Category: writing
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Where the Writing Stands Right Now
I’m in a different phase of the work now. For a while, what I needed most was to get things out of my head and onto the page. A lot of that material had been building for years—some of it since I was a kid—and it needed release before it could be understood. Now the…
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Learning the Rhythm of the New Room
This is the new room. Not finished. Not optimized. Just honest enough to work in. It’s where the desk lives now. Where the drums sit close enough to matter. Where I can make noise—literal and otherwise—without worrying about shared walls or quiet hours. A house instead of a condo. More air. More room to think…
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On Change, Catastrophe, and Balance
For a long time, I believed that change meant death—or at least the possibility of it. Not metaphorical death. Not ego death. Real, physical, catastrophic endings. That belief didn’t come from nowhere. It came from impact. From accidents. From moments where the world didn’t just shift, but hit. The waterfall incident. My teeth. A baseball…
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One Last Session Here
So this is my last session sitting in the brain of this operation. This place has been my office and my condo here in Greenville, South Carolina—near downtown, by the YMCA, close to where I grew up. And today it’s making me a little wistful. This space has been a kind of protective bubble for…
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Big news incoming.
Things have been brewing quickly in the mad scientist’s lab of my brain, and the results are almost ready to escape into the world. How soon? Weeks, not months. Here’s what’s going on. Trying to Be Good Trying to Be Good is a small, quiet book.It isn’t a memoir in the traditional sense, and it…
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On AI, Sloppiness, and Being Honest About the Work
When I was a kid, I used to get out of trouble by punishing myself harder than anyone else could. I’d replay mistakes in my head, pick them apart, scold myself privately until whatever authority figure was involved decided I’d clearly “learned my lesson.” In reality, I was just being left alone with my thoughts—and…
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The Lying Years Is Out — and Where the Work Is Headed Now
I quietly released The Lying Years this week. There wasn’t a launch plan or a marketing push. I didn’t run ads or build anticipation. I posted about it a few times and let it go. That wasn’t avoidance. It was intentional. What The Lying Years Is The Lying Years is the second of two memoirs…
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What the AI Thought About My Reading Habits
Based on the Books and Comics That Shaped Me If you really want to understand a writer, don’t ask them about their influences.Ask them what they consumed when they were too young to know they were forming a worldview. When the AI looked at the books and comics that shaped me, it didn’t see a…
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My College Comics: How they show my path as a writer.
By Francis Anderson When I think about how I became a writer, I don’t picture the usual origin scenes. I don’t picture myself reading The Chronicle of Narnia on my bedroom floor, or staying up late with Stephen King novels I was far too young to understand. I don’t even picture the first time a…
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The Quiet Work of Patience (and Why I Don’t Force My Books Anymore)
I’ve learned something about myself as a writer that I wish I’d understood years ago: My best work happens when I’m not working. Not in the literal sense — I write constantly. But the real shape of a book doesn’t come from typing. It comes from the quiet, invisible stages in between. I move through…
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A Tale of Two Settings
Two places shape my world more than any others:the Veil and the Axis.They are the quiet machinery behind every fracture in reality,two halves of a single moment when everything began to separate. THE VEIL The Veil is where the world forgets its outline. A thin, unmapped space of fog and almost-forms,where landscapes fade after a…
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The Literary Revolution No One Wants to Admit Is Happening
By Francis Anderson, Fulcrum & Axis Press For most of my life, writing felt like a lonely act — a private wrestling match with memory, imagination, and the page. Then, almost overnight, something changed. A new tool arrived, not with fanfare or permission, but with a quiet suggestion: “Try me.” People expected a calculator.Or a…
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How The Lying Years Connects to Everything Else I Write
(And Why the Memoir Is the Key to My Entire Universe) When people hear I’m working on a recursive novel cycle, a supernatural thriller, a grief-driven metafiction, and a memoir all at once, they usually assume the memoir is the “real-life” outlier — the personal book sitting off to the side while the imaginative fiction…
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Jazz Writing, AI Partnership, and Wolf Wounds
I’m gearing up for a second round of Wolf Wounds work, and before I dive back in, I need to explain something about my process—because I’m beginning to see that I work differently than most writers, and that difference is going to matter for anyone following along. A few nights ago, I joked that I…
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THE SPIRE MANIFESTO
How My Stories Connect, Why I Write Across Genres, and What the Spire Really Is I don’t write books the way other people do.I don’t pick a genre, plant a flag, and stay there. I can’t.My brain doesn’t work in straight lines. My life didn’t either. Instead, I write the way I live: in recursion,in…
Frank M. Anderson's Writing 