“Every self-inflicted wound…”

Wasn’t every self-inflicted wound really aimed at the conscience of the world? —Walter M. Miller, Jr. “The Darfstellar”

Fantasy from A to Z: I is for Immortality

Immortality is one of those fantasy tropes that shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. Vampires, elves, gods, liches, ancient dragons hoarding gold through the centuries—we’re fascinated by the idea of beings that can’t die. Sometimes they’re terrifying, sometimes noble, sometimes weary and wise. But always, they strike a chord.

Why? Because they brush up against one of our deepest human anxieties: death.

Death is one of those universal aspects of the human experience. Everybody dies. And compared to the lifespan of things like mountains, or forests, or stars, the human lifespan is remarkably short and fleeting. Some of us live a long and a full life, and are ready to go when the time comes, but many of us are not. Tragedy can strike us at any time. No one knows when the reaper will come for them.

This is why, in fantasy fiction, immortality often comes wrapped in awe and mystery. It’s a mark of otherworldliness, a symbol of something beyond the ordinary cycles of birth and death. Sometimes it’s a gift. Sometimes it’s a curse. Often, it’s a little bit of both.

Personally, my favorite fantasy author who captured this complexity is J.R.R. Tolkien. His elves are perhaps the most iconic immortal race in all of fantasy. They don’t age or grow frail. They don’t die of disease. They are not eternal in the divine sense, but their lives are bound to the life of the world. When they are slain, their spirits travel to the Halls of Mandos, where they can eventually be re-embodied. But they are still bound to the world. They don’t pass beyond it. They don’t get to move on.

That’s the heart of their tragedy.

Elves in Tolkien’s legendarium aren’t happy fairytale creatures dancing in the moonlight. They are ancient beings with long memories, deep sorrows, and wounds that don’t always heal. They remember battles and betrayals that happened millennia ago. They carry the weight of history like a cloak that can never be removed. And for all their beauty and wisdom, they are fading. Slowly, subtly, inevitably. Their time is passing, and they know it.

In contrast, humans are mortal and thus are not subject to this curse. As Tolkien writes in The Silmarillion:

“And the Doom of Men, that they should depart, was at first a gift of Ilúvatar. It became a grief to them only because coming under the shadow of Morgoth it seemed to them that they were surrounded by a great darkness, of which they grew afraid.”

That’s a remarkable insight. Mortality, which we so often view as a curse, was originally a gift. The elves envy us not because we die, but because we get to leave. To move beyond the world. To have an end.

And yet, we don’t often treat it like a gift. In fact, we go to absurd lengths to avoid it.

You don’t have to look far to see that our obsession with immortality isn’t limited to fantasy stories. In Silicon Valley and other corners of the tech world, there’s a growing movement of wealthy futurists who are pouring money into the dream of defeating death. Some want to reverse aging at the cellular level. Some are working on brain-uploading technology, convinced they can digitize the human soul. Others are experimenting with biological “enhancements,” anti-aging therapies, or even transfusions from younger people in an effort to extend their lifespans.

This hunger for immortality is as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh, but today it wears a lab coat and calls itself “biohacking.” The names have changed, but the impulse remains the same. We want to stay. To cling to life. To hold onto what we have, no matter the cost.

But is that really such a noble goal?

Fantasy offers us a counterpoint. Again and again, stories show that immortality comes at a price. Vampires lose their humanity. Liches surrender their souls. Gods become detached from the world of mortals. Even the elves, for all their grace, are caught in a long decline.

Immortality often brings with it a kind of existential exhaustion. Without death, there is no closure. Without loss, there is no growth. Without time running out, nothing truly matters.

Mortality, by contrast, sharpens everything. Because we are mortal, our choices matter. Because time is a scarce resource—indeed, perhaps the only resource in our world that is truly scarce—our relationships carry weight. Because we will one day die, every act of love, courage, sacrifice, or faith becomes immeasurably precious.

And that’s something that fantasy, at its best, understands better than any philosophical treatise or TED Talk ever could. Again, Tolkien writes:

“But the sons of Men die indeed, and leave the world; wherefore they are called the Guests, or the Strangers. Death is their fate, the gift of Ilúvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy.”

The elves call us guests. Strangers. Not because we are lesser, but because we do not belong to the world in the same way they do. We are pilgrims passing through this world—strangers in a strange land. Our road leads elsewhere, and that elsewhere—whatever lies beyond the circles of the world—is part of the hope that makes us human.

In my own fantasy, I like to play with this idea. My characters all live in the Mortal Realm, but there is an Immortal Realm that lies beyond the bounds of their current existence, and the veil that separates the two can sometimes grow quite thin. In The Sword Keeper, there is a Void between the two realms that Tamuna must cross in order to confront the evil that afflicts her world, and to find the lost spirit of her father. In Bloodfire Legacy, when Lord Arion is assassinated in the first chapter, he temporarily gives up the indescribable glory of the Immortal Realm in order to linger as a ghost and help guide his orphaned daughter.

