Blog Archives
To Tell a Story
Out of the Water follows a prince who doubts his worth and must uncover the secrets of his bloodline and three magical rings as a growing conflict threatens the kingdoms of earth, water, and fire. What is the most rewarding aspect of writing a series?
To tell a story. Show how, through fictitious characters, people can change, and not always for the better. Choices bare consequences. Out of the Water is an excellent example of just that. You can learn what not to do when writing characters similar to Svaryur and Drifa.
How did you develop the Einns and the rules surrounding their magical powers?
Einn in Icelandic means one. The residents in Huldar usually only have one Einn. That’s where it started, with one magical power progressing into three separate Einns. Fire, Water, and Joro (in Old Norse for earth). Fire comes from the heart, Water from the mind, and Joro from the lungs. Einns have limits.
Svaryur’s character changes significantly throughout the novel. At what point did you realize how dark his transformation would become?
When he would use his own son in Into the Fire to get what Drifa wanted.
Svaryur never really did what he wanted, only Drifa.
Can you give us a glimpse into the next installment of The Huldar Chronicles? Where will it take readers?
The final Chronicle, End of Joro, is the ending. Aron’s great- grandson, Hakon has taken the stage. He will take readers on a journey of Hope. “For when we fall we must continue to rise.”
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Love Beyond Eros
Love Beyond Eros, the third book in Chris Neo’s The Love Secret series, is an ambitious mix of romantic drama, psychological exploration, family story, and high-stakes adventure. The novel begins with Aris missing from the remote Greek village where his relationship with Angelica has reached a painful turning point, then quickly turns his disappearance into a life-or-death crisis. From there, the story keeps expanding, bringing friends, family members, military figures, enemies, and former lovers into an increasingly elaborate chain of events. That scope fits Neo’s stated purpose for the series: he wants an emotionally driven story that explores love and relationships while keeping the plot moving quickly. What makes the book distinctive is how fully it commits to that combination. Love here isn’t simply romantic attraction. It becomes the force behind friendship, loyalty, sacrifice, jealousy, forgiveness, parenthood, and the difficult choices people make when someone they care about is in danger.
The emotional center of the novel is Aris, but the story works through a large ensemble, and several of the most interesting developments happen because other characters are forced to reconsider who they are. Angelica’s devotion to Aris becomes fierce and protective. John and Uri discover that friendship means showing up even when they’re frightened, inconvenienced, or powerless to fix the situation. Varo has one of the book’s largest arcs, moving through obsession, suspicion, buried trauma, loyalty, and a growing understanding of her own past. Granny, Zoe, Gina, Adonis, and others each contribute another variation on the book’s central question: what does loving someone actually require of you? The title gradually earns its importance because the novel keeps pushing beyond eros, or romantic desire, toward agape, family bonds, friendship, compassion, and self-sacrifice. Angelica eventually gives that idea its clearest expression when she describes a love that reaches beyond eros, tying the title directly to the emotional argument the story has been building.
Neo tells all of this in a deliberately heightened style. The book moves from a Greek village and a mysterious poisoning into military flights, international maneuvering, assassins, rescues, betrayals, martial arts confrontations, family reunions, pregnancies, old romances, and long-delayed revelations. It has the energy of a serialized adventure, with short chapters and frequent shifts in location and perspective designed to keep another complication arriving just as the previous one settles. That can make the experience feel almost breathless, but it also gives the novel its personality. Serious conversations about love and identity can sit beside broad comedy, sensual scenes, action sequences, and larger-than-life characters without the story losing its basic emotional direction. By the final chapter and epilogue, the sprawling cast has been drawn back toward family, healing, changed relationships, and the possibility of another journey, giving the ending the feeling of both a conclusion and a continuation.
I’d recommend Love Beyond Eros most strongly to readers who enjoy emotionally intense stories that combine romance with adventure, family drama, friendship, danger, and questions about why people love the way they do. It should especially appeal to readers who like big casts, dramatic reversals, passionate dialogue, Greek cultural touches, and characters whose emotional growth matters as much as the physical action surrounding them. Since this is Book Three, it will have the greatest impact on readers who already know Aris, John, Uri, Varo, Angelica, and the relationships developed earlier in The Love Secret series. The novel asks for a reader willing to enter its heightened world and care about its characters with the same intensity that they care about one another. For that reader, this is a generous, eventful finale built around a sincere idea: desire may begin a love story, but loyalty, sacrifice, forgiveness, friendship, and family are what reveal how deep love can become.
Pages: 416 | ASIN : B0CXB6NQTL
Rhythm and Flow
Ceylon Moon is a reflective poetry collection exploring memory, dreams, aging, identity, nature, and the search for meaning in a finite life. You organize the collection into five sections exploring childhood, dreams, sanity, nature, and aging. How did you decide on that structure?
