DANOTI (Do Anything Not on the Internet) 2026

Writers are the only necessary ingredient to the creation of transcendent literary work.

It’s been about 100 years since the publication of The Great Gatsby. Since then, writers have relinquished much of their power to create transcendent work to a group of professionals and wannabes that stand between them and a sustainable readership. The group includes:

• Literary agents, who all but dictate who will get a chance at a literary career

• Editors, whose livelihoods depend on book sales and not book quality

• Marketing boards, who cannot afford to accept “this book is really good” as a reason to support it

• Publishing executives, who know never to transgress corporate shareholders

• Sensitivity readers, whose misdirected efforts turn compelling prose into disguised legalese

• Activists, who stand ready to make trouble for any book that expresses political incorrectness

• Readers, who act as disgruntled customers ready to abandon or, worse, pillory authors whose works don’t satisfy their prescribed needs.

The aspiration toward writing careers—quitting our jobs, making enough money to survive, spending all day at our literary work—is the culprit. We’ve internalized the need to, on some level, acquiesce to this wide range of players in the publishing world. If there is another path to a career in literary fiction in 2026, you’ll have to show it to me.

There are, no doubt, other paths to careers in genre writing, but that comes with the requirement of adhering too closely to conventions that can easily stifle the need to create something that stretches beyond conventional parameters and toward something that transcends them.

The resulting power shift to all the players of the publishing world but the writer—the only people with the ability to create transcendent literature—has doomed the position of career writer to be just another position of compromise, and often the compromise of the work itself.

That’s all the bad news. Here’s the good news.

The abandonment of these players will eventually lead to the continuance of the literary endeavor as it has been practiced for centuries. This abandonment has never been more possible because of modern technology that, as of this moment, still allows for the relatively cheap and easy publication of work without succumbing to the power of any of the forces above.

First and foremost, it requires the literary writer to abandon the careerism that seeks to reduce their work to something that merely fits into prescribed boxes. Great works of literature don’t fit into prescribed boxes. They create their own boxes. Contemporary publishing, like never before, seeks to force contemporary writers into boxes that hamper if not preclude the creation of transcendent work.

Second, literary fiction writers must abandon the use of the internet as a device through which others read their works. The internet fosters monitored reading experiences. This injects between the only two necessary entities in the communication of great literature—the reader and the writer—another entity that seeks to influence the experience in ways no doubt both obvious and subtle. This monitoring provides these entities with information about the reading experience that has never before been captured. It can be used to further the agendas of some of the players above, who are already too powerful when compared to the writer. This information is now likely to lead to the continued development and proliferation of works that appeal to bottom lines and shareholder gains as opposed to those likely to transcend materialist concerns and speak to deeper literary concerns. If we want the literary endeavor to keep going as it has for centuries, it has to happen outside of the internet.

Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Austin, Melville, Joyce, and so many others dealt with forces in society that tried to stifle the proliferation of their work, that tried to reduce it, but none could boast the delimiting effects of the internet for making their work something less than transcendent, or for cancelling their works at the outset.

The way to get back on a path that can lead to transcendent literature is to publish works in ways that limit the impact of the above players and put the power to create back in the hands of the writer. One of those ways is the process I invented called D.A.N.O.T.I. This process involves publishing your work in a way that avoids five conventional pitfalls of contemporary publishing. D.A.N.O.T.I. removes the power from the players above and puts it back in the hands of writers. D.A.N.O.T.I. requires:

1) No careerism: The number one reason writers relinquish their literary power is that they want to trade it for a career as a writer. Remove careerism from your writing practice, and you’ll be left with nothing but the goal of creating great work.

2) No ebooks: Ebooks foster monitored reading experiences that ultimately relinquish writer power to players such as Amazon. The resulting data collection helps shape the publishing world to produce derivative works that the holders of this data deem preferable to their companies’ bottom lines.

3) No ISBNs: This barcode on the back covers of published books is meant to allow the industry to track book sales and thus determine which books to support and promote in the future. This data is then used to support derivative works that follow conventions and don’t necessarily aspire to transcendence.

4) No AI: The use of AI to create your works inherently leads to recycled ideas from the internet, which is not the way to create transcendent work. Furthermore, the owners of these programs will use your work to create other work, which is inherently derivative.

5) Little to no marketing: The more you use the internet to market your work, the more the internet has you. You must avoid using it as much as possible, and never allow the actual contents of your book to be disseminated through the internet.

Approaching the publication of your work in a way that avoids all of the above removes the power from players that seek to shape literature in conventional, materialistic ways and puts the power back in the hands of writers, who have the capacity to make transcendent literature. Adopt the above, and you will find that the only obstacle to creating the work you want to create is your own lack of talent.

Putting this power back in the hands of writers is the only way we as a literary society will get back to the creation of works that transcend. When writers have the power to create their most transcendent work, they have the power to shape work that truly gives to the reader rather than takes away from them. Transcendent work is harder to sell than conventional, derivative work, which makes it not ideal for company bottom lines. For the literary writer, the bottom line is the transcendence of the work.

Read the first book ever published by D.A.N.O.T.I.