⚖️ The Forgotten Distinction

You could be forgiven for forgetting the distinction between a covenant and a contract, but the consequences may be dire.

A contract is an exchange between equals with mutual obligation, mutual benefit, and generally some kind of mutual exit. If one party fails to deliver, the other seeks arbitration. It’s the post-Enlightenment default. Formal relationships reduced to transactions between consenting adults. We’re comfortable with contracts. In a way, they even flatter us.

A covenant is something else. It can bind asymmetric power dynamics, like a king to a vassal. Or it can bind both parties to an oath greater than either of them, like a marriage. Either way, the cost of breaking it goes beyond arbitration. A broken covenant has consequences.

The kind of covenant that inspires the Adventures of Valen is the first kind. The ancient, asymmetric, terrifying kind.

The Hebrew word is berith.1 When the Septuagint translators rendered it into Greek, they chose diatheke (meaning “last will and testament”) over syntheke, which would have meant “mutual agreement.”2 A covenant, in their understanding, was closer to an inheritance than a handshake. You don’t negotiate your father’s will. You receive it or you don’t.

The Levantine world (Israel, Moab, Ammon, Philistia, the Hittite empire) organized relationships of power through covenantal structures. Suzerainty treaties, loyalty oaths, divine patronage. The Hittite treaties included mutual stipulations; the Israelite theological tradition involved radical asymmetry.3 But the grammar underneath was the same: the powerful party sets the terms. The weaker party’s survival depends on whether those terms are kept.

Which raises a question the ancient world wrestled with: What happens when the power imbalance isn’t political but ontological?

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🔥 The Gracious Covenant

The oldest recorded covenant-cutting ritual involves butchered animals arranged in two rows and a god walking between them alone in the dark. It’s stranger than fantasy.

The term is karath berith, literally “to cut a covenant.”4 In the ancient Near East, the cutting wasn’t metaphorical. Animals were split and the parties walked between the halves. The symbolism was a self-curse: may I become like these animals if I break my oath.5 Blood sealed the words.

In the Hebrew account, something departs from the established pattern. God instructs Abram to arrange the halves. Abram drives off vultures while night falls and nothing happens yet. Then God, appearing as fire and smoke, passes between the pieces alone.6 Abram sleeps. He does not walk. In standard practice, both parties would walk, binding themselves mutually. Here, only the stronger party walks. Implying that the curse of breaking that covenant falls only on the one party. God, in this case.

The stronger party has taken the full weight of the oath upon himself. The Abrahamic covenant removes the human performance requirement. What remains is trust (and waiting… a whole lot of waiting). Fulfillment comes on the stronger party’s timeline, in the stronger party’s way.

But Hebrew scripture also contains the Mosaic covenant, which looks very different. At Sinai, the terms are bilateral: “If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession” (Exodus 19:5). Stipulations, blessings, curses. The full apparatus of a suzerainty treaty. This is the covenant that most resembles a contract, and it’s the one most human institutions end up imitating.

The gracious covenant and the conditional covenant exist in tension throughout the tradition. A lot of interesting theology lives in that tension, which is unique in the ancient world. That’s also why we still talk about how it played out to this day.

Happy Easter, by the way.

💰 The Transactional Alternative

The nations surrounding ancient Israel were not atheistic. They were busy with their own supernatural obligations. Their gods demanded a great deal, and the people scrambled to deliver.

Modern readers often assume ancient polytheism was naïve. The texts suggest otherwise. The ancient Near East operated on the assumption that multiple spiritual powers were real, active, and competing for human allegiance. Certain threads within the Christian tradition identify the entities behind pagan worship as fallen angels: real spiritual powers presenting themselves as gods. While the veracity of the objects of worship is open to debate, the danger of that misplaced devotion was never theoretical.

Dagon of Philistia presided over agricultural and territorial power.7 Chemosh of Moab demanded military devotion and received it.8 Molech of Ammon demanded child sacrifice9 (which some scholars dismiss as polemical exaggeration, though recent headlines make such unpalatable accusations highly plausible all over again). The texts, at least, present these as exchanges with tangible outcomes. Which stands to reason as the text also suggests Israel dealt with a constant draw toward engaging in those deals themselves. Idol worship, that is.

But these arrangements were transactional. The power was purchased, not given. And the entities selling it had interests that didn’t align with the buyer’s wellbeing so much as with the prolonged tarnishing of the imago dei. The transaction delivered something like what was promised, even if the true cost was obscured until too late.

This pattern rhymes through European literature. Marlowe’s Faustus doesn’t bargain out of ignorance. He bargains out of impatience. He wants what the gracious covenant won’t give him on his schedule, so he finds an entity willing to deal. Lewis made the same observation in The Screwtape Letters: the enemy’s strategy isn’t to offer nothing. It’s to offer something real at a price the buyer won’t see until the bill comes due.

The world of Omon lives on this spectrum. Instead of reinventing superheroes in the ancient world or attempting to revive a mythos that no longer resides in our cultural psyche, I’d rather borrow from the deep foundations we still build on.

🏛️ The Covenant Corrupted

A sacred covenant can’t be destroyed by an enemy. But they can be hollowed out by custodians who find the outward forms more useful than the inward reality. It’s a pattern Old Testament prophets never stop denouncing.

The Israelites had the Temple (even if it was destroyed for a time). The rituals continued. The sacrifices were offered. The forms were immaculate. And the prophets screamed that the whole enterprise had become a corpse dressed for a wedding: outward performance masking inward rot. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6).

I attempted to imitate that pattern in Stellentia. In Starlit Scepter, Valen arrives in Maristella during the Festival of Starlight, a week-long celebration of the Celestial Covenant. The covenant is real. The divine light on the mountain is real. But the Ivorian Empire has colonized the province and secularized the festival into a carnival.

The chief priestess Caelestis stands on a stage before a crowd of drunken revelers and recites the ancient prophecy — “The star descends its celestial throne, / Lost in darkness where light ne’er shone” — while pyrotechnics explode behind her and the crowd hoists their tankards. The faithful mutter in the shadows. The robes are costumes. The rite is a floor show. And the light on the mountain (if it exists at all, which most in Maristella no longer believe) burns on unnoticed.

Nothing supernatural failed. The covenant held. What failed were the institutions that found pageantry more profitable than piety.

Valen watches this with the detachment of a man observing someone else’s house fire. Not his covenant. Not his deity. Not his problem.

But he does get paid.

🌋 The Covenant of the Mountain

In Arcane Awakening, the covenant isn’t with a light on a mountain but with a living creature who nests inside one. And this creature, unlike a beam of starlight, can express its displeasure.

For eight hundred years, the people of High Ulvindra have warmed and protected an egg entrusted to them by a noxodon queen, an ancient winged creature whose grief and desperation forged a covenant out of what should have been a slaughter. The people sing to the egg. They tend it with their warmth. In exchange, the queen provides shelter, protection, and a mountain that breathes.

The Ulvindran covenant is conditional. Mutual benefit, mutually assured destruction. I wanted the terms to be ambiguous: the purpose half-understood, the obligations debated, the consequences unclear until it’s too late. What happens when eight hundred years of fidelity meets human ambition is the question the book asks. The thing on the other end of this covenant has talons.

🌍 The World Beneath the World

You may have noticed a pattern.

The peoples of Omon possess no innate magical ability. Every supernatural power a human wields in this world was granted by something older and stronger, through an arrangement whose full terms the human party rarely comprehends.

The sorcerer’s blindfold in Domain of Darkness. Power offered, strings attached, origin unsettling. The Celestial Covenant in The Starlit Scepter. A divine light that asks faith and gives protection. The Queen’s covenant in Arcane Awakening. A creature who demands fidelity and service and grants forbearance. Every time Valen encounters the supernatural, there’s a cosmic legal arrangement beneath it. He hasn’t noticed this pattern yet. The reader might.

🗡️ The Skeptic’s Unearned Passage

What do the faithful do when the terms of their devotion exceed their understanding?

Abram waited. He drove off the vultures. Night fell. The fire passed between the pieces alone. He didn’t understand what he was participating in. He participated anyway. The covenant was fulfilled. Not by his performance, but by the stronger party’s.

I wrote characters who face the same question. The High Ulvindrans warmed the egg for eight hundred years. The Queen was silent for most of it. They warmed the egg anyway. Faith as action sustained in the absence of confirmation, which is the only kind of faith that counts.

