embrace your comfort zone.

Every entrepreneur has heard the opposite advice.

Get uncomfortable. Push your edges. Do the scary thing.

Anita disagrees. Or at least, she thinks we have the order backwards.

“Get into your comfort zone before you try to get out of your comfort zone.”

Find the process that works. Master it. Do it well enough that the results are consistent, that clients are satisfied, that you feel the flow of it. Then you can expand from there.

Mastery first. Then iteration. Not the other way around.

The challenge she wants to leave you with.

Stop trying to do a million things.

Stop trying to escape your comfort zone when you haven’t really found it yet.

“There is a flow that happens when you develop a process or a system. It impacts who you say yes to as a client. It impacts your enjoyment. And it also impacts the quality of the output.”

Find the thing you do well. Do it consistently. Let the momentum build.

That’s the whole game.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Anita just wants to see creative entrepreneurs profit from their genius.

That’s the thing underneath all of it. The frameworks, the VIP Days, the nine to twelve month process. The years of figuring out her own comfort zone before she could help others find theirs.

She’s watched too many talented people write good books that never found their readers. Or never got written at all.

If you’ve been sitting on a book idea for three years, or five, or eight, this episode is the nudge.

You don’t have to figure it out alone. You just have to go first.

Standout Authors Unbound amplifies the voices of underrepresented writers and indie authors to disrupt an industry that rewards conformity over authenticity.

There was a book sitting on ’s shelf for years.

He could see it. He could hold it. He just couldn’t read it.

His father had written his memoir in Chinese. The story of escaping China during the Cultural Revolution on a rowboat. Three years of manual labor in Hong Kong. A decade of clawing his way back to the life he’d built as a physician.

It was all in there. And Henry couldn’t access any of it.

That quiet distance from his own family’s story is where this chat begins. And what Henry did about it is something I think you’ll find yourself thinking about long after you finish listening.

Highlights

The story that almost stayed hidden.

Henry’s father is 84 years old.

He wrote The Day After Winter more than a decade ago. Got a small publishing run done in China. And then life moved on.

Henry grew up knowing the outline of his family’s story. His great-great-grandfather came to America as a coolie and helped build the railroads. His grandparents trained in the US and founded China’s premier eye hospital. His mother became one of the most cited ophthalmologists in the world, close to 700 publications, her own Wikipedia page.

And his father escaped China on a rowboat during the Cultural Revolution with seven people and a plan that almost didn’t happen.

But knowing the outline and knowing the story are two very different things.

“He worked in construction, he worked in restaurants, he did whatever it took to finally scrape enough money to get over, first to Canada, where they reunited and eventually had me.”

The happy ending was always there. What wasn’t there were all the impossible decisions it took to get there.

The gap between translation and storytelling.

When Google Translate got good enough, Henry finally got a rough version of the book in English.

And he realized something.

His father had written around the most important moments. There were brief mentions of all seven siblings, most of whom never appear again. There were gaps where questions should have been answered. Things left out because they felt so obvious to his father that he never thought a reader would need them explained.

“I had to ask questions that his original narrative didn’t address.”

A few of those stories show you the difference between idealistic and realistic.

When his father’s escape was disrupted, one of the seven people had already gone ahead to the meeting point. When the plan fell apart, his father had to make a call.

He left him behind.

Another story: a professor’s family had secretly given his mother money to help buy a boat. They wanted to come along. There was no room.

They left them behind too.

“My father was very matter of fact about it. But these things didn’t surface in the original writing. I had to link the actions to the consequences.”

That’s the work Henry had to do. Not just translate words. Excavate the truth underneath them.

One conversation changed everything.

Here’s something I think a lot of us can relate to.

You know a story needs to change. You know it could be better. But it’s not your story to change.

Henry felt that tension deeply. These were his father’s words. His mother’s memories. Who was he to rewrite any of it?

So he asked.

“I felt nervous about it. I was like, do you mind if I delete this chapter? Do you mind if I change your words? Because it’s your story at the end of the day.”

His father said yes. Immediately. Do whatever you need to do.

“I think that unlocked a lot for me. I felt way more freedom to create something I believed in.”

That one conversation. That’s all it took.

Sometimes the permission we’re waiting for is closer than we think.

Subscribe now

Writing became the channel for questions he couldn’t ask any other way.

Henry took a sabbatical from his job in biotech to finally finish the manuscript.

And something unexpected happened.

