October 10, 2025 – Edition No. 3

Here’s the deal: writing is hard enough without wading through another “10 Tips to Hack Your Productivity” list written by someone who hasn’t touched a blank page in years. The Cole Mine is different.

Every issue, I’ll hand you two things:

Two Sharp Tools: Apps, hacks, and strategies that actually make writing easier, faster, and better. No snake oil. No guru-speak. Just practical stuff that works.

A Deep Cut: An unfiltered look behind the curtain at ColePress: bonus material, process breakdowns, drafts that didn’t make the cut, and the occasional moment of chaos that somehow turns into progress.

If you like shortcuts, inside scoops, and the occasional pro wrestling reference, you’re in the right place. Strap in…we’re going deep.

2 SHARP TOOLS.

ONE DEEP CUT.

This is where I pull back the curtain and let you peek inside ColePress. Early drafts, abandoned paragraphs, behind-the-scenes chaos, and the strange little rituals that keep the words flowing. If Sharp Tools is the how, Deep Cuts is the why. Think of it as the bonus track you didn’t know you needed.

It’s been an interesting few weeks of rewrites. Last issue, I teased some exclusive bonus content: a complete chapter of Ephemeris that didn’t make the final manuscript. Little did I know at the time that the chapter I had in mind would make a surprise comeback over the past week and fight its way back into the book.

But fear not: it bumped another chapter that was too similar to another storyline from the book. So now I present to you, the freshly trimmed final chapter from the Ephemeris beta manuscript:
​
​CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A Library Without Time

The book on her desk had been repaired twice before. Maren could see the threadwork of younger hands in the spine: one set neat, one chaotic. Neither would hold much longer.

She squinted down through her magnifier, guiding her needle through the frayed binding of Fahrenheit 451. A tremor in her right thumb nudged the line off-center. She cursed under her breath, then adjusted her grip with the slow precision of someone who knew how much worse it could get.

“Of all the books to fall apart in here,” she murmured. “You’re lucky I appreciate irony.”

Outside, the wind scraped tree branches against the library’s boarded windows like a slow violin. One pane on the east side rattled…broken seal, loose frame. She made a mental note to reinforce it with cloth tape. Again.

The repair finished, she set the book aside gently, like laying a child down for sleep. She lit the second lantern, low flame to preserve the battery, and walked the perimeter of the main reading room. She ran her fingers along the edges of the shelves as she passed. Oak. Solid. Scarred by half a century of neglect and an ongoing apocalypse. They held firm anyway.

Books sat in careful order: not alphabetical, not by Dewey. Hers was a taxonomy of purpose.

• Hope & Resistance
• Survival & Systems
• Witness & Warning
• Joy & Folly
• Myths That Might Still Be True

She paused at a shelf marked “Joy” and tapped the spine of Watership Down. “You held the line better than most,” she said. At the central reference desk (her unofficial command post) Maren slid open the logbook. She flipped past yesterday’s notations and uncapped her pen.

DAY 327
Weather: Cool. Sky clear.
Visitors: None yesterday. No disturbances.
Supplies: Battery 40%, water stable. Tea leaves running low.
Request: barter priority.
Mood: Heavy silence. Not a warning, not a peace. Waiting for something.

She paused on that last line, then underlined “waiting” once and left it alone.

The lantern sputtered slightly. She gave it a firm tap. It steadied. At the far wall, a bulletin board titled “What Was Lost, and When.” Dozens of yellowing index cards were pinned in careful rows, each listing a burned or destroyed volume, its author, and the circumstances. Next to it, a companion board: “What Was Found, and Why It Matters.”

She reached up and thumbed a newer card on the second board: a Bible from the personal collection of someone named Ansel Stone. She had no idea who he was. Neither did the boy who traded it to her for a pair of wool gloves and two nights’ safety. But it was a beautiful edition with handwritten notes in the margins.

The boy never came back. She imagined he didn’t need the gloves for long.

By now the light from outside had shifted into a pale gold sliver. Sunrise behind what remained of Detroit. Maren walked to the western window, stood between two shelves of cracked encyclopedias, and peeked through the small section of unboarded glass. The city still smoldered in places. The river glinted faintly in the distance, though you couldn’t trust its currents anymore. The People Mover track lay twisted like an unfinished sentence. A blue tarp snapped loose from the old opera house three blocks away.