Valen trusts no covenant. He honors no god. He keeps faith only with the contents of his satchel and the edge of his knife. He would tell you, if asked, that he has survived by skill and luck. Not by anyone’s favor.

But the reader has watched something else. A thief who believes in nothing, standing before a sacred object, saying “I am unworthy” — and being answered. He didn’t understand what he was participating in. He participated anyway.

There’s a word for this, and it’s not “luck.”

📚 The Books

Covenants have been the engine of these two Valen stories. Arcane Awakening, the third novella, is coming soon. It’s the story of what happens when a covenant eight hundred years old meets a man ambitious enough to break it — and a thief unlucky enough to be standing nearby when it shatters. After that, Valen’s troubles will take a different shape.

If you haven’t started the series: Domain of Darkness is where those troubles begin. A barbarian prison, a death sentence, an invisible tower, and a cursed blindfold whose master isn’t finished with him. Starlit Scepter takes him south to Stellentia, where a sacred covenant has been reduced to a carnival, a governor is staging a false salvation, and the light on the mountain still burns for those who believe.

Both are available on eBook and in paperback!

The mountain breathed smoke into a bruised sky. Snow fell in grey curtains, swallowed by volcanic stone before it could settle, but the cold lingered. It found the spaces between ribs. It pressed into empty stomachs.

Thorgun stood at the mouth of the cave and watched the world disappear.

Behind him, the remnants of his clan huddled around a fire that gave less warmth each day. Fewer each morning than the night before. The firewood was green, scoured from stunted pines on the lower slopes. It hissed and spat more smoke than heat. The children had stopped crying two days ago. This was worse, far worse than the crying had been. A hungry child wails, but a dying child goes quiet. A dying child has already begun to leave.

They had fled lowland raiders three weeks past. His father—but no, he could not think of his father now, though the image came unbidden… the river crossing, the shallows turning red, the old man’s sword arm rising and falling until it rose no more.

Thorgun had led the survivors into the heights. He had not wanted to lead. He was merely twenty-six summers old, and a hunter, no less, not a chieftain. But his father’s body now lay in the lowlands, and none had stepped forward. So Thorgun led them into the mountains where raiders would not follow, into territory the lowlanders spoke of only in whispers.

Certain death dwelt upon the peaks of Ulvindra.

The cave stank of unwashed bodies, offal, and the animal musk of fear. Beneath these rose the slow rot that crept into wounds when there was no clean water. Old Margat’s leg had turned black below the knee. She would not survive the week. The youngest child had developed a cough that rattled like stones. Grandmother Rhunna sat apart from the others, humming to herself, her blind eyes fixed on nothing.

Thorgun counted the cured meat in his head once more. The same arithmetic he had run a hundred times. Only four days’ worth remained. Maybe five if they gave the children nothing. After that, the pack animals. After that… nothing.

He had heard stories of clans driven to such extremes that they looked upon one another with the eyes of predators, teeth turned to fangs by the pain of hunger.

He would not let his people sink to such dishonorable depths.

The sound of movement rose from the trail below: a figure climbing fast, surefooted despite the ice, something heavy across his shoulders. Thorgun’s heart lifted before his mind caught up. He knew that gait. He knew that reckless confidence.

Brant reached the cave mouth with frost in his beard. He was younger than Thorgun by four years, broader in the shoulder, quicker to anger and quicker to laugh. He had their mother’s coloring, dark where Thorgun was fair, and their father’s stubborn jaw.

He threw down his burden with pride.

“Meat,” he said. “And fresh. Enough for days.”

The clan gathered. Someone laughed, a sound not heard in weeks. Someone wept. Hands reached for the carcass, and Thorgun let them reach. Joy spread through his people. But his own stomach turned to ice.

The beast Brant had returned with was not hooved. Neither was it furred.

The creature was the length of a tall man, though much of that was neck and tail. Black scales covered its flanks, gleaming wetly. Leathery wings lay folded against its body, the membrane still thin and soft, not yet toughened by years of flight. Its head was long-beaked, crusted with blood where Brant’s spear had struck. The eyes, half-lidded in death, were gold—the color of amber held to flame.

A noxodon.

Thorgun had seen them circling the peaks, black shapes against grey sky, too distant to seem real. The elders spoke of them as one might speak of demons. Beings from the time before time, when the world was young and fire still ran freely through stone. They were never hunted. They were avoided, occasionally placated with offerings left at the treeline, and in desperation even prayed to when storms came down from the heights.

Now Brant had killed one.

“We eat well tonight,” Brant said, grinning.

Thorgun looked at the wings. They had never carried this creature above the clouds. The bones were still growing, the joints still soft. A child, perhaps.

“What have you done?”

Brant’s grin faltered. “I’ve fed us, brother. I’ve climbed higher than anyone else dared, found fresh prey fit for our clan, and brought it back. Our children starve. Why do you question it? You should thank me.”

“The noxodon do not forget.”

“Superstition. The noxodon are beasts.” Brant kicked the carcass. “Large beasts, yes, but beasts all the same. They hunt. We hunt. Today we were better hunters. Look at it. Scales and wings and nothing more. It bleeds. It dies. It feeds hungry mouths.”

Thorgun looked up at the peak, where larger shapes circled in the haze. How many were there? The elders had always said the noxodon numbered in the hundreds, that they had laired in these mountains since before the clans dwelt on the earth. And the noxodon remembered everything. They held grudges across generations. They knew the scent of those who wronged them.

Thorgun said nothing. Brant knew as much already.

The meat was already being butchered, scales pried off by eager hands, flesh divided among the hungry. His people were already eating, faces awash with relief, and gratitude, and the simple pleasure of famine abating. Who was he to deny them this? Who was he to speak of consequences when children sat with food in their mouths for the first time in weeks?

That night they slept with full bellies. The fire burned brighter, fed by fat rendered from the carcass. Children curled against their mothers, no longer crying, no longer silent with the silence of the dying. Even old Margat seemed stronger, though her leg still wept black into the bandages.

But Thorgun could not sleep.

He sat at the cave mouth with his spear across his knees and watched the sky.

She arrived at dawn.

Gray light crept over the eastern peaks. Mist rose from the volcanic vents, mingling with falling snow, erasing the world’s edges. Thorgun had dozed despite himself, chin dropping to his chest, grip loosening on the spear.

He woke to a silence deeper than snowfall alone could bring.

The birds had stopped singing. The wind had stopped blowing. Even the fire had fallen quiet.

Her shadow fell across the cave before he saw her.

The morning sun vanished. The temperature plummeted deep beyond the winter cold, something that belonged to tombs and the spaces between stars. His people woke screaming.

The mother landed on the ridge above them with a sound like the mountain being sundered.

She was vast—many times the size of any noxodon Thorgun had glimpsed circling the peaks. Her scales were the deep, pitted black of ancient iron, drinking the light and giving nothing back. Her wings blotted out the sky, leathery membranes stretched between bones thicker than tree trunks.

But Thorgun could not help but meet her eyes. Her terrible eyes. They were twin points of cold, pitiless fire, fixed on the cave mouth with purpose and vengeance. She had seen the bones piled by the fire. She had smelled her child’s flesh on their breath.

The clan scrambled for weapons, for children, for each other. Brant seized his spear and pushed to the front, shouting glory. The other hunters formed a ragged line. Their faces were pale, and their hands were trembling. Fighting raiders and wolves was one thing. This was something else. They raised their weapons all the same.

Thorgun stepped past his brother and the line of hunters. Past the last boundary between his people and their death. Each step felt like walking into deep water, the pressure building against his chest, his breath coming shorter.

He carried no weapon. He raised no hand. He walked forward, into the shadow of the queen.

He stopped at the edge of the ridge. The wind had returned, carrying sulfur and char and the rarified air bred by storms: the breath of the mountain itself. He looked up into her eyes and spoke.

“If blood is owed, take mine.” His hands hung open at his sides. “Spare the others.”

His voice did not shake.

“What are you doing?” Brant’s voice cracked between whisper and shout. “It’s going to kill you!”

The mother of the noxodon spread her wings. Shadow swallowed the cave mouth, the ridge, the sky itself. Her talons gouged the stone as she lowered herself toward them.

She regarded him with eyes made for flames. With her gaze came weight and pressure, as though her attention alone might crush him into the snow. Then something entered his thoughts. Not words. Meaning.

You killed my child.

