Ink vs Algorithm: The Writers' Pod

Mookie Spitz
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Books

Creative writing in all forms has never been this exciting -- or frustrating. In a time when ChatGPT writes novels, TikTok “authors” go viral, and algorithms decide which stories live or die, Ink vs Algorithm is a podcast dedicated to writers who bleed ink and and publish their heart out.  Hosted by writer, ranter, and raconteur Mookie Spitz, each episode features lively conversations with flesh and blood authors who love what they do -- and hate competing with prompt-jockeys and viral Bots. Along the way more stories will be told and laughs shared, living proof the living still matter.     Whether you’re a novelist, journalist, pundit, poet, or just a cynic with a keyboard and an attitude, Ink vs Algorithm reminds us all why lived experience still matters — and how extracting and sharing it still takes relentless grit, determination, and a mountain of fought for and refined talent. 

  1. 2d ago

    The Jumper: 30 Seconds of Grief, 30 Years of Laughter

    Mookie steps away from interviews for a solo episode of Ink vs Algorithm, reading one of his own short stories straight from Substack. "The Jumper" is set in a Chicago high-rise insurance office in the early 1990s, where a temp worker watches his two office besties turn a woman's suicide into the day's juiciest gossip, trading grim, escalating details with the same giddy energy they'd use for celebrity news. The story's real target goes beyond the tragedy itself, and implies the strange, almost comic speed with which people absorb someone else's death and keep right on living theirs. Within minutes of hearing the details, the office is already back to flirting, drink plans, and petty jealousy, genuine sympathy flickers for a sentence or two before getting steamrolled by the far more urgent business of the banal everyday.  Mookie's upfront afterward describes how the story is true, pulled directly from his own early thirties, temping and adrift in Chicago's John Hancock Building, refusing to grow up in any conventional sense. That admission opens into the real heart of the episode: his theory that the most excruciating, humiliating periods of a person's life are precisely the richest material a writer will ever get, and that financial recklessness, chronically broke, still creating anyway, isn't the wrench in the works, but the engine of it. He traces his own arc from cringing at his early, overwrought Medium posts to fully owning his voice now, volume and unevenness included. The Short Story Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    The Jumper: 30 Seconds of Grief, 30 Years of Laughter

  2. Aug 12

    Colleen Coffman: The "Crazy Ghost Lady" Haunts Us with Creativity and Empathy

    Colleen Coffman spent decades as a special effects and makeup artist, building monsters for haunted houses and horror films, working alongside actors like Wes Studi and Lou Diamond Phillips, designing wigs for the Kansas City Ballet. But on this episode of Ink vs Algorithm, she joins Mookie to talk about something stranger than anything she ever built for the screen: a lifelong habit of seeing entities most people don't, and the sketch diary she'd kept of them for years, which vanished during a move in 2014 and reappeared, completely out of nowhere, from a stranger on Facebook exactly one day after she found herself missing it. That diary became her book, The Adventures of a Sketch Diary, and Colleen walks through some of what's in it: sylphs, satyrs, and a genuinely unsettling personal encounter with a duende, a small, physical creature she watched steal a pair of socks from her late uncle's closet and knew, on instinct, not to follow. Mookie and Colleen dig into where these experiences might come from: Jung's archetypes, the idea of a "thinning veil," and whether these entities represent something genuinely external or a very old, very human way of processing the unexplainable. What ties all of it together, the entities, the art, the feeling that something else is present, is a kind of sensitivity most people have trained themselves out of. Mookie frames it as something that was never really about belief in the first place, but about lived experience, and the same creative openness that lets someone tap into and express what they're feeling, whether that's through art or through encounters like Colleen's.  That same idea becomes the emotional center of the conversation once the topic turns to 2020. Colleen traces a direct line from pandemic isolation to a lasting breakdown in empathy, patience, and basic human contact, in her own family and everywhere she looks, and argues the same capacity, the willingness to actually feel another person's presence, drives both her entities and her fractured relationships.  Mookie connects it back to why he started podcasting in the first place, a very Socratic argument that real understanding only happens face to face, never through a screen. They land together on something genuinely simple as the antidote: slow down, look people in the eye, and remember that everyone else is struggling too, the same open-hearted attention that let Colleen see sylphs and satyrs in the first place. The Guest Colleen Coffman is a semi-retired special effects and makeup artist for stage and film, and the author of The Adventures of a Sketch Diary, published by Hangar 1 Publishing. Her film work includes Nailbiter and The Stylist, and her stage credits include productions with the Kansas City Ballet. Get the book: https://hangar1publishing.com/products/the-adventures-of-a-sketch-diary Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    Colleen Coffman: The "Crazy Ghost Lady" Haunts Us with Creativity and Empathy

