Origin story. In 2020, just after the Covid lockdowns started and I started working from home, I took a mid-afternoon walk around my backyard while waiting for some code to finish running. I started thinking about how while religion is a frequent source of conflict and meaning, it rarely plays that role in science fiction and fantasy. I realized how infrequently true religious conflict ends up in the plot. People either follow the same Gods or they deny Them. In modern fantasy, especially, the Good Guys tend to know the Gods are simply a means of control for some evil Church, but they rarely believe in an alternate God.

The other element I thought was missing was the idea of belief. In most fantasy, if there are Gods, They tend to show up. When the Gods show up, the debate about whether the Gods exist gets stale. So I got to thinking about what a religious war would look like in a sci-fantasy world idea I had if I made religion work something like in our world. The truth of the Gods is unknown, people disagree about it, and chosen faiths deeply matter to the characters. Initially, because I program, I thought maybe I would write a computer role-playing game. I wrote a basic engine, game rules, and a few levels, but I realized I was having more fun writing the story than the game so I decided to ditch the pretense and just write a novel with the world I'd started building (which had gotten seriously out of hand).

The world has four primary religious viewpoints. Each has aspects of the truth. None has a monopoly on it. I have no idea what inspired that.

Projects and Progress. All of these projects are set in the same world.

• Main Series
• Book 1 (working title: The Magic Without A Master). First draft complete. Current status: 30% done with first revision.
• A novella. Drafted and revised. Current status: being edited. I am going to push this out soon, once it has been edited and I get through looking at the edits. I think you will like reading it. It's completely standalone. A corporate espionage novel set in a science fiction (sci-fantasy) world. It is also about the Gods. I really liked writing in the novella format, so I will write more like this.

Reviews. Below, I link to some reviews I've written. I indicate whether the review is positive, mixed, or critical in tone. Note that it's not a rating of the work as a whole. It just indicates the tone of the review.

• Dreams of Fire. Positive.
• Baldur's Gate 3. Critical.
• John Gwynne: Hunger of the Gods. Positive.
• MJ Kuhn: Among Thieves. Positive.

About me. In real life, I am a statistics person, a data scientist, and a tech bro. I'm a Southern Californian by birth, but I live in the Midwest now with a pretty blonde, chipmunks (all are named "Chunks"), skunks ("Stinky"), and squirrels (squirrels don't have names, of course).