All of these characters are bound, in time, to pass from this Mortal Realm, but that isn’t a curse—it’s a gift. There is far more to this life than the bounds of our material existence. There are more things in heaven and in earth than we can comprehend with our mortal understanding.

In the end, fantasy doesn’t just explore our fear of death. It teaches us how to find meaning in the brief time we’re given. So the next time you read about some deathless sorcerer or ageless elf queen, remember: you have something they never will. An ending, and a beginning. A home beyond this world. A story that can reach its conclusion.

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Will super-intelligent AI take over the world?

I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction books about AI recently. Basically, whenever a nonfiction audiobook that has anything to do with AI comes into my audiobook library app, I jump on the waiting list and listen to it right away. I’ve also been following AI news podcasts and watching lots of YouTube channels that discuss the recent developments… and boy, is there a lot of doom porn out there.

People who are closely watching this stuff believe that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is imminent, ie within the next 6 to 72 months, and that when AGI gets mainstreamed, it will either usher in a golden age of post-scarcity, or the ultimate extinction of all mankind (or both, weirdly). The main crux of their thesis is that once we achieve an AGI that can rewrite its own code, it will quickly turn into a superintelligence, and then it will either work to serve humanity or else work to eliminate humanity as a threat, either by outright exterminating us, or putting us into some kind of zoo.

This is all very science fictional stuff—but now more than ever, we are living in a science fictional world. So what is actually going to happen? Do I believe we going to enter the singularity, and give birth to a new species of superintelligent AI that will ultimately replace us? Or, in the lingo of Silicon Valley, what is my P(doom)?

TL;DR: I have two P(doom) values, one of which is 0%, the other of which is 90%. My P(doom) for basically all of the scenarios that involve a runaway superintelligence is 0%, but my P(doom) for massive catastrophic social upheaval due to the disruptive nature of AI technology is 90%.

For the last century or so (basically ever since Turing’s work during WWII), the field of artificial intelligence has followed a cyclical pattern. First, researchers make some sort of breakthrough, which leads to rapid technological advancements and a brief AI boom. During this boom, futurists and technologists rave about how this technology will keep scaling up forever until it ushers in a sci-fi utopia/dystopia and utterly changes what it means to be human. Then, the technological development stalls as researchers run up against a hard barrier that makes further scaling impossible, at which point most of the investors sours on the technology and we fall into an “AI winter” for a decade or two.

The problem with the futurists and technologists who promote AI technology is that the vast majority of them are transhumanists who believe that intelligence is purely an emergent phenomenon that is 100% materialistic in nature. In other words, they believe that the human mind is little more than an organic machine created through the process of evolution, and that 100% of our intelligence, emotions, spirituality, and experience can be explained and understood through purely material processes. Therefore, if they can build a machine that replicates the same biological processes as the human brain, and subject it to similar conditions that evolution subjected us to, intelligence will naturally emerge from such processes and conditions.

But what if they’re wrong? What if there are more things in heaven and in earth than are dreamed up in our modern philosophies? I’m not saying that evolution didn’t play a role in the creation/emergence of intelligence—only that it’s insufficient. And why wouldn’t it be? Science, by definition, can only explain what it can measure. And what about the questions that we can’t ask? The things about this universe that are as foreign to our own understanding as quantum physics is to a German Shepherd?

For these reasons, I do not think that these generative AI models are going to keep scaling upward until we achieve a general superintelligence. At some point in the next 0-18 months, I think that the researchers and developers are going to start hitting hard limits that we don’t understand, because of the limitations of our understanding of the human brain and how our own intelligence emerged or was created.

I am extremely skeptical of all of the doom porn floating around out there, that we are months away from achieving AGI, and that a superintelligence will shortly thereafter replace us as the dominant species on this planet. For one thing, the goalposts for AGI are constantly moving—by the standards two or three decades ago, we have already achieved it—and for another, the transhumanists have turned this concept of AGI into a sort of Messianic savior / world-ending destroyer. And I just don’t buy into that religion.

So if I’m right, all of this doom porn about a world-ending superintelligence is utterly misguided. Which, on a certain level, is somewhat comforting. But on the other hand, that also means that we shouldn’t expect AI to save us—and that anyone who tries to tell us otherwise is ultimately trying to sell us something.

The big AI developers like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. have every incentive to hype up the doom porn. It makes them look powerful, which in turn attracts investment capital. At the same time, they also have every incentive to promote this idea that a superintelligent AI can be our savior, since if AGI is inevitable, shouldn’t we put everything we have into making sure that our AI overlords are benevolent and have humanity’s interest at heart? But again, if we take that view, we also end up pumping lots of investment capital into these AI companies, turning them into massive cultural behemoths without really questioning their ultimate aims.

What if instead of building a superintelligent AI savior, we ultimately end up with a new form of techno-feudalism, powered by AI? What if a true superintelligence never emerges, and all of the energy and resources we’re pumping into AI is really just going to create a new class of elites, with the rest of us dependent on some sort of universal basic income and totally at the mercy of the owners, controllers, and operators of AI?