  3. Jul 31

    Matthew Nelson & Mookie: Infinite Pynchon with Zero Restraint

    Mookie's an "old veteran hoofer" Pynchon fan, having discovered the iconic author in the 1980s and obsessing ever since, while Matthew Nelson, now finishing his doctorate on Pynchon's fiction at the University of St Andrews, found him a different way entirely: at 14, in the paranoid, hypermediated fog right after 9/11, in a world already reshaped by YouTube and conspiracy spirals that the acclaimed novelist seemed to have predicted decades early. That generational gap consisting of two readers separated by almost thirty years, arriving at the same obsessive body of work from opposite ends of American history, is the engine running underneath this compelling conversation.  And Pynchon rewards their long-haul, cross-generational reading, because the same handful of obsessions recur across his entire fifty-year bibliography, deepening each time. Boundary and duality above all: the line between animate and inanimate running through V., the split between the elect and the preterite — and a stark black-and-white racial duality — driving Gravity's Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon's literal and figurative obsession with the lines humans draw across land, people, and ideas. Underneath all of it sits Pynchon's vision of paranoia, entropy, and authoritarian control, ordinary people caught inside what Mookie calls a "labyrinthine hellscape" they can never fully discern.  From that foundation, the conversation turns personal and sharp. Mookie stakes out a provocative claim: Pynchon's male protagonists (Benny Profane, Tyrone Slothrop, Zoyd Wheeler, Doc Sportello) are neutered on purpose, stripped of agency, cultural precursors of Cold Play, the Star Wars sequels, and other cultural disasters, while his women (Oedipa Maas, Maxine Tarnow) are the ones actually driving the drama. Matthew complicates that instinct, arguing the loser protagonists are avatars for collective helplessness under a system too vast to fight, not failures of nerve. They debate whether Against the Day is self-indulgent Pynchon competing with his own literary heir David Foster Wallace, trade an uncomfortable personal story about meeting DFW in person, and land, finally, on the biggest question of all: whether Pynchon, underneath the conspiracy and the entropy, is reaching for something transcendent. His most sprawling novel ends, after all, on a single word: grace. Fair warning, this episode of Ink vs Algorithm goes full inside sports on Pynchon. If you've read him, buckle up. If you haven't, it might just be the push you need to start. The Guest Matthew Nelson is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) at the University of St Andrews, working under supervisor Gavin Hopps. His thesis research concerns the theological implications of Thomas Pynchon's fiction, investigating how Pynchon's postsecular work questions both secular and religious constructions of reality, and situating it within the Gothic literary tradition — specifically American Gothic, alongside Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.  Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    Matthew Nelson & Mookie: Infinite Pynchon with Zero Restraint

