Ink vs Algorithm: The Writers' Pod

Mookie Spitz
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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. 1d ago

    Justin A. Williams Gets Reborn Through the Myths His Father Loved

    Justin Williams lost his father at twenty-one, with too much still unsaid between them. So he did what storytellers have always done with problems too big to face head on: he handed the problem to the gods. His father loved Joseph Campbell, the mythologist behind The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Justin turned that love into a novel about a hero who can’t believe in himself. Justin A. Williams, author of the YA mythic fantasy Reborn: Virtues Constellation, joins Mookie Spitz as a guest on Ink vs Algorithm to talk about how myth carried him through grief, faith, and his own mental health journey. His hero, Christian Belvedere, hides a deity’s power behind a human mask at elite Parthenon University, a campus where Greek, Egyptian, Norse, and Japanese mythologies collide. Justin modeled the book’s father on his own dad as a young man, and he explains why the story chases understanding instead of a tidy reconciliation. Mookie and Justin dig into the craft: daydreaming every scene like a film before writing it, the “little ego death” every rewrite demands, and how his mother, a psychologist, pushed him to stop writing a diary and start writing for readers. They trace the dying-and-rising god from Osiris, the Egyptian lord of death and rebirth, to Dionysus and beyond, and Justin describes his own path from devout high school Christian to a more Gnostic, meditative faith. For indie authors hearing crickets, he offers a blunt five-to-ten-year plan for building a fandom. He also shares the last thing his father ever told him, words that fueled the whole book: “It’s good to have fun.” The Guest Justin A. Williams writes mythological fiction for young adults. His debut novel, Reborn: Virtues Constellation, follows a bipolar college senior who discovers he is Osiris reborn. The book is now in its second edition and has an audiobook that Justin narrates himself, with a sequel due in March. Born in Queens and raised on Long Island, he studied comparative religion at Princeton, where he rowed on the varsity heavyweight crew and played club rugby, and he earned a master’s in political science from Rutgers. He directs NYGEARUP, a program that helps underrepresented students succeed in college and careers, and he co-founded Policy Titans LLC, a firm that writes, advises on, and manages grants. He also hosts the podcast The Trend with Justin A. Williams and the YouTube channel MyMentality, where he explores myth, mindset, and personal growth. https://www.therebornseries.com/copy-of-book Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    Justin A. Williams Gets Reborn Through the Myths His Father Loved

  2. 6d ago

    Kestral Gaian’s The Boy From Elsewhere Finds Identity Where No Algorithm Can

    Kestral Gaian would rather read a hundred bad stories from people who will get better than one “perfect” story from a machine. Kestral is the author of the YA fantasy novel The Boy From Elsewhere and joins Mookie Spitz days after the US midterms, to talk about identity, craft, and why the struggle to write well gives a story its soul. The Boy From Elsewhere began in the first COVID lockdown, when Kestral livestreamed a 30-hour writing marathon on Twitch for charity. They pointed one webcam at their face and one at the keyboard, and swapped water for energy drinks around hour twenty. The draft came out “unhinged,” so Kestral shelved it and started again from scratch, keeping the story’s kernel and the high-stakes mood of that moment. The novel deliberately memorializes the pandemic, which most fiction has chosen to forget. Kestral explains why their queer characters simply get to be themselves while the plot throws parallel worlds at them, and why they now face more pushback and fewer event invitations than they did ten years ago. “We tend to think of progress as a straight line,” Kestral says, “and really it’s a bit of a dance.” The conversation then turns to technology. Kestral remembers mapping the caves of Colossal Cave Adventure, the original text adventure game, with their mum, and built a text adventure of their own, GooseVenture. A former technologist, Kestral left the industry disillusioned and now refuses to use generative AI in their own work. Their quarrel lies with the system and the people pushing AI, not with those who use it: “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.” Mookie compares writing to the sweaty kitchen in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, the chef’s memoir of restaurant life where the agony in the back creates ecstasy in the front. Kestral answers that AI fiction amounts to “vanilla lump on a plate.” Both agree that people on every side of the AI debate need real education about it so they can make an informed choice. The Guest Kestral Gaian is a UK-based novelist, poet, playwright, and former technologist, and this episode’s guest on Ink vs Algorithm. Their YA sci-fi novel The Boy From Elsewhere, published by Reconnecting Rainbows Press in February 2026, opens a four-book series, and its sequel, The Girl From Nowhere, follows in February 2027. Kestral edited the anthology Twenty-Eight: Stories from the Section 28 Generation, wrote the poetry collection Tubelines, created the text adventure game GooseVenture, and co-hosted seven seasons of the podcast The Geekly Chronicles.  Find Kestral at https://kestr.al/ Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    Kestral Gaian’s The Boy From Elsewhere Finds Identity Where No Algorithm Can