To me, this seems like a much more likely scenario—and from what I can tell, we are already in the opening phases of it. Generative AI has already become so powerful that it will likely replace a large number of jobs or render them obsolete—which may or may not be a problem in the medium- to long-term, but will certainly be a problem in the short-term. As increasing numbers of people find themselves unemployed, it will put a tremendous strain on our welfare safety nets, and drive calls for increased government spending on social problems. But our governments are already so deep in debt that these pressures can only lead to some combination of (hyper)inflation, soveriegn debt crisis, and austerity-driven political instability.

Some people think that the solution to all of this is a universal basic income (UBI). But every time a UBI has been introduced, it has always led to negative outcomes, including wealth outcomes. Unfortunately, if AI is truly going to be a huge driver of unemployment (which doesn’t require AGI or a superintelligence—our current models are already powerful enough to drive massive disruption in the labor market), then I don’t see how we can avoid a massive push toward UBI. Certainly not with how our current investments in AI are so centralized—but again, all of the AGI doom-porn is driving us to centralize things even more. So while all of the benefits of this new technology accrue to Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, etc, and they keep holding out the promise of a messianic superintelligent AI that never truly emerges, the rest of us end up in a world where we have very little agency or control over our lives, with or without a UBI.

It doesn’t have to be this way. But if we all keep buying into the doom porn without looking critically at these AI companies and their transhumanist messianic promises, I think that this is the future we’re most likely going to get.

Fantasy from A to Z: H is for Heroes

When David Gemmell, my favorite fantasy author, broke into the field in the 1980s, his books were considered to be part of the “heroic fantasy” subgenre. If the two major divisions of fantasy were epic fantasy (sometimes also known as “high fantasy”) and sword & sorcery (sometimes known as “low fantasy”), heroic fantasy was very much in the sword & sorcery vein. Then the stars of George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie began to rise, and heroic fantasy gave way to what we now know as “grimdark.”

On a superficial level, both grimdark and heroic fantasy appear to have much in common. Both subgenres tend to feature morally gray characters, worlds that are dark and brutal, and a great deal of graphic violence. George R.R. Martin is famous for killing off his characters, and David Gemmell likewise tends to kill off about half of his starting characters in every book.

But if you spend enough time with both subgenres to get past the superficialities, you’ll see that they are totally different—and in some key ways, diametrically opposed. Not all grimdark descends into total nihilism, but much of it unfortunately does. But heroic fantasy is defined by the fact that it is not utterly nihilistic. Which isn’t to say that all heroes are noble and bright—gray morality is still very much a trope of the subgenre—but the very fact that heroes exist is enough to keep heroic fantasy from delving too deep into nihilism.

This is why I love practically everything that David Gemmell has written, but I couldn’t get past the first book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. I acknowledge that Martin is a brilliant and gifted writer. There were parts of A Game of Thrones where I felt more immersed in Martin’s fantasy world than in almost any other book I’d read. But by the end of the book, I hated all of the characters and was rooting for Danaerys to come with her dragons and burn them all to cinders (which was apparently the plan all along, if season 8 of the show followed Martin’s outline).

The thing is, George R.R. Martin is obsessed with the idea of victimhood. All of the characters in A Song of Ice and Fire are either victims or victimizers, or both. That is, apparently, the most interesting aspect that Martin finds about them. Which explains why his series did so well in the 00s and the 10s, when intersectionality was on the rise and critical theory came to dominate so many aspects of our culture. In any other time, Martin’s obsession with victimhood would not have gained such a following—which explains why it took him nearly five decades to hit his big break.

But where Martin is obsessed with victimhood, Gemmell was obsessed with heroism. He had a penchant for taking the most despicable and morally bankrupt characters, putting them in circumstances that demanded something more of them, and showing them rise to the occasion, making a heel-face turn and becoming the hero that the story demanded. It’s so immensely satisfying for me, every single time. Even the villains will sometimes turn into heroes by the end—though when they don’t, you can always expect them to have creative and satisfying deaths. No “creative subversion” of reader expectations there!

For Gemmell, there’s nothing very complicated about being a hero. There’s no list of defining characteristics or attributes. There’s also nothing particularly complex that a character has to do. For Gemmell, a hero is simply a person who does something heroic. Nothing more, and nothing less.

At this point, I’d usually give examples, but since all of them are spoilers, all I can say is go and read David Gemmell’s books! Some of the best heel-face turns are in Winter Warriors and Hero in the Shadows. I also really loved the protagonist’s redemption in The Swords of Night and Day. And of course, if you really want a great example of an unlikely hero, read Morningstar. That’s basically the whole plot of the book.