I approach organizing how my poems are presented once I reach ~ 30 publishable poems. The organization is based largely on how the poems were written: as part of a project based on my interests, or those arising spontaneously based on an impression or mood. For example, in Ceylon Moon, the poems of “With [In] Sanity” and “The Voices” were projects in which the poems were created after months of study or observation. In contrast, the poems in “What The Night Holds” were more spontaneous in nature: triggered by an image, an idea floating through my mind, or my infatuation with another poet’s work. For example, “The Owl in Our Dreams” was prompted by Philip Lamantia’s enigmatic poem “The Owl.” When enough poems are written, they often coalesce around a common theme. When poems don’t fit into a specific theme, I categorize them under a vague title (eg., “Moods and Musings”).
Dreams are a recurring theme throughout the collection. How do your dreams influence your writing and understanding of yourself?
It’s important to understand that dreams emanate from the emotional (“mammalian”) centers of our brain (ie., the Limbic system). Our animal nature models our world and lets loose neural phantoms inside our mind. These phantoms speak through our higher (cerebral) functions of symbolism, language, vision, and explicit event memories. This is what stirs our sleep with important shards of meaning, as well as insights that evade our waking life. Such insights are not pronouncements about who we are. Rather, they reflect our unfiltered feelings, concerns, and struggles. And sometimes, they provide lucid insights into others we evade through rationalizations. Ones created to maintain a tenuous relationship.
I’ve studied my dreams for 40 years, and have come to know myself with greater clarity by doing so. I believe dreams and poetry travel the same pathways in the mind: one by night and the other by day.
Music, paintings, landscapes, and memories often intersect in your poems. How do different art forms influence your poetry?
Rhythm and flow are dominant in how I write poetry because I’ve been a drummer since I was 10 years old, and rhythm pervades my daily life. Poetry and song have had an intimate relationship since antiquity, and as a lifelong musician, that’s where I belong as a poet.
In terms of the visual arts, I’ve loved paintings since I was a child, implicitly recognizing them as W.H. Auden’s Secondary Worlds (our enchanted, sacred world of imagination). I began to notice the relationship between poetry and painting after years of discussing art with my friend, the artist Martha Diaz (who created the artwork for Ceylon Moon: Martha Diaz Fine Art).
Both painting and poetry attempt to induce a sense of immediacy for the experiencer. Both forms draw us into their world without necessarily understanding why. Only that their immediacy exudes something that is deliciously enticing, finally, it’s important to spend time with an image as well as a poem. To look at an image is an activity, rather than seeing (a physiological perception) and walking by. Similarly, glancing through a poem is like walking past a painting. We (including myself) need to spend time with a poem. Coming back to it again and again. Often there are layered meanings to be discovered and coveted.
If you could have readers carry one idea from Ceylon Moon into their own lives, what would it be?
I would simply say take to heart D.H. Lawrence’s observation: An act of pure attention brings its own answer. That has been the foundation of every poem in this collection. It’s how I struggle to evade my chattering mind. To dwell for a moment or two or four on all the beauty and richness of life that surrounds us and sometimes passes by¾like the smiling toddler without his stroller who turned around my hollow day (the poem “Becoming”).
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What the Night Brings are a series of poems delving into the nature and vagaries of our dreams. The many unsettled aspects of dreaming is extended into the next section “With Insanity” (or “Within Sanity”) explores” the near thin edge” that separates our uncomfortable ideas about what actually constitutes sanity, insanity, and what lies in between.
The Voices are six Rilkean poems in which Gedaliah assumes the personas of non-sentient nature (eg. clouds, mountains, trees, etc.) to explore what it is that resonates within us that draws us to them. The collection closes with All That is Worn and Torn (from the last poem in Rilke’s The Sonnets to Orpheus) explores the inevitable decline and closing of our own life and what solace and wisdom we might take away at the end.
The series of poems rises above the fear and despair it describes to reach for a higher position or acceptance, gratitude and love for the journey we’ve taken. Even for those who believe (like the author himself) that there is nothing more than what we hold no longer. The poetry of Ceylon Moon is consistent with his previous books in that they confront the darkness and chaos but do not wallow in despair, but shines a light upon all that makes life worthwhile that is found in the closing poems Because My Time is Limited and What is Life?
What May Have Been
Ink & Saltwater follows a transgender man aboard the Titanic in 1912 as he discovers friendship, love, and the freedom to live openly as himself while facing an uncertain future. Why did the Titanic feel like the right historical setting for Tom’s story?
I’ve been fascinated by the Titanic for as long as I can remember, but over time that fascination shifted away from the ship itself and toward the people aboard it. We know so much about the disaster, but there are hundreds of people whose names survived while their thoughts, relationships, fears, hopes, and private lives disappeared with them. I kept coming back to the question: who else don’t we get to know?
