What Do You Do With All the Stories If Nobody Reads Anymore?

I have a confession.

Underneath every book I've written, underneath every world I've built and every character I've refused to let go of, there is a fear I don't talk about much. Not the usual writer fear — the one about whether the story is good enough, whether anyone will care, whether I got it right.

This one is bigger, quieter, and harder to argue with.

What if I'm writing books at exactly the wrong moment in history?

What if the world has already moved on?

I watch people scroll. I watch attention spans compress into fifteen-second windows. I watch readers who used to devour novels now saying they can't finish a chapter without reaching for their phone. And I sit here with a three-thousand-year-old dragon, a Norse god hiding in Las Vegas, a little girl running toward a hatchery with sticky fingers and absolute certainty — and I wonder. Is there still room for all of this? Is there still someone out there who wants to go this deep?

And then something shifts.

Because here's what I've noticed: people aren't reading less. They're reading differently. They're reading in smaller windows and through different doors. A podcast on a Tuesday morning commute. A blog post that shows up in their inbox and gives them something to think about over coffee. A newsletter that feels like a letter from someone they actually want to hear from. A short post that makes them laugh or makes them feel something — and sends them, quietly, toward the longer thing.

The door into a story doesn't have to be the first page of a book anymore.

It can be Anna's voice in their ears while they're folding laundry. It can be a five-year-old at a Renaissance fair who makes them remember what wonder felt like. It can be a blog post about a grumpy little gremlin named Stuart who helped an overwhelmed author stop drowning long enough to tell her story.

I want to be honest about something, though. I don't entirely understand the scroll world. I'm a focused person by nature, and the way attention skips from surface to surface without settling — without a thread — is genuinely hard for me to follow. My own mind wanders, don't get me wrong. One thought leads to another leads to another, and sometimes I look up and wonder how I got here. But there is always a string. Always a thread running back through everything, tying it together. Piper leads to Sophia leads to Dragon World leads to a little girl at a Renaissance fair leads to a three-thousand-year-old dragon who remembers being young. It's not chaos. It's a web.

What I see in scroll culture doesn't have a web. It's surface after surface after surface, with nothing underneath to hold it together. And I think — I hope — that's exactly why stories like mine still matter. Because some of those scrolling people are tired. They're exhausted by the surface, and they're looking, without quite knowing it, for somewhere to land. Somewhere with depth and weight and a thread that holds.

I'm not fighting the short-attention-span world. I'm using it. Every blog post, every podcast episode, every newsletter is a door I'm building into something deeper. Some people will stop at the door. That's fine. Some will walk through — and when they do, there's a whole universe waiting for them. Dragons and Norse gods and girls who go with strangers in spaceships because something in their bones says yes.

The stories aren't going anywhere. Neither am I.

I just had to find more doors.