Like Gemmell, I prefer to write stories with heroes rather than anti-heroes. My Sea Mage Cycle books are generally more light on violence than a typical Gemmell book, but in The Widow’s Child and The Winds of Desolation, I put the main characters into some tough circumstances that forced them to step up and play the part. Same with The Sword Keeper, my first fantasy novel. And of course, with the Soulbond King books that I’m currently writing, where the main character is patterned after King David, there will be lots of opportunities for him to do heroic things, even if he is a more complicated character.

Heroes are so important to me that I honestly cannot read any fantasy book that doesn’t have one. When I look back on all of the big-name fantasy books that I’ve DNFed, that honestly is the major defining factor. Fortunately, the fantasy genre is full of excellent heroes—and with the way trends are shifting, I think we are going to see a lot more of them soon.

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Excerpt: Bloodfire Legacy (Chapter 3)

The Clairvoyant Thief

Lord Arion

Lord Arion passed silently through the stone walls of Castle Caravelia. He yearned to feel the floor beneath his feet, to brush his fingers across the rough stone and feel their rough texture. But he was merely a wraith, disembodied and immaterial.

He rose and emerged through the floor above, stopping at the door to his daughter’s apartment. For a moment, he considered passing inside, but then he remembered the last time he had passed into that space. Sorrow pierced his ghostly heart as he recalled how she’d pored over the ancient tome of magic, the hideous black evil of the Serpent’s Eye desecrating her desk.

“Lyra, my child,” he whispered softly. “If only I could reach you.”

Of course, the awful truth was that she wasn’t beyond his reach. At any time, he could pierce the veil and speak to her one last time. In her current state, was he sure that she would listen? Would her father’s last words be enough to bring her back from the darkness? Or would she ignore him and continue on her chosen course?

He drifted down into the great hall, where courtiers mingled. Their idle chatter and vapid laughter hardly improved his mood. How many of them were secret allies of the Dark Brotherhood? How could they all carry on so blithely while darkness festered in their midst?

His gaze fell upon Lord Blackwood, deep in conversation with one of the king’s advisors. At the very sight of him, rage and despair warred within Arion’s heart.

“You monster,” he hissed. “You slew me in cold blood, and now you seek to ensnare my daughter? By all that is good and holy in this world, I swear that I will find a way to stop you!”

He paused, his gaze falling upon a cluster of mages engaged in hushed conversation near the hearth. One of them cast a sidelong glance at him, subtle enough that no one else noticed.

A clairvoyant, Lord Arion thought to himself. One with the magical gift to see and speak with the dead. Clairvoyance was rare, but not unheard of. Many of those who possessed the gift preferred to keep it secret, developing their other talents instead.

For a fleeting moment, Lord Arion considered approaching the mage. Yet a nagging suspicion stayed his hand. From observing Lord Blackwood, he knew that the Dark Brotherhood had already infiltrated the ranks of the kingdom’s magical elite. And of course, everyone else had their own devious schemes. Could he trust any of the clairvoyants at the court? No—the risk of exposing himself to his enemies was simply too great.

Dismayed, he drifted up from the hall, passing through the rafters and rough stone walls. So deeply did he brood over his troubled thoughts that he hardly noticed where he was going until he emerged in his daughter’s chamber, illuminated in the flickering light of a single candle. Lyra sat hunched over her desk, her midnight-black hair spilling over her shoulders. With one hand, she idly stroked the Serpent’s Eye.

“I will bring you justice, father,” she murmured. “I swear it.”

Arion’s heart clenched. “No!” he screamed. “My killer is Lord Blackwood, child! The very man you’ve chosen to make your mentor!”

Lyra shivered suddenly, wrapping her arms around her chest. “Are you here, Father?” she asked softly. “Sometimes, it almost seems like I can feel you.”

Lord Arion reached out to her, his ghostly fingers passing through her cheek. “I’m here, child,” he whispered.

For a fleeting moment, he wondered if she could feel his ethereal touch. But then, she shook her head and returned to her studies.

Unable to bear his helplessness any longer, Arion soared through the castle walls and up into the night sky. The city sprawled beneath him, the light of countless torches flickering in the shadowed streets.

There had to be someone down there who could help him reach out to his wayward daughter. But where?

Corin

Corin darted across the dark alley, leaping between the crates and barrels in his way. He slowed as he rounded the corner, careful to watch for any dangerous figures lurking in the shadows. But once he knew they were clear, he wore the shadows like an old familiar cloak over his threadbare rags.

“I told you,” he hissed under his breath. “I don’t do this anymore. Find someone else to help.”

The ghost of a middle-aged man followed him, his pudgy face creased with worry. “Please, young man. My daughter is in danger—you’re the only one who can help!”

Corin quickly scanned his surroundings, and not just for the usual threats. Anyone who saw him would think him mad—his ghostly companion was invisible to everyone else.

“Look,” he whispered harshly, “I’m sorry about Mariah. Truly, I am. But from what you’ve told me, I’m liable to end up floating face-down in the river if I go after her. And I rather like breathing.”

“But if you do nothing, she’ll die!”