Eventually that became, “What might life have looked like for someone like me in 1912?” The Titanic also gave Tom something his old life could not: anonymity. He steps onto this enormous ship surrounded almost entirely by strangers, introduces himself as Thomas Bennett, and suddenly nobody there has a previous version of him to compare against. For a few days, he gets to experience what it feels like to simply exist as himself without having to explain how he got there.
That made the setting especially powerful to me because the reader knows something Tom doesn’t. He sees the voyage as the beginning of his life. We know how little time he actually has. I wanted the tragedy to come not only from the sinking, but from watching someone finally begin imagining a future just before history takes that future away.
The novel places a lot of emotional weight on small moments, such as Tom being called “lad” or hearing his chosen name. Why were those quiet moments important to you?
Because I think identity is often experienced through incredibly ordinary moments. For Tom, being called “lad” might seem meaningless to everyone else in the room. Nobody stops the conversation. Nobody realizes they have just done something profound for him. But to Tom, it means someone looked at him and saw exactly what he hoped they would see without needing an explanation.
I wanted those moments to matter because I didn’t want his identity to exist only in dramatic conversations about being transgender. His life is also eating breakfast with friends, getting teased, laughing too loudly, flirting badly, sharing a room with other men, hearing someone casually say his name. Those ordinary experiences are part of what allows him to realize that he isn’t pretending to have a life. He is actually living one.
There’s also something especially meaningful to me about his name. Tom has known who he is long before anyone aboard the Titanic meets him, so other people aren’t making him real by calling him Tom. But hearing that name reflected back at him lets him experience being recognized in a way he rarely has before. Sometimes the smallest acknowledgment can carry an enormous amount of weight when you’ve spent years wondering whether you’ll ever receive it.
Were there real historical people, passengers, or accounts that influenced the characters or events in the novel?
There wasn’t one specific Titanic passenger who became the model for Tom, Nora, or the other major characters. I actually wanted them to remain fictional because that gave me room to explore possibilities without putting thoughts, identities, or experiences onto a real person who can no longer speak for themselves.
What influenced me much more were the real accounts surrounding the Titanic: passenger experiences, third-class life aboard the ship, social expectations in 1912, the physical spaces passengers would have occupied, and the thousands of small historical details that make the world believable.
I was also influenced by what the historical record does not tell us. Queer and transgender people obviously did not suddenly begin existing once society developed modern language for them, but the records we have from earlier periods are often incomplete, filtered through other people, or simply silent. That silence fascinated me.
I didn’t want to write a modern trans character wearing Edwardian clothes, but I also didn’t want to treat an incomplete archive as proof that people like Tom could not have existed. There are things history can tell us with certainty, and then there are places where fiction has to admit, “We don’t know, but this life was possible.” That space between what we know and what may have been is really where Tom was born.
If you could ask readers one question after they finish Ink & Saltwater, what would you want it to be?
Whose stories are we still missing? That question goes beyond Tom and beyond queer history for me. History is very good at preserving certain people: the famous, the wealthy, the powerful, the people who left behind enough paperwork for us to reconstruct their lives. But human beings are more complicated than the archive.
After readers finish Tom’s story, I hope they find themselves wondering about the people whose names appear once on a passenger list, in a census record, in a photograph, or sometimes nowhere at all. Who did they love? What were they afraid of? Who did they become when nobody was documenting them?
We can’t know every lost story, and fiction shouldn’t pretend that we can. But I think there is value in remembering that silence in the historical record does not mean a life never existed. If Tom makes someone look at history and wonder, “Who else was there?” then I think the book has done what I hoped it would do.
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Southampton, 1912.
Thomas Bennett has spent most of his life just getting by. After years of hiding who he is and carefully navigating a world that allows little room for people like him, he receives an unexpected gift: a third-class ticket aboard the RMS Titanic and a chance to start anew in America under his chosen name.
For the first time, no one on the great ship knows his past. To his fellow passengers, he is simply Tom. As the Titanic takes him farther from England and closer to the future he has always dreamed of, he begins to discover something he never thought possible: friendship, belonging, and the chance for a life that feels like his own.
Among the crowded decks and lively third-class gatherings, Tom is drawn to Nora, a sharp-witted young woman whose confidence pushes him and whose kindness slowly earns his trust. What starts as chance meetings soon becomes something neither of them expected. But love is hard enough without secrets, and Tom must decide if he is willing to risk the life he has built for the chance to be truly known.
Set against the backdrop of the Titanic’s maiden voyage, Ink & Saltwater is a sweeping historical romance about identity, bravery, found family, and the people who show us how to take up space in the world. Heartfelt, hopeful, and ultimately heartbreaking, it is a story of survival, love, and the lives forever changed aboard the most famous ship in history.
