Inky Compass

09/10/2026

NaNoWriMo's gone, and there're too many options for replacements, so I joined the crowd and built my own.

THE LONG HAUL 🚛✒️

One book. 2,000 words a day. Phone off. Delivered by New Year's Eve.

Nov 1, I start drafting Friend (Thirty Pieces, Book 1) from the cab. Hold me to it.

09/10/2026

https://inkycompass.substack.com/p/the-modern-pioneer-meets-from-the?r=8eurov&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

02/10/2026

When you work hard on an outline, then the freaking characters AND shared universe tell you something completely different, completely changing how you thought the story was going to go!

01/10/2026

28/09/2026

https://inkycompass.substack.com/p/the-modern-pioneer-the-clock-was?r=8eurov&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

22/09/2026

I don't know what I did to offend Louisiana.

I've tried to be respectful. Hauled freight through her parishes without complaint. Navigated her roads with what I believe is appropriate humility for a visiting Ohioan.

She cracked my windshield anyway. The passenger side this time. Less than a week after the PM replaced the first one.

The sleeper HVAC has also withdrawn its services again. In Louisiana. In September. And somewhere in the process of grabbing a fresh trash bag, I found a mosquito-like creature whose body was the size of my thumb and whose legs and wingspan approached the size of my hand.

Louisiana sent it. I'm certain of it.

Three weeks out due to revenue problems we're finally getting to the root of. Three weeks of clarity, too — the kind that only comes when the noise stops long enough to hear what you actually think. I've been debating something. I think I know which way I need to go. When I'm ready to name it, I will.

What changed in those three weeks: I started cooking real food. Butane burner, a pot, a reusable bowl from the store. The meal sounds like a fever dream — burger patties, eggs, mozzarella, two kinds of sausage, Greek yogurt — but the flavor and texture work together in a way nothing I'd been eating on the road had. One week in and the shorts I hadn't worn in a while are trying to fall down when I walk. Feeling significantly better already.

READ IT FROM THE PRESS!!

The new pipeline is producing. 16,700+ words drafted in The Lost Volume over the last ten days of active sessions. The RRR prologue exists — 933 virgin words, first chapter ever drafted for that book, in my voice.

My pastor offered to read Friend and offered me a slot in a writing course he built. Both of those things are significant.

The faith is honest right now: inconsistent Bible reading, the enemy with his fingers in deep, the static filling the space between the songs. I'm naming it because naming it is the first move.

Full dispatch on Substack. Link in bio.

Inky Compass Ltd · Ellis "Inky" E. Pinkerton

09/09/2026

The shirt is in the trash.

Trashed. It earned that ending.

Every time I wore it something broke. Mer's big breakdown and the tow-away. The steer tire. The brake chamber. The trailer airlines. And when I finally threw it away, it left a parting gift — two trailer tires that had apparently been auditioning for careers outside of trucking.

One was completely bald in the center. Smooth. NASCAR ready. The other was cupped so bad the techs were surprised it hadn't blown. Both trailer tires, mounted and installed: just shy of $900. The PM before that — oil, air and oil filters — ran a similar number. Three new tires total this stretch. The MRA is getting built as a priority. Pre-trip discipline is tightening. Charged flashlight. Every tire. Every time. Doggonit.

Mer is running clean now. The cursed shirt is gone and she's acting like it.

The restart gave me time to think and time to cook. A MyMini made its way into the cab. Turkey burger, mozzarella, Greek yogurt — sounds weird, ate like a stroganoff. Best meal I've had on the truck in weeks. The bar was a sandwich, so take that for what it's worth.

READ IT FROM THE PRESS!!

Something significant happened on the Press side.

I stopped letting AI write my books.

The previous process had me prompting Claude to generate prose, then editing it, trying to make it mine. The imposter feeling never left because it had a real cause — I wasn't writing the prose. I was editing someone else's draft and calling it mine. I knew it then. I'm saying it now.