Corin winced, though he did his best to hide it. “Yeah, well, we all go sooner or later. I’m not a hero. Why don’t you go ask someone respectable, with one of those big, fancy swords?”

“Do you think I haven’t tried? None of them can see or hear me. Only you have the gift!”

“Some gift,” Corin snorted, leaping over a putrid rivulet of freshly-dumped sewage. “All it’s ever brought me is trouble.”

His stomach growled. The only food he’d managed to scrounge up that day were some meager scraps from a refuse pile. Even when he managed to pinch a few silvers, the hunger always gnawed at him. It was his only constant companion in his hardscrabble existence—aside, of course, from the dead.

“Please,” the ghost moaned. “You are my daughter’s only hope.”

Corin clenched his jaw. Mariah was a friend, of a sort—at least, as much of a friend as one could have on the streets. He doubted she would come after him if their roles were reversed. But she might. Shouldn’t he… but no, every instinct screamed at him not to risk his neck. He hadn’t survived this long by always saying ‘yes’ to every ghost with a haunting sob story. Hadn’t he?

“Why do I always let myself get dragged into these things?” he muttered. The ghost’s face lit up immediately.

“Thank you, lad! You’ve no idea how much this means to—”

“Save it,” Corin growled. “Just guide me to her.”

The ghost nodded and led Corin deeper into the labyrinthine heart of the city’s slums. Worn and weathered buildings loomed over them, their once-grand facades now reduced to crumbling ruins. Shattered windows glinted in the moonlight, many boarded up with pinewood planks. The stench of mildew and raw sewage hung heavy in the air, so thick that it practically clung to Corin’s skin.

The ghost suddenly veered to the left, leading Corin towards a decrepit warehouse. A salty sea breeze from the harbor made its old, weathered boards groan ever so slightly.

“This is it,” the ghost whispered. “My daughter’s in there.”

Corin narrowed his eyes. “Your daughter got herself mixed up with Grim’s gang? Brilliant, that.”

“It wasn’t her fault! Times are hard, and—”

“Times are always hard,” Corin snapped. He ran a hand through his unkempt hair. “Look, if I do this—and that’s a big if—I’m gonna need more than just encouragement. You know the layout in there?”

“Aye, I’ll guide you. Just… please, save my little girl.”

Corin sighed. “I’ll do what I can. But don’t expect any miracles.”

The ghost’s lips curled into a faint smile. “Thank you, Corin. I knew I could count on you.”

Corin crept along the warehouse’s outer wall toward a rickety ladder. Pausing only to test if it would hold his weight, he nimbly scaled the rungs, slipping through a small hatch into a dark and dusty hayloft.

The pungent smell of moldy straw assaulted him as he crawled forward on his belly, peering through gaps in the floorboards. Mariah’s father hovered nearby, his ghostly form passing effortlessly through the wooden beams.

“There she is,” the ghost whispered, pointing downward.

Corin’s breath caught in his throat. Mariah sat bound and gagged in the center of the floor, her face a patchwork of ugly bruises. Corin recognized the hulking crime boss immediately, with his shaved head and a scar splitting his lip. Half a dozen thugs flanked the ugly man. He grabbed Mariah’s hair and yanked her head back, making Corin wince.

“Last chance, little seer,” Grim growled. “Tell me what I want to know, or I start to become unpleasant.”

Mariah’s eyes blazed with defiance. “Go to hell,” she spat.

“Wrong answer, little seer.”

“Hey boss,” said one of the thugs. “Want us to have some fun with her?”

“Yeah,” said another, puffing out his chest. “What about it, boss?”

Grim chuckled—a cold, mirthless sound that sent shivers down Corin’s spine. “Not yet,” he said, his eyes roving over Mariah’s battered body. “I want to hear her beg for mercy first.”

Corin felt a surge of anger in his gut. He knew he had to act fast. His eyes darted about the warehouse, falling on an oil lamp hanging from the rafters just below him. Below it lay a pile of oily rags.

“What are you thinking, lad?” the ghost asked.

“What I need is a distraction,” Corin muttered under his breath. “But what to do after—”

The sharp crack of a hand striking flesh cut him short. Mariah’s cry of pain echoed in the cavernous space below him.

“Blast it all,” Corin hissed. Right now, all that mattered was getting Mariah away. He’d figure out the rest as he went. With that decided, his hand slipped to the worn handle of his knife as he crept closer to the edge of the hayloft, his heart hammering.

Here goes nothing.

Corin sprang from his hiding spot and rolled as he hit the floor. The thugs whirled around at the sudden movement, but he was already in motion, running. His blade flashed as it sliced through the rope holding the lamp.

“What the—”

The lamp crashed and shattered. The flames licked hungrily at the oily rags, and the thugs hesitated, unsure whether to chase Corin or to put out the fire.

“Yah!” shouted Corin, lunging in a feint. The thugs instinctively moved to fight him, wasting the precious few seconds they had before the fire grew out of control.

“What are you doing?” Grim bellowed. “Smith, Carter—after that thief! The rest of you put out the fire!” But he was too late. The flames had already taken to the dry and weathered wood, filling the air with smoke.

