Opening Remarks

Over the past few years, the core of my creative endeavors has shifted from designing TTRPGs to writing fiction. I do want to get back into TTRPGs at some point, but my writing feels like it needs its own home. A blog feels like the right place for that, though in an effort to reach more people I’ll be experimenting with some other venues as well. My Patreon has already shifted to more or less be a blog, so it’ll become a way to get access to my blog essays early, along with some exclusive bonuses.

I started trying to write fiction years and years ago, but the first novel I actually finished was Nekomimi Land, a panic attack of a dystopian novel about catgirls. Currently I’m working on both Memes of the Prophets (my isekai series) and the Xeroverse Tetralogy (a Lynchian deconstruction of superhero blockbusters). I’ve found that the focus of my writing is affectionate critique, taking genres I genuinely enjoy and trying to ask deeper questions about them. What does it really mean to die and then try to live in another world, far from everything you ever knew? What lessons are superheroes teaching us, and which ones are they avoiding teaching us?

My writing style is my own—though one friend compared it favorably to Robert Aspirin—but my literary idol is Terry Pratchett. I have a lot of silliness in my stories, but I try to respect the reader, take my characters’ internal lives seriously, and say something about the human condition. I don’t want to hit readers over the head with polemics, but I try to ground my creations in compassion first and foremost.

The “Clockwork Avocado” is a motif that I’ve been playing with for a while now. It was originally going to be a science fiction short story about a guy who gets an implant that gives him perfectly average tastes (and thus overcomes his dislike of avocado), and how mass adoption makes things go out of control and create strange feedback loops. In my unfinished Persona-inspired novel Zero Hour it’s going to be the “final boss,” the idiot-god of social media. The larger point is that it’s a thing that takes what it perceives as what we want and regurgitates it back at us, and does so in a mindless, mechanistic manner. It worked well as an over-the-top surreal embodiment of algorithmic social media, but it’s even better as a metaphor for the generative AI that’s been trying to invade every aspect of our lives. I’m emphatically not advocating for the Clockwork Avocado, but I felt it made a good name for this blog because it’s both unique and sums up an important aspect of the world I want to critique.

Anyway, as to what you can expect here:

• Essays about technology, popular culture, and my writing process
• Reviews of media that I find particularly interesting
• Updates on my various projects
• NO content made with generative AI. Why would you want to read something I couldn’t even be bothered to write myself?