The book became a reason to go deeper with his parents than he ever had. To ask things that would have felt too heavy, too intrusive, outside of this context.

Like why his father barely wrote to his mother during the three years they were separated in different countries.

It turned out to be intentional. His father was afraid that if he stayed too connected, she would come back to Hong Kong. He didn’t want to be the reason she gave up her chance.

“I learned so much through the process about the tough decisions they had to make along the way. These are things that could be hard to ask one’s parent or anybody really. You’re resurfacing trauma. But it gave me a channel and an avenue to do so.”

The memoir gave him permission to go to places the conversation alone never could.

He never thought of himself as a writer, until he was.

Henry’s background is Wall Street and biotech. Not exactly the resume you’d expect from someone rewriting a family memoir.

But his parents sent him to writing camp as a kid. His English was strong where theirs wasn’t. He hated it at the time.

Later, he started sneaking writing back into his work life. Monthly updates for his team, always opened with a story. His colleagues weren’t used to it. They kept showing up for it.

“I think what drives a lot of anything really is just great storytelling. When you want to get people moving behind something, whether it be a work initiative or just because they like to read a book, you need good storytelling.”

He never stopped being a writer. He just had to find his way back.

Never give up, but face what’s actually in front of you.

I asked Henry to give me one phrase that captures his father’s story.

He told me about Admiral Stockdale, a POW in Vietnam for seven years. Someone asked Stockdale how he survived. His answer was surprising.

The optimists were the ones who broke. They told themselves they’d be out by Christmas. By Easter. By next year. And when those days came and went, it crushed something in them.

“You have to always believe that you’re going to make it out. But you also have to have the discipline to confront the reality that’s in front of you today.”

That’s his father in a sentence. He never gave up, never pretended away what was hard. He just kept moving through each challenge until he found his way out.

Subscribe now

The Substack that turned into something he didn’t plan for.

Henry started writing on Substack because building a platform is part of the publishing game now. That was the practical reason.

But it became something else.

“I started to realize that this process has been a process of me understanding my parents better. And as a result, understanding how they chose to parent me and understanding myself better as a person. And at the very last, understanding how I want to be a father to my kids.”

He didn’t intend for that. The arc just appeared as he kept writing.

A publisher even suggested his Substack could become a second book. His father’s story first, then Henry’s story of inheriting it, and maybe one day his own children adding their chapter.

“I just found that to be really interesting. I hadn’t thought of it that way previously.”

That’s what writing does. It takes you somewhere you didn’t know you were going.

How do you make your story stand out?

Before finishing the manuscript, Henry read every memoir and nonfiction book he could find about China from the 1930s to the 1990s.

Not to copy anyone but to understand the landscape. To find what was missing.

The pattern he kept seeing: books that felt more like history lessons than stories. Narratives that gave everything equal weight, so nothing actually landed.

“How can you delightfully surprise your readers?”

That’s the question he kept returning to. When you reveal the story, how do you let the cinematic moments breathe instead of rushing past them to get to the next fact?

“The ability to stand out needs to go beyond just the facts of the story itself. It needs to go to how you reveal certain things at certain moments. How you gain the trust of the audience.”

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Henry just wants to put something in his father’s hands.

That’s the thing underneath all of it. The querying, the rejections, the platform building, the questions asked late in life that should have been asked sooner.

His father is 84. The publishing process moves slowly. And Henry is not willing to wait.

“My goal is just to get something in his hands. I think it’ll be meaningful for all of us as a family.”

If you’ve got a story like this sitting somewhere, a story that belongs to someone who lived through something extraordinary and never quite got to tell it the way let us know in the comments.

You don’t have to be a writer to start. You just have to go first.

Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

Standout Authors Unbound amplifies the voices of underrepresented writers and indie authors to disrupt an industry that rewards conformity over authenticity.

What if the history you learned in school was missing most of the story?

discovered this when a publisher approached her to write about influential women. She started researching Latina contributions and kept hitting dead ends.

Stories that should have been everywhere were nowhere to be found.

So Ashley teamed up with to write the book that should have existed all along, The Book of Awesome Latinas, a book that profiles 74 Latinas whose contributions had been buried, erased, or simply never told.

In this conversation, Ashley and Mirtle talk about what it takes to recover lost history, the power of collaboration, and why representation matters.

Highlights

A book born from frustration.

Before the profiles, the research, and the collaboration, there was Ashley hitting wall after wall trying to find Latina stories that should have been everywhere.