“Dirty little waif,” one of the thugs snarled as he drew a wicked dagger. Corin took that as his cue to dance.

The thug lunged at him, moving much faster than his hulking form seemed to allow. But Corin was faster. He darted to the side, tripping up a man with a water pail and causing him to spill it on the floor. Another thug tried to catch him, but slipped on the water and barreled into someone else.

Corin ran toward a stack of crates, leading his attackers away from Mariah, who still sat bound to her chair. The thugs crashed after him, knocking some of them over, but he had already doubled around behind them.

“Get him!” Grim roared, his face contorted with rage.

Corin had just enough time to duck before another thug came after him, swinging his meaty fists. He felt the whoosh of the air as the man’s arm passed over his head. Without thinking, he lashed out with his foot, catching his attacker in the knee. The man grunted and took a step back.

“My daughter!” the ghost yelled. “We have to save her before the place burns down!”

The warehouse was fully on fire now, the acrid smoke stinging Corin’s eyes and throat. He caught a glimpse of Mariah staring wide-eyed at the flames as men scrambled in vain to put them out. She was far too close to them for comfort.

But before Corin could run after her, the thugs came after him. Since they were both taller than him, though, the smoke stung their eyes enough for him to slip between them. He darted toward the opposite wall, coughing.

“A little help here?” he asked the ghost. The smoke was already thick enough that he could barely see anything.

“This way!” Mariah’s father called, urging him into the fire.

Corin followed, dodging started thugs and burning debris. Mariah’s muffled cries for help urged him to move faster. The acrid stench burned his lungs, but he ducked his head and pushed on.

“There she is!” the ghost cried out.

Through the haze, Corin spotted her. She’d been knocked to the floor in the commotion and was now struggling for her life against her bonds. When she saw him, her eyes widened.

“Corin? What are you doing here?”

“That’s a very good question,” he muttered, sawing at the ropes that bound her feet. As soon as they were cut, he grunted and hauled her up.

“Can you run?”

She nodded, her arms still bound behind her back. The timbers above them groaned and cracked, showering them with sparks and embers. But before they could run, a rough hand grabbed Corin’s shoulder.

“You little street rat,” Grim snarled, his face contorted with rage. “I’ll gut you myself!”

His knife was almost as long as Corin’s forearm. But before he could use it, Mariah landed a kick in the crime lord’s groin. Grim howled and doubled over.

“Run!” said Corin, grabbing Mariah by the arm. She didn’t need to be told twice. Together, they stumbled through the thickening smoke.

The burst out into the cool night air, coughing and gasping for breath. Behind them, angry shouts and roaring flames filled the air. Mariah staggered, and for a moment, it seemed that she was about to collapse.

“Don’t stop,” Corin gasped, pulling her back to her feet. “We’ve got to get away from here.”

Mariah nodded. Together, they plunged into the winding alleys of Caravelia, leaving the inferno far behind.

Corin

The old wharf groaned under Corin’s weight. He stumbled to the edge, letting his feet dangle over the water as he sat. The putrid stench of the river wafted up to greet him, a nauseating blend of sewage and rotting fish. As if that weren’t enough, the acrid smoke of the warehouse fire still clung to his rags.

“Think we lost ‘em,” he muttered as Mariah sat beside him. The distant shouts of the city guard echoed behind them through the narrow streets.

Mariah nodded. “For now, at least.” She sagged against a moldering wooden post, wincing at her bonds. “Lend a hand?”

“Right, sorry.” Corin fumbled for his knife and carefully sawed through the ropes binding her wrists. The raw, red welts stirred his anger.

“How badly did they hurt you?”

Mariah grimaced as she rubbed her chafed skin. “Ain’t nothing I can’t handle. You learn to take your licks on the streets.” She glanced at him, her eyes glinting. “Speaking of which, what were you doing there? How’d you know where to find me?”

Mariah’s father hovered at the edge of Corin’s vision. “Tell her,” he urged. But Corin couldn’t afford to let word get out about his gift.

“I heard a rumor,” he lied. “Thought I’d check it out, see if you needed my help.”

Mariah snorted. “Since when do you play the hero, Corey?”

“Maybe I just wanted to buck the trend for once.”

She stared at him for a while, then shook her head. “You’re a strange one. But… thanks. I mean it.”

“What were you doing getting mixed up with Grim’s crew anyway?” Corin asked. Mariah looked away, her lips pressed into a thin line.

“It’s… complicated,” she said evasively. “I got mixed up in something I shouldn’t have.”

Corin’s frown deepened. He knew all too well the kinds of people who ruled Caravelia’s underworld. It often felt like the city’s prosperity was built on a foundation of corruption and greed. The fact that Mariah didn’t want to talk about it obviously meant she was in over her head.

“Must’ve been some job,” he pressed. “Grim doesn’t tie people up for fun.”