And yet, across the street, the painted mural of Aretha Franklin, partially obscured by ivy, still stared forward, chin raised. Maren nodded back to her.

Then she turned, walked back to her desk, and turned over the small wooden sign that faced the doorway: Library Open. Entry by Trade. Knowledge Bartered. Stories Welcome.

***

The boy hesitated just beyond the bottom step, arms bundled around something wrapped in burlap. His boots were uneven. One tied with frayed cord, the other duct-taped at the sole. He stared up at the entrance like it might ask for his name before letting him pass.

Maren watched from behind the glass-paneled doors, unmoving. She’d seen his type before: half-starved, half-cocky, aged prematurely by the kind of decisions no one should have to make before twenty. His face was windburned. His left ear was pierced with a bent paperclip. He didn’t look armed, which meant either he wasn’t or he was confident enough not to show it.

When he reached the door and tried the handle, she opened it first. “No weapons,” she said flatly.

He held up both hands. “Just books,” he replied, with an awkward smile that barely reached his eyes.

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

He held out the bundle. Inside: a cracked tablet, wrapped with cloth. Battery long dead, screen spiderwebbed, but intact. “Got it from an old municipal building down near Fort Street. Found it in a drawer labeled ‘Oral Histories.’ Figured that sounded like something you’d like.”

Maren raised an eyebrow. “You figured correctly. Still…entry requires a story.”

He shifted, suddenly uncertain. “A story?”

She gestured toward the sign behind her. Knowledge Bartered. Stories Welcome.

He scratched his jaw. “I mean…I got stories. Most of ’em aren’t good.”

“Good isn’t the measure. Tell me one that matters.”

The boy exhaled and looked down at his boots. Then, slowly: “My sister used to play this game. We’d pretend we were on different planets. She’d sit on top of the washing machine and make these little chirp noises. Like she was broadcasting from a radio tower on Saturn or something.”

He paused.

“She died in a fire set by people trying to steal our food. I found the walkie-talkie we used, like, a month later. Still worked. I carried it all the way here. Sometimes I still talk into it, even though it’s just me.”

Silence followed. Maren didn’t speak. She simply stepped aside and held the door.

“Welcome to the Holloway,” she said.

Inside, the boy moved slowly, eyes darting to every towering shelf like the walls might close in. He stood for a long moment in the atrium, breathing in the scent. Dust, paper, wax, and the faintest trace of lemon oil. “You really kept all this up?” he asked, his voice soft now.

“No,” she replied. “The books kept me up. I just sorted the wreckage.”

He gave a small chuckle. “You always talk like that?”

“Only when people are listening.”

She took the tablet and added it to a growing collection on a side cart labeled “Unconverted Orphans.” There were eight others, all in various states of damage. Some held memories. Some held nothing but encrypted tax forms.

She handed him a slip of paper. “Reading time. Three hours. No pocketing, no folding pages, no annotations. You damage anything, I make you catalog poetry until your fingers fall off.”

He nodded solemnly.

“And one more thing,” she added. “If you’re going to read fiction, read something that hurts.”

He blinked. “Hurts?”

“Nothing worth remembering is painless.”

He wandered toward the stacks, turning once to glance back at her.

“I’m Ravi,” he said. “In case you want to yell at me by name later.”

She allowed the smallest of nods. “Noted.”

She watched him until he disappeared between “Joy & Folly” and “Warning & Witness.”

Then she returned to her desk, flipped open the logbook, and added a line: Visitor: Male, ~17. Named Ravi. Traded tablet for story. Chose fiction. Good.

For a moment, she sat still, fingers resting on the open page. She thought of the walkie-talkie, imagined a boy whispering into it like a ghost calling a ghost. Nonfiction. Not good.

***

The knock came after dusk. Three taps, pause, two more. Like someone trying to sound harmless.

Maren closed her ledger and stood slowly. She didn’t need to look through the peephole. No one from the neighborhood knocked like that. Locals knew better. Locals came through the back or simply announced themselves.

