Toby Austin · A craft course for writers
The Holdout Craft Course
Read one novel like a writer. A chapter-by-chapter workshop that takes a Texas-noir crime novel apart on the bench — and hands you exercises that push the moves into your own pages.
Free to read now · 9 hands-on exercises · no sign-up required to start.
What you'll practice
Craft you can steal, chapter by chapter
Chapters, worked
Voice & the opening promise, characterization by indirection, and the load-bearing flashback — each with its craft focus and place in the story's arcs.
Writing exercises
Three per chapter — analyze the book, generate new pages of your own, and one stretch built to push you past your defaults.
In the full course
Every chapter across seven craft units, 120 exercises, full character- and plot-arc maps, and capstone projects — arriving with the book.
The full course is coming with the book
Get the complete craft course at launch.
The free sampler is yours to read right now. Leave your email and I'll send the full 40-chapter Holdout Craft Course the day the novel launches — subscribers first. No spam, just the course and the occasional note about the book.
About the novel
Holdout
Toby Austin used to be a cop. Now he works out of the third booth of an Austin honky-tonk, with a ruined face, a bad heart, and a pedal steel guitar he plays when the words won't come. When a grandmother sets a folded police report on his table, the case looks hopeless — and the thread, once he pulls it, climbs all the way to the most beloved man in the city.
A slow-burning, deeply Texan crime novel for readers of James Lee Burke, S.A. Cosby, and Attica Locke — about money, murder, and who gets to count as a person.