About Dill Duo Media

Books, ideas, education, and practical resources built from real life, curiosity, and the belief that there is almost always another way to look at the story.

Dill Duo Media began with books, but the idea behind it has always been bigger than a bookshelf.

I created Dill Duo Media because I needed a home for the things I write, the things I investigate, the things I teach, and the ideas that don’t always fit neatly into one category. Some ideas become books. Some become articles. Some become educational resources. Some become practical guides or tutorials. And some sit in my notes for months until another thought, conversation, or experience suddenly gives them somewhere to go.

That’s pretty much how my mind works.

I’ve never been particularly interested in looking at something from only one direction. Give me a historical event, a business problem, a movie, a social issue, a strange story, a system that doesn’t seem to make sense, or even something completely ordinary that happened during my day, and my first instinct is usually to start pulling it apart.

Why did that happen?

What else could explain it?

What does it look like from the other side?

What happens if one variable changes?

And maybe most importantly:

What are we missing because we’ve already decided what we’re supposed to see?

That curiosity is at the center of Dill Duo Media.

I’m Christopher Dill

I’m an independent author-publisher, entrepreneur, father, homeschool parent, lifelong storyteller, and the founder of Dill Duo Media.

My work doesn’t fit comfortably into one genre, because neither has my life.

I’ve written fiction and nonfiction, history and cultural analysis, practical guides and books about strange questions, complicated systems, family, food, society, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves about the world. You can explore the current Dill Duo Media book catalog here, and my broader publishing work can also be found through my Amazon Author page and BookBub author profile.

That range isn’t an attempt to write about everything.

It comes from having spent a lifetime being interested in almost everything.

Even as a kid, I loved literature, English, writing, books, and comic books. Comics fascinated me for reasons that went beyond the artwork. A character could make a different decision and suddenly an entirely different story became possible. Change one event, one choice, one relationship, and watch the consequences ripple outward.

There was something fascinating about that idea then, and there still is.

Life works like that too.

One variable changes and the plan changes with it.

A Life With a Lot of Different Lanes

I’ve been reselling in one form or another since 2005. I’ve run a thrift store. I’ve sold across numerous online marketplaces. I’ve built side hustles, abandoned some ideas, returned to others, and learned that deciding something isn’t working anymore isn’t necessarily failure.

Sometimes it’s just time to pivot.

I’ve worked in restaurants, construction, temporary jobs, warehouses, management, self-employment, independent contracting, and the gig economy. In my previous career, I spent 12 years in leadership, eventually managing large groups of people and dealing every day with the unpredictable mixture of personalities, problems, expectations, deadlines, systems, and decisions that comes with that responsibility.

I’ve worked independently in the gig economy since 2019, which introduced a completely different kind of problem solving: make decisions with incomplete information, control what you can, account for what you can’t, and adjust when reality refuses to cooperate with the plan.

I’ve also spent years actively homeschooling my daughter, creating lessons, adapting curriculum, figuring out what works for an actual child instead of what looks good on paper, and learning alongside her in the process.

Those experiences might look unrelated on a résumé.

To me, they’re connected.

They’re all people. They’re all systems. They’re all decisions. They’re all stories.

And all of them have taught me something worth carrying into the next thing.

For anyone interested in the more conventional version of my professional background, you can also find me on LinkedIn. But the longer version—the one that explains Dill Duo Media—is this page.

The World Rarely Fits Neatly Into Two Sides

One of the principles behind my nonfiction writing and the editorial approach at Dill Duo Media is simple:

I want to know what happens when we look from another angle.

That doesn’t mean pretending every argument is equally strong. It doesn’t mean manufacturing a middle ground when the evidence clearly points somewhere else. And it definitely doesn’t mean starting with the conclusion I want and searching until I find something that supports it.

It means being willing to investigate the uncomfortable possibility that the first explanation isn’t the whole explanation.

There is your experience of an event. There is mine. There is what another person saw. There is what the evidence can actually establish. And somewhere among all of that may be a fuller picture than any one perspective provides by itself.

That’s especially important when I write about history, culture, power, institutions, public memory, disputed stories, unusual claims, or subjects people have already divided into opposing camps.

I try to separate what we know, what someone says happened, what the evidence supports, what remains uncertain, and what we’re inferring from all of it.

Sometimes the evidence changes my mind.

Good.

That’s what research is supposed to be allowed to do.

How a Dill Duo Media Story Gets Built

A lot of what appears here starts somewhere completely different.

It might begin with something I noticed while working. A conversation with a stranger. A question my daughter asked. A movie that made me wonder about the real story behind something. A historical claim that didn’t quite add up. A problem I had to solve. Something somebody confidently stated that made me think, Wait—is that actually true?

Sometimes it’s just a sentence typed into my notes at two in the morning.

I don’t automatically know what that idea is going to become.

That’s intentional.

I might investigate it and discover there’s a book there. Another idea might support one article and nothing more. Something else may eventually become a practical guide, educational resource, piece of fiction, or part of a completely different project.