Mariah’s lips tightened. “Look, I appreciate you saving me and all, but it’s better if you don’t know all the details. For both our sakes.”

Corin opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of it. Why was he trying to get himself involved anyway? Everyone on the streets had their own dirty secrets.

“Fine,” he said. “Just… take care of yourself, alright? And if you need my help again—”

“Don’t worry, I’ll ask for it,” she said, turning away. But she couldn’t hide the gratitude in her eyes.

Maybe I just want to feel needed for a change, he thought, answering his own question. By someone who isn’t dead yet, he added quickly, turning away from the ghost.

“Tell her,” Mariah’s father pleaded. “Please, Corin. Tell her I’m here—that I love her.”

But Corin ignored the spectral being, fixing his gaze on the water instead. A small barge glided past them, its hull groaning as it made its way toward the harbor. Mariah noticed his sudden tension and frowned.

“What is it, Corey?” she asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“You have no idea.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Now, let’s get out of here before those goons catch up to us.”

Corin felt the ghost’s disappointment like a cold wind at his back. But he shoved the feeling aside. Survival came first—everything else was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

Lord Arion

Lord Arion silently watched the two ragged figures below. Though unremarkable to mortal eyes, the boy stood out among the thousands of other inhabitants of the capital city.

“He has the gift,” Lord Arion whispered. “The power to see beyond the veil of the Mortal Realm.”

Hope began to surge within him, a feeling he hadn’t felt very often since his demise. He swooped lower, watching as Corin parted ways with Mariah before slipping into a gaggle of drunken sailors. He blended in surprisingly well.

“He is so different from my Lyra,” Arion mused as he followed the boy through the city’s squalid streets. Where Lyra walked with the grace and poise of nobility, Corin slunk through the shadows, always watching his back. Where Lyra had a position at court, Corin trusted no one and always kept a knife on his belt.

“The streets haven’t been kind to you, have they, lad?” Arion murmured. He focused his otherworldly senses to peer into Corin’s heart. Beneath the boy’s gritty cynicism, a flicker of something pure still burned.

“There’s goodness there,” Arion decided. “Buried, perhaps, but not extinguished. You’re a good man, Corin—or at least, you want to be.”

Arion’s mind turned to the peril his daughter now courted. His rage burned at the thought of Dorian indoctrinating her in the ways of the Dark Brotherhood. She needed her father now more than ever—before she made a mistake that would fix the course of her life.

“The boy has the gift,” he repeated, steeling his resolve. It would not be easy, persuading a street urchin to turn from a life of petty thievery. But for Lyra’s sake, he had to try.

Restored footage from just after WWI

I don’t know how the YouTube algorithm decides what to show me, but every once and a while something really fascinating shows up in my recommends. This was one of those times. Really excellent job restoring this old footage.

Back from Arkansas

So we’re finally back from our family vacation to Arkansas! My youngest sister manages cabins over at the Buffalo River National Park, which means she’s busy over there all summer, so we all decided to go over to her.

It was a looong drive. Took us three days to get down there, mostly because we stayed with my brother-in-law in Omaha for a couple of nights (just long enough for our five year-old to fall in the shower and bust open her head. Took her to the emergency room, where she got a couple of staples. She’s fine.) On the way back, we busted our butts and did it in two days. We must have listened to the Tarzan and Mulan soundtracks thirty or forty times each.

Arkansas is almost like another world. Very beautiful, but mostly jungle, and full of all sorts of venemous things that want to suck your blood. The first day, I made the mistake of walking around in shorts without any bug spray, and I got nearly a dozen deer ticks on me, including one that had crawled up into my unmentionables. My wife and both our kids also had ticks on them. Needless to say, we did very thorough tick checks every day after that.

Other than that, it wasn’t too bad. I heard from one of the locals that there are copperheads and water mocassins in the river, but we didn’t see any of those. Also, the black widows like to roof in the awning and lower themselves down in the evening, but we didn’t see any of those either (thank goodness). And apparently, there’s an annual tarantula migration, which sounds absolutely terrifying. In fact, it sounds like someone in the Ozarks started a game of Jumanji some 150 years ago, and it’s never been finished.

But the people are all friendly and generous, and there’s a tiny little country church almost every other mile in the back country. Also, driving through Branson and southern Missouri was like driving through the heart of Trump country. The Twelve Days War was raging the whole time, and there were MAGA billboards and billboards saying “we stand with Israel.” Kind of surreal.

It was good to spend some time with family, but it’s good to be home now. We just got the staples out of our daughter’s head, and it’s healed just fine. She’s really glad to be able to swim now (too bad she couldn’t swim while we were at the park). For the next week, my brother-in-law from Couer D’Alene is down here with his wife and eight kids for a family vacation. Our kids are having a blast, though our littlest just came down with a stomach bug… hopefully it ends with him, but I’m not holding my breath.