This was theater.

She unlatched the top bolt, left the bottom one in place, and cracked the door half an inch.

A man stood on the step. Early forties. Clean-shaven, polished boots, pale leather gloves. His coat too new to be scavenged. He held a wide-brimmed hat in his hand like he’d just stepped out of a noir film and hadn’t yet realized the world had ended.

“Ms. Holloway?” he said smoothly.

Maren didn’t blink. “She’s dead. Library’s mine now.”

“Of course. Forgive the formality.”

He offered a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “I’m Wex. Representative of the Brush Park Assembly.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re here about zoning.” He chuckled politely. “You’re sharp. We like that. This building sits at a critical junction. River corridor to the south, rail lines to the north. We’re consolidating assets. Stabilizing the district. You understand.”

“I understand euphemisms. I collect them.”

He tilted his head. “We’d prefer not to claim this place by force. It has…sentimental value, we know. But our patrols are expanding. Logistics need space. Shelter. Storage. A new command post.”

Maren’s eyes narrowed. “This isn’t a depot. It’s a library.”

Wex smiled again. “Everything is a depot now.”

She shut the door just enough to lean her shoulder against it. The bolt still held.

“You’ll want to tell your Assembly,” she said, “that this library has a filtration system. Works fine. But if your people move in, the filters get removed. With prejudice.”

Wex raised an eyebrow. “Water leverage?”

“No,” she said. “Mold prevention. You people smell like mildew already. I won’t have it spreading to the archives.”

He stared at her, expression unreadable. Then laughed. A real one this time. “You’re a rare breed, Miss…”

“Maren.”

“Maren,” he repeated. “You know you can’t hold this place forever.”

“I’m not trying to. Just long enough.”

“For what?”

She didn’t answer. Wex adjusted his gloves and nodded once. “We’ll be in touch.”

As he turned to go, she called after him: “Next time, bring a book. Or don’t bother knocking.”

Inside, Maren slid the bolt back into place and stood quietly, listening to the sound of his boots fading down the steps, then across the cracked pavement.

From the second-floor landing, Ravi leaned over the banister. “Who was that?”

“Trouble,” she said.

He came halfway down the stairs, keeping his voice low. “Do we need to hide anything?”

“No,” she said. “We need to start choosing what we’d carry if this place burns.”

Ravi swallowed hard. “You think they’d actually… ?”

She didn’t answer. She returned to her desk and opened a drawer. Inside were hand-drawn maps of the building’s lower levels, lists of titles she’d earmarked for evacuation, a folded photo of a woman holding a book open to a poem Maren could still recite from memory.

She placed the photo face down and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper. At the top, she wrote:

Evacuation List: Priority 1

Then, underneath:

Memory is lighter than most things. But heavier when lost.

***

Ravi had never seen the lower level. There was no lock on the basement door… just a long, thick scarf tied around the handle in a series of intricate knots. Maren undid them with a deliberate rhythm, one knot per second, as if reciting a silent poem.

“You sure you want to see this?” she asked without looking up.

“Not if it’s, like… where you keep bodies.”

She snorted softly. “Just ghosts.”

She pulled the door open. A staircase dropped into shadow. She lit a lantern and handed it to him.

“Walk slowly. Shelves are narrow. Voices echo.”

The sublevel had once been a records archive for city documents. Deeds, permits, blueprints. Now it was something different. Not cleaner. Not brighter. But sacred.

Lanternlight swept across towering rows of mismatched shelving: filing cabinets without drawers, broken server racks, warped card catalogs. Between them, carefully stacked crates and sealed tubs labeled in Maren’s steady handwriting.

• Letters / Personal, verified
• Artifacts / Pre-collapse, nonfunctional
• Journals / Anonymous (screened)
• Oral Histories / Untranscribed

In one corner sat a crate marked simply: Cartography.

Ravi drifted toward it, crouched beside a wooden box filled with maps of all shapes and sizes. Beside the box, a weathered notebook labeled “Len Mallory – Day 58.”