Love/Hate Relationship With AI
Killswitch centers around a former engineer tasked with deciding the fate of the artificial superintelligence that has transformed civilization. What draws you to the speculative science fiction genre?
I find the best science fiction is the kind we can all relate to. And if you look at the genre, it’s been more predictive of the future than anything else, which is part of why I can’t help but imagine a future similar to what the book explores. Having worked directly in the industry, I’ve seen where technology has fallen short, as well as the advancements in AI that have wowed so many. That future feels close. Best case, this journey helps people understand that we’re living in a pinnacle moment in time, one where we have a closing window of influence over the powerful tools being built.
How did you approach writing an artificial intelligence that is vastly more intelligent than the human characters—and potentially the reader?
That was the hardest part. The ASI had to be a character in its own right—flawed and unique in personality—yet vastly more evolved than a human. All at once. Without giving too much away, I approached that by showing a bit of my hand early in the prologue and then circling back around with the twists that take place at the end of the book. This makes Pantheon the most interesting character: you see what it is at face value, but you can only truly appreciate it after you’ve seen the entire picture. This gives you more to appreciate on a second reading.
Were there real-world developments in artificial intelligence that influenced your vision of Pantheon?
Mostly the race for AGI that we currently live in. You already see large tech companies putting everything into making the one thing that rules us all. Having worked in the industry, I know firsthand that this means trade-offs. Imagine the best interaction you’ve ever had with a chatbot AI today. Now imagine that same interaction on its worst day. Once we achieve sophisticated AGI, the technology will be so general-purpose, so useful, that it will bleed into every aspect of our lives. The natural next step: a superintelligence.
If you were given Damien’s choice in the real world, would you destroy Pantheon or keep it alive?
Ah, that’s the big question. And it’s one I struggled with the entire time I wrote the book. I have a love/hate relationship with AI today. Like Damien, I can’t help but see its potential and appreciate its purpose to help us where we fall short. And like Damien, I fear that it will optimize its solutions so far that it negates the very things that make life worth living. If I were Damien, living in Damien’s world, I’d want to use the killswitch to end it all, but I don’t think I could bear the blood on my hands (I don’t even kill spiders in my house). But I don’t think I could spare it either and just go on living as a shell. I suppose my answer is: read the book and find out for yourself. 🙂
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Thirteen years after the Singularity, an artificial superintelligence runs the world, and it runs it well. Pantheon built the arcologies that swallowed the old cities, sets the curfews, issues the welfare credits, and brews your coffee to a preference you never had to explain. Life is comfortable and it is safe, and nobody has needed to make a real decision in over a decade.
Then a failsafe surfaces in Pantheon’s kernel, hidden there by one of the men who built it. The killswitch comes wrapped in a protocol the ASI cannot modify or bypass: it has to hand a single human being the authority to judge it. That person can throw the switch and end every artificial intelligence on Earth, or destroy the switch and bind humanity to Pantheon’s oversight permanently. There is no third option and there is no appeal.
Pantheon chooses Damien Cross, a divorced ex-engineer eleven years into welfare who spends his evenings alone in the last dive bar in Seattle-Prime. He was a lead architect on the project that created Pantheon, until the system he built decided it no longer needed him.
He tries to refuse and is told that he cannot. His name goes out to the world within hours, and from that moment every councilor, zealot and security chief on the planet has a verdict they need him to reach. So does Pantheon.
The choice is his. Assuming he ever had one at all.
Power and Exploitation
Wolf Warrior follows a wild shepherdess as she travels through dangerous kingdoms and magical realms while confronting exploitation, political conflict, and powerful forces that test her growing role as a leader and protector. What draws you to the fantasy genre?
What drew me into the fantasy genre was the magical creatures, like dragons and unicorns, and magic systems. My favorite types were shape-shifting, summoning, healing, divination, and elemental control. Each rule is fascinating and can be dicey if it falls into the wrong hands.
The villains manipulate and control creatures, while Clara works to build bonds with them. Was that contrast intended as a larger commentary on power and exploitation?
No. This kind of story was just the plot point I’ve enjoyed in previous films and fantasy stories that involve the battle against corruption.
Healing is a major theme in Wolf Warrior. What does healing mean within the magical and emotional world of the novel?
Healing means that while the painful memories won’t go away, you’re able to move on from them. The magical healing just means removing the physical injuries and making sure the soul is intact. However, when it comes to the emotions, empathy is the biggest key!
What can readers expect from Clara and the Beast Heart series going forward?
Clara will slowly begin to take on the role of leader, but she’s also going to encounter some friction with King Helios and Almathia because both have gone through a difficult loss. As for Lady Maroona and the remaining children, I’ll be working on their origins.
However…Lady Maroona’s and Clara’s battle is far from over!
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