Wonderment Within Weirdness follows Matthew after he dies and wakes in a bureaucratic and politically fractured Heaven, where divine authority, rebellion, and multiverse conflict collide in a bold sci-fi fantasy adventure. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Short answer: a YouTube comment. lol. Long answer, it was a YouTube comment on a video I had seen on some atheist YouTube channel I had watched back in college in 2017. Dont remember which channel, or what the video was called, but I think it was about Lucifer’s depiction in the Bible and other media, and how Lucifer’s depictions has a lot of misconceptions, and in the comments of that video was a comment, not sure how it went exactly, but it hypothetically asked the question “what if Lucifer was good and God was bad?” and that inspired me to write my book. And before finding this comment, I had tried to write other books, but I barely got anywhere with those ideas and scrapped them. but the idea i got from the youtube comment really sparked something in me. i felt i was onto something. a what-if role reversal story. But I didn’t want it to just be straight up saying definitively that God is bad and Lucifer is good. because that is up to people’s interpretations of who they consider good or bad. So, what I did, I decided to come up with a multiverse story, to explore different versions of figures, so that the versions that we know can exist, separately, out there, somewhere, while my book explores different versions of figures, beyond the ones that we know.

Matthew begins the story by dying and waking into something far stranger than expected. What did you want his first encounter with the afterlife to reveal about him?

Those things were not what they seemed to be.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

My biggest themes were friendship and found family, and standing up for what is right, even when it is something folks may not appreciate or even know about.

What do you hope readers take away from the book’s anger, chaos, and big questions about judgment, exclusion, and power?

That sometimes it takes one person to make a difference. One action, one choice, one decision, sometimes that can be the spark for change.

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