The cover was brittle with age; the title page read: “If we can’t draw the world, we can still describe it.” On the wall above the box was a map unlike any he’d ever seen. Where restaurants, hospitals or parks might normally be marked, this one had strange symbols. A circle inside another circle in what appeared to be a small town. A triangle next to a tree. An infinity symbol by a lake.

“Who is this guy?” he asked.

“Someone trying to redraw the world. Not for power, but to help people find their way back to each other.”

“What’s up with this map?”

Maren smiled.

“He doesn’t just record locations. He records moments of clarity. If I understand him, I believe the infinity symbol means hope.”

She moved to a tall cabinet and opened the top drawer. Inside, a stack of old vinyl records sat sleeved in butcher paper. The label on the first: Motown Sampler – For Playback & Memory Only.

“Some things need to be heard in the dark,” she said.

He walked to a different shelf and picked up a slim volume. The cover was blank. Inside were hundreds of clipped phrases, quotes, and fragments, glued and hand-numbered like scripture.

“What is this?”

“Ephemera. Word scraps I couldn’t throw away.”

He flipped to one at random:

“We left behind maps of our laughter and hoped someone would read them like coordinates.”

Ravi looked up. “You wrote that?”

“No. I found it carved into a school desk near Corktown.”

He nodded, slowly.

“I thought you were just holding onto books,” he said. “But this is like… a memory museum.”

She walked over to him and gently took the volume from his hands.

“No,” she said. “Museums get looted. This is a garden. I’m growing what’s left.”

They sat cross-legged on the floor beside an overturned crate, eating dried apple slices and staring into the warm glow of the lantern. After a while, Ravi asked, “You ever think about leaving?” Maren shook her head. “This place is the only thing that doesn’t lie to me.”

“Even if no one ever comes back?”

She looked around the room. “Someone will. Not for me. For this.”

He tapped the box of maps with his foot. “What if it’s not enough?”

She smiled faintly. “Then maybe I wasn’t either. But we don’t catalog what succeeded. We catalog what mattered.”

Later, when Ravi had dozed off under an old fleece blanket and the lantern had burned low, Maren stayed up and copied a single sentence into a fresh notebook labeled “For the Next Librarian:” “If you’re wondering whether it was worth saving, you’ve already answered the question.”

She closed the notebook, placed it in a waterproof pouch, and filed it behind an unlabeled drawer.

A new category had begun.

***

The bell above the side door barely made a sound anymore. A rusted ping, more suggestion than alert.

Maren looked up from her work at the front desk and waited. Some people announced themselves. Some didn’t. You could tell a lot about grief by the way it entered a room.

Footsteps. Slow. Hesitant. Familiar.

A woman stepped into the light filtering through the front windows. Her coat was cleaner than most. Hair cut short. Eyes fixed not on the books, but on the floor just in front of her. She held a small bundle in her hands, wrapped in what looked like a child’s scarf.

Maren rose.

“Chloe,” she said softly.

The woman didn’t answer. Just approached the front desk, unwrapped the bundle, and laid its contents on the counter. A folded drawing: sun-faded, edges curled. Stick figures, bright colors, blocky handwriting. One figure with a crown. Another with glasses. A book drawn between them.

Maren remembered it instantly. Amir had made it. Six years old. Talked too loud in the reading room, always asked if he could take home two books instead of one. Brought her half a chocolate bar once and called it “a thank-you tax.”

He’d drawn this on his third visit. Said it was a picture of “me and you, learning forever.”

Chloe didn’t speak. Just stepped back and looked around the room. Her eyes lingered on the “Lost & Remembered” board in the corner, then flicked to the cart of children’s books. Empty, save for a teddy bear and a clothbound copy of Charlotte’s Web.

“Do you want me to archive it?” Maren asked quietly. Chloe shook her head. “Just…put it somewhere it won’t be forgotten.”

Maren nodded. “That I can do.”

She took the drawing carefully, almost reverently, and carried it to the rear alcove – an area marked by a hanging sign carved in wood: “Memory is a form of presence.”

There, she pinned the drawing beside a paper airplane, a pressed flower, and a broken pencil etched with the name Carter. Then she added a new card to the adjacent catalog drawer.

Name: Amir
Age: 6
Visits: 3
Gift: Drawing
Filed Under: Joy / Loss / Teaching

When she turned around, Chloe was already at the door.

