I surrendered the glow. The soft, blue hum that filled the room after dinner. I set the remote down the way some people set aside sugar for Lent—deliberately, almost ceremonially—like I was laying a coin on a ferryman’s palm. The one-eyed monster blinked into its own reflection, and the living room exhaled. No laugh track. No canned cliffhanger. Only the fridge whispering, the clock ticking, the house going quiet enough for another world to speak.

That was the night my AR clicked on.

Not augmented reality. Author Reality. The dimension that lives behind every closed door and blinking cursor. It doesn’t need a headset, and it doesn’t apologize for being demanding. It’s the world that asks you to show up with the same seriousness you bring to your job, your family, your grief, your joy. It rewards the faithful, and it keeps its secrets from the curious who wander in for a minute and wander back out.

Is it worth it? Depends on what you want from a story: to be carried, or to build the boat.

Here’s the rhythm I’ve learned, the three-beat cadence of making a book: if I’m not writing, I’m editing. If I’m not editing, I’m sharing—sending flares from my lighthouse so readers can find the shore I’ve drawn by hand. The work doesn’t pause when inspiration does. The tide moves with or without me, and the only way to get anywhere is to put an oar in the water every day, even when the fog is thick.

In AR, everything means more than it looks. A mug of coffee stops being a mug. Steam rolls out like sea fog over the harbor city I sketched in a January notebook—the one with crooked alleys and market bells and a lighthouse whose stair treads know my footsteps by now. The keyboard isn’t plastic and wires; it’s a compass that points toward scenes I haven’t met and scenes I’m avoiding. The cursor blinks like a beacon: here, here, here. Come back to work.

Characters are the first to step through. They don’t knock; they appear mid-argument, mid-laugh, mid-betrayal, dragging weather from their world into mine. A woman with ink-stained fingers and a secret she thinks is hers to keep sits across a table I’ve never owned, tapping out a rhythm that nags me until I write it. A courier with a map stitched into his jacket refuses to sleep until I let him miss his train. They bring me their trouble and their hope and ask me to be brave enough to tell the truth about both.

Writing is the first excavation. It’s the rush of discovering a bone in the sand and imagining the whole animal in a heartbeat. Then comes editing—the archaeology that happens with a brush instead of a shovel. Line by line, brush, brush, brush. I dig out the clean edges of the story from the clay of my habits. I cut the clever lines that don’t serve the skeleton. I sand away the splinters of scenes that snag but don’t support.

Editing is humbling. It asks: if you were a reader with a train to catch and twenty minutes to spare, would you keep turning pages? It makes you honest. It makes you protective of the reader’s time like it’s your own. It teaches you that your favorite sentence is sometimes the one that has to go.

Then there’s the sharing. I used to call it marketing and feel like I’d swapped my compass for a billboard, but that was before I understood it as lighthouse work. A story without a reader is a ship locked in the bottle: complete, exquisite, invisible. So I keep the glass polished. I write the note that says, “This is the world waiting inside,” and I send it in a thousand bottles. I accept that some will wash back to my own feet. I light the lamp again tomorrow. Maintenance isn’t glamorous, but neither is missing land because the light went out.

What did I trade for this? The easy glow of someone else’s story. The comfort of predictable arcs and neat resolutions. I traded hours that evaporated into hours that accrue. The time I used to float became time I build.

Not all trades feel noble. There are nights when the couch calls me by name, when the news scrolls like a slow-motion car wreck and every good show has three seasons ready to swallow me whole. There are mornings when the alarm sounds like a dare. I don’t always win. But I keep a little ledger—a trade log that tells me, honestly, what I gave up and what I made instead.

Gave up: an hour of television, a mindless scroll, a snack I didn’t need. Built instead: 827 words that moved a character from lying to telling the truth. Reshaped a chapter so the secret doesn’t leak too soon. Jotted a note about how the lighthouse uses a lens I’d never heard of before—Fresnel, a word that tastes like a bell.

Some nights the ledger holds only this: showed up. Sat with the blank and did not run. That counts. That’s a bead on the string.

Is it worth it? I don’t pretend I don’t miss the weightless time. Ease is its own kind of bliss. But there’s another kind: the exhale that comes when a paragraph clicks into place after a week of sanding. The email that says, “I brought your character to the doctor with me; she kept me company in the waiting room.” The message that says, “I didn’t think anyone knew how this felt until I read your chapter.” Those are the moments when the ledger pays interest.

Author Reality is not glamorous. It’s not a montage scored to moody piano. It’s a series of ordinary choices that turn into extraordinary pages. It is the practice of saying no to something pleasant so you can say yes to something that will outlast you. It’s a room you have to reenter every day because the door locks when you leave. And it is, somehow, always worth the key.

Maybe you feel the familiar itch in your palms. The tug toward building instead of consuming. The quiet knowing that you are meant to make something you cannot yet see the edges of. If that’s you, come with me. We can navigate together, even in different boats.

Here’s how to open your AR door:

For one week, switch off the one-eyed monster. Thirty minutes a day is enough to crack the seam between here and there. Put your remote in a drawer, set a timer, and let silence stretch long enough to get uncomfortable. On the other side of discomfort is a voice that wants to talk to you.

Choose your role each day so you don’t fight your own weather. Calm sea? Write new words, even if they’re ugly. Wind picking up? Edit yesterday’s draft with gentle eyes. Fog horn blowing? Share a piece—a paragraph, a line, a feeling—with someone who might need it. Writing, editing, sharing. Every day has a job.

Keep a tiny trade log. One line. What you traded. What you built. Gave up: 40 minutes of scrolling. Built: 3 new pages and a better scene transition. Gave up: a second helping of dessert. Built: the energy to reread my own work without hating it. The log is proof. The log is a map.

Offer a postcard from your AR. A sentence, a sketch of a character, a logline that scares you a little to say out loud. Tell me why it matters to you. We anchor each other when we speak our worlds into air.

You don’t need a headset to live in augmented reality. You need intention. You need a door you’re willing to close and a light you’re willing to switch on. You need the courage to choose your story over the millions that want to borrow your attention for free and charge you with regret later.

I won’t pretend it’s easy to keep that light burning. But I can promise this: the worlds we build in AR have a way of building us back. They give us patience and precision and a tenderness for our own imperfect drafts. They teach us to wait for the fog to lift and to move forward anyway, even when it doesn’t. They send back echoes in the shape of readers who bring our characters to breakfast, to chemotherapy, to bed. They make meaning out of minutes.

The light is on. The keys are warm. The door is unlocked. If you’re ready, step into your AR. Leave your shoes at the threshold and carry only what you need: your stubbornness, your curiosity, a pen that doesn’t mind being chewed. I’ll be in the lighthouse, keeping watch, sending signals. When your boat appears on the horizon, I’ll wave you in.

We have worlds to make.

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