  4. Jul 20

    Natalie Saar: 3 Books a Year, 1 Day Job, Zero Excuses

    Natalie Saar joins Mookie for another episode of Ink vs Algorithm to share how she writes three books a year while also working, starting with the story of how her first published novel came out of a panic attack. She wrote her way through the anxiety, read back what came out afterward, and realized there was a psychological thriller in it: a stalker with OCD so compulsive about order that he fills exactly one notebook per victim and physically cannot bring himself to write a second page, no matter what he witnesses. That's the origin story for a career that's since spanned psychological thrillers and personal-development nonfiction, self-published since 2012 — most recently Fake It Till You Make It: The Science of Feeling Rich, with Let It Be Easy next. Mookie and Natalie discuss how the comparison trap and a lack of "time affluence" is what truly makes people feel poor, wealth instead described as the freedom to spend your hours how you want. Natalie unpacks a genuinely useful reframe: satisfaction is a cheap emotion (a candy bar gives you satisfaction), but excitement is the signal worth chasing, and she now protects a chunk of every weekend for decisions based purely on what excites her, not what's productive. They dig into resistance, too — not as a signal to quit, but as something to interrogate honestly: is this hard because you're avoiding growth, or because it's genuinely wrong for you? The back half turns into one of the more candid conversations about writerly voice this show has had. Natalie has ghostwritten for celebrities, written financial marketing copy, and wandered through enough professional "voices" that she now deliberately writes throwaway pages — sometimes just to delete them at the end of the day — purely to stay in touch with what she actually sounds like underneath all the client work. Her own friends, when asked, consistently prefer her earliest, least-polished books, because they sound the most like her. That sets up the AI conversation. Natalie's framework is sharp and specific: she'll let AI handle anything a computer reads — SEO headers, metadata, GEO optimization — but nothing a human reads. Research, yes, with primary sources double-checked by hand, because in her experience it's right maybe 40% of the time. Actual prose, never. Her broader bet is genuinely optimistic: because readers invest real hours in a book, they're better judges of quality than viewers or listeners skimming video or music, and as AI slop floods every category, human voice becomes the differentiator, not a liability. They close out with hard-won, unglamorous marketing tactics: Goodreads giveaways, BookBub ads, reverse giveaways, and Natalie's own backlink-building site for indie authors, plus a real warning about the increasingly sophisticated scam emails targeting self-published writers with fake agents, fake award nominations, and fake TV deals. Instead: be real, and keep writing!  The Guest Natalie Saar is a journalist and writer based in Los Angeles, California. She has been telling stories to anyone who will listen since she was able to talk. After years of consuming true crime content, she developed a love of thrillers. Her stories feature everyday situations — but with an added twist. “Becoming 1% Better” is her first work of nonfiction, born out of a love of general curiosity about how we can better ourselves and treat those around us better. It's a finalist in the Chanticleer International Book Awards (CIBA) for Mind and Spirit Non-fiction.  By day, she works as a marketing writer and content strategist; she also runs The Indie Authors, a site built to help self-published writers get discovered.  Her Websites & Books https://nataliesaar.com/ The Indie Authors Project  https://www.theindieauthors.com/  Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    Natalie Saar: 3 Books a Year, 1 Day Job, Zero Excuses

  5. Jul 15

    Why Boys Stopped Reading, and How Malory & LitRPG Save Them

    Reading fiction has become "a girl thing," and an entire generation of boys now pay for it. Mookie sits down with UK author Malory (yes, one name — think Sting, but with lots of typing) to dig into why literacy stats are cratering for young men worldwide, and why the fix isn't more "important" books, it's fun ones they love to read.  They dig into a defense of pulp fiction, the mechanics of why LitRPG works where traditional YA fiction hasn't, describe the genre's video-game style "system" that tracks stats and rewards competence, and why stories of everyday heroes overcoming adversity resonate. They also discuss why publishing quietly stopped wanting male protagonists and how a teacher's assumption about "who the good readers are" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by age fourteen. Then the conversation turns to Malory himself, and how he went from burned-out day job to full-time author in four years. His professional writer's journey started on Royal Road, the crowdsourced fiction platform where he serialized a chapter a day. There he learned the hard way to write rapidly, consistently, and with good quality, while thousands of strangers picked apart everything wrong with every word. That brutal, real-time feedback loop is where he actually learned to write, and where the deadline discipline got hard-coded: break the schedule, lose the audience. His craft sharpened further through Raconteur Press's themed anthologies: a Buck Rogers pulp month, a hardboiled noir month, each with a hard word-count ceiling that beat the ramble out of his prose and made his longer 100k+ word litRPG series tighter. He talks through his actual process: 5 a.m. starts, treating writing like "another nine-to-five," not waiting for inspiration, nor taking days off because he might not feel it. Malory also shares lessons learned from co-writing, hitting Audible's 40-hour sweet spot for readers doing long American truck hauls, and why he now has several ongoing series plus new ones signed for next year. Malory and Mookie also get philosophical, and wrestle through the paradoxes and illusions of the "tortured genius" myth. For Malory, writing is a contract with an audience, and being responsive to readers isn't selling out, it's the job. That leads into the AI reckoning hitting litRPG, and why Malory's shifted away from pure pen-name anonymity toward doing more podcasts and interviews. He understands that human readers are most responsive to human writers, especially ones with a real track record fueled by their lived experience, not LLM matrix math.  For Malory, writing is about deadlines, discipline, writing for a younger version of himself, and an older version of his 9-year-old son. For you, this podcast provides inspiration, best practices, and a rare glimpse into the world of creativity, publishing, and creative success.  The Guest Malory is a lifelong sci-fi and fantasy fan writing LitRPG and Progression Fantasy, books built on strong characters, action, and snark. His philosophy: write fun stories people actually want to read, because the world needs more escapism. That drive led him to write his first Boy's Own Adventure for his son, chasing the golden age of classic heroics. Winner of the 2026 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award, he's partnered with Aethon Books, Legion Publishers, LitForge, and Soundbooth Theater, plus regular anthology work at Raconteur Press. Outside writing and doctoral research, he's rereading Terry Pratchett or watching England's cricket team collapse again. His Website https://maloryauthor.com/ Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    Why Boys Stopped Reading, and How Malory & LitRPG Save Them