Maren called gently, “Would you like to borrow something?”

Chloe paused. “Not today.”

“Will you come back?”

A beat. Then: “Maybe. If it gets cold.”

Maren nodded. “There’s always tea. And a chair that doesn’t creak as much as the others.”

Chloe gave the smallest of smiles and then stepped out into the fading light. Just before the door closed, she paused.

“I’ve been writing things down,” she said quietly, without turning back. “Not sure if it’s worth anything. But if it ever is…I might bring them here.”

Then she was gone.

Later that evening, Maren logged the visit.

Chloe returned. Amir’s drawing placed in L&R. No words needed. Love lingers in quiet things. She’s begun writing.

She looked over at the board again. “We’ll keep learning,” she whispered. Then she dimmed the light.

***

The smoke reached her first. Thin, acidic, curling under the door like a whisper trying to become a scream.

Maren didn’t panic. She moved with practiced calm, dousing the lantern, unlocking the bolt, stepping into the vestibule. From there, she saw it clearly through the slit in the front doors.

A pile of books stacked at the bottom of the stairs. Burning. Mostly pulp novels. A few old manuals. Nothing from her core collection. Not this time.

She opened the door wide, letting the smoke curl around her, refusing to flinch. Across the street, no one stood watch. Whoever lit the fire wanted the message read, not signed.

She stood there until the flames finished their work. Then she turned, went back inside, and grabbed the damage ledger.

An hour later, Ravi found her in the front room, eyes red. Not from tears, but from smoke and fatigue. She sat on the floor with a wet cloth in one hand and the soot-smudged remains of a volume in the other.

“What the hell happened?” he asked.

She didn’t look up. “Someone mistook intimidation for cleverness.”

“They burned books?”

She gave him a tired look. “They always do. When ideas become inconvenient.”

He glanced at the hearth, where four partially melted covers lay like corpses awaiting identification.

“Were they… important?”

Maren held up a scorched spine. “This was The Little Prince. One of three copies left.”

Ravi looked stricken. “Why would they burn that?”

“Because they didn’t read it.”

She handed him a clean cloth and pointed to the last book, now barely legible. He knelt beside her and began to wipe.

“I didn’t think it would get this bad,” he muttered.

“It hasn’t,” she said firmly. “Yet.”

They sat in silence, cataloging loss like coroners.

When the work was done, Maren taped a fresh card to the “What Was Lost, and When” board:

Title: The Little Prince
Cause: Arson / Fear
Message: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

She pinned the card in the center of the board. Then, without a word, she reached into the drawer below and took out a scrap of charcoal. On the wall beside the board, she wrote in sharp, unshaking strokes: “We remember the burned as fiercely as we remember the saved.”

Ravi stood back and read it twice. “They’ll come back,” he said.

“I know.”

“And what do we do then?”

Maren turned and met his eyes.

“Then we stop organizing books and start organizing people.”

***

The reading room had been closed for nearly two years. It wasn’t boarded up, just forgotten. Tucked behind a sliding partition near the geography wing. The old oak door bore no label. Maren never mentioned it to visitors, and few ever found it by accident.

She opened it now with the same reverence she reserved for weathered spines and final pages. The room smelled of paper and dry leather. Rows of high-backed chairs faced a cracked projection screen. A threadbare carpet muffled her steps. The glass ceiling above was coated in dust and bird droppings, softening the sunlight into a mournful amber glow.

She walked to the front and stood beneath a faded quote etched in brass above the chalkboard: “To learn is to remember what we’ve always known.”

She read it aloud. The words felt heavier now, not like wisdom…but like obligation.

Behind her, Ravi hovered in the doorway.

“You sure?” he asked.

“No,” she replied. “That’s how I know it’s time.” She motioned for him to follow her to the supply closet behind the podium. Inside: blank cards, graphite pencils, a canvas bag with a cracked stamp set, and a stack of old library cards. Real ones, yellowed and fraying at the edges.

She handed him the stamp pad.

“We’re reopening,” she said.

“Reopening what?”

“This room. This wing. The whole damn idea.”

Ravi blinked. “To who?”