“I was getting really frustrated because I couldn’t find a lot of information about Latinas in history books or even online.”

So she started an Instagram page to share what she could find. Then she realized she needed help, real help from someone who knew how to dig up stories and structure them into something readable.

That’s when she reached out to Mirtle, who had newsroom experience and a knack for profiles.

How they found each other.

Ashley knew she needed help take on such a big project so she reached out to Mirtle, a journalist with newsroom experience.

Mirtle’s response? Radio silence.

“I only have one amendment to her story and that’s that I ignored them completely for six months... I did have an e-copy of her book. Did I read the e-copy of her book? I did not.”

Mirtle was drowning in 200-300 emails a day at her journalism job. Ashley’s pitch got buried.

But persistence pays off. Six months later, they connected and discovered they were perfect collaborators. Collaboration unlocked what neither could do alone.

Subscribe now

Structure made the impossible possible.

Mirtle created a repeatable format for each profile: headline impact, origin story, family context, career achievements, and lasting influence.

Having that framework meant they could tackle dozens of stories without getting overwhelmed or losing consistency.

“By asking myself those questions, I can find themes or things... to explore later on.”

Daily reflection questions helped Mirtle spot patterns across the research that became narrative threads connecting the individual stories.

Platform building happens before the book.

The traditional publishing path worked backwards from what most people expect.

“Publishers will find you because you have an audience already, right? It’s like the opposite of what you would expect.”

Ashley’s Instagram page became the proof of concept. The audience came first, then the book deal.

But it’s not just about follower counts:

“Don’t let social media numbers be your only way of thinking that that is the way to build a platform... there are plenty of people who have a lot of followers and their books don’t sell.”

Real community beats vanity metrics every time.

Ashley discussed the importance of building community to sell the book.

“I would rather have 100 people that actually want to interact with me, that actually appreciate what I’m writing, than 100,000 empty likes.”

Instead of chasing follower counts they’re building genuine connections with people who care about the work.

Turn constraints into strategic advantages.

Even though Ashley and Mirtle live across the country from each other, they turned that distance into an advantage.

“She can tackle the Southeast and I can tackle the Pacific Northwest.”

Instead of being limited by distance, their different locations let them build community in multiple regions simultaneously by doubling their reach on opposite sides of the US.

The work is bigger than the book.

What started as frustration with missing history became something deeper: a way to show readers they’re not alone in their struggles.

“We just want anyone who reads this book to feel that one that they carry the strength of their ancestors with them and two that they’re in good company.”

The profiles aren’t just about celebrating individual achievements. They’re about creating connection across time and experience.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Ashley and Mirtle prove that the most important creative work often starts with noticing what’s missing.

They didn’t wait for someone else to write the book they wanted to read. They built a structure that worked, and got it done.

If you think your project is too big, too important, or too overwhelming to tackle alone, this episode is your reminder that collaboration can unlock what individual effort can’t.

What’s your author story? Maybe you’re wrestling with a project that needs a collaborator. Maybe you’ve been ignoring emails from potential partners. Or maybe you’re sitting on stories about representation, recovery, or resistance that need telling.

Drop a comment and share what you’re working on. Your work matters too, and this community is here for it.

What if the thing that makes you feel like an outsider is actually your greatest business asset?

Danielle Anderson figured that out after 15 years as a paralegal.

She didn’t have an English degree. She’d never worked at a big New York publishing house. She wasn’t an agent with industry connections. But she had something else: a way of combining structure with soul that authors desperately needed.

In this conversation, Danielle, founder of Ink Worthy Books and creator of the Soulful Nonfiction framework, talks about building a business that honors both the creative process and the human being behind the book.

Highlights

Law school taught her how stories work.

Before Danielle was helping authors craft their books, she was crafting legal arguments.

The skills translated perfectly: the research, the structure, and building a case that moves people from point A to point B. The only difference was the outcome she was fighting for.

“What drew me to law wasn’t just the structure — it was the writing.”

That legal background didn’t disappear when she pivoted. It became the foundation for how she helps authors organize their ideas, strengthen their arguments, and build books that actually work.

She said yes before she knew how.

Danielle’s first real publishing client was a yoga instructor writing about recovering from an eating disorder.

Did Danielle know exactly how to guide someone through that process? Not really. But she knew something more important: how to show up with care and figure it out together.

“If you have a strong enough connection with somebody, you trust them enough to do things because you know they’re going to work as hard as they can to make something happen.”

