Some years are quieter than others. Some years are meant for rest.
And some years? Some years hand you a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and a horizon full of work worth doing.
In this reflective new post, Mark Posey writes about turning sixty, building twenty raised garden beds, rebuilding the future of Stories Rule Press, and why this season of life feels less about chasing and more about building — steadily, patiently, one load of compost at a time.
Sunday mornings used to be about sleeping late, catching up, or feeling guilty about everything still left undone. These days, they’re quieter. Coffee in the kitchen. Music playing softly. Conversations that drift between the new, the familiar, and the things you somehow keep revisiting after decades together. Outside, twenty raised garden beds wait for spring planting, which may be ambition or madness. Possibly both.
What happens when a ten-year anniversary edition becomes something more? While revisiting the Kiss Across Time series for a special collector release, Tracy Cooper-Posey found herself reflecting not just on the books, but on time itself, storytelling, survival, and the strange roads that lead writers to create the stories readers love. Kiss Across Memories is part memoir, part publishing notebook, and part behind-the-scenes look at one of Tracy’s longest-running series.
Star Wars has been part of my life for as long as I can remember—and, in a very real way, it helped shape my career as a writer. But decades on, the question isn’t why it began. It’s why it never seems to end. As new generations discover it and older ones drift away, Star Wars continues to renew itself in ways that are both familiar and puzzling.
This weekend, Mark is trading the keyboard for lumber, screws, and soil as he builds twenty raised beds in the backyard. There’s a quiet satisfaction in work you can see at the end of the day—and a surprising connection between gardening and writing. Both are acts of optimism: you do the work now, trust the process, and hope something good will grow.
Trends come and go. One month it’s a trope, a cover style, or a subgenre everyone is chasing; six months later, the industry has already sprinted off after the next shiny object like a Labrador with three tennis balls and no self-control. At Stories Rule Press, we’ve made a different choice. We pay attention to the market, but we don’t build our catalogue around trends. We start with the story—and whether it’s the kind of world a reader can disappear into and want to return to years later.
Writers spend months — sometimes years — alone in a room inventing characters, places, and entire worlds. It can start to feel like writing is a solitary act. But the truth is, a story isn’t finished when the writer types the last sentence. It comes alive when someone reads it. When a reader laughs, gasps, misses their bus stop, or stays up far too late turning pages — that’s when the story truly becomes real.
One of the unexpected joys of running Stories Rule Press has nothing to do with computers, algorithms, or online stores. It’s the live markets. Standing behind a table of books and talking with readers face-to-face changes everything. Conversations happen, stories get discovered, and suddenly the solitary work of writing becomes something wonderfully human.
Ideas don’t arrive fully formed. They start as small, sideways questions — the kind that won’t leave you alone once they land. That’s where stories actually come from.
Some weeks, the stories don’t stall — they simply make room for other word-work. Editing, shaping, refining someone else’s manuscript is still time spent inside the craft. And when you finally return to your own blank page, you bring sharper instincts with you.