Thorgun could not deny it.

“Please…” he stammered.

There is no please. There is only ending.

The shadow deepened. The weight in his mind became agony, a vice closing around his skull. Thorgun’s knees buckled. He thought of his father at the river crossing. He would see him soon.

Then a voice rose behind him.

Rhunna was ancient. The oldest of the clan, half-blind and bent nearly double by her years. She had outlived more kin than she could count. The young men carried her when the clan moved. She had not walked unaided in five winters. Most thought her mind had wandered into the fogged lands where ancestors dwelt. Rumor was that she spoke more to the dead than to the living.

Now she was singing.

Her bearer had carried her forward, toward this queen of fel beasts, and there Rhunna had slipped from his arms. She crawled the last few paces on hands and knees, joints cracking, breath rattling—dragged herself toward the very jaws that would kill her. And she raised her head and sang. A lullaby. The melody was already old when her own grandmother was young. She had sung it to Thorgun’s father when he was small, and to Thorgun after that, and to every child of the clan who could not sleep. This wordless tune. This mother’s song. Sung now to a beast that had come to slaughter them all.

The pressure in Thorgun’s mind vanished.

The queen went still. Not the stillness of a predator tensing, but something else... A frail woman, crawling toward certain death, offering comfort all the same. Her burning gaze found Rhunna, and the fire in them shifted. The rage did not vanish. But beneath it, older and deeper, rose a question.

New images flooded through like a waking dream.

A nest high in the mountain. Heat rising from the stone. The smell of sulfur and shell and living warmth. Dozens of eggs crowded the hollow, pale and pulsing. Noxodon mothers circled above, restless even in tending, their blood burning with the need to hunt. They could not be still. They were not made for stillness. Their hunger drove them to the sky.

The vision lurched. The nest half empty now. A shell gone cold under his palm. The feel of it, smooth and dead as river-stone. A crack splitting the silence. A hatchling too weak to push through, its cries thinning to nothing. The stench of an egg gone dark. Fewer mothers each generation. Fewer wings overhead.

Now the nest was nigh empty. The queen alone where dozens once circled. She was the last who could still lay, and she could not tend and hunt both. The stone still breathed heat beneath the shells. But warmth without presence was not enough. Her children had needed hands. Voices. Lest the brood die in its pride.

She had come to kill. She could still kill. But she showed Thorgun what killing would buy her: nothing. His people would die in the winter regardless. Her vengeance would be complete and hollow, and her eggs would grow cold, and her kind would end. She had watched humans for hundreds of years from the heights. She had seen them as prey, as pests, as things beneath notice.

But she had never seen one crawl toward death to sing comfort.

Uncertainty hung in the air for what felt like centuries. Rhunna sang. The hunters awaited an order, bracing for the end.

At last, the tension broke, and the vision continued. She showed Thorgun what she offered: warmth channeled through the mountain’s heart, protection from above, and a place to endure. And she showed him the price. One egg, always, kept warm by human hands, human voices, and human presence. His people would be bound to the mountain. His bloodline would be sworn to her service. Not in friendship, nor trust. But in obligation, sealed in the blood his brother had spilled. A covenant forged from necessity and grief that would bind man and beast until fate could be staved off no longer.

Thorgun sank to his knees. Cold seeped through hide and wool. The weight of generations settled upon his shoulders; those past and those yet lived. To what he might bind them, he could not fathom. He was accepting for his children, and their children, and all who would come after.

“We accept,” he said, bowing his head. “My queen, Azythra.”

The words hung in frozen air. For a moment the clan murmured in confusion. But then, they fell silent. Even Brant lowered his spear.

Azythra bowed her head and spread her wings. The shadow deepened, vast and cold, then lifted as she rose. The sun broke through at last, casting golden light across the snow.

She turned toward the peak.

Follow.

Azythra led them up the mountain until darkness fell.

All the clan followed. The hunters with their useless spears, the women carrying the youngest children, Rhunna on her bearer’s back, still humming faintly, eyes half-closed. Even Brant followed, clutching his weapon, scowling. Every so often he caught a glimpse down through the mist, toward the grey lowlands where the rivers ran to salt water and a man might breathe without bowing to beast.

The clan climbed paths no man had ever dared walk. They shimmied across narrow ledges carved by volcanic flows and crept through tunnels that breathed strange air from the mountain’s depths. Steam rose from fissures in the rock, and the air grew warm with the breath of the mountain.

Eventually, the cold sloughed away like a shed skin.

A few noxodon watched from the ledges above, their eyes like guttering embers in the dark. They tracked the procession of small prey climbing into their domain.

The queen led them to a shelf of stone high above the clouds, and there the mountain revealed its heart. Heat breathed from the rock, steady and patient, the warmth of embers banked since the world was young. Moss grew here, soft and fierce green, the first living color Thorgun had seen in weeks. A spring of clean water whispered from a fissure in the stone, steam curling into the thin air.

The clan spread across the ledge in silence. They touched the warm stone with trembling hands, flinching as though it might burn or vanish. No one wept. Not yet. They had lived too long inside the certainty of death to trust its sudden absence. Mothers held their children close, not lifting them toward the heat but shielding them from it. A few sat with their backs against the rock and their eyes on the sky, waiting for the blow to fall.

Brant alone did not sit. He stood at the ledge’s edge with his spear planted, watching the noxodon that perched on the crags above. He did not touch the warm stone. He did not feel an ounce of gratitude for the mountain’s heat.

The queen descended.

In her talons she held an egg.

The egg stood taller than a man, pale as moonlight on snow, and within it burned a glow that pulsed like a living heart. Its shell held warmth the way embers hold fire—patient, ancient, and waiting. Something stirred in that light: a shadow turning, slow and vast. She set it before Thorgun with the tenderness of a mother placing her child in another’s arms.

The light reflected in the eyes of his people. The starving, freezing people he had led up a mountain to die. They were warm now.

Rhunna pushed herself from her bearer’s back. The young man tried to stop her, but she waved him away. She dragged herself to where the egg rested, joints creaking, breath coming in shallow gasps. So terribly, desperately frail. The effort alone might kill her.

She curled herself around the shell, pressed her thin frame against its glowing surface, and began to sing the lullaby again.

“Grandmother,” Thorgun said. “Let someone else.”

“No.”

Her voice was firm. It was the voice of the woman she had been before age withered her.

“I have buried many children. Let me keep this one warm.”

She sang through the night.

Dawn found her still singing, her voice worn to a whisper but unbroken. The egg pulsed brighter with each verse. Someone pressed water to her lips—she drank between breaths, never letting the melody falter, as though the song itself had taken root in her chest and would not be silenced.

She sang through the second night.

Her voice cracked and wandered, losing the tune, finding it again. But the egg’s glow continued to spread through the chamber, casting soft, yet growing shadows on stone.

On the third night, her voice failed entirely.

She kept humming. A thin rasp, barely audible, but constant. Then even that stopped.

Thorgun found her in the morning.

She lay curled around the egg as though asleep, her thin arms wrapped around its shell. Her face was more peaceful than he had ever seen it, more peaceful than it had been since his grandfather died. Her skin was cold. But the noxodon egg beside her was warmer than ever.

Her final breath. Her final warmth. Her final song. She had given everything she had left to give.

The clan gathered in silence. They had no words for such a sacrifice.

And in the silence that followed, Thorgun could have sworn he heard her voice still hanging in the cold air… a wisp of melody, thin as frost.

Brant broke the trance.

“She gave her life for an egg.” His voice was scraped raw by grief. He stood apart from the mourners, spear still in hand, his dark eyes fixed on the glowing shell that held the shape of Rhunna’s embrace. “A beast’s egg. And you kneel.”

No one answered. The words hung in the air.

“Our grandmother is dead. She sang herself to death for a creature that would have killed us all yesterday morning… and still might! And now you would bind our children, and their children, and their children’s children to this mountain forever? As nursemaids to reptiles? Servants to a beast who showed us mercy only because she needed my grandmother’s final warm breath.” He looked at Thorgun. “I love her too, brother. That is precisely why I will not accept this. There is land below. Coastline, and timber, and game that bleeds red and does not fly. I would sooner take my chances with the raiders than follow your foolery.”

Thorgun looked at his brother for a long while. He wanted to argue. He wanted to say that Rhunna had chosen freely, and that her death was not the covenant’s price but its foundation stone. But the words tasted false. Brant was not entirely wrong.