That willingness to lean into connection over credentials became her business model. And it works because authors need someone who believes in their story as much as they need expertise.

Subscribe now

Soulful nonfiction is structure with heart.

Danielle coined the term “soulful nonfiction” for a reason.

Too many business books feel soulless. Too many personal development books lack structure. She helps authors find the sweet spot between both.

“It’s really bringing like that structure in with the creativity and the flow and allowing for that to be really supportive.”

Her authors don’t have to choose between being vulnerable and being clear. They get to be both.

She builds business around real life.

Danielle is refreshingly honest about the gap between business advice and actual life.

Most entrepreneurship content assumes you have unlimited time, energy, and resources. Danielle had to build differently.

“I got four kids. I’ve got a mortgage payment. Like I got to do this my way.”

That constraint helped her relate with clients who also have real lives, real responsibilities, and real limits on their time. She gets it in a way that matters.

Subscribe now

Free calls build the right relationships.

While other coaches are optimizing funnels, Danielle is offering free Zoom calls.

It sounds counterintuitive. But it works because book coaching is deeply personal work. People need to feel the fit before they commit.

“I think there is so much value in truly leading with your heart and like truly leading with such an openness and an authentic energy.”

Those calls help her convert the right clients. The ones who are ready to do the work and trust the process.

Your weird path is your competitive advantage.

Danielle’s unconventional background could have been a liability.

Instead, it became exactly what set her apart. She brings legal thinking to creative work. She combines structure with intuition. She understands both the business side and the human side of publishing.

“There’s absolute value in going out there and if you don’t know what you’re doing, finding a guide or a mentor or someone to help you find your way. But I always reserve a little bit of discernment to say, does this feel right for me?”

That discernment of knowing when to follow advice and when to trust your gut is what turns an unconventional path into an unbeatable advantage.

Bonus Challenge from Danielle:

Write a post sharing why you do what you do and a specific moment when things shifted for you. Make it vulnerable. Don’t worry about grammar or typos. “I want you to tap into the fact that this is probably going to feel a little vulnerable. I really want you to allow space for that.”

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Danielle Anderson is proof that you don’t need the “right” background to build something meaningful.

You need the willingness to show up authentically, the courage to combine your unique skills in new ways, and the patience to build relationships that matter.

I hide because I’m afraid of the consequences.

It’s not necessarily the fear of failure.

It’s the fear of, what if I actually succeed?

I hide because comfort is easier than standing out.

I have a whole brand about standing out.

But what am I doing to stand out?

I hide because I want to fit in.

I know I’ll get buried underneath the sea of sameness.

But what if I want to stay buried?

Isn’t that where comfort lies?

I hide because no one has shown me how to do anything else.

School and society teaches us how to become a cog in the machine.

It’s what we’re supposed to do.

But I’m starting to see the machine break down.

Subscribe now

I stopped hiding because I’m not afraid of success.

I will change the world by giving creatives a platform to shine.

I flourish when I help others reach their full potential.

I stopped hiding because it’s time to stand out.

I have what I need, everything it takes, to step into the spotlight.

It’s time to let everybody see me.

I stopped hiding because fitting in is boring.

I realized being like everyone else makes me want to vomit.

I don’t want my tombstone to say “Here lies someone who fit in.”

I stopped hiding because the society we inherited was not built for us.

It was built for the billionaires who control everything: our food, our media, our politicians.

Machines were created for corporations, it’s time to build something for us.

I stopped hiding because we only have one life to lead.

What will you do with yours?

What if the thing you think is holding you back actually makes you stand out?

figured that out in first grade.

She read a comic where the villain didn’t need strength or weapons to defeat every superhero in the room. He used words. And something clicked for a kid who felt powerless, out of place, and a little too weird for Wyoming.

“He who controls the words, controls the world.”

She didn’t want to be a super villain. She wanted her voice to direct her life and her stories to open doors. And they did. Over and over again.

In this conversation, Angela, a two-time Bram Stoker Award winner, former president of the Horror Writers Association, editor, publisher, and community builder, talks about what it actually means to own your creative life from the inside out.

Highlights

A letter to the editor changed everything.

Before the awards, the magazine, and the community, there was a simple letter.

Angela wrote to the editor of a publication she genuinely admired, not with a pitch or an ask, but with real, specific appreciation for what they were building.

That letter turned into one of the best writing gigs of her career, leading to interviews with people like Joan Jett and a trajectory she never saw coming.