The plan for now is to finish writing all the blog posts for Fantasy from A to Z, hopefully before the end of next week. I’ll also do my best to finish up the rough AI draft of Lord of the Falconstar (book 3 of the trilogy) by the end of this week. So far, it’s going really well. After that, it’s back to the revised AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, which I hope to finish before we go on our next road trip to Canada for my wife’s family. And after Fantasy from A to Z is finished, I’ll work on the rough human draft of The Road to New Jerusalem, hopefully finishing it in time for the Ark Press contest.

That’s the plan, anyway. I have a lot of thoughts on the Twelve Days War and the situation in the Middle East, but I’ll save all that for now. If the ceasefire holds and it truly is the end of the war, I think President Trump will go down as the greatest American president of the 21st century.

“Every age seems to spawn a leader…”

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written. —Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion.

How I Hacked My ADHD to Read 5-15 Books Every Month

For a long time, I wanted to read more books. Year after year, I would set a reading goal, only to fail miserably.

I have a mild case of ADHD, which makes it very difficult to focus exclusively on a monotonous task for longer than about fifteen minutes (or alternately, makes it difficult to notice anything else when I’m in a state of hyperfocus). Because most novels take around 8-10 hours to read, it was usually my ADHD that made it difficult to finish any of them.

Then on year, I set a resolution to read or DNF (“did not finish”) every novel that has ever won a Hugo or a Nebula award. I knew that it would be difficult, so I went in with a plan. Long story short, the plan worked out amazingly well, and by the end of the year I had read (or DNFed) nearly 150 books.

But I didn’t stop there. After accomplishing the reading goal, I kept up with the same plan, tweaking it here and there until it became the main process by which I read books. And it still works amazingly well, as you can see from my current stats for this year:

January: 11 books read, 6 DNFed
February: 8 books read, 2 DNFed
March: 15 books read, 6 DNFed
April: 6 books read, 6 DNFed
May: 10 books read, 5 DNFed

So how does it work? Basically, by hacking my ADHD to turn it into an asset instead of a liability. Here is what I do:

1. Read lots of books simultaneously

This is the main principle that drives my reading process. Instead of trying to work against my ADHD and force myself to focus on the same book all the time, I keep a pile of books that I’m currently reading, and cycle through them. Whenever I get bored of my current book, I put it down and allow myself to become distracted with the next book. In this way, even though I’m constantly getting distracted, I’m also constantly reading, since the distractions are just other books.

If you don’t have ADHD, this might sound like it’s a little maddening—and for normal people, it probably is. But one of the nice things I’ve found about ADHD is that it really expands my capacity to hold multiple thoughts or ideas in my head at the same time. Yes, my mind is constantly bouncing around between all of them, but because I have enough room to hold them all, it’s actually not that hard to read, say, a dozen books simultaneously and remember what’s going on in each of them. I just have to make sure that I don’t let too much time slip by between the last time I pick it up.

Which leads to…

2. Keep a spreadsheet to measure daily progress

Because ADHD can really hamper my executive function, I try to simplify and automate as much as I can. For reading, that means tracking my progress on a spreadsheet, so that I don’t need to keep any of that in my head. Instead, when the time comes to restack my currently-reading pile, I just check the spreadsheet and stack them in the order that it tells me.

As an added bonus, seeing the numbers on the spreadsheet go up over time gives me a lot of motivation to keep reading. And when I’m in a place of low motivation, the spreadsheet helps me to pull back and reorder things, putting the short, easy books at the top and pulling the hard, longer books out of what I’m currently reading, to pick up later. Because it’s all tracked, when the time comes to pick up a book again after setting it aside for a few months, the spreadsheet helps me to do that quickly.

3. Have dedicated reading time

Another huge thing that helps with the executive function issue is keeping to a routine that includes some reading time, so that I don’t have to think about reading—I just do it. Personally, I’ve found that the best time for this is at night, shortly after putting the kids to bed. I’ll usually read through about half a dozen books before I become sleepy enough that it’s time to turn off the light.

I’ll admit, I’m not always great about keeping to this routine, but thankfully it’s the sort of thing that you can pick up easily after missing for a couple of days. It also helps that my wife usually likes to read in bed with me at the same time.

4. Start a new book almost every day

The thing I’ve found with ADHD is that it really makes me crave novelty. So whenever I feel like my reading habits are flagging, one thing that usually helps is to pick up a new book and put it on the top of the pile. After reading the first ten or so pages of a new book, that’s usually enough to put me into reading mode, and then I’ll devour the rest of the pile.

5. DNF early and often

Of course, if I’m starting a new book almost every day, that’s a recipe for getting buried in books really quickly! So to counteract that, and give myself room to experience more novelty in my reading life, I don’t force myself to finish every book that I start. In fact, there are some months where it seems I DNF more books than I finish! But that’s okay, because it makes room for the really good books. And honestly, there are so many books in the world that it just doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time on the mediocre or terrible ones.

So that’s how I do it. How about you? What are some hacks that you’ve found that help to read more books?

Should men still pursue traditional publishers, or is that a waste of time?

A fascinating interview and discussion.