“The choice is made,” Thorgun said. “Those who wish to go may go.”

Silence held the chamber. Then movement.

A hunter near the back rose first, pulling his cloak around his shoulders. Then a woman with a child on her hip. Then two more hunters, young and hard-jawed, men who had followed Brant since the lowlands. A family of five. An old man who had never trusted the mountain’s warmth.

They gathered behind Brant. Not many. But enough to wound. Enough to thin the firelight, to leave gaps in the circle where bodies had been.

The two brothers faced each other across the diminished chamber. Brant opened his mouth as though to speak again, then closed it. There was nothing left to say that would not draw blood.

He turned and led his people down the path they had climbed.

Thorgun walked to the ledge’s edge and watched. The small band of his brethren wound through the mist, growing smaller with each switchback. Torchlight and shadow, the shape of his brother’s broad shoulders, the spear held upright against the grey sky. They passed below the cloud line and were gone.

He stood there long after the last light vanished. Wind pressed against him, carrying sulfur and the memory of snow. Somewhere far below, the mountain gave way to foothills, and the foothills to the flatlands, and the flatlands to the sea. His brother would find that coast. He would build there, at the foot of the mountain, within sight of the peaks but free of their burden. And his children would look upward and remember what their father had refused.

It was the last time the brothers would stand upon the same ground, and neither of them had known it until it was past.

Thorgun looked at the egg, then to his grandmother’s face. He could not bring himself to look upon the people who depended on him. He was their chieftain, bound by covenant to a creature who had watched the world grow from its youth, responsible for a bargain that would outlast everyone in the chamber.

He knelt beside her body. The melody was there, placed in his memory by her voice when he was too young to understand words. His throat was tight. His eyes burned.

Then Thorgun began to sing.

His voice was unsteady and unpracticed, nothing at all like Rhunna’s. But the tune formed nonetheless. The egg’s glow pulsed in response.

One by one, those who remained joined in.

The high voices of the children threaded through the deeper tones of men, red-faced and off-key. The women carried the melody. But there were gaps. The sound was thinner than it should have been. Even so, the singing filled the chamber, echoed from the warm stone walls. Though rough and unpolished and diminished, Rhunna’s lullaby pleased Azythra nonetheless.

Had he done the right thing? His children’s children would be bound to this mountain, to this egg, to the queen who watched from the heights. Not for a winter. Not for a lifetime. For generations beyond counting. Blood had opened the door, and blood had sealed the covenant and severed the clan.

Two bloodlines made one. One bloodline made two. The price was only beginning, and there was no telling what Queen Azythra would ask of those who remained… or when death might finally find them.

But the choice was made.

The egg glowed.

And his people were warm.

And the song did not stop.

It would not stop for eight hundred years.

🌋 Valen the Rogue and the Arcane Awakening

The next Valen the Rogue novella is right around the corner. Instead of buckling down and concentrating on finishing it when I intended to, I decided to distract myself with more (albeit tangentially related) writing.

Turns out writing an even shorter story isn’t actually that much easier. It’s just a bit less to keep track of day-to-day.

This text will likely be printed in the paperback edition of Valen the Rogue and the Arcane Awakening. But it will remain free to read here, as well.

If you enjoyed this story, I would be appreciative if you checked out my two currently published novellas, too. They’re available as eBooks and paperbacks on the ‘zon.

After eight years in this house, our dining room finally got its turn. For a long time it wore a coat of primer and leftover paint. We covered up the color from the previous owners, then seldom thought of it while we worked on other rooms.

As part of the makeover, my wife suggested it would be nice to have some kind of landscape painting in the room instead of another mirror. So I volunteered to paint one.

While it’s primarily a landscape, she also liked the idea of a subtle, Biblical element visible to anyone who looked closely. I liked that idea, too.

I’m not much of an artist. I’ve aspired to be. But in the way one aspires to have already done the work. The daily practice never called to me the way computer programming or writing does, where in boredom I’m quick to pick up either. But an old image kept visiting me: the home of a high school friend whose father was a painter. Every wall held one of his canvases. The house felt like a quiet gallery curated by a single soul. They were skillfully done and, in my opinion, transformed the house into a personalized gallery. It was a tasteful and unique portrayal of the artist who lived there. That memory has stayed with me. What a thing, to have lived among the fruits of a loved one’s creativity.

There’s a potential vanity in filling your own home with your own work, I realize. But I’d suggest that God Himself has surrounded Himself with His own beautiful creations, many of which are for His eyes only. No living man will ever see the farthest reaches of the cosmos, and those glimpses we do see are spectacular. As the only creatures made in the image of God, perhaps we have permission, maybe even a prerogative, to fill our own spaces with the beautiful fruits of creative impulses. I don’t begrudge my children for filling their rooms with crafts and drawings. The soulless alternative is worse.

My goals for the painting were twofold: First, it needed to belong in the room, and to complement with the new color. Second, I wanted a landscape, not an obvious Bible illustration. No ark on a mountain, no haloed figure front and center, and certainly nothing so grandiose as to render the hanging of my meager artistry a blasphemous statement unto itself. Just mountains, trees, water, and, if you look closely, a quiet scriptural nod.

So I worked up a scene of a mountain and a forest path running along the water’s edge. In that scene I placed three figures walking together. The first bears only a hint of a halo. The other two carry a soft glow at the chest, as if their hearts are lit from within. It’s a small homage to the Road to Emmaus.

The Road to Emmaus is a deceptively simple addition to Scripture, and a fascinating story both in content and in its inclusion in the gospel canon. The resurrected Christ joins two people (whom I’ve elected to interpret as a married couple) who walk with Him, and speak of Him, but do not recognize Him. Later on, once their eyes have been opened to the reality of the person with whom they spent their day and evening, they declare, “Did not our hearts burn within us!” The risen Christ was with them for miles, unrecognized and yet utterly Himself.

It is the privilege of believers in Christ to occasionally see, in retrospect, the work of the Lord amid difficult journeys. We are not entitled to such clarity, and should expect to go an earthly lifetime without seeing clearly the full work of the Lord. But from time to time, hard circumstances are revealed to have been mercies and blessings, moments at which the presence of the resurrected Christ cannot be denied… even if it was not recognized at the time.

I’m also struck by how the risen Jesus is both changed and still Himself. His own disciples fail to recognize Him at first. There is continuity: wounds, voice, ways of speaking and moving. But in the new life, there is also a difference that precludes immediate recognition.

C. S. Lewis once wrote that grace doesn’t erase our personalities but makes them most fully what they were meant to be. Like salt that brings out flavor rather than smothering it.

We experience this transformation spiritually now. And we will experience it physically when the resurrection comes. I can only imagine.

How I long to walk with the Lord, and how I long to recognize Him when I do.

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By now, everyone is familiar with the concept of “cyberspace,” thanks in part to William Gibson’s Neuromancer. But when Gibson first coined the word, he never stopped to define it. He didn’t explain the physics or write an appendix on how his networks operated. He dropped readers headfirst into a world of console cowboys, artificial intelligences, and multinational cartels, and trusted them to catch up.

Neuromancer is one of my favorite novels of all time. And it’s not because the book is encyclopedic or overloaded with detail. Its world feels immense precisely because Gibson refuses to explain everything. Characters like Case and Molly, groups like the Tessier-Ashpool clan, and places like Freeside or the Sprawl are sketched in bold strokes, but never fully mapped. Readers get fragments of slang, glimpses of architecture, hints of history. The rest is left to the imagination.

Nowhere is this clearer than in one of my favorite place names in all of fiction: Villa Straylight. The words drip with implication. It is part fortress, part ancestral palace, part decaying labyrinth. Gibson doesn’t hand his readers blueprints or dynastic charts. The name alone conjures eccentricity and mystery. The world grows larger in the space between what’s said and what’s only suggested.

And that’s the point. The gaps don’t work because Neuromancer is set in “our future,” making it easier to imagine. They work because Gibson sparks the imagination. That spark is the engine of immersion.

The same principle applies to fantasy. Too much detail is not only unnecessary, but it can weigh a story down. Fantasy and science fiction don’t differ from contemporary fiction and thrillers because their worlds are “less known.” Our own world is already massive and mysterious. No one person has mapped every inch of it. And yet novels set here are compelling… not because the geography is explained to us, but because the characters are.

