Welcome to my website! By day I am a technologist, by night a crafter of epic worlds and events. Here you can learn about all my books, read my blog, find book reviews, or free fiction and preview chapters for upcoming projects.
Works In Progress
Crystal Empire
Demara’s world is destroyed every year. Her people have been pushed past the far side of nowhere and to the edge of extinction. In this world, it is only the crystals that keep a tribe safe through the Turnings. Can Demara learn the secrets of the stones at the heart of that yearly apocalypse and save her people, and the world, from their fate? Is she ready for how far that journey will take her?
Book 1: To Chase Light [Alpha]: 105000 / 100000 words (105%) - Read the Prologue
Book 2: Imperial Heart [Alpha]: 83000 / 100000 words (83%)
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2024 Book Review Some Desperate Glory Emily Tesh
This has been a hard review for me to write. Not because I didn’t enjoy the book or have unkind things to say; in fact its the opposite, it’s difficult for me not to gush about this book. Another concern was some statements I am going to make that I needed to wait until the end of the year to confirm. Let’s begin.
The Exile
Introduction
Genre: High Fantasy Word Count: 3700 Words
Banished and betrayed by his homeland, the Exile searches for redemption in the wreckage of a world he failed to save.
The Exile was first published in December 2024. This story is set in the world of Crystal Empire.
The Exile
Turquoise, Reign of the Second 994th God Emperor
The gentle rocking of the little wooden rowboat in the lake along with the soft splashing of oars in the water that evening was almost relaxing. It had been two months since escaping the Labyrinth, and tonight was normally the night of the Turning. Nobody was quite sure what to expect this evening, and Mal was just as ignorant as everyone else on this side of the Wall. He rested in between the boat’s first two benches, back against the hull, watching the stars and listening to the lapping of the water. Once, he would have gleefully dozed off in a boat like this, but sleep did not come easy lately.
2024 Book Review Jasmine Throne Tasha Suri
A Slow Walk Through a Beautiful Garden.
The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri is a wonderful, beautifully written book. I was bored through most of it. That isn’t necessarily the fault of the author, I suspect it has more to do with my own expectations and preferences for pacing. However, I felt as though a large portion of the book was spent watching characters naval-gaze. This book definitely qualifies as a slow burn in my categorization. I’m a guy who reads Brandon Sanderson and that guy is famous for the long drawn out books then a big climactic ending, but the Jasmine Throne, in my opinion, only really got exciting in the last 15 chapters. I wish that there’d been more to the book earlier on.
The Process
Writing is hard. Not in the way that manual labor is hard, or even in the way that a puzzle or a level in a video game can be hard. Instead, writing is hard like getting in shape is hard, like therapy is hard, like your job is hard. Sometimes success pours out of you, and others you can’t get even the simplest of results. You get stuck, and making progress might as well be impossible. And yet in all of these things there are people who do them every day, succeeding consistently where you most often fail. How? What separates success from failure?
Time Flies
It’s been an eventful few months for me.
I started off the year with a lot of energy and excitement to be writing again. I still am, but I’ve had to delay a lot of the writing for almost the entire past three months. Why? Because life, that’s why. A lot has happened in the past three months.
- moved across the country
- joined an exciting, fast moving project at work
- officially in toddler mode now
Reviewing Spring of Black Flowers was enlightening. It’s both better than I remember it being, and still, definitely, not a good book. It could be a great book after some major structural work and passes for setting and character details, which I don’t expect to get to any time soon.