Blog Archives
Microcosm of Our Society
Destiny and Other Follies follows a midlife consultant and his wife, a couple struggling through marital strain, waning career ambitions, and trying to find one another again. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
From life. I worked in consulting for far too many years and saw what it can do to a person, the cold dog-eat-dog brutality of it, the strain it puts on a marriage. It’s arguably the most extreme corporate experience one can have, and that compelled me to capture it on paper.
The consulting world in the novel feels both realistic and quietly surreal. What drew you to that setting?
Working as a consultant, experiencing so many different client environments, it became clear how the corporate world has impacted society, how disconnected and dehumanized it’s become. My intention was to present this world as a microcosm of our society, to depict the blurring boundaries between worklife and life.
Why was it important that the novel not remain entirely within Calder’s point of view?
It would have read more like a memoir if there had not been other points of view. It was important to show that his wife had similar experiences in her role as a retail banker. I also liked the idea of presenting their separate views about their marriage instead of only his own. Their different perspectives on the US were also important. They consider it from very different backgrounds and mindsets. Hana deserved to be a significant subplot.
What kind of reader do you imagine connecting most deeply with this book?
Readers who have direct experience with the corporate world seem the most likely. But anyone who is intrigued by the corporatization of our society would also connect with it, by the influence some of its most undesirable traits have had on us, and by what that might mean for the future.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Website | Amazon
How will he tell his wife?
Younger and Bosnian, Hana feels adrift in an overwhelming America. Their relationship’s sole center of gravity is an old Weimaraner named Darwin. Terrified by her husband’s failing health and the prospect of widowhood, Hana takes a retail bank job and an interest in her one friend’s husband.
Meanwhile, Calder’s client work unravels; hints at internal sabotage mount. As the base ruthlessness of colleagues begins to emerge, so do the primal forces that drive him. His battle to salvage both dignity and career deteriorates into a thirst for vengeance, leading to unexpected revelations about his past, his world, and himself.
Destiny and Other Follies is a darkly comic, gritty yet humane portrait of misdirected lives in our corporatized age.
God’s Mercy
The Beyond is Part of the Here Now is a spiritual memoir of witness in which you recount a lifetime of visions, losses, rescues, and unexplained encounters to show how love binds the visible world to the unseen. When did you first realize these experiences belonged together rather than as separate events?
Around the age of 30, I realized I needed to someday put several experiences in writing. I thought up until then my empathic encounters were happening to everyone but started to see they were not typical. I had to work full-time as most do, and so had to wait until retirement to write what I had been wanting to say for a while.
How did you decide what to present plainly as testimony and what to reflect on more deeply for the reader?
The experiences that registered very deeply were when friends, family, and even pets who passed away showed up to give me a message. They came to say goodbye, and often looked younger or repaired from the debilitated state they were in when alive. I thought this–God’s mercy was something humankind should know about. However, I do not think this is automatic, as sadly, I have seen some end up in darkness as well. The encounters with God were by far the best experiences.
The memoir moves easily between ordinary life and extraordinary encounters. Was that tonal balance natural to your memory, or something you shaped carefully while writing?
I saw one of the goals of my life was to learn how to use a sword, so I trained and eventually won several tournaments. There is good and evil, and I want to be able to literally stand against the evil. Sounds corny, but that’s how the spiritual world is set up. The Bible tells us to wear a helmet of salvation and to carry the sword of the Spirit. I’m trying to help people defeat fear, but at the same time convert fear of the Lord to loyalty to Him. My memory wasn’t shaped, but my life was.
What do you hope readers carry with them after finishing the book?
I hope people understand that heaven is not automatic, and it takes something on our part to get there. It helps when you show love to the innocent, help what is right, and try to understand God while you can, because life is short and the window of opportunity is always closing.
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Modern New Adult Audience
Moonlight Desires, a Gothic retelling of Cinderella, follows a woman abused by her family who is lifted from drudgery by a royal figure who appears in spider form. What inspired you to retell this classic tale with a Gothic flair?
I’ve always had a thing for fairy tales, the kind we used to call “wonder tales” before they were sanitized. If you look closely at my work, the Brothers Grimm are almost always lurking under the surface. These are classic stories we all know by heart, which gives me a great foundation to build on. It allows me to focus my energy on reshaping those familiar bones into a Gothic fantasy retelling that feels gritty and real for a modern New Adult audience.
The imagery—especially the web, the dress, and the spectral coach—feels symbolic as well as aesthetic. What meanings did you intend behind those elements?