That’s what we can borrow from reality for fantasy and sci-fi: the power of the unknown. A good story leaves gaps. Not plot holes… but deliberate spaces where wonder takes root.

When the world grows beyond the page, so too will the reader’s imagination with it.

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🌋 Worldbuilding is the Servant, Not the Master

Maps are wonderful things. They can orient and overwhelm at the same time. But a good map is drawn for a purpose.

Worldbuilding is the same way. Its purpose is to serve the story. The most intricate fictional culture, the most painstakingly documented political system, and the most detailed machinery of magic will not matter if the story isn’t compelling. A reader is here for the journey. The scaffolding should be invisible… or at least translucent.

This is easy to forget in genres like fantasy and science fiction, where worldbuilding can become a competitive sport. It’s tempting to start with lore, timelines, languages, and dynasties. But plenty of great stories get along without any of that.

Contemporary fiction, romance, and thrillers all happen in our own world. A world already massive, mysterious, and largely unknown. We read those stories not because every corner of the Earth is catalogued, but because the characters are compelling within the great, unmapped expanse of real life.

If that’s enough to keep us turning pages here, maybe your fictional world doesn’t need an appendix the size of a phone book. And, I would argue, it shouldn’t have one.

🥀 The Liability of Over-Explaining

There’s a certain type of chapter that sinks otherwise fine novels: the exposition dump. It often begins with “It was said that…” or “Long ago, in the time of…” and proceeds to ladle out pages of lukewarm broth with all the appeal of history homework.

These sections tend to feel obligatory rather than electric. The author may think, “I have to explain this or the reader won’t understand.” If that’s the case, then the story lacks human drama… and if it’s not the case, then explaining it all up front robs readers of the sense of discovery they hope to feel turning page after page.

Hints are far more powerful than infodumps. A hint invites the reader to lean forward, an infodump pushes them back. A cellar door refusing to open is the beginning of a compelling story… the minutes of the meeting where its square footage was approved is not.

Characters keep us reading. Mystery keeps us up past bedtime. Explanation keeps us checking the page count.

🪞 Etymology is a Portal

Nowhere is the art of suggestion more potent than in naming things. A name can open a door to another world faster than a paragraph of description.

It’s quiet worldbuilding. In the real world, place names and surnames carry centuries of change… rivers older than nations, borrowed words wandering through languages, professions fossilized in family names. We may never think about these links, but we feel them.

Fiction works the same way. A city called “Blackfen” feels older and stranger than “Dark Marsh City” because it sounds like something shaped by real tongues over time. A character named “Calder” hints at streams and stones without needing explanation.

A good name whispers that there’s more to know. It doesn’t need an origin story, only the suggestion of one. That hint draws readers into a world that feels deeper than the page, where every name might have yet another story behind it.

🌳 Borrowing from Reality

If you’ve ever read a name in a fantasy novel and thought, “That sounds real,” it’s probably because it is… or at least, it’s wearing the clothing of something real. Historical linguistics is a treasure trove for worldbuilders. Old Norse, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Latin… these languages carry with them echoes of whole civilizations. When you borrow from them thoughtfully, you borrow their gravity.

This doesn’t mean you have to create a fully functioning language. There’s a spectrum. On one end, you have the simplest possible names: “The Tower,” “The Temple.” These can work if they’re meant to feel universal or archetypal. On the other, you have Tolkien’s high-investment naming… words with centuries of fictional history. Most of us live in the middle: we want the flavor, the suggestion of a history, without the decades of linguistic homework.

Drawing from real-world etymology also keeps your invented names from feeling like random syllables strung together. It helps them belong. Even a slight nod to real language can give the reader the sense that this is just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.

📈 Leave them Wanting More

This is the heart of it.

We think we want every detail, but the moment every detail is given, the mystery evaporates. Wonder thrives in the spaces between what is told and what is hinted.

A good name is like a locked door at the end of a hallway. You may never open it, but you’ll think about it for the rest of the book. A good story gives you glimpses… the name of an ancient battle, a reference to a half-forgotten king, a word from a language no one speaks anymore. These are threads the reader can choose to pull or leave dangling, but they create the sense of a tapestry too large to see all at once.

Hints make the world seem big. Explanations make it seem small. This doesn’t mean you should never explain anything… only that you should explain less than you’re tempted to. Let your reader’s imagination do some of the work. They’ll thank you for it, even if they don’t realize why.

🚪 Closing the Door (But Not All the Way)

If I’ve done my job right, the worlds I write will feel like they exist beyond the page. You won’t see every river on the map, but you might glimpse one in the distance. You won’t know every etymological root, but you’ll sense the weight of history behind the names. You won’t get a full lecture on ancient wars, but you’ll hear the echoes of them in a tavern song.

This is the kind of worldbuilding I love as a reader, and the kind I try to create as a writer. Not a showcase of exhaustive research. Not a self-contained encyclopedia. Just enough scaffolding to hold the story… and just enough mystery to keep you leaning forward.

The door to the cellar is locked. But if you press your ear to it, you might hear something moving inside.

🔌 Shameless Plug

Valen the Rogue and the Starlit Scepter is now available on Amazon as an eBook and in paperback. To begin at the beginning, Valen the Rogue and the Domain of Darkness is also available as an eBook and in paperback.

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Of course, outlining and writing are two different beasts. And most of my creative energy this past month or so has been funneled into planning our annual murder mystery party. This year marks the fourth year in a row my wife and I have hosted one, and the third year in which we’ve written the story and characters ourselves. Not to mention the artistic work of designing evidence, invitations, decorations, making our own costumes, etc.

Every time, it’s a bigger undertaking than we expect, and we forget that until we’re deep in the middle of it again.

Last year was our largest yet, and we managed to pack sixteen guests into our house, which turned out to be just barely big enough for so many people. This year, we’re aiming for about forty.

Needless to say, we’ll be hosting at a different venue.

Once the last piece of evidence is deciphered and the killer is caught, I’ll be turning my attention back to Valen. I’m excited to share more soon. In the meantime, enjoy the sketch.

High atop the frigid peaks of Stellentia stands the Temple of Starlight. Should the cold and treacherous climb fail to deter trespassers, the temple’s guardians await.

These creatures have no name, no tongue, and no memory of who they once were. Some say they were once angelic stewards, sculpted in the image of the divine and placed to watch over the temple in an ancient age. Others claim they were pilgrims who climbed the mountain in pursuit of the divine light, only to be unmade and reshaped by it. Whatever the truth, time has scoured their origin. Only their compulsion remains.

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Drawn to the Starlit Scepter, they prowl the temple grounds without rest or reason. They do not understand the relic’s power, nor do they seek to wield it. They seek only to guard it, and to bask in its light in endless penance for sins they cannot remember.

Now twisted into monstrous forms, clad in leathers leftover from previous lives, and wielding brutish weapons fit for their forms, they lash out in mindless rage against any who might attempt to claim the Scepter as their own.

They are the keepers of the light they will never touch.

They are the damned, eternally vigilant.

They are the nameless guardians of the Temple of Starlight.

🔌 Shameless Plug

Valen the Rogue and the Starlit Scepter is now available on Amazon as an eBook and in paperback. To begin at the beginning, Valen the Rogue and the Domain of Darkness is also available as an eBook and in paperback.

The process of writing Starlit Scepter went much more smoothly than that of writing Domain of Darkness. With that fact, I am pleased. After jumping around and attempting many different writing techniques, I had finally settled on one that worked for me. And after putting the work into outlining, the process of writing went much more smoothly this time around.

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That said, I did try to skip ahead after finishing chapter one. I wrote chapter one, then seven, then four. After that came two, three, five, and six… only to discover that chapter seven no longer made sense, and chapter four wasn’t nearly as strong as I’d imagined.

In hindsight, jumping around didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. The outline wasn’t as airtight as I thought. I stumbled into a few unexpected plot points along the way, which needed to be referenced consistently in chapters I’d already written. And I realized that I’d made assumptions about how chapters four and seven would function that didn’t hold up once the rest of the story took shape.

Also, I found myself in need of adding an eighth chapter, despite my hope to keep all Valen the Rogue stories to a consistent seven-chapter length. But the idea of making each day of the Stellentian holy week a single chapter in the book was too appealing to pass up, so the story’s conclusion had to occur in its own chapter.

🧠 Personal Problems

I suppose the greatest item worth mentioning that affected the writing of Starlit Scepter comes in the form of a health issue I encountered in early November of 2024. I woke up in the early hours of the morning experiencing what turned out to be the first of three strokes over the course of that day.