“I have gotten so many places by just connecting to the person behind the publication and just saying a compliment, a genuine compliment.”

We forget that publishers and editors are writers too. They’re humans who rarely hear thank you. A little genuine connection goes a long way, and Angela’s whole career is proof.

Writing for a newspaper taught her to deal with rejection.

Working in newspapers teaches you something brutal and useful.

You can pour yourself into a story, spend hours crafting something that matters, and watch it get pulled for a tire ad without a second thought.

Angela says that experience wired her differently when it came to rejection in publishing.

“When I get rejected, I don’t really worry about it. It’s just not the right time. Not the right story. It’s not a big deal.”

She didn’t always feel this way. A critique group in high school was so brutal it stopped her from writing poetry for years. Now she has a Bram Stoker for poetry.

The lesson she carries: be careful with other people’s work, and don’t let anyone’s harsh words become the final word on yours.

Subscribe now

Your weird is your work.

Angela was writing Gothic horror the way everyone else wrote Gothic horror.

Then her mentor, Bryan Thao Worra, stopped her cold.

He pointed out that she was mixed Asian, obsessed with tech, and drawn to science fiction. So why was she writing stories about babysitters in haunted houses?

She took his advice and wrote “Vanilla Rice,” a story rooted in her own experience of mixed identity, belonging, and the painful things families pass down. It sold. And she’s sold nearly every story since.

“Once I started putting what I love and what excites me into my work, it just took off. I think that is the key. Putting what makes us different into our work because we’re excited about it, and we pass that excitement on through the story.”

Horror is hopeful.

Angela talks about horror the way most people talk about therapy.

Because in a real sense, that’s what it does. It lets you rehearse the worst. It puts you in the scenario, makes you figure out what you’d do, and sends you out the other side a little less afraid.

There’s science behind it. During COVID, research found that horror fans were among the most emotionally resilient people. They weren’t caught off guard by being locked inside or facing existential uncertainty. They had already practiced.

“Horror is the genre that faces the fear and then tries to show us how to empower ourselves so that we don’t fall prey to that fear.”

Subscribe now

100 people who actually care beats 100,000 who scroll past.

Angela had a post go viral once.

Millions of people saw it. And she sold almost nothing because of it.

Then she built a community, almost by accident, by dropping a few magazine staff members into a platform called Mighty Networks and forgetting about it. When she came back, 80 people had shown up and were talking, supporting each other, buying each other’s books.

“I would rather have 100 people that actually want to interact with me, that actually appreciate what I’m writing, than 100,000 empty likes.”

Social media is designed to farm your attention, not build your audience. The Authortunities she built does something different. It creates trust. And trust is what makes people actually buy.

Creation is sacred. Even when it’s messy.

Angela describes being a creator not as a job or a hobby, but as a state of being.

Her upcoming book, Art Not Arson, grew from a 52-week Substack series about the creative journey. The idea is simple and deep at the same time: we are going to create no matter what. The question is whether we build something or burn something down with that energy.

“We can build a bridge or burn the bridge, but we’re going to do something by the act of being human.”

Every creative person she’s met is proof. The drive doesn’t go away. It just needs somewhere to go.

We control our own destiny.

Angela has an eighth grade education. She left school twice. She’s been told she couldn’t do things because of her gender, her background, her degree, her age.

But she’s on her third bucket list.

Her message isn’t that the path is easy. It’s that the path is yours.

“I’ve constantly had people tell me why I couldn’t do something. And I have done everything that I wanted to do.”

What we call “I can’t” is almost always “I’m choosing not to.” As uncomfortable as that may sound, it’s also liberating. It means we have the ability to make our own choices.

When we stop waiting for permission, we realize we were holding the key the whole time.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Angela is proof that a weird kid from Wyoming with an eighth grade education and a love of monsters can become an award-winning author, a magazine publisher, a community builder, and a voice worth listening to.

She didn’t do it by being like everyone else. She did it by leaning into exactly who she is.

If you’re sitting on a story, a quirk, a weird obsession, or a genre that people raise their eyebrows at, this episode is your sign to keep going.

And if you’re an author with a story to share, leave a comment and tell us about your work. You deserve the spotlight too.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

What if the genre you dismissed as too dark was actually the most honest thing you could read?

Lee Murray has spent twenty years writing horror from the edge of the world. She’s won five Bram Stoker Awards, a New Zealand Prime Minister Award for Literary Achievement, and a medal from the King.