  3. Nov 4

    TJ Poortinga’s Electric Orange Turns Political Scripture into Literary Satire

    What happens when a frustrated professor's sarcastic rant gets taken as gospel? In TJ Poortinga's darkly comic novel Electric Orange, a Dutch Calvinist social psychologist melts down on live TV, dares America's angriest fringe to swap the federal government for the church, and watches a movement take him at his word. TJ Poortinga, a former Bible teacher and evangelical ghostwriter who walked away from the world he grew up in, joins Mookie Spitz as a guest on Ink vs Algorithm to talk about Electric Orange, his satire set in a reimagined 2012. TJ explains why he believes American politics and religion have fused to the ruin of both, and how Ross Perot's third-party run, Sarah Palin's end-times faith, and students carrying the Left Behind novels (a bestselling evangelical series about the Rapture) fed the book. Then TJ and Mookie take on the hardest trick in political fiction: satire that doesn't preach. TJ shares how Philip Roth's The Plot Against America made him scrap his spoof and start over, why he adopted Margaret Atwood's rule that every event in a novel needs a real-world precedent, and why a madman needs a level-headed narrator to keep the story on the ground. Mookie brings in Digger, Don't Look Up, Aliens, and Avatar to show where message movies soar and where they sink. The conversation closes on the business of writing: agent queries, the launch of TJ's own Peep Stone Press, and Barnes and Noble pop-up signings, where Mookie's son saw and referred him. TJ uses AI for grammar and marketing copy but never for fiction, Mookie makes the case for blood, sweat, and tears, and both writers argue that human presence may matter more than ever as AI-generated books flood the market. The Guest TJ Poortinga writes psychological fiction laced with mystery, satire, and just enough truth to make you howl. Raised among dairy farmers in an immigrant enclave of Washington State, he was groomed for the clergy and trained accordingly. In college, he was recruited by a network of political activists disguised as a prayer club, one of many experiences that would later fuel his writing. After teaching high school for two years, he ghostwrote for a famed global evangelist before making a dramatic exit from the movement—complete with existential crisis. His work is darkly funny, unexpectedly tender, and pulses with the energy of a fever dream and the timing of a well-told joke. https://www.tjpoortinga.com/ Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    TJ Poortinga’s Electric Orange Turns Political Scripture into Literary Satire

  4. Sep 23

    Stay in Your Lane and Watch It Go Off the Rails

    Mookie flips a familiar piece of career advice on its head: stay in your lane, the guidance handed to nearly every writer, marketer, and creator trying to build an audience. He builds the case around Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, tracing how Newton's absolute universe held for centuries until Einstein tore it apart at twenty-seven by rejecting Newton's core assumption rather than refining it. Kuhn's insight, Mookie argues, applies just as much to building a career or a brand: real shifts come from crisis, and crisis rarely rewards the person who stays put. He draws the line carefully though. Staying in your lane works once you've already claimed one, and he leans on Ries and Trout's classic positioning theory to explain why line extensions like New Coke and Xerox computers failed. But before you've established that mind share, doubling down on a single genre or modality can quietly sink you. Mookie points to Matt Dinniman's "Dungeon Crawler Carl" series as an example of a writer who built a lane by blending satire, social commentary, and multiple genres rather than narrowing into one. The rant turns personal from there. Mookie explains why he stopped treating himself as just a novelist and started spreading across five podcasts, daily TikTok and Instagram rants, and video blogs, treating each one like a gig on tour, testing the room until something sticks. In an AI environment reshaping the rules week to week, he argues finding a lane matters more right now than defending one. Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    Stay in Your Lane and Watch It Go Off the Rails

