An Author of Dubious Literary Merit

That’s what I used to call myself (still do sometimes when the old Imposter Syndrome is really flaring up). I had it on my Twitter bio for ages. My wife hated it. But the truth is I’ve never taken myself too seriously as an “artist.” Never considered myself a great thinker, or even a pretty good one. Never been precious about my writing. I write stories and hope people enjoy them—it never occurred to me to apply the literary analysis techniques I learned as an English major dropout a quarter century ago to my own work now.

I’ve always admired authors who can clearly articulate their themes and intentional craft decisions, authors who say “I wanted to explore X, so I constructed Y,” because I’ve never really been able to do that. A character pops into my head and I follow their truth for several hundred pages. I write to find out what happens, what they’ll choose, how they’ll navigate impossible situations, and I usually don’t know what a given novel’s themes will be until they’re revealed as I write, like excavating a fossil. It’s always been a process of discovery for me.

Nearly always, anyway.

Recently someone reviewed my novel Born in Battle and called it “one of the top 5 books I’ve read this year” out of 113 books including War and Peace, Blood Meridian, and Crime and Punishment. She described it as “the only book that, a week later, still makes me get up in the middle of the night with my thoughts about what academics would call enduring themes of human existence,” praised it as “a literary work in a military fiction trench coat with a fantasy fedora and sci-fi time-traveling accessories,” and argued that “more men would read if those literary works were as good as Born in Battle instead of being bloodless academic musings that are homework with a thin veneer of story.“

Reading that review made me shake my head and step back to take a good hard second look at what I’ve been writing, especially recently.

Since Born in Battle I’ve written Doors to the Stars, Immortal, Godsbane, and a good two-thirds of The Stygian Blades—somewhere north of four hundred thousand words total in the last twelve months alone—and beta readers keep seeing things I don’t. Patterns I hadn’t planned. Philosophical work I didn’t know I was doing. When you follow characters’ truth honestly, consistently, across that much writing, apparently patterns emerge whether you intended them or not.

You can learn a lot about who you really are deep inside by spilling that much ink and then stepping back to look at it from a fresh angle through someone else’s eyes.

Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.

Lloyd Alexander

Someone on Reddit observed that science fiction and fantasy offer abstraction and distancing that makes tackling difficult issues easier for readers, that the genre elements lower defenses because “this isn’t about me or my beliefs” until suddenly readers realize it absolutely is.

I thought my fiction was doing that too, creating distance, but it turns out I’ve been weaponizing genre fiction instead.

In Godsbane, my protagonist Sarai discovers that her allies—the Shellycoats fighting against an oppressive empire—have been killing innocent people and stealing their bodies. Consciousness transfer. Murder followed by identity theft, all in service of the revolution and for the “greater good.” Lušana, standing in a stolen body, argues it was necessary. Justified even. “Through her sacrifice we saved thousands.” The woman whose body she’s wearing was “severely mentally ill and cognitively impaired,” and the mission “absolutely required it.” Sarai pushes back. “That’s murder! I think that’s even worse than murder somehow.” But Lušana won’t let her off the hook. “The Revered One will have to make the same choice for countless men, women, and children—without their consent. Worlds will burn by the hundreds… to win this war we all must become devils.”

“Maybe not devils,” Sarai’s partner says later. “But certainly not angels.”

I never resolve