October 27, 2025 – Edition No. 4
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.
This is where I hand over some of the weapons in my writing arsenal. Think of it as contraband from the Cole Mine: software, hacks, and sneaky shortcuts I actually use to carve through drafts without losing my mind (or my deadline).
Canva: Visual Content at Lightning Speed
If you’ve ever been stuck waiting on a designer or spent too long wrestling PowerPoint, Canva is your shortcut to clean, professional-look visuals. It’s made for communicators who want speed and control without needing full-blown design training.
How I use it:
At Sanitation District No. 1, my team uses Canva to design publications, social media posts, digital signage, and a host of other things. We pick a template, drop in our brand colors, swap out the imagery, tweak the text… and boom!
- One sneaky trick: use the drag-and-drop editor + pre-formatted templates to get 80-90% done in 10 minutes, then refine.
- I also use it for quick ancillary content for ColePress: e-book covers, social graphics, even newsletter headers.
Bonus move:
Build a “brand kit” within Canva to easily manage your fonts, colors, asset placeholders, etc. Then when you jump into design mode, you’re already in your visual zone. And depending on what level of subscription you have, you can even share content between team members and have them comment directly in the design.
Class Central: Find the Right Course, Fast!
When you want to sharpen a skill, whether it’s “advanced PowerPoint visuals” or “storytelling for nonprofits,” Class Central aggregates thousands of online courses from many providers and lets you filter by topic, cost, certificate, provider, etc.
Example:
Let’s say you want to become more marketable by earning a free university-sponsored certificate in an AI-related field.
- Just visit classcentral.com.
- Search “AI” in the subject search box.
- Filter for “With free certificate” (1306 courses) and “University course only” and you will find 20 free courses that result in a university-sponsored AI certificate.
- Click on the one you want and start learning.
Study the Ethics of AI at the University of Helsinki or master digital thinking tools at The Open University. There are free courses offered from over 1,300 universities including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. You will also find courses from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, the Smithsonian, the United Nations, and many other institutions.
Bonus move:
Protect your precious time by searching courses rated as “The Best Free Online Courses of All Time.” There are 250 courses guaranteed to give you the best bang for your (zero) bucks.tMaker to create a meta-prompt that “forces argument tension.” You’ll be surprised how much more alive your copy sounds.
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.
A Library Without Time: Postmortem
Writers love to call their work “living things.” Sometimes that’s true. Other times, it’s a polite way of saying we can’t stop performing surgery on something that’s already died beautifully.
“A Library Without Time” was one of those. When I first wrote it, I thought it was a quiet elegy inside the storm of Ephemeris: a story about preservation, not progress. Maren’s library was a sanctuary built on stubbornness and memory. It was everything I love about endurance in the face of collapse. Which is exactly why it couldn’t stay.
WHY IT HAD TO GO
In the beta draft, “Library” landed too close to another thread in the book… another isolated character curating meaning from the ashes. It doubled the theme without doubling the impact. Structurally, it slowed the pacing just as the broader world of Ephemeris needed to accelerate.
More simply: it was beautiful, but redundant. Like keeping two last songs on an album that both say “goodbye.” You only need one of them to land the message.
Cutting it hurt. The kind of hurt that makes you step away from your desk and walk until you stop muttering “maybe I can make it fit.” But when I pulled it, the surrounding chapters breathed again. The global story rebalanced. The silence that followed was the sound of the book exhaling.
WHAT IT GAVE BACK
Here’s the secret, though: cutting a chapter doesn’t mean it dies. “Library” became a compass. Its tone, melancholy but defiant, reshaped how I wrote the rest of the book. Maren’s spirit leaked into other characters. The phrase “Memory is lighter than most things. But heavier when lost.” became an invisible motto for the survivors who refuse to forget who they were.
Sometimes a deleted scene leaves fingerprints all over what remains. This one did.
WHAT I LEARNED
The world of Ephemeris is about loss, yes, but also about selective survival. What endures, what fades, and what we choose to remember when we can’t keep everything. The same rules apply to writing. You don’t just build worlds. You prune them. You keep what hums when the rest goes quiet.
So here’s what I remind myself now when I face a cut that feels impossible:
“If it still means something, it’ll find another form.”
And this one did. It’s no longer a chapter, but it’s still a heartbeat in the dark.
EDITOR’S COMMENTARY: Scene Dissection
Let’s look at one small exchange between Maren and Ravi:
RAVI: “You ever think about leaving?”
MAREN: “This place is the only thing that doesn’t lie to me.”
RAVI: “Even if no one ever comes back?”
MAREN: “Someone will. Not for me. For this.”
At the time, I loved this scene for its quiet defiance. It’s emotionally neat: the kind of dialogue that lands well on the first read and feels wise.
But on the second pass, I realized something: it told the same truth as too many others.
Maren’s answer is nearly identical in tone and purpose to an earlier speech from another survivor: one that carries real narrative consequence. In other words, this moment post-spoiled a better one. It answered a question the book had already resolved.
If I rewrote it today, I’d let her dodge the question. Maybe she’d say something evasive like, “Leaving’s a luxury for people with maps.”
Same defiance, different shape. It keeps her mysterious and lets Ravi (and the reader) wonder if she’s protecting the library or hiding inside it.
That’s the difference between closure and tension. One ends a conversation. The other keeps it breathing.
IN THE NEXT DEEP CUT:
As Ephemeris rewrites continue, I’ll share a personal essay I recently submitted to a Writer’s Digest competition.