I actually used the Italian Commedia dell’arte as a sort of mental map for these characters. In that world, you have the “unmasked” lovers. These are the ones who are vulnerable and can actually change. And then you have the “masked” figures who are stuck in their ways.
In Moonlight Desires, Aurelia is the “unmasked” one. She’s going through loss and resentment, and she has to choose to forgive to find her path. Princess Kipira, though, is a “masked” figure. Her spider form isn’t just a choice; it’s a reflection of her own selfishness, trapped under a hideous curse. Then you have the Desires. These beautiful yet hollow spirits of the underworld only come alive in the moonlight. They’re yearning for a life they can’t have. By weaving these magical elements together, I wanted to create the kind of atmospheric writing and vivid world-building that fans of dark romance and monster fantasy are looking for.
Some readers have mentioned they wanted more technical details about the “Ingridelite Weave,” which is the pattern of Aurelia’s dress. But the weave is a metaphor of the story itself. In adult fairy tales, you don’t always need a manual for how the magic works and what makes it significant. You need to experience it. Kipira explains the Ingridelite Weave simply: every part of the pattern is connected to everything else. That’s how I see fantasy retellings across history: their patterns are endlessly moving, reshaped, and retold while staying recognizably themselves.
Just as the threads of the dress guide Aurelia’s movement when she dances, the inherited patterns of Ye Xian and Ashputtel guided my own hand as a writer.
What question did you most want readers to wrestle with after finishing the book?
I try to create a literary space where the symbolism does the heavy lifting. I don’t want to be a control freak and tell you exactly what questions to ask. I’d rather give you a dark, moody environment where you can find your own questions and answers within the frame of an adult fairy tale.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m currently finishing up Spider Sister, which is the sequel to my novel Spider Seeds. It’s part of the Spider Seeds Universe and links directly back to Moonlight Desires. You can expect a 2026 release, which will officially bring my spider horror series to a close.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
From her webs arise quiet works of fantasy: a gown, slippers, and a horse-drawn carriage, their threads quickened by moonlight and inhabited by the restless spirits of Hades.
Carried to Duke Andrew’s court festival, where jeweled crowns glint and his son must choose a bride, Aurelia steps into a world that finally sees her worth. Yet the curse gripping Kipira tightens, for she can only be freed through an act of true kindness, and even her best intentions are shadowed by self-interest.
As romance awakens, fate begins to stir.
Aurelia is about to discover that destiny is as fragile as threads of moonlit silk…and they are all woven into MOONLIGHT DESIRES
Opening Pandora’s Box
Echoes of Oblivion follows three students who inherit the research of two broken men and soon find themselves responsible for bringing the first stable AGI into being. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
Most of the core scientific ideas in the book came from realizations I had through conversations with friends who are deeply interested in this topic, including a professor friend of mine who writes papers on cognition and artificial intelligence. These conversations spanned years. I’ve always had an interest in artificial intelligence and its inevitable emergence. There’s this constant sense of anxiety lingering at the back of my mind. That one day, we may become the lesser species.
The story itself formed gradually. I wrote this without a rigid structure and made up situations as I went. To be honest, I had a blast writing it this way. It felt like I was discovering the story at the same time as the reader would.
Each of the central characters carries a different emotional weight—guilt, ambition, resentment, curiosity. How did you balance those perspectives?
I didn’t consciously focus on balancing the characters’ perspectives. Instead, I try to put myself in their shoes and imagine a full backstory for each of them to really embody their personalities, motivations, and emotional states. From there, I imagine how they would react, respond, and make decisions. Their interactions naturally drive the story in a certain direction, not necessarily one I had planned ahead of time.
Is the novel, in part, about the danger of continuing work we don’t fully understand?
Yes. I believe we are in the process of opening Pandora’s box. We are largely clueless about the outcome of our fervent efforts to create this intelligence that we hope will elevate humanity. At the same time, it has an equally real chance of wiping us out.
I’m not a doomsayer, but I pay enough attention to believe there is a very real possibility that artificial general intelligence could be our final invention. If it reaches that point, AGI would surpass us in its ability to improve itself, leading to a singularity. What happens to us after that? No one really knows.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from Echoes of Oblivion?