And sometimes the research tells me the original idea wasn’t very good.

That’s useful too.

I don’t believe every thought needs to become content.

The idea has to earn its way forward.

Research Comes Before the Story—But the Story Still Matters

I love research.

I also don’t want to write like a research paper unless I’m actually writing one.

There is an important difference between doing serious research and making the reader suffer through the research process.

For research-driven work, I try to trace consequential claims toward the strongest evidence reasonably available. That can mean original statements, firsthand accounts, historical documents, records, contemporary reporting, reputable secondary research, or multiple independent sources that allow us to see where the evidence agrees—and where it doesn’t.

I also deliberately look for information that could challenge the premise.

If I’m investigating whether something happened, I don’t only want evidence saying that it did. I want to know what evidence says it didn’t.

If the evidence doesn’t establish an answer, I would rather tell you that than manufacture certainty because certainty makes for a cleaner ending.

Then comes the other half of the job:

Tell the story.

Research gives the story its foundation.

Storytelling gives somebody a reason to keep reading.

That’s why Dill Duo Media articles and nonfiction books aren’t intended to sound like somebody copied an encyclopedia, rearranged the sentences, and added citations.

I want the facts underneath the floorboards without making you stare at the floorboards the entire time.

Why I Write the Way I Do

People have told me since I was young that my stories could be movies.

Part of that probably comes from the fact that I rarely tell a story in a perfectly straight line.

I’ll be telling you what happened, remember something else that explains why that part matters, take you over there for a minute, and eventually bring it back around.

Those side roads aren’t always distractions.

Sometimes they’re where the story is.

And I don’t consider myself a particularly traditional writer, either.

I like to write the way I talk—and, honestly, the way I like to read.

Conversationally.

When I’m writing, I don’t want to feel like I’m standing behind a podium delivering information to an audience. I’d rather feel like you and I are sitting somewhere having a conversation and I happen to be the one telling the story.

That’s why my writing sometimes takes a side road. It’s why I might stop in the middle of explaining something to give you another story that suddenly makes the first one make more sense. It’s why I ask questions on the page, work through possibilities, circle back to something from earlier, or occasionally tell you exactly what I was thinking when something happened.

That’s not something I’m trying to edit out of my writing.

That’s the writing.

I want research-driven nonfiction to still sound human. I want practical information to sound like somebody is actually helping you figure something out. And when I’m telling a story, I want you to feel like somebody is telling you a story—not like you’re reading a report about one.

I write conversationally because that’s how I connect with people in real life, and it’s how I want to connect with readers.

Movies, dramas, science fiction, books, comics, conversations, and real people have all influenced the way I think about storytelling. I’m fascinated by motivations and consequences—why somebody did something, what happened because of it, what could have happened differently, and how the same situation changes depending on where you’re standing.

The subject might change.

The depth of the research might change.

The structure might change.

But underneath it, I still want you to be able to hear the person telling you the story.

Different subjects.

Same brain behind them.

Real Life Is Part of the Research

One of the unexpected benefits of working independently is the number of people I encounter.

I meet and talk with people from completely different walks of life—workers, customers, business owners, managers, parents, retirees, teenagers, people having a fantastic day and people clearly having one of the worst days of their week.

I like talking to people.

More importantly, I like listening to them.

I’m interested in what somebody does for a living, how they ended up doing it, what they know that I don’t, what frustrates them, what they’re proud of, and how they see something I’ve only experienced from the outside.

But I’ve also learned that what I bring into those interactions matters.

I try to hold the door when I can. I tell people to have a blessed day. I try to put positive energy into the world through small gestures that might not seem particularly important on their own.

I’ve found that doing those things changes my day too.

When you’re speaking positively, treating people positively, and consciously looking for opportunities to do something kind—even something as small as holding a door—you start noticing more of the good happening around you.

That was something I had to learn.

There were times when I could have twenty perfectly good interactions and one bad one, and somehow that one bad interaction became the story of my day. I’d replay it. I’d talk about it. I’d give it far more attention than I gave everything that had gone right.

Eventually I realized I was allowing the exception to outweigh the evidence.

So I changed the way I looked at it.

Bad experiences still happen. Of course they do. Being positive doesn’t magically prevent somebody from being rude, something going wrong, or life throwing another variable into the equation.

But when I look honestly at my days, the good interactions significantly outweigh the bad ones.

And I think some of that comes from what I try to put into the world myself.

Those thousands of little interactions have taught me something else too:

Perspective isn’t only about how we interpret history, systems, or somebody else’s behavior. Sometimes it’s about deciding which parts of our own experience we’re going to give the most power.

Those conversations expand my worldview.

Sometimes they also send me home with another idea to write about.

I don’t believe I’m ever going to reach a point where I’ve learned enough.

I don’t want to.

Practical Experience Matters Here Too

Not everything on Dill Duo Media is an investigation into history, culture, or some strange question that sent me down a research rabbit hole.

