How the Hell Did We Get Here + the New Tools of #IndieLit

Let’s be clear—we didn’t start this journey at a writing retreat sipping pinot & talking about our “process”. We started by reminiscing and goating each other about forgotten Word docs, and bygone writing dates.

We used to meet at Starbucks and play a game: write every other paragraph in the same notebook. Romantic? Yes. Practical? Absolutely not. The result? Some of the most unreadable stories ever committed to paper—but we laughed our way through every page.

Example A: Dustin starts us off with a drunk guy waking up in a snow-fallen graveyard. Erica’s turn: suddenly, he’s a grieving widower who can’t let go. Dustin again: plot twist—he’s a zombie vampire out to avenge his wife. Pulitzer? Nope. Ridiculous? You bet.

Not all the stories stuck, but we believed some of them deserved a second chance. Or maybe we just got tired of talking about writing and finally sat down to, you know, actually write.

Meanwhile, Erica was wrangling kids and launching a wellness startup with her bestie, while Dustin was holed up in Marriott Courtyards working on his MBA. Most Dads cherish hotel time with their long-lost Nintendo Switch and overpriced cocktails. Dustin opened Ulysses and wrote.

“I figured if I was gonna be lonely, I might as well be productive.”

That productivity turned into chapters. Then books. Then the gentle but relentless bullying of Erica to pick up her pen again.

So there we were again, two writers, two styles, with one goal. We write separately—our ideas, our voices, our plots—but everything eventually goes through both of us, for our separate but meaningful strengths. 

Dustin writes in Ulysses because he likes structure. Before that? Chaos in Apple Notes. Erica writes longhand, which is both poetic and insane. 

He outlines meticulously. She likes to uncover the story as she goes, fueled by coffee and music.

We argue about characters. About commas, story arcs, technical feasibility, historical context, and whether writer’s liberties means bending English rules or roasting them like marshmallows at a campout.

The kids are catching on too—they’ve invented a new car-trip game where they write poems on the fly. (Future indie lit stars in the making. Or future stand-up comics. TBD.)

When the draft is done, we switch: Erica edits Dustin’s work with red ink and grace. Dustin edits Erica’s with precision and probing comments. Then we edit again. And again. And again. (At this point we could start a drinking game called Find the Last Edit, but nobody would survive.)

By the time we’re through, our manuscripts go through these multiple layers of developmental challenges, heavy-handed editing, and proofreading. Our final polishing is always in Microsoft Word because, as much as we love fancy tools, Word is still the best for tracking changes and clean exports.

Once a book is ready, we use Vellum for layout and formatting. It makes our words look good. For printing, we use Lulu to create beautiful paperbacks that we sell directly through our Shopify site at a discount—because we’d rather sell directly to you than feed the retail beast (though yes, we do that too).

eBooks are delivered through Bookfunnel, which is the indie writer’s best friend. We distribute through Amazon for both ebooks and paperbacks because visibility matters.

We’ll be posting more blogs soon—with more about where we get our ideas, what inspires us, how we manage writing with real life pulling at the edges, and what tools we swear by. (Spoiler: not AI. Except for spelling. And research. Okay, maybe a tinsy bit of AI.)

And my personal favorite—the Closet Chronicles (aka Audiobooks. How Dustin records surrounded by coats and dreams.

Yours in Chaos,

Erica & Dustin