Aside from having a great overall experience reading the book, I hope readers come away with an understanding that playing with things we don’t fully understand can lead to catastrophe. That said, I did end the book on a slightly lighter note. When we first discovered fire, we likely burned ourselves and probably a few other things, but we eventually learned how to control it and make it work for us. Part of me hopes the same could be true for artificial intelligence. But a larger part of me believes that’s unlikely. Unlike fire, AGI may not be something we can ever truly control.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
When college student Robert Fletcher and his friends find forgotten research locked in a dead professor’s office, they unknowingly uncover the legacy of a father and son obsessed with building true artificial general intelligence.
But every attempt to bring the AGI to life ends in failure. Not because it doesn’t work… but because it does. Every creation chooses death over existence.
Curiosity spirals into obsession as each revelation unravels the boundaries of life, consciousness, and morality. Some creations reject their own being. Some awakenings defy control. And some intelligences arrive before humanity is ready to meet them.
For Ex Machina, Black Mirror, and Dark Matter fans, Echoes of Oblivion is a mind-bending hard sci-fi thriller exploring identity, obsession, and the terrifying implications of consciousness unbound.
Red Ghost Trilogy: The Complete Series
Red Ghost Trilogy is a big, pulpy, wide-angle genre mashup in the best sense. It opens with a sixteenth-century sea disaster, swings into modern criminal conspiracies and cosmic horror, and keeps expanding until it becomes an apocalypse story with time travel, myth, telepathy, pirates, and spacefaring war. What makes it hang together is that author Gerry Eugene writes like he genuinely enjoys every strange ingredient he’s tossing into the pot. The book isn’t shy about being large, dramatic, and weird, and that confidence gives it a real charge.
What the trilogy really is, though, is an ensemble adventure built around people with mythic nicknames and very human grief. Anders Benson, Emerson Beekman, Anne Forcetti, Fred Collier, and especially Genevieve Cocklin all arrive with outsized abilities, but the story keeps grounding them in loss, loyalty, and stubbornness. Genevieve ends up being the emotional center of a lot of the book, which surprised me in a good way. She’s introduced with the blunt, perfect line, “Genevieve was a pirate,” and Eugene spends a lot of time proving how many shades that can hold: strategist, lover, killer, commander, and eventually something close to legend.
The thing I liked most was the book’s scale. Eugene doesn’t think in narrow lanes. He thinks in collisions: old Spain and future war, organized crime and folklore, fungal plague and sacred cure, helicopters and demons. Even the diction likes to leap upward. Early on, one of the villains offers a string of clues that sounds like a thesis statement for the whole trilogy: “Cosmology. Cosmic vortices. Conical wormholes. Triggering megahertz. Auditory mandalas.” That line tells readers exactly what kind of ride this is. It’s not interested in staying tidy. It wants to be vivid, maximal, and just a little feverish.
Eugene likes ornate prose, formal phrasing, dramatic entrances, and chapter-to-chapter momentum, and that gives the book an old-school storytelling energy. He also has a gift for giving emotional pain a clean, memorable shape. One of the strongest stretches in the first book is Genevieve’s rush toward Seattle after the world has started collapsing around her. That whole sequence works because the action never floats free of feeling. For all the telepathy, monsters, and battlefield planning, the trilogy keeps coming back to what catastrophe does to love, friendship, and chosen family.
Red Ghost Trilogy is a sprawling speculative epic that runs on sincerity, imagination, and momentum. It’s the kind of book that wants to entertain generously. It gives readers haunted history, end-of-the-world stakes, magical combat, and a found-family core sturdy enough to carry all that spectacle. Anyone who likes fiction that blends science fiction, fantasy, horror, and adventure, this collection has a lot to offer. It feels less like a neatly engineered machine and more like a huge, eccentric saga told by someone who loves stories too much to keep them small.
Pages: 748 | ASIN : B0GKXKF9Z6
A Life Manual-Finally!
Gerry O’Reilly’s A Life Manual (Finally) is less a conventional self-help book and more of a sprawling personal handbook for everyday living. It presents itself as an eighteen-month course in becoming more cultured, capable, and self-possessed, beginning with cleanliness, posture, manners, and presentation, then widening into cooking, writing, finances, religion, languages, flags, politics, nature, survival, psychology, the arts, and even antiques. The book openly announces that range and ambition from the start, with O’Reilly calling it “a life encyclopaedia after all,” and that description fits. It’s a manual in the old-fashioned sense: part guidebook, part reference work, part encouragement from someone who wants to pass along everything he’s gathered.