Sometimes you just need to know how to do something.

The practical side of Dill Duo Media comes from many of the same principles as the research side:

Start with the real problem, remove unnecessary complication, explain what actually matters, and make the information useful.

When I write about reselling, I’m drawing from decades of doing it.

When I write about gig work and independent contracting, I’m writing from years inside that world.

When I write about leadership, work, operations, decision-making, or managing unpredictable situations, there’s a previous career behind those observations.

And when Dill Duo Media creates homeschool resources or discusses homeschooling, those ideas come from years of actually teaching my own child, adapting when something isn’t working, and learning that education doesn’t have to look exactly the same for every student.

That’s also the thinking behind Dill Duo Media tutorials and practical guides.

I don’t want to explain something in the most impressive way possible.

I want to explain it in the way that makes you say:

“Okay. Now I know what to do.”

Controlled Chaos

If there is one idea connecting an absurd number of things I’ve done, it may be this:

Life introduces variables.

You can plan.

You should plan.

You can create systems.

I love systems.

But eventually reality gets a vote.

Business does it. Parenting does it. Homeschooling does it. Leadership does it. Gig work definitely does it. Writing does it.

You can only control so much.

What you can usually control is how you respond, what you do next, what you learn from what happened, and whether you’re willing to adjust when the original plan no longer makes sense.

I think of that as controlled chaos.

Build enough structure to keep moving without becoming so attached to the structure that you can’t move when something changes.

That’s also how Dill Duo Media has grown.

Why Dill Duo Media Exists

For a long time, the different things I did felt separate.

Writing was over here.

Work was over there.

Reselling was something else.

Homeschooling was another part of life.

Business was business.

Stories were stories.

Then I realized they weren’t really separate.

Writing was the thread running through all of them.

Everything I experience can teach me something. Everything I learn can lead to another question. Every question has the potential to become a story.

And sometimes that story can help somebody else understand something, solve something, question something, laugh at something, or simply see it differently.

Dill Duo Media became the place where those pieces could finally live together.

It is an independent publishing company, but it’s also the larger home for the work.

Books.

Articles.

Educational resources.

Practical guides and tutorials.

Stories.

Research.

Ideas that haven’t found their final form yet.

I don’t know exactly what every future piece of Dill Duo Media will look like.

That’s kind of the point.

Building Something That Can Keep Growing

There’s another reason the name isn’t Christopher Dill Publishing.

My daughter is part of the story too.

She has grown up watching me write, publish, build businesses, change directions, make mistakes, figure things out, and start again when something doesn’t work. She loves stories and creates her own things too, and I want her to see firsthand that creating something doesn’t require waiting for somebody else to give you permission.

You learn.

You work.

You make a mistake.

You learn some more.

You get better.

And you keep building.

Dill Duo Media is primarily my work today, but I intentionally built something with room for another generation to find its own lane rather than inherit mine.

If my daughter eventually decides she wants a bigger role in it, there’s room.

If she decides her path is somewhere completely different, that’s okay too.

That’s part of the philosophy.

You don’t have to become what somebody else planned for you.

I Wouldn’t Rewrite the Past

There are plenty of things in my life that didn’t go according to plan.

I don’t spend much time wishing I could go backward and erase them.

Change one decision and you don’t just erase the bad part. You potentially change everything that came afterward.

The jobs I didn’t like taught me things.

Businesses I moved away from taught me things.

People I’ve managed taught me things.

People I’ve worked beside taught me things.

Parenthood changed me.

Homeschooling changed me.

Working for myself changed me.

Successes changed me.

Failures—or things somebody else might call failures—changed me too.

All of those experiences left fingerprints.

They’re part of the person writing these words.

I’d rather ask what can I do with what happened? than spend my life wishing it hadn’t happened.

That same philosophy shows up in my writing.

Sometimes I finish one project and realize there was another story hiding inside it.

Not the same story rewritten fifteen different ways.

A genuinely different question.

Change the perspective and sometimes you change the entire meaning.

There Is No Finish Line for Curiosity

Dill Duo Media continues to evolve because I continue to evolve.

I’m still learning publishing.

I’m still learning business.

I’m still learning technology.

I’m still learning history.

I’m still learning from my daughter.

I’m still learning from people I meet for five minutes.

I’m still learning from things I got wrong.

And I’m still discovering questions I didn’t know enough to ask yesterday.

I don’t have a grand declaration about exactly what Dill Duo Media will become ten years from now.

I’ve lived enough life to know better than that.

I have goals.

I’ll work toward them.

And when I reach them, there will probably be new ones.

Something unexpected will happen somewhere in between.

I’ll adjust.

I’ll probably take notes.

And there’s a decent chance I’ll eventually write about it.

That’s Dill Duo Media.

Real life. Real questions. Careful research. Practical experience. Good stories. And the willingness to keep looking when the first answer seems a little too easy.

If that sounds like your kind of rabbit hole, you’re in the right place.