Forty-six and twenty-three. Then forty-eight and eight. Those four numbers come from an experiment where college students had to wear a Barry Manilow t-shirt into a room full of strangers, and I think the second pair might be the most freeing finding in social psychology. Especially if you have something finished sitting on your desk that you haven't published yet.

Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you’re sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can’t shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn’t for you, that’s a real answer and a good one.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

Did you keep two fingers in the book? One on the page you were on, one back at the choice, so a bad ending never had to count. Guilty! I’ve never met a Choose Your Own Adventure reader who didn’t. And if you were a purist, I genuinely want to hear from you, because maybe you’re my ideal reader.

This week my own interactive novel came out. The Escape Artist drops you into Lester Honeycutt, a teenager in mid-century Delaware, Ohio, who owns a pair of striped pants he considers part of his act and wants to be the greatest magician in the world. Two legends come to town on the same Saturday at eight o’clock, the escape artist and the knife thrower, and you can only see one of them.

Thirty endings. Four complete life cycles. A gang, a rival magician, a hot air balloon, and one moment where you nudge your best friend up on stage to be generous and it costs you everything. Kirkus calls it “entertaining escapades bolstered by a bevy of gleefully unpredictable endings.”

Play the opening free, ten minutes: https://chadprevost.com/ea

The book: https://chadprevost.com/if-then-books/the-escape-artist/

Buy it anywhere, forward the receipt to [email protected], and the full online version is yours free.

Illustrations by Annabelle Tarter. Ages 14–17.

Teachers, librarians, principals: I’ll come run this live in your classroom, and the room votes on every choice. Book two sessions and the second is a writing workshop where students write their own endings. Same address.Substack:

Apple Podcasts:

Spotify:

Show page: https://crossroadspublishing.group/the-difficulty/

Personal site: https://chadprevost.com

Live from Home Bar with Genesis, on a Friday evening in August.

I brought a poem this time. The last time we sat down together I got self-conscious about which one to read and never read any of them, and then a night or two later I had a dream: a baby left with me in an upstairs room, a baby I ignored for a while before I finally drew close and started building trust with her. Robert A. Johnson says don’t just tell a dream, walk with it. So I walked with it, and this episode is some of what came of that.

Genesis talks about why creative people need frequent times of silly, and why that’s the thing that keeps you limber enough to lift something heavy later. He tells the story behind the Brothers painting hanging on the wall behind us, which is a better story than I knew. And he hands me a line I haven’t been able to put down since: every day is a birthday.

The poem is “On Your Birthday,” from Mirage and Tar, my first collection in twelve years, on its way back from the printer now. Order a copy here.

Follow The Difficulty: Subscribe at chadprevost.substack.com, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The Difficulty is produced by Crossroads Publishing Group, a message-and-meaning press.

More at chadprevost.com.

Recorded live at Home Bar, Fourth and Market, Chattanooga. Art and conversation by Genesis.

Almost every piece of writing advice you have ever received came from a survivor. In 1943 a statistician looked at where returning bombers had been shot and realized the military was about to armor exactly the wrong parts of the plane. This episode is about what his correction has to do with every craft book, agent story, and five-a.m. routine you've ever read, and why the most important information is the part that never made it back.

Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you're sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can't shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn't for you, that's a real answer and a good one.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

If you’ve spent any real time with the Enneagram, you’ve probably felt Chris Heuertz’s influence whether you knew his name or not. Chris is the author of seven books, including The Sacred Enneagram (foreword by Richard Rohr) and The Enneagram of Belonging, with an eighth on pilgrimage coming from Simon & Schuster. But the books came out of a life: nearly three decades of humanitarian work across 70 countries, years in the anti-trafficking movement, time serving alongside Mother Teresa in Calcutta.

We recorded this a couple of weeks before his wedding, and I wanted it out in the world before he walks into that new life. We talk about learning to tell stories on a word processor in India, burying 700 of the women and children he served and what that does to a person, the end of a twenty-year marriage and the strange welcome into the human family on the other side of it, rewriting sloth for the Nines, what Eights actually feel under the armor, and why the detours are sacred and the arrival is a myth.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

Show-note links:

* Chris’s site: chrisheuertz.com

* The Sacred Enneagram and The Enneagram of Belonging (Bookshop.org)

* Chris’s Substack: Sacred Detours

* Instagram: @chrisheuertz

* Subscribe to The Difficulty: chadprevost.substack.com

* Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

* The press where it all makes sense: crossroadspublishing.group

* Chad’s site: chadprevost.com

You open the app and it seems like every writer you know is having a better year than you are. There’s a name for what’s happening in your head and it isn’t envy. Two psychologists went and read what NFL fans posted when the season schedule came out, and found that every single fanbase was certain their team had drawn the hardest one. Same thing is happening to you on a Tuesday night, and once you see the shape of it, it loses most of its power.

Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you're sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can't shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn't for you, that's a real answer and a good one.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

Everyone has a GO button. Mine was a drawer holding seven unpublished choose-your-path books I finally published under my own name. What happened after? On what courage actually is (a heart energy, not a head energy), what it isn’t (recklessness refuses feedback; courage subscribes to it), and why the unlived life is the one certain loss.In this episode:

* The confession: a decade in the drawer, three books shipped, and what the children’s book market taught me the hard way

* David Whyte’s Consolations on courage as “heartfelt participation”

* David Hawkins on courage at level 200 — the threshold where a life stops draining energy and starts giving it back

* Dr. Spalding’s cliff: courage without readiness is just another form of impulse

* Roethke’s permission: “I learn by going where I have to go”

* Readings from my forthcoming nonfiction book, arriving January

Bring us your book. Crossroads publishes serious nonfiction of the inner life—memoir, essay, contemplative work. Six openings remain for fall authors, and founding-author rates hold through September 30: $5,000 for a short book we call a Crossing, up to $7,000 for a full-length book, with the audio edition included in every tier.

→ Book the free 20-minute discovery call · See the engagement ladder · Tell us about your book in writing

The pricing on the site is the pricing.

On the horizon: our reissue of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (September 8) · Mirage and Tar, a numbered first edition of 100 copies, this fall · the book read from in today’s episode, January.

Last week I told you to stick with things. This week I want to tell you about the afternoon Daniel Kahneman sat in a room, was handed the exact information that should have made him quit, and carried on as if nothing had happened. It cost him eight years, and the thing they were building was never used. I try to work out honestly which one of us is right.

Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you're sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can't shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn't for you, that's a real answer and a good one.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much is the ball? If you said ten cents, you're in good company, because more than half the students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton said the same thing. It's wrong. This episode is about why the wrong answer arrives so fast and feels so finished, and it starts with a seven-year-old boy in occupied Paris who turned his sweater inside out to hide the yellow star, and the SS officer who stopped him on the street.

Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you’re sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can’t shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn’t for you, that’s a real answer and a good one.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

The Anthropic settlement got final approval, Amazon raised its royalty ceiling for the first time since 2007, and the first half sales numbers say something uncomfortable about nonfiction. Three answers to one question, and none of them came from a reader.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

If you’re sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can’t shake loose, Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. Editorial, design, print, ebook, audio, distribution. Take a look at crossroadspublishing.group and see what you think. If you decide it isn’t for you, that’s a real answer and a fine one.

I also coach writers toward the harder part, which is hearing yourself into committing to the thing you actually want to do. That’s a conversation, not a purchase.

And I’m taking on a handful of new projects this fall. If you know someone with a book they keep almost writing, or a story you know is worth telling, send them my way or just send me their name.