  6. Jun 4

    Mary Rose on Memoir, Mortality, and Meaning

    Mary Rose never expected a cancer diagnosis to become the catalyst for some of her most inspired and important writing. A former marketing executive, corporate storyteller, Mary Rose is a lifelong writer who joins Mookie to discuss her battle with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer that forced her to confront not only a life-threatening illness, but the childhood trauma she thought she'd left behind decades earlier. What began as simple health updates for friends and family evolved into a deeply personal memoir, Inhale, Exhale, Survive, a story that explores the intersection of trauma, illness, resilience, and the struggle to retain agency inside a healthcare system that can often leave patients feeling powerless. Mary shares how writing became both a survival mechanism and a form of service, helping her process her experience while creating a roadmap for others facing serious illness. Along the way, she and Mookie dive into the rise of the empowered patient, the role of AI and online research in modern healthcare, the challenges of navigating complex medical systems, and why understanding your own condition may be one of the most important forms of self-advocacy. The conversation also veers into the craft of writing itself. From the limitations of "show, don't tell" dogma to the flood of AI-generated content reshaping publishing, Mary and Mookie debate what makes writing truly human—and why authentic storytelling still matters in an age increasingly dominated by algorithms. Part memoir, part writing workshop, part exploration of survival itself, this is a conversation about finding meaning when life veers off script, reclaiming your voice when circumstances try to take it away, and transforming adversity into something that can help others feel a little less alone. Mary Rose can be found on Substack, where she writes about life, illness, healing, and patient advocacy. Her upcoming memoir, Inhale, Exhale, Survive, chronicles her journey through cancer, trauma recovery, and the enduring power of storytelling. The Guest Mary Rose is a retired owner of a production company who has shifted from high-tech marketing stories to personal essays and memoir. Her work explores survivorship, early childhood trauma, and the life built on the other side of serious illness. Her memoir, in the final editing stage, traces the unexpected collision of unresolved childhood trauma with a multiple myeloma diagnosis and the stem cell transplant that followed.  She writes two Substack publications. In Love Heals, her weekly essays are attracting a devoted readership drawn to her unflinching honesty and spare, grounded prose. In Myeloma Fighters, she co-authors with medical experts to create medical content that bridges the gap between emerging science and the people living within it. She also facilitates a myeloma patient and caregiver support community. On Substack: https://maryrose23.substack.com/ https://myelomafighters.substack.com/  On Instagram & Threads:  @maryrosewriter Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    Mary Rose on Memoir, Mortality, and Meaning

  7. May 14

    Bill Bernhardt Demands Truth & Justice for Superman’s Creators

    Acclaimed and prolific author William Bernhardt joins host Mookie Spitz for a wide-ranging conversation that starts with the tragic origin story behind Superman and spirals into something much bigger: the brutal collision between creativity, commerce, ego, exploitation, and survival. Drawing from his new nonfiction book The Superman Wars, Bill unpacks how teenage creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster built the first true superhero during the Depression, only to lose control of Superman to businessmen who turned their creation into a global empire while the creators themselves struggled for recognition, stability, and dignity. Their conversation goes beyond comic book history into an honest discussion about what it means to be a creator in any era. Mookie and Bill connect Jerry Siegel’s fight to modern writers battling algorithms, AI scraping, scam publishers, vanity presses, content overload, and the impossible economics of attention. They dig into why talented creatives so often get crushed by the business side of art, why perseverance matters more than raw talent, and why most writers fail long before the quality of their work ever has a chance to matter. Bernhardt also shares hard-earned lessons from publishing more than 67 books across legal thrillers, historical fiction, poetry, children’s books, and writing instruction. He breaks down the reality of finding agents, surviving rejection, building a readership, networking without becoming disingenuous, and treating writing like an actual profession instead of waiting around for inspiration to strike. They also discuss a strong emotional thread: how creators are fueled by this tension of living chaotic, vulnerable, financially unstable lives behind the scenes. Bill's research even took him into Jerry Siegel’s childhood home — the literal room where Superman was born — and he captures that eerie feeling of standing inside the physical birthplace of modern mythology. If you’re a writer, artist, indie creator, comic fan, or just somebody trying to build something meaningful in a world designed to commodify everything, join them for part publishing war story, part creative survival guide, and part cautionary tale about what happens when imagination collides with money and power.  The Guest William Bernhardt is the author of over sixty books, including the Daniel Pike legal thriller series (#1 best-selling novel The Last Chance Lawyer). His previous works include the bestselling Ben Kincaid series, the historical novels Challengers of the Dust and The Florentine Poet, three books of poetry, and the Red Sneaker books on fiction writing. In addition, Bernhardt founded WriterCon Programs to mentor aspiring writers. WriterCon hosts an annual writers conference, an annual cruise, small-group writing retreats, a magazine, plus free bi-weekly e-newsletters and podcasts. More than three dozen of Bernhardt’s students have subsequently published with major houses. He is also the president/owner of Bernhardt Books, which publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. In addition to his novels and poetry, Bernhardt has written plays, a musical (book and score), humor, children stories, biography, and puzzles. He has edited two anthologies (Legal Briefs and Natural Suspect) as fundraisers for The Nature Conservancy and the Children’s Legal Defense Fund. In his spare time, he has enjoyed surfing, digging for dinosaurs, trekking through the Himalayas, paragliding, scuba diving, caving, zip-lining over the canopy of the Costa Rican rainforest, and jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet. In 2013, he became a Jeopardy! champion. His Website & Books https://williambernhardt.com/ Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    Bill Bernhardt Demands Truth & Justice for Superman’s Creators