And she’ll be the first to tell you she’s barely making grocery money. That gap between recognition and reward is just one of the things Lee is refreshingly honest about in this conversation.

She also talks about what it really means to put yourself in a story, why horror is one of the most grown-up genres out there, and how building community from the bottom of the world changed everything for her.

Highlights

“Write what you know” means something deeper than you think.

Most writers hear that phrase and think about surface-level experience. When she was starting out, Lee did too.

She wrote about marathon running because she had run 25 of them. She knew the material. But something was still missing.

It wasn’t until she started writing from her identity as an Asian woman in a Western country, about her experience with depression and anxiety, and the tension between cultures she carries every day, that her writing found its real power.

“What I think they mean when they say put yourself in this story is you need to write the story that only you can write. You need to write the things that resonate for you, that make you frightened, that make you feel something. You need to put those things into the story.”

That kind of vulnerability is harder than craft. And it takes longer to find. But when you do, readers feel it.

Horror is the most grown-up genre in the room.

There is a particular kind of prejudice that follows horror writers around.

People assume it’s B-grade, gratuitous, not serious literature.

Lee pushes back on that because horror is where we go to face the things we can’t say out loud: losing control, shame, the unknown. All the parts of the human experience that we aren’t supposed to talk about.

“Fear is the most primal feeling. What frightens us, what worries us, what gives us the chills — exploring that is a universal thing because we all are afraid of something. And it drives our behavior.”

Monsters, she explains, are almost always metaphors. For trauma. For oppression. For the generational weight we carry without even realizing it. Horror allows us to hold those things up and examine them.

Subscribe now

Everyone has their own process.

Lee describes herself as a slow writer. She does not do vomit drafts. She can’t turn off her editor brain long enough to just get words on the page.

For a long time, that felt like a flaw but now she sees it differently.

“I tend to kind of have an idea, kind of know where it’s going, and then I kind of write it... I’ll write a sentence and I’ll go back and revise the sentence and then I’ll write the next sentence. That makes me a slow writer. But at the end of the day, I tend to find that I don’t change too much.”

She has no stories on the backburner. Nothing is abandoned. Everything she has written has found its place.

Find the gap that only you can fill.

Lee did not set out to create a niche. She just started writing the stories she wanted to read and could not find anywhere else: horror thrillers set in the New Zealand bush, feminist Asian horror, stories about mental illness.

“Sometimes it’s a good idea to look for the gap. Where is the gap that you can fill that only you can tell that story? Your story.”

And once she found that space, she did something most people won’t do — she invited others in. She believes you don’t need to protect your niche because there’s more than enough room for everyone.

When you bring more writers into the space you helped create, the whole genre grows.

Subscribe now

Survive and thrive through community.

Publishing from New Zealand is difficult because the industry mostly looks the other way. Traditional publishers are largely absent and literary agents are almost nonexistent. Shipping a $12 book to New Zealand costs $35.

And yet Lee has built something that spans the globe and she did it by showing up.

Through anthologies that built readerships around shared ideas. Through mentorship that she gives and receives. And through joining every writing group she believes in.

“If you want something to happen, you need to step up and do it.”

That lesson came from her parents, who ran school committees and sports clubs because they wanted to see those things exist. Lee brought the same energy to horror. And horror gave her a tribe in return.

Success means something different for everyone.

Lee is not a millionaire bestseller, but she also doesn’t aim to be one.

Instead she has a community she loves, a genre she is proud of, and a body of work that has earned some of the highest honors in the field.

“Once you’ve defined what is successful to you, what would successful look like, then you can step forward and say, how am I going to get there?”

That question is worth asking because the answer changes everything. The path to a bestselling series looks nothing like the path to a life built around craft, community, and meaning. There is no “right” path, only the path you choose to take.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Lee Murray reminds us that horror is not a guilty pleasure. It is literature doing serious work in a world that needs it.

Her journey shows what happens when a writer stops acting the part and starts putting the real, complicated, vulnerable parts of themselves on the page.

If you are an author who writes stories that feel too personal, too niche, or too strange for the mainstream, we want to hear from you.

Leave a comment and tell us about your work. You deserve the spotlight too.

It’s never too late to get started.

Stop judging yourself for not being good enough. Not brave enough. Not talented enough.

Good enough for what? Are you sitting at a negotiating table at the UN making decisions that could change the trajectory of the whole world?

No? Then you’re good enough to bring your creative project to life.

Just get started.

Brave enough for what? Are you flying into space detailing your travels around the moon?