What gives the book its identity is O’Reilly’s voice. He writes like someone talking across a kitchen table, excited to share a stack of notes, hard-won habits, and odd bits of trivia that he genuinely thinks might improve your life. That tone is there in lines like, “You are about to commence your own journey,” which captures the book’s basic spirit: he’s not lecturing from a distance, he’s trying to accompany the reader through a long process of self-education. Even when the material gets dense or idiosyncratic, the voice keeps it personal. You always know there’s a specific person behind the advice, and that makes the book feel more human than polished.
The book is at its most distinctive when it embraces its huge scope. O’Reilly doesn’t stop at etiquette or grooming. He wants to teach the reader how to move through the world with more awareness, from table manners and bar behavior to cultural literacy and practical resilience. That’s why the same volume can move from “proper presentation” and restaurant conduct to tolerance, spirituality, and detailed pandemic and terrain survival planning. Read as a whole, the book becomes a portrait of the life O’Reilly admires: disciplined, curious, courteous, informed, and ready for almost anything. It’s not just about refinement. It’s about building a broad base of knowledge that he believes can steady a person in daily life.
What I found most interesting is that A Life Manual is really a map of one man’s idea of self-formation. O’Reilly tells the reader that this grew out of his own effort to become “more cultured and refined,” and that sense of private project turned public book gives it a memorable character. The result is a book full of instructions, opinions, encouragement, and personal conviction, all arranged into a long curriculum of improvement. It can feel eccentric because it reflects one person’s worldview so directly, but that’s also why it holds attention. You’re not reading bland advice assembled by committee. You’re reading a deeply individual attempt to answer a big question: what should a person know to live well and carry themselves with dignity?
A Life Manual is a big, earnest, wide-ranging compendium that wants to be useful, motivating, and memorable all at once. This book is a conversation starter, a personal syllabus, and a running attempt to make everyday life more intentional. Even when it wanders, it stays committed to that central mission, and that commitment gives the book its real charm.
Pages: 3054 | ASIN : B0GNR9J4NF
The Vectorist: Book 1 Rise of the Tribes
The Vectorist: Book I, Rise of the Tribes is a near-future techno-political thriller that turns social influence into the central weapon of public life. Author M. E. McMillan builds the novel around Marek Drovik, a master “vectorist” who uses AI to map human behavior, tribal loyalties, and pressure points across the internet, then nudges events at scale for clients who want power, profit, or both. What gives the book its shape is that it’s also a father-daughter story. Marek’s estranged daughter, Zara, has joined an anti-system movement, so the novel keeps one foot in global manipulation and the other in a badly damaged family trying to figure out whether anything human can survive inside a machine-built world.
I liked how clearly the book knows its own terrain. It’s not shy about being idea-driven, but it still understands that ideas need bodies, voices, habits, grudges, and private grief to matter. Early on, Marek explains his trade with chilling confidence: “That’s how we drive real-world change.” That line works because the novel spends so much time showing what that actually means, from corporate tribal warfare to digital radicalization to the casual destruction of privacy. McMillan writes this world as sleek, cold, and overstimulated, and the atmosphere fits the premise really well.
The strongest thread in the novel is Marek himself. He could’ve been written as just a symbol of technocratic corruption, but he comes off as something more bruised and recognizably human. He’s vain, brilliant, compromised, and emotionally stalled, yet the book keeps circling back to the pain he can’t manage when it comes to Zara. That gives the story a real pulse. Zara works well as his counterforce, not because she’s presented as morally spotless, but because she’s trying to recover a sense of life beyond systems, metrics, and manipulation. I think their conflict gives the novel room to ask what freedom might look like after a society has confused connection with capture.
By the time the story moves toward Arborstead, the Luddite Nation, and the mass “log-off,” the book becomes less about tactical dominance and more about civilizational withdrawal. That shift is bold, and I think it works. The novel starts in a world where every node can be tracked and exploited, then gradually pivots toward the radical possibility of refusal. One of the most telling lines comes later, when the anti-lattice movement reframes escape in plain language: “Freedom isn’t found in the cloud.” That turn gives the book a surprisingly earnest streak. Under all the surveillance, strategy, and digital warfare, it’s interested in whether people can relearn how to live without constant mediation.
The Vectorist is a speculative thriller with a strong ideological backbone, a clean sense of momentum, and a real appetite for big questions about power, technology, and consent. It’s most compelling when it lets those questions run through the personal wreckage between Marek and Zara, because that’s where the book stops being only conceptual and starts feeling intimate. The result is a novel that’s sharp, serious, and openly argumentative in the best way. It’s a warning about what happens when influence becomes infrastructure, and the soul gets treated like data.
Pages: 79 | ASIN : B0GQQSBM5Q
