A closing bookstore, a stripped fiction section, and one aisle that nobody had touched. What the gap between loving books and making them actually costs us.
August 2, 2026I’ve been quiet here for a while. Not because I ran out of things to say, but because most of my writing energy was going somewhere else.
Here’s what I’ve been up to.
I finished the pilot script for an anime series and launched a pitch site for the project. You can see it at parallelcheckin.com. I’m now deep into the second episode, drafting it in Final Draft. I still love that program. It feels less like an app than a workbench: practical, orderly, and built for one job.
AI played a real part in this project, so I want to be clear about what it did and didn’t do.
It didn’t write the pilot. I used it to storyboard scenes, work through visual sequences, and help build the pitch site. Basically, it helped me turn something I could see in my head into something I could show another person. That distance used to swallow months.
In my work life, I also partnered with a fellow librarian on an academic paper. We completed not one but two full drafts, which feels worth celebrating whether or not the publishing gods cooperate. If they do, you may see it one of these days.
The honest version is that all of this felt great until it didn’t. The writing was exciting, then exhausting. Burnout arrived, and eventually my wrist started hurting and didn’t stop.
I usually leave that part out, but it seems worth saying. I suspect some of you are somewhere along that same path. The tools moved faster. My body did not. That is something I should have planned for instead of learning the hard way.
Which brings me to yesterday afternoon.
I was thinking about this community while walking through a Barnes & Noble that is closing in September. Nearly everything was 40 percent off, and the store had been thoroughly picked over. Fiction was gutted. The art books were nearly gone. Most of the good stuff had already found a home.
Then I reached the section on writing.
Almost untouched.
Full shelves. Straight spines. Barely a gap anywhere.
I took that a little personally and bought an entire row. Partly because I genuinely wanted the books, and partly because I couldn’t bear the thought of writing being the last thing left in a dying bookstore.
I’d like to say this was a noble gesture. It was probably sixty percent noble gesture and forty percent spite.
While I was standing in line with the stack in my arms—which my wrist immediately regretted—I looked over at the magazine rack and saw one of the saddest covers I’ve encountered in years.
It was the August issue of The Atlantic. Rose Horowitch’s cover story was “The End of Reading.” The promotional headline was even bleaker: “The Age of Reading Is Over.”
The article isn’t cheap alarmism. Horowitch, who reported in 2024 on elite college students struggling to finish books, widens the lens to the whole country. Her argument is that we are entering a postliterate era. Fewer adults are reading books, and the decline reaches even the groups that have traditionally read the most. Careers in literature and the humanities are increasingly treated as economic dead ends. The larger question hanging over the piece is whether a culture built around reading can survive once reading is no longer at its center.
That is a serious argument supported by real numbers. One crowded bookstore parking lot doesn’t disprove it.
Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about that untouched shelf.
I had trouble finding parking that afternoon. The store was full of people, and they were leaving with armloads of books. Fiction had been stripped nearly to the fixtures.
Whatever is happening nationally, the room I was standing in had not given up on books.
And yet the section on how to write them remained almost perfectly intact.
What that aisle showed me wasn’t that people have stopped reading. It was how much easier it is to imagine ourselves as the audience than as the person who makes the thing.
That doesn’t answer Horowitch’s argument, but I think it adds something to it.
A culture of reading needs writers, and writers don’t appear fully formed. They need practice, encouragement, and some believable path between a private idea and a finished piece of work. If writing is presented as financially foolish, culturally irrelevant, and nearly impossible to publish, plenty of people who might have written something will decide to spend their time elsewhere.
That gap matters: the distance between loving books and believing you could make one.
On that particular afternoon, the gap was the width of an untouched aisle.
A few pages after the cover story, the same issue includes a piece by Shirley Li about animators deciding whether to fight the technology threatening their jobs or find some way to work with it.
I read that description while holding a stack of writing books, on my way home to work on the second episode of an anime series I had storyboarded with AI.
The pairing felt almost too perfect.
One article asks what happens when the audience for creative work begins to disappear. The other asks what happens when the tools for making that work suddenly change who can participate and how.
The threat to jobs and hard-earned creative skills is real. So is the new access. Depending on where you stand, the same technology can look like a threat, an invitation, or both.
For me, it helped close some practical gaps. It didn’t turn me into an animator, and it didn’t write my story. It helped me show people what the project could look and feel like before I had a studio or a production budget.
Three years ago, a pitch site for an original anime series would have remained a someday project sitting in a folder. Now it is a URL I can hand to someone.
I still had to write the pilot. I still had to revise it, make decisions, throw things away, and keep going when the work became difficult. The tools didn’t remove the work. They removed some of the friction between doing the work and letting other people see it.
I don’t believe these tools will automatically save reading or creativity. They can produce mountains of junk just as easily as they can help someone finish something worthwhile. But I also don’t think the answer is to leave good work trapped in private folders while we wait for perfect conditions.
The useful question is what we choose to make with the tools—and what standards we keep while making it.
Here are three things I’m trying to do, and I invite you to try them too:
The Atlantic has the data. I have one crowded parking lot, a set of stripped shelves, and one untouched aisle. Neither cancels the other.
That aisle may not prove anything, but it felt like a challenge.
Let’s make it harder to walk past.
I’ll see you at the retreat. Bring pages.
And if you’d like to see what I’ve been building, visit parallelcheckin.com.