I do book reviews and rewrite proposals for films and TV shows.
Hello, dear readers and lost wanderers of the Internet. Welcome to my site!
We’ve been here for about 3 years at this point, so I thought I’d update the signage.
I am a Fantasy novelist, engineer, and English teacher. After multiple projects where my ambition exceeded my ability (like the xenofantasy about dragon people, or the one with six different factions that the reader had to keep track of), I’ve dialed things down and am working on a Romantasy project that is more within my means. My plan is to try to shop it around to traditional publishers, but if that fails, I’m content to release it in the indie sphere.
On this website, I have three different content offerings for you all. I try to have at least one post out per week, but given that I do have a full-time job, there may be periods where I need to scale back to biweekly releases.
Book reviews, some as one-part critiques and others as deep-dive retrospectives, providing an opportunity to both discover new stories and to learn from examples of both good and bad writing.
This is where I post critiques and rewrite proposals for films and television. In addition to the odd bit of commentary, I have two series.
Missed the Mark: Sometimes, our best intentions for a story don’t come on the page. It’s always easier to see what went wrong in hindsight. This series takes stories with clear goals (typically thematic ones) and explores how the story could have been reworked to accomplish those goals.
If They Planned It All Ahead: Long-running stories, especially serialized ones, are often victims of their own longevity. Sometimes the story outlives the originally planned narrative or even the original concept. Other times, an adaptation of existing source material will fail to include key details early on and need to play a messy game of catch-up. Then there are the cases where there was never any plan at all, or where multiple creators fight for control of the narrative. In this series, we explore examples of stories that would have desperately benefited from a comprehensive roadmap, identify where wrong turns were taken, and then try to flesh out an alternative story that repairs and unifies the narrative while preserving as much of the original story as possible.
I admittedly post to this one only sporadically. Analytics show it simply isn’t as popular with my audience, so I need to prioritize the time I have available. If folks do want more, though (such as me finishing the Sequel Trilogy series), I can certainly step things up.
This is my original fiction, where I will post free novellas and short stories featuring my worlds and characters from my novel projects. You will all have a chance to sample my writing style and decide whether the stories I offer are something you’re interested in, as well as to comment on what stories, characters, or world elements interest you the most.
One of the things that influences how I create content is a desire to make things I myself would enjoy. I think it’s only fair that I share those criteria with you, so as to set expectations.
I am here to tells entertain people with storytelling and book reviews, as well as to assess whether books are good on their merits as stories being told. That’s it.
Far too many reviewers these days take time to criticize a book because said book doesn’t provide enough Representation, sustains Purity Culture, makes the military characters into protegonists, or other such things that have nothing to do with whether the book is good or enjoyable. It annoys me every time a podcast that seemingly focussed on the book itself veers onto such tangents. I do not want to subject you all to that.
These factors therefore do not affect my ratings, nor will they even be mentioned - with one exception.
If an author chooses to virtue signal or ram badly handled commentary into his or her book, that is fair game. The author has chosen to damage immersion and / or undermine the story by forcing the outside world into the fiction, putting his or herself before the audience exoerience. In those cases, I will attack the execution of these things as a writing topic, referencing the real world only as necessary to provide context.
This also applies to the personal views, including politics, or the authors. I don’t care what authors put into their Twitter feeds unless those posts provide context to understand writing decisions, and that is the only context in which I’ll bring such matters up.
For example, I criticize Rebecca Yarros heavily, but only for what she chooses to divulge in interviews or on her (former) blog, especially if those things are being sued to promote her books. I’m fully wiling to give her the benefit of the doubt for everything outside of the literary sphere. She may well be an absolute saint and a generally lovely person.
Bottom line, I read Fantasy for escapism. I just care about good stories. If something external to the story really bothers me so much that it’s going to impact my rating of a book, I either won’t read it or won’t review it. I’m not going to drag the matter in here.
Any priest who’s had the misfortune of hearing my confessions knows I’m no saint, yet I want to at least try create content that I won’t be ashamed to have my children see someday. If you’re tired of porn in your entertainment media and/or the endless stereotyping of Catholics, Christians, and religion in general, you don’t need to worry about that sort of thing here (unless it’s in a book I’m reviewing, at least). I’m also working on the swearing thing, though I’m not going to go back and self-censor the older posts.
If you don’t particularly care about this sort of thing, you’re still welcome. This statement isn’t intended to exclude anyone. Of course, if these are the kinds of things you’re looking for in entertainment, I’m probably going to end up disappointing you.
I don’t use generative A.I. for my writing. This is an essentialism issue for me (at least, I think it’s essentialism - philosophy has never been my strong suit). Outsourcing my thinking for a spell checker, Google maps, or other such tools is one thing, because I’m not marketing myself on my ability to do either of those things. If I outsource the writing itself, I’m effectively having an unpaid ghost writer do all the work for me. I can’t in good conscience put my name on that.
If you like A.I., or simply don’t mind A.I., I beg your patience. I do understand that not using these tools slows down my production of content, and thus slows down what I deliver to you. I will do my best to ensure that the quality of the product is worth your waiting.
If you don’t like A.I. … well, I’m not about to join those copy-chains on Twitter to condemn anyone who used an LLM to make something, but if you truly care about art not being made by A.I., you are now duly informed that I intend to fill that demand.
This also applies to the art I use in Tales of the Five Worlds. I like the idea of using art made by human hands (in so much as digital art can ever really be made by human hands) to go with a story I took the effort to write myself. Obviously, I outsource the art, so the only guarantee I can offer that it isn’t A.I. art is that the artists say they don’t use A.I., but I am at least making an effort to chose artists who do the work themselves.
I’m bad at proofreading. That’s not to excuse the many proofreading errors in these posts, merely an acknowledgement that things will slip through the cracks. I do my best to go back and fix these things when I notice them. If you all catch something, I don’t mind if you comment just to tell me about the mistake.
With all that said, I hope you all stick around. I hope that I can provide you all with some entertainment. Maybe some of you will also learn a thing or two from Recent Reads or Reflect & Redraft. Whatever you’re here for, I hope I can offer something to make your days at least a little bit better.