No? Then you’re brave enough to do the thing you’re scared of.

Just get started.

Talented enough for what? Are you performing in front of millions of people on the world stage?

No? Then you’re talented enough to build that thing you’re dreaming of.

If you are negotiating at the UN, flying off into space, or performing in front of millions of people, I applaud you. Also, why are you sitting around reading this? Go change the world.

If you aren’t, stop letting your fears and doubts get the best of you.

Just get started.

A small audience means no one is around to watch you fumble and fail.

A decent audience means you have people cheering for you to succeed.

A big audience means you can enroll others in making your dreams come true

Audience size doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is knowing you can reinvent yourself wherever you are.

Subscribe now

That’s why I started Standout Reinventions.

A year ago, my wife and I left behind everything we owned in Florida except for five suitcases, two carry-ons, and our dog Pookie, and moved to Costa Rica.

It wasn’t a perfectly planned pivot. It was a messy and terrifying leap, and one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.

This move changed how I think about life. We are not bound by our circumstances. We can reinvent ourselves at any stage of life.

We reinvented ourselves to fulfill our creative dreams when we moved to Costa Rica and I want to show others you can reinvent yourself too.

This series is where I am documenting that. The move. The lessons. The mindset shifts. And eventually I’ll share the full story as a memoir.

Subscribe now

What you’ll find in Standout Reinventions:

The series already documents much of our journey: what it looks like to leave what’s familiar, build something new, and figure out who you are on the other side.

But there are other pieces I left out of the journey like why we really wanted to leave and what circumstances led me to this pivotal moment.

That’s why I wanted to write a memoir.

This series will also feature others who have reinvented themselves. Because this isn’t just my story. It’s a story of how anyone can reinvent themselves.

If you’ve made a bold change: a move, a career shift, a creative leap, and you think your story could inspire others, I’d love to hear from you.

I am incredibly grateful to share my reinvention with you. Hopefully it will inspire you to change your own life too.

How does a daughter’s simple wish become a full creative enterprise?

Osayi Lasisi didn’t set out to launch a product line. She set out to find a brown plush doll for her daughter.

When that search came up empty, her daughter didn’t just get disappointed and move on. She said, let’s make them ourselves.

And that’s where everything started.

In this conversation, Osayi shares how Pocketlings was born, what it’s like to co-build a business with a 10-year-old, and the lessons that have emerged from just figuring things out as they go.

Highlights

Your idea doesn’t have to be brilliant.

Pocketlings didn’t start with a market analysis or a brand strategy.

It started with a kid who wanted something she couldn’t find.

“She couldn’t find brown plush dolls and she decided she wanted to start selling them.”

That’s it. That was the spark.

And it’s a good reminder that the ideas closest to our real lives, the ones rooted in genuine need, are often more powerful than the ones we manufacture trying to be clever.

Research is a skill.

Before anything was ordered or designed, Osayi asked her daughter to do the research: manufacturers, price points, competitors, and profit margins.

Not because she needed her daughter to do the work. But because she wanted her to build the skill.

“I asked her to research manufacturers and how much it would cost. She would find similar dolls and the pricing and then we’d discuss it.”

That’s real-world learning.

And it produced real-world results. Her daughter came back with data. They made decisions together. And the business became something they both owned.

Subscribe now

You can’t learn everything before you start.

There’s a version of this story where they spent months researching the perfect doll size before placing any order.

They didn’t do that.

They started with the size her daughter wanted. And only after shipping real dolls to real customers did they realize a smaller size would have been easier to manage.

“There are some things that we understood better after we started.”

That sentence says it all.

Not everything can be researched in advance. Some knowledge only comes from doing the work.

Quitting can be a strategy but it must be intentional.

Osayi brought up Seth Godin’s concept of the dip:

The hardest moments are often the thing separating the people who figure it out from the ones who walk away before they get the chance.

“Quitting is always okay. My only thing is, if you’re going to quit, you want to decide to quit. Not because it’s hard. Because you’ve decided to quit.”

Decide with intention. Not with exhaustion.

Building in public means learning in public too.

One of the unexpected gifts of starting Pocketlings has been the conversations it opened up.

Other parents started asking how they could give their kids the same experience. That led Osayi and her daughter to libraries, to workshops, and to community entrepreneurship sessions for kids who want to build something of their own.

“We didn’t think we were going to be doing that when we were starting out with just dolls.”

That’s how it usually goes.