“To anyone who can read. Or anyone who wants to learn. No more vetting. No more silent trades. They want knowledge, they help maintain it.”

He gave a wary look. “You think people are ready for that?”

“No,” she said again. “But neither was I.”

By midday, the sign on the library’s front door had changed.

HOLLOWAY PUBLIC LIBRARY
Now Open to Stewards of Memory
Admission: One Story, One Promise

On a small table inside, Maren placed a new card catalog drawer labeled “Readers & Rememberers.”

Each blank card asked two questions, hand-written in her script: What is something you’ve learned that no one taught you? What do you want others to remember about this world?

They began to arrive that afternoon. A man with one arm and a suitcase full of cassette tapes. A woman who used to be a teacher, her voice gone raspy from illness. Three kids who said they’d “only come in for the warm chairs,” but stayed to read The Giver cover to cover. Maren let them. She watched them. She made notes in her ledger with words she hadn’t used in a long time.

Visitor count: 9. No theft. No damage.
One child cried during chapter six. Good.

That night, she and Ravi returned to the reading room. The chairs had been rearranged. A new drawing was taped to the chalkboard: a crude image of the library itself, with words scribbled beneath: This place is a thinking place.

Ravi sat in the front row, flipping through an old poetry volume. “Feels different in here now.”

“It is,” she said. “It belongs to more than just the dead.”

“You’re not gonna lose it, are you? The library?”

She looked around. The imperfect shelves, the dusty skylight, the hand-lettered signs, the scrape marks on the tile where someone had dragged a chair too fast.

“No,” she said. “I’m going to give it away before someone can take it.”

She sat beside him, opened her own book, and read in silence until the sun vanished entirely.

***

The wind had shifted again.

Maren could hear it through the cracks in the transom window above her desk. A hollow moan through broken glass, like the library was exhaling after holding its breath too long.

The last visitors had gone an hour earlier. A teenager left behind a dog-eared copy of Of Mice and Men with a note tucked inside: “Didn’t expect it to hit that hard. Thanks for the warning.” She smiled faintly and added the note to a small tin labeled “First Reactions Worth Keeping.”

Ravi was asleep on the floor above, tucked in beneath a mountain of mismatched blankets. He’d tried to stay awake to “guard the atrium,” but the boy had been reading Neruda poems out loud and didn’t make it past the third stanza.

Maren sat alone at the front desk, flipping open the battered recorder salvaged from an old NPR affiliate. The red light flickered. Still worked… barely.

She pressed record.

“Log entry, Day 330. Name: Maren Johnstone Role: Curator, steward, reluctant matriarch of borrowed thought. Status: Still here.”

She paused.

“I used to think this place would outlive me. Now I wonder if I’ve simply been keeping it alive long enough to be worth losing. Maybe that’s all a library ever is… a promise whispered until someone’s ready to listen.”

She reached into the drawer beneath the desk and pulled out a book she hadn’t shelved yet. It had no title on the cover, only a deep blue binding and worn silver corners. The inside was blank. Unfilled. Waiting.

She hesitated, then added it to a new drawer in the card catalog. The label above it: “Distance.”

She looked up at the skylight, the night sky choked with drifting ash and low cloud.

“It’s not just light we lose,” she said into the recorder. “It’s proximity. We drift. From what we meant to say. From who we were. From each other.”

A long silence followed.

Then, softly: “Some stories stay far from the light for a long time. Doesn’t mean they’re lost.”

She clicked the recorder off.

Outside, the wind rose again. But it didn’t rattle the windows this time. Something about the way the chairs had been moved, the books re-shelved, the space repopulated with breath and footsteps and grief and hope. It all felt… braced. Ready. She flipped the front sign over one last time before turning in for the night.

Library Closed (for now) Return When the World Feels Quiet Enough to Listen

She lingered a moment at the threshold, one hand resting on the doorframe, as if expecting someone to arrive even now. Too late for the light, but not too late to begin again.

Then she turned off the lantern, stepped into the dark, and let the silence hold her like a final page.

You’ve read The Library Without Time. Next issue, we’ll dissect it: what hurt to cut, what has to be extracted, and why this chapter didn’t make the final manuscript.