The new process: Claude helps build the outline, maintains world-building consistency, checks canon. I cold-draft all prose myself. Every word on the page is mine before anyone else touches it.

The RRR prologue — first chapter of any draft for Rail-Rooted Rust — was cold-drafted under this new process. It exists. It's mine. It has more emotion. More oomph.

The imposter feeling is gone because the imposter condition is gone.

Also — a developmental editor lead came in through the inquiry email on the page. Imlia Book, through the Fiverr account Jyvon Reads. Still vetting. References are the next step before budget gets involved. More when there's more to report.

Full dispatch on Substack. Link in bio.

Inky Compass Ltd · Ellis "Inky" E. Pinkerton

31/08/2026

This one came from a question Seam Ink Bandits left on the table.

A reference kept surfacing while drafting Bandits — a lost volume, a run nobody talked about in full, a gap in the record that the characters knew better than to fill in. The question got louder the longer I left it alone.

So I wrote it.

Crow has run hot loads before. This one reads clean on paper — a double haul, two Fount cylinders, corporate money, a straight run through Ohio's back-corridors to a drop site that doesn't exist on any civilian map.

It doesn't feel clean. Harlan's tuning fork won't settle. The pressure keeps climbing past what the contract calls safe. And somewhere behind them on the CB, a smooth voice keeps offering an es**rt nobody asked for — calling itself the Vein Keepers, asking questions about the cargo that have nothing to do with delivery.

Crow keeps the mic short. Keeps the Scripts tight. Keeps driving.

Some loads don't forgive mistakes. Some doors only open one way.

Drafted. In edits. The road remembers this one.

Inky Compass Press · Ellis E. Pinkerton

25/08/2026

I've been avoiding prayer.
Not because I stopped believing He's listening. Because I think I already know what He'd say, and I wasn't ready to hear it.
Last night, six songs came on back to back. Not chosen by me. Each one hit harder than the last — Jonny Diaz, Casting Crowns, Hawk Nelson, Matthew West, Jeremy Camp, Micah Tyler. By the end I couldn't breathe. I couldn't see. I was somewhere between being convicted and being found, and I'm not sure there's much difference between those two things when God's the one doing it.
I wrote it all down. The songs. The tears. The things He's been asking of me that I've been too scared to name out loud. The difference between being baptized and actually letting the water mean what it symbolizes. The footprints in the sand — and what I now believe about the stretch where only one set shows.
If you're avoiding worn-out knees on worn-out carpet because you're afraid of what God already knows — this one's for you.
Permission to Be Unsure. On Substack now. Link in bio.
God Bless You.
— Inky

(Photo is from my personal baptism on April 21, 2024)

23/08/2026

This one started with The Horror Scriptorium.

A YouTube channel that goes deep into all things horror — the kind of research that makes you understand how people end up inside something they cannot name until it is too late. Two videos caught me at the right angle: cults and their leaders. My mind went somewhere with it. Dark. Way too dark for me to feel comfortable with. The obvious place first. Then the story dragged me somewhere else entirely.

The more the idea moved, the less it wanted to be about the leader and the cult. It wanted to be about the ground underneath. About the people who carry something unspoken long enough that the weight starts making decisions for them. About what happens when a place has been collecting that kind of weight for longer than anyone currently standing in it has been alive.

The Hocking Valley had opinions about where this was going. I followed them.

Silas Grim maps terrain for a living. He is very good at it. He is less good at the other kind of mapping — the kind that requires looking directly at what happened six months ago on a rain-slicked stretch of US Route 33. At the seventy-four seconds before he called for help.

The Hocking Valley doesn't require him to look. It already has the record.

Beneath Vein Hollow, a keeper named Cassia Forge has spent years mastering the seep's deepest property: the truth people cannot say out loud. She doesn't break people with force. She just needs them in the same room when the seep finishes what it started.

The hills remember. And they grow.

Outlined. The hills are patient.

Inky Compass Press · Ellis E. Pinkerton