  5. Sep 2

    Josh Adam: Understanding Reality through the Measurement Mind

    Mookie found Josh Adam the way both of them hoped strangers still could online, stumbling on one of his essays and immediately recognizing a kindred mind. Josh joins Ink vs Algorithm to talk about his book, The Measurement Mind, and fair warning: their discussion is one of the deepest, most unapologetically nerdy conversations the show has done, working through the actual nature of Reality itself. Josh spent a decade of hour-long gym commutes listening to physics and philosophy audiobooks, and slowly built his own original theory out of it. His core claim: reality isn't made of things, it's made of measurements. Every time anything, a person, a thermometer, a particle, makes a distinction between one state and another, that act of measurement is what pulls raw, unconstrained information into the ordered, causal world we actually experience. Mookie, a lifelong physics obsessive in his own right, meets him step for step, and together they build the idea out from quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's cat, through Max Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis and Stephen Wolfram's Ruliad, all the way to the multiverse, the anthropic principle, and why an AI can be fluent and intelligent without ever actually experiencing anything at all. What makes the conversation land, though, is watching two genuinely curious, credential-free thinkers, a marketing consultant and a gymnastics coach, work through ideas usually reserved for physics departments, purely because they can't stop wondering about them. They test the theory against the Moon (does it keep bending spacetime if nobody's around to measure it?), against free will, against the meaning of consciousness itself, and land, unexpectedly, on something warm and human: that no matter how mathematical the universe turns out to be, what actually matters is still love, family, and the people sitting across from you. The Guest Josh Adam is a gymnastics coach and the author of The Measurement Mind, a book blending physics, philosophy, and original theory on the nature of consciousness and reality. He lives in the Chicago area with his wife and two sons. More from Josh, including his book: https://www.themeasurementmind.com Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    Josh Adam: Understanding Reality through the Measurement Mind

  6. Aug 28

    Doctor's Orders: "Put Your Hands On Your Head!"

    Mookie's back on Ink vs Algorithm with another true story that's got no business being this fun to tell. This one's got a needle, a Southern-accented campus doctor barking orders, a soon-to-be Grammy winner squatting in the next apartment over, and a girlfriend who wanted him married before she wanted him gone: cocaine on the pizza counter, a robbery a month like clockwork, and one deeply, spectacularly unglamorous trip to student health services that Mookie still remembers in vivid, wincing detail decades later. The story is Cheepnis in action, the philosophy Mookie laid out a few episodes back on Bald and Bloviating: Zappa, Nietzsche, and the idea that the most humiliating, unpolished, can't-believe-that-happened moments of a life make for the best art we can create/ No developmental editor cutting the adverbs here, no sanding off the embarrassing edges, just the real, ridiculous, occasionally gross truth, told the way it actually happened. And then, without losing a beat of the comedy, Mookie goes somewhere he hasn't quite gone before on the show, peeling back what else was really happening in his life during this exact stretch of reckless, twenty-something chaos, expressed the way he thinks storytelling is supposed to work: not to fix anything, just to turn it into something worth telling. The Short Story Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    Doctor's Orders: "Put Your Hands On Your Head!"

  7. Aug 24

    The Night Bobby Almost Burned the Bar Down

    Mookie returns to Ink vs Algorithm for another solo reading, this one a true story from his nightclub-managing days in 1990s Chicago, and a companion piece to his published novella Greg's Gift. Before diving in, he opens with a real, honest check-in on where his head's at these days: five shows running in parallel, a self-described introverted extrovert New York City emigre now happily isolated in Southern California, and a hard-won sense that his writing has finally earned the confidence it took decades to find. The story itself picks up a thread Mookie's been pulling all season: that the most chaotic, humiliating, out-of-control experiences of our lives are exactly the ones worth telling, not despite the mess, but because of it. The harrowing tale centers on a bartender Mookie liked a little too much to manage properly, the quiet ways enabling someone can start to feel like loyalty, and a single shift where every bad habit Mookie let slide finally came due at once. He tells it in the roman à clef tradition where real events, real people, compressed and shaped for maximum impact, and insists every beat of it  happened, down to sending it years later to the real person it's about and getting back a giggling, unprompted confirmation. Mookie closes with an honest look at his own process, why reading his own work aloud makes him a sharper writer every time, and where this story fits into a planned sequel to Greg's Gift he's already hungry to write. The Short Story The Novella Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

    The Night Bobby Almost Burned the Bar Down

  8. Aug 21

    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
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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. 

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