  8. Apr 15

    Jeff Krell & Jayson: 40 Years of Turning Life Into Story

    In this episode of Ink vs Algorithm, Mookie sits down with cartoonist and writer Jeff Krell, the creator of Jayson: a comic strip turned graphic novel universe that started as pure survival and evolved into a living, breathing archive of identity, humor, and cultural change. Jeff didn’t break in through some polished pipeline. He got rejected, ignored, reshaped, and edited into existence. A local paper cut his work in half and ran it anyway. An editor forced him to rethink storytelling structure from the ground up. Underground comics cracked open what was allowed, and suddenly there were no rules except the ones he chose to keep. What followed was a long experiment in character-driven storytelling. Jayson and his orbit of friends, which were often pulled straight from Krell’s real life, became a vehicle for catharsis, comedy, and eventually something more controlled: a way to step back, look at the past, and reshape it with intention. The conversation hits hard and true about what it means to be an indie creator:  Why most creators are lying to themselves about “doing what you love”How underground comics gave more freedom than today’s “inclusive” mainstreamWhy characters get more interesting when you stop protecting themHow cartoons became a way of saying things you can’t say directlyAnd why self-publishing isn’t a fallback, but a way to control your own destiny Jeff also shares a blunt throughline: if you’re waiting to be discovered, you’re already losing. Krell built his audience one conversation at a time, throuigh conventions, hand-selling, face-to-face, and then watched the algorithm catch up later. His career success is less about nostalgia, and more about sheer endurance.  JAYSON is about what happens when you keep showing up, keep drawing, keep writing—even when nobody’s paying attention—and then one day, you realize the work outlasted the noise. If you care about storytelling, comics, or just figuring out how to keep creating without losing your mind or your voice, then Jeff's story will inspire you.  The Guest Jeff Krell created the long-running gay-themed humor strip “Jayson,” which debuted in the Philadelphia Gay News in 1983 and enjoyed long runs in Gay Comix and Meatmen. Since 2005 Krell has been publishing original “Jayson” graphic novels including “Jayson Goes to Hollywood” and “Jayson Gets a Job!” In 2023, in collaboration with Sue Bielenberg, Krell debuted the all-ages Jayson spinoff “Arena Takes Manhattan,” a career girl humor comic starring Jayson’s sidekick Arena Stage. Krell also translates comics for famed German cartoonist Ralf König.  His Work http://ignite-ent.com https://www.amazon.com/dp/0988357429/ Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    Jeff Krell & Jayson: 40 Years of Turning Life Into Story
See All (16)

Trailer

About

Creative writing in all forms has never been this exciting -- or frustrating. In a time when ChatGPT writes novels, TikTok “authors” go viral, and algorithms decide which stories live or die, Ink vs Algorithm is a podcast dedicated to writers who bleed ink and and publish their heart out.  Hosted by writer, ranter, and raconteur Mookie Spitz, each episode features lively conversations with flesh and blood authors who love what they do -- and hate competing with prompt-jockeys and viral Bots. Along the way more stories will be told and laughs shared, living proof the living still matter.     Whether you’re a novelist, journalist, pundit, poet, or just a cynic with a keyboard and an attitude, Ink vs Algorithm reminds us all why lived experience still matters — and how extracting and sharing it still takes relentless grit, determination, and a mountain of fought for and refined talent. 

Information