At thirty-six years old and in otherwise excellent health (something I began to take much more seriously with great success between 2020 and 2022), I stayed in the hospital five days awaiting a myriad of tests and the results thereof in order to determine a probable cause.

I imagine it’s never fun to be a medical mystery. Unless the mystery is how you’re so effortlessly toned and handsome. Regrettably, that was not the case here. Instead, the mystery was why someone four decades shy of the usual stroke demographic would end up in that situation at all.

All told, I’d strongly recommend having a stroke. You get a few weeks off of work. Your friends come visit you at the hospital. They bring snacks. They tell you how much they love you. It’s expensive, but what can I say? Can’t put a price on getting a little attention. 👍🏻 10/10

In January 2025, I had heart surgery to close the hole in my heart (a patent foramen ovale) that likely caused the strokes. As of this writing, I am still recovering from both the surgery and the original injury. I have a baseball’s worth of scar tissue in my brain and my heart is still growing new tissue around the implant and acclimating to pumping blood at full capacity for the first time in my life.

Despite the difficulty, and the lasting deficits, and the uncertainty, the Lord Jesus Christ has been a faithful and good shepherd to me, as he has promised time and again. Though I am not yet grateful for my stroke, I pray that I will be one day, and that evidence of the perfection of the Father’s loving plan will be undeniable to those who have yet to believe.

📈 Sales

But I digress… back to swords and sorcery! I’ve read on a number of self-publishing Internet groups that releasing sequels boosts sales of the first entry in a series. I had no idea what to expect for my own meager novellas. But the advice turned out to be true.

Domain of Darkness sold about a dozen copies on release in June 2024. Then sales dwindled to nothing. I think I sold an additional copy here and there throughout the year, but nothing worth mentioning to anyone other than Uncle Sam come tax season.

Then, two weeks ago, Starlit Scepter went live on Amazon. For every copy it sold, Domain of Darkness sold five. Whether anyone actually returns for the sequel remains to be seen.

It’s given me a new appreciation for the importance of a strong first entry… and a newfound sympathy for George Lucas and his endless desire to revisit old work. I’ll try to resist the temptation, myself. Probably.

🪺 Valen the Rogue and the Adventure Number Three

I’ve already begun to outline the next novella. Like Domain of Darkness, it’s one I’ve attempted to write in the past, but never completed. I hope soon to overcome that obstacle and get the story out of my system in a full and complete form for others to enjoy. Or ruthlessly criticize. Reader’s choice.

I doubt I’ll write later chapters early. But I may experiment with writing the roughest draft imaginable as early as possible. Just abysmal prose… riddled with repetitious language, weird descriptions, and jarring and unatmospheric imagery.

It’s easy to make a very bad draft better. It’s very difficult to put words on a blank page. I’d like to reduce that friction as much as possible wherever I can, and hopefully churn out a story a little more promptly. Barring any unforeseen major medical events.

🔌 Shameless Plug

Valen the Rogue in the Domain of Darkness is available on Amazon as an eBook and in paperback. Its sequel, Valen the Rogue and the Starlit Scepter, is also now available as an eBook and in paperback.

The sternothol is the undisputed apex predator of the Endless Southern Sea, a beast whose presence casts a long shadow over the waters. Once dismissed as a myth propagated by barbarian sailors, who named it skjoldmar, it has crept into the realm of the known. Sightings have become more frequent, prompting the Imperial Navy to officially catalog the creature under the name sternothol.

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Those who survive its passing speak of a colossal, shell-armored behemoth capable of splintering hulls and dragging entire ships into the briny abyss. Its jagged carapace, ringed with ossified spines the length of a man’s arm, gleams dully in the moonlight. Below this armored dome lies a hide of thick, gnarled leather. Scholars note with unease that such defenses suggest the sternothol is armored for protection. But from what, they dare not guess.

Indeed, though no larger sea-beast has ever been documented in Imperial annals, the brutal, primal design of the sternothol implies a need to withstand assaults from something even more terrible dwelling beyond the edge of the known sea, where Imperial maps surrender to blank parchment and inkless borders.

Some sailors claim the beast is drawn to battle, or perhaps to blood; others that it emerges in silence, drifting below like a continent of dread before breaching in a fury of froth and foam. Whatever its purpose or origin, one thing is certain: where the sternothol rises, death is seldom far behind.

🔌 Shameless Plug

Valen the Rogue in the Domain of Darkness is available on Amazon as an eBook and in paperback. Its sequel, Valen the Rogue and the Starlit Scepter, is also now available as an eBook and in paperback.

But it’s my opinion that a good map serves the story, not the other way around. This isn’t only my opinion when it comes to speculative fiction, or even exclusively fiction in general, because a good map can tell a story of any kind all on its own.

Unless the purpose of the map is to assist you in charting a course through real terrain, it can depict anything. Sure, maps often fall into genres of their own. But they each emphasize something at the expense of something else.

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🗺️ What is the purpose of maps in fiction?

Ideally, the map should serve to stoke the reader’s imagination, not lead to confusion and require constant consultation throughout the reading. All too many fantasy books especially rely on requiring the reader to read between the lines and recall elaborate cartography as characters journey from place to place.

Even so, I do love maps, and old maps especially. And I wanted to draw inspiration for my own maps from unique, pictographic maps that emphasized giving a feel for the setting over scale depictions of landmasses and political entities. More importantly, I want to leave myself room to grow when it comes to details that can be filled in later.

🗯️ The Storytelling Power of Maps

A map isn’t just a backdrop. And it certainly shouldn’t be a crutch for the story. A map is a narrative tool all on its own. The best fictional maps don’t just chart locations, because frankly they don’t even need to. They hint of history, danger, and unexplored wonders. A jagged coastline might suggest shipwrecks, and a lonely tower can spark curiosity long before it appears in the plot.

Maps foreshadow and deepen immersion, inviting readers to imagine stories that exist beyond the page. Maps also shape tone and reinforce genre. A stark, utilitarian map feels different from one cluttered with sea serpents and ornate compass roses. The art style of a map can suggest fantasy, science fiction, contemporary fiction, political thriller, and anything else the mapmaker can imagine.

At their best, maps work as partners in storytelling, enriching the story without demanding constant attention.

🌍 Real World Maps

As with fictional maps, a great deal of variety exists in real world maps. More, I’d bet. Old maps have a unique character that goes beyond navigation. They’re as much works of art and imagination as they are records of geography. The Carta Marina, for instance, famously teems with sea monsters and mythical creatures. The Tabula Peutingeriana, a Roman road map, stretches and distorts the landscape, prioritizing connectivity over accuracy.

These maps don’t just show places; they reveal worldviews, priorities, and the limits of knowledge. For writers and mapmakers today, they offer rich inspiration: from ornate flourishes to symbolic landmarks, from deliberate gaps to delightful exaggerations. Historical maps can free us from the tyranny of needless precision and invite a looser, more evocative approach. Maps need not serve measurement.

🌌 Detail & Flexibility

A good map should support the story, not shackle it. While detail adds richness, too much can box in both writer and reader, turning the map into a rigid framework that limits imagination. The best maps serve as pictorial plot diagrams. They’re broad sketches that help readers visualize journeys, relationships between places, and key landmarks without requiring constant reference or memorization. Flexibility leaves room for surprises and growth as the story unfolds. Rather than dictating every mile and mountain, a well-crafted map orients the reader just enough to follow the plot with clarity and wonder.

🔭 An Invitation to Explore

A good story leaves the reader wanting more; even beyond the final page. A good map should do the same. It isn’t there to answer every question or resolve every mystery. It’s an open door, inviting the reader to imagine what lies just out of sight. The most compelling maps spark curiosity, and make the story feel bigger than what little has been committed to page.

Just as a well-told tale balances clarity with wonder, a well-drawn map provides enough detail to guide the reader while leaving room for the imagination to roam. In that way, maps become more than just diagrams of physical space, they are a doorway to the what’s beyond the story.

🔌 Shameless Plug

My novella, Valen the Rogue in the Domain of Darkness, is available on Amazon as an eBook and in paperback. Its sequel, Valen the Rogue and the Starlit Scepter, is now available for preorder as an eBook and will be available as a paperback on the same day as the eBook is released, May 15th, 2025.