You start one thing and it opens a door to something you never planned for.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Osayi’s story isn’t just about dolls or books or tween period journals.

It’s about what happens when you take a child’s idea seriously.

When you let them research, make decisions, deal with real world problems, and experience what it means to build something from nothing.

And it started because a girl couldn’t find a doll that looked like her.

Standout Authors Unbound amplifies the voices of underrepresented writers and indie authors to disrupt an industry that rewards conformity over authenticity.

What if the life you’ve already lived was the most compelling story you could ever tell?

has performed in 42 countries. She’s lost a husband, raised two sons, cleaned houses when times got hard, earned a master’s in mental health at 50, and built an anthem for Latina women almost by accident.

And she wrote all of it down.

Her memoir, Embracing Life: One Stage at a Time, is exactly what the title promises: a life lived in stages, each one teaching something the next one needed.

In this conversation, Adela shares what compelled her to finally write her story, what the music world never tells you, and why she believes sharing is the most powerful act of change there is.

Highlights

Your family doesn’t know your story. Neither does the world.

Adela grew up in Gary, Indiana. At 19, she married a jazz musician and moved to New York City. And once she left, she rarely went back.

“Nobody really understands me when I go back home. They think that it’s a glamorous thing. Yeah, it could be glamorous, but usually musicians don’t have houses or cars. We’re usually trying to work and usually that money is for you to live on.”

That gap between how a creative life looks from the outside and what it actually costs on the inside is exactly why she wrote her book.

Her family knew she was a singer. They didn’t know the rest.

The show must go on. Until you decide it doesn’t have to.

After losing her first husband, Adela did what she had always done.

She pushed herself from the back burner to the front.

She kept working. She raised her boys. She put them through college. She kept singing.

And then, at 60, she thought she was done performing.

Then Cuba called.

“When I got back from Cuba, I felt that my life had gone full circle. A little bit of publicity, people start calling you again. Before you know it, you’re singing again, you’re working again.”

For Adela, the ending she thought she’d written was really just another stage.

Subscribe now

The writing life isn’t glamorous either. But it’s worth it.

Adela is candid about what putting a book together actually looks like.

Late nights. Three a.m. bursts of momentum. A head that felt like it was going to explode. A Spanish translation that took just as much out of her as the original.

“A book is, my God, it’s so much work. I mean, it was two years of pretty much intense work because you’re trying to meet your deadline, you’re trying to keep going because if you stop, a month might go by before you get that energy rolling again.”

She also learned the hard way not to delegate her own story.

“You own your book. You own your story. You own your life. Before you send it out, you should go through it again and again.”

Inspiration doesn’t wait for the right moment.

One of my favorite parts of this conversation is when Adela talks about where songs come from.

A patch of water outside a hotel window in Japan became a song about a girl crying on the beach in Ipanema. A morning spent looking at the sun became a new track. An anthem for Latinas in business came to her three days before the gig.

“Those inspirations, they flow. They flow through you. You might come up with a verse or two verses or just a hook. You already have a form, you have an idea.”

The lesson she keeps returning to: write it down. Whatever it is. Before it disappears.

Subscribe now

Role models change everything.

Long before the memoir, Adela started a website called MujeresLatinas.com. She wrote short profiles of Latina heroines. She created a workbook for young girls. She mentored.

All of it came from a single statistic she read in the New York Times about dropout rates among Latinos.

“I said, how embarrassing. I have to do my thing. I have to help. I don’t have daughters. I’m just going to treat them all like daughters.”

She wanted young Latinas to see themselves in someone who had already done hard things. Because she never had that.

“If you have somebody that looks like you, it’s easier to follow. You believe in them more because you feel that you’re closer. So you have a chance also.”

Sharing can create change.

At the end of the conversation, I asked Adela what she most wants readers to take away from her book.

Her answer is immediate.

“Sharing is the most important thing in life. Sharing can create change. That’s what I say on my website. It’s because they’re not getting the information that would stimulate them. So we have to share this.”

Seven decades of stories. Forty-two countries. One stage at a time.

And she’s still building.

Subscribe now

Closing Reflection

Adela doesn’t talk about her life like someone summarizing a resume.

She talks about it like someone who has actually lived it fully, messily, and on purpose.

The most surprising insight was how much life gets compressed into silence: the the years nobody asks about and the sacrifices people assume aren’t there because the performer showed up and smiled.

Writing is how Adela closes that gap.

If you have your own author journey to share, leave a comment and tell us what resonated most.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !