On writing the books, the research behind the world, the path to publication, and occasional thinking-out-loud about craft, history, and fabricated things.
First Dispatch
May 2026On Writing
Why I Set a Novel in a World That Can Fabricate Anything
The question I keep getting asked about Wakes & Shadows is some version of: what made you want to write about a post-scarcity world? The honest answer is that I didn't start there. I started with a question about authenticity that came directly from my day job, which involves making things from raw materials — and working with people who can tell the difference between something made with care and something made to specification.
May 2026Research
The Real Deep Current: Official Records, Observed Reality, and the Certified Model Problem
Frey Anderssen's buoy data shows a current the certified Arctic charts say isn't there. The deep current is invented. The gap between what the official record says and what observed reality shows — that part is not.
June 2026Craft
On Writing a Venetian Watchmaker: Grief, Craft, and the Allure of Not Knowing
I recently bought a vintage 1980s Soviet Raketa Polar watch. Someone wore it — maybe to the Arctic, maybe just to work every day in Leningrad. I don't know. The not-knowing is part of what it carries. That's the feeling I was trying to give Ennio.
June 2026World
The Great Fabrication Age Is Not a Trilogy (It Started as a Video Game)
The world bible came first. The factions, the geography, the technology systems — all of it was built to make an RPG/city-building/survival game work. The broadcast was an engineering solution to a game design problem. The novel was almost an accident of the world getting too rich to leave in a design document.
ForthcomingVermont
The Champlain Margin: Writing the Ridge You Live On
Galen Marsh is not me. But he lives on a ridge above an expanded Lake Champlain, fixes his neighbors' equipment, and watches the valley below with a mixture of attachment and wariness that I recognize from the inside. Writing him required figuring out the difference between using a place you know and using yourself.
// Post in preparation
ForthcomingPublication
The Query Process: Notes from the Trenches
I promised myself I'd write honestly about querying while I was doing it, rather than after, when the outcome would shape the telling. This is the first of what will probably be several dispatches about what it's like to find a literary agent for a speculative fiction universe that doesn't fit cleanly into any of the obvious marketing buckets.