Valen the Rogue and the Starlit Scepter is a sequel to Valen the Rogue in the Domain of Darkness and picks up immediately where the first story leaves off. Valen makes landfall at a city immersed in a hedonistic weeklong celebration, fraught with tension between the natives who live there and the occupying Imperial overlords who’ve claimed the territory as their own. After being drawn into a plot to save the city, Valen wonders if he’s done the right thing, and is forced to take a side.

Starting projects is easy. Being the kind of person who starts projects, doesn’t indicate at all whether you’re the kind of person who finishes them. There’s a saying which goes something like “the first 90% takes the first 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time.”

Finishing a project is an entirely different skill than starting one.

Valen the Rogue in the Domain of Darkness is hardly my first creative writing project. In fact, it’s not even the first Valen the Rogue story I attempted to write. I’ve sat down with a blank document on many occasions and started writing the beginnings of stories doomed never to conclude. Sometimes I’ll spend no more than an afternoon on them. Occasionally I’ve chipped away for years. The end result is always the same.

So in the interest of becoming a better writer, and pursuing my goal of publishing something worth reading, I decided to commit to something smaller.

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⛔️ Eliminating Analysis Paralysis

Starting this project required a bit of a silent, personal commitment. I decided that if I spent my free time on anything creative at all, it would be this. Having so few free moments, especially as a parent, leaves no room for deciding what to do with what little free time you’re afforded. And lots of room for deciding to not really do anything at all.

There’s a certain self-discipline required for such a commitment. New ideas are more exciting than old. So making the commitment requires acknowledging that the time spent may be less fun. Less relaxing.

But that’s the cost of completing a creative project, as far as I can tell.

📉 Devaluing Ideas

Frankly, I didn’t have any ideas that would fit into a short story. I had big ideas. Series of novels ideas. Ideas too big to see clearly just how big they are. And I was emotionally attached to those ideas, for no good reason other than the fact that they were mine.

What I needed were ideas I didn’t care about. Ideas that were small… barely interesting enough to turn into a story, let alone spiral out of control into something unmanageable.

I ended up coming up with several short story ideas suitable for a fantasy setting with relatively low stakes. Low, at least, compared to the likes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, wherein the world (or more!) is repeatedly on the verge of terminal disaster. These were ideas that could be executed without tons of world building, as a short story doesn’t allow for much of that. And they were stories whose plots would be interesting enough absent grand arcs which tease sequel after sequel.

To take things even one step further, I took one of the ideas that seemed almost too simple to execute: that of a thief robbing a sorcerer’s really, really dark tower.

📝 Back to the Word Doc

So I did what anyone would do and opened up a new document, stared at the blank page, and started writing something that sounded like the opening to a story.

✋🏻 There are two big problems with this!

The first problem is that writing prose (i.e. the words themselves, the ones that describe what happens) is an entirely different discipline than coming up with a story (i.e. the ideas of what happens, why, to whom, and then what happens next).

If that doesn’t make sense, imagine tasking everyone who watched the same play with writing it out as a short story afterward. The plots (stories) would be similar, if not nearly identical, but the words (prose) each person would use would be entirely different. There would be as many versions of the same story as there were members of the audience!

The second problem is that our minds are uneven, and tend to gloss over things in ways we’re not conscious of. Stories are also uneven. But their unevenness comes in the form of pacing, wherein important and interesting things may be given more room on the page, and unimportant and uninteresting things less.

These two sets of uneven terrain do not naturally overlap in a helpful way. The result of this is that as the story progressed, pieces of it which I had spent more time imagining beforehand took up a lot of words, and pieces which I’d “saved for later” ended up being too short, even if they were important.

🧻 First Draft

My goal of 10,000 words snuck up on me before I knew it. Not in that it came too quickly; just the opposite. I slogged forever through the draft. But in that when I reached the goal, the story was underdeveloped. The setup was nearly 7,000 words, the action and payoff were about 3,000.

That’s not an ideal distribution.

10,000 words is plenty of time in which to tell a simple story, especially if you adhere to the advice of beginning as far into the action as you reasonably can, and ending as promptly as possible. I thought I had done both. But it was still a mess.

🗑️ Second Draft

The second time around, I decided to take a more methodical approach. I’d outline the story first, and then build on that outline. I wasn’t ready to commit to something like the Snowflake Method. But I knew that just putting one word after another wasn’t giving me the result I wanted.

This is clearly a very rough outline. I’d done little more than try to break apart what I already had and attempted to budget a word count for every part. And I didn’t even finish it. Despite being equipped with such a simple plan, the second attempt was went much smoother than the first.

All told, outlining turned out to be the creative writing equivalent of when you’d tell your teacher that your essay was “already done” and you “just needed to type it up.” Except it’s true.

But the story still wasn’t any good… Maybe I’m just not a great writer. That’s entirely possible. But I still knew I could do better.

📃 What is a Story?

It’s remarkable that even after spending so much time consuming stories, it’s possible (and even likely) that you may not know what makes a good story. Or any story for that matter. I’d heard of the three act story structure. But that’s still pretty vague. You can break a story into those parts but can you assemble one from them? Maybe. I decided to go all the way back to the basics and ask “how does a person write a story?”

Calling something a story has very little to do with how long it is. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series is a story, and it’s more than four million words long. Children are famous for telling stories of similar length with next to no point whatsoever. But people don’t read the Wheel of Time because it’s only interesting if you commit to all fourteen books. They read it (or any story for that matter) because it’s engaging book by book, chapter by chapter, scene by scene, and yes, even sentence by sentence.

Here’s the thing. Tons of people have spent their lives thinking about this. There’s no end to the advice you can find online about what makes a good story. There are even outline templates detailing how much time a writer should spend on each story beat. The rules for writing an interesting big story and an interesting scene are about the same. And, after some searching, I found a set of rules that described a kind of generic structure for a story that I thought sounded good enough to imitate.

The Internet is seemingly full of writers who churn out full-length books multiple times per year. Nearly all of them say they outline more. Now it was my turn.

Unfortunately, outlining after the fact was difficult, as the story was already written. Trying to fit something that already existed onto a structure I didn’t originally have in mind was a challenge. And even though I’d picked a loosely-defined idea I didn’t care about very much, by this point I was invested in this story, and retrofitting it into someone else’s structure meant sacrificing ideas I liked.

I suspect it’s impossible to commit yourself to an idea you don’t care about. You’ll likely wind up caring.

Budgeting words, as with money, allows a certain freedom within the confines of that budget. The pacing of the story is more or less locked in. Now, instead of needing to fill a certain number of pages, the ideas need to be written succinctly enough to fit within those pages. It may be a matter of mental gymnastics, but I found that only being able to use one page to get a scene across is a different matter entirely than having to figure out how to say enough to fill up a whole page. More often than not, I’d (unintentionally) write twice as much and then boil it down to what I needed after. Following the guidance of what I’d planned in my 343-point online, there was simply too much story and not enough time. So I expanded my goal to about 24,000 words - squarely in novella territory - and attempted again.

Surprisingly, after agonizing over the outline for ages, the draft was finished before I knew it.

⏭️ What Next?

The process was far from perfect, and involved a lot of repeating the same work multiple times over. For my next project, I’ve continued with what worked for me, and left behind what didn’t. And although it’s been the better part of a year since Domain of Darkness was first released on Amazon’s Kindle store, I am pleased to say that it has taken far, far less time to write its sequel, Valen the Rogue and the Starlit Scepter.

I look forward to launching the prerelease for Starlit Scepter very soon.

🔌 Shameless Plug

The subject of this post, Valen the Rogue in the Domain of Darkness, is available on Amazon as an eBook and in paperback.

Maybe you’ve never imagined yourself writing a book like the one you just devoured, or envisioned yourself in the director’s chair after watching magic on screen. But if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably, at one point or another, told someone that you were going to accomplish a goal you’d barely began moving toward… if at all.

I was that kid. I’m writing a book. I’m making a movie. I’m making a game. No sooner did the ideas occur to me did I announce my new plans. But I didn’t do these things; they were only ideas.

Looking back, I think part of the excitement of telling people these things is that you get to be, if only for a moment, an interesting person with interesting ideas who does interesting things.

But even if I started these things, I seldom finished. So before too long you just become a person who talks a lot and tells everyone not to “steal” your ideas. And that’s not a very interesting person.

Maybe now I’m at risk of becoming that kid again.

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🐣 Be the Person who has Done the Thing

I lurk on a few forums for writers who self-publish. Reddit’s r/selfpublish sub is one, the 20 Books to 50k group on Facebook is another. And while every Internet group has its own quirky netiquette and rude members who enforce it, they also have a lot of novices trying to suss out just what to do in order to find the success they see modeled among the group’s heroes.

But the answer, occasionally harshly delivered, is always the same: do the work.*
(* and do it well)

These groups in particular exist around the topic of how to turn work-well-done into success-well-earned. But the attraction of many (myself included) is to skip the first part and jump to the second. Very few are focused on doing the work at all, let alone doing it well.

You may rightly point out that there are doubtless other groups for the craft of writing. I lurk in those, too, and they have the same problem. The groups’ top posts are people saying they’ve finally done it, and among the masses are many people who say they want to do it.

It’s the same in every group for every goal imaginable. Weight loss, woodworking, even groups about video games for goodness sake. If you want to count yourself among the cohort who has “done the thing,” you first need to “do the thing.” Don’t cash in your intention too early and burn up your credibility. Instead, do it, and don’t tell anyone until later. It’ll be much more impressive once it’s done.

🤐 Forever Lurking

But this isn’t a tough love motivational post. The thing is, you don’t need to have mastered the thing. Especially after growing tired of residing in the camp of wishers, it’s easy to fall into another camp: the camp of never-finishers, and never-good-enough-ers.

Everyone you look up to as a master of their craft knows their own flaws well. They can see how much room they have for improvement. And it’s likely more than you’d imagine. The wishers don’t know those things about themselves. Because they’ve never tried.

Once you’ve tried, and taken that first small step, you’ll know it about yourself. Congratulations. You’re already out of the camp of wishers and onto the same part of the spectrum the masters can spot themselves on. The only remaining difference between them and you is that they published their flawed work, and you did not.

I write this post now because I find myself in the camp of never-good-enough-ers. I shy away from ideas I like for fear that I don’t yet have the skill to execute them. And the ones I do commit to fail to meet my own standards. But my advice to anyone else in this situation would be to get over themselves. By the time you’ve mustered up the courage to show someone else something you’ve actually done, odds are you’re farther along than 99% of people will ever be. You don’t have to be very good to be better than everyone who has never tried; and that’s most people.

🌎 The World Wants to See

Your effort is valuable. People want to see it. There’s a reason people enjoyed the special features so much when DVDs first hit the shelves. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is almost as often remembered for its extensive behind the scenes documentaries as for the films themselves.

People buy art books to accompany their favorite films. They read biographies of their favorite authors and musicians. People are hungry to see more of the work. Even the work that didn’t make the final cut. For true fans, the process is part of the appeal.

🐜 Small Victories

The reason for doing more creative work in public isn’t to err on the side of declaring too much intention and delivering too little of value. It’s to recognize that the value can come in smaller sizes than what you might think.

If there’s value in publishing an intimidating tome of epic fantasy to daunt even the most avid reader, filled with maps and glossaries and appendices, then there’s value in publishing one novel. If there’s value in a novel, there’s value in a novella. And if there’s value in that, then maybe there’s value in even smaller pieces of work.

The Internet has enabled publishing even the smallest efforts, each of which may represent a level of craftsmanship that many will never achieve. This is certainly not to say that every idea anyone has ever had is worth sharing and capitalizing on. And it’s not to say that this style of publishing is appropriate and preferred in all cases. It’s merely to say that sitting on the sidelines for fear of never being good enough knows no bounds.

To that end, I intend to be more creative more often and for more people. And I think the world would be a more interesting place if others were as well.

🔌 Shameless Plug

My novella, Valen the Rogue in the Domain of Darkness, is available on Amazon as an eBook and in paperback.

Many if not most of these are doomed to go nowhere. And this very publication may well share the same fate. Aspiring writers with dreams of virality hop onto some platform with no real plan except to win anonymous crowds over with naught but their personality, which often suggests if not outright screams “I don’t know what I’m doing!”

Frankly, I don’t anticipate doing much better here, and you may well have already added my own scream to the chorus. That’s fine.

If I find any modicum of success on this platform, this post’s title will be, at best, somewhat ironic. Few, if any, will read it today. The only people who will read it in years to come are people who don’t need to be welcomed. They may look back at previous posts hoping for more to read only to find this disappointing opener.

Hello, future readers who need no welcome. 👋🏻

🔍 What’s the point?

The purpose of this publication will primarily be to catalog my thoughts. And by catalog, I mean “dump.” Social media has, in my opinion, proven flaky and unreliable compared to having more direct control over one’s own presence. Unfortunately, the days of personal blogs with RSS feeds seem to have passed, though I wish they’d return. In their place are platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now X), where people write according to the whims of the algorithm in what often devolves into engagement-bait for undiscerning users. On Facebook, if it’s not information of dubious veracity, it’s some kind of generative AI imagery designed to deceive the same generation that warned millennials not to “believe everything you see on television.” On Twitter, it’s nonsense followed with the thread emoji (🧵). And don’t even get me started on Reddit.

But I digress. Many social media platforms have come and gone. I don’t even recall their names. They all develop their fair share of problems eventually. Sooner or later, their algorithms punish their star users to favor paid advertisers. It’s an endless cycle of the pineapple-on-head meme all the way down.

👨🏻‍💻 But what will I write about?

I’ve long been a technologist at heart. I first started learning to code at the age of seven, and haven’t taken a break in just about thirty years now. For as long as I can remember, I’ve maintained some kind of personal coding project. I’m hardly unique in that regard; I think most software developers do. But I found myself increasingly unable to escape the endless battle against bitrot, even on my free time. I’d dedicate myself to an engaging and educational personal project for years at a time, only to find myself pacing the maintenance treadmill both on and off the clock, working on projects that were in no state to share.

But recently, I’ve turned the focus of my free time toward a more lasting pursuit: writing. The written word has staying power. It has the potential to last for years. My thoughts are unlikely valuable enough to mean much of anything to anyone beyond my children in future years. But many of civilization’s greatest works have lasted for millennia. Every day, young and old enjoy the works of Tolkien, who published the Hobbit nearly a century ago, they study the scripts of the Bard, whose life ended back in 1616, and they set the course of their lives by words first written by Moses untold thousands of years ago. We will all return to dust. But perhaps we should each spend some effort reaching into the future, if only a little bit.

I suppose I am blessed that I suffer the weight of existential thoughts only during my free time.

📚 Oh, it’s about writing…

So the primary purpose and focus of this publication will be to cultivate an audience for my own works of fiction, written and published on my own time for largely my own enjoyment. If you’re a person who, like me, is interested in science fiction and fantasy, I may have things to say that are of interest to you. If you’re not interested in those things, I make no promises.

At the time of this writing, I have published one novella entitled Valen the Rogue in the Domain of Darkness, and anticipate soon publishing its sequel, Valen the Rogue and the Starlit Scepter. My goal in writing these has been to recapture the style of 1970’s pulp sword and sorcery. The scopes of the stories are small. The stakes aren’t world-ending. The protagonist isn’t a paragon of virtue. And, perhaps most importantly, they didn’t take decades to write.

🪙 World-Wide Wishing Well

I once worked with a man who was known around the office for having many side projects, some of which made him a decent side income. I suspect that he exaggerated the amount he made from those side projects, as he remained at the same company doing the same job as the rest of us. But they did make some money. His advice about the Internet had to do with comparing it to a great big fountain, into which people would occasionally throw loose change. A world-wide wishing well, if you will. It’s impossible to catch most of the coins. It’s pointless to even try. But if you widen your net a bit, you may just catch some.

It’s my hope to catch a few [figurative, and perhaps even literal] coins.

💸 Wait, isn’t Substack a Paid Platform?

I guess so. I don’t pay for anyone’s writing on here. I do subscribe (for free) to a few people and anticipate their thoughts in my inbox on an irregular basis. That’s the same deal I’d like to give you. My posts will remain free of charge. If I set up paid subscriptions, it will be on a purely voluntary basis. If ever decide to lock anything behind a paywall, it would be things like pre-release chapters of upcoming works.

Frankly, if money needs to change hands, at this point it would be me paying you to read my thoughts. Not the other way around. And I can assure you, there’s not enough money in my bank account for that.

So, once again, welcome to what may well be a soon-abandoned publication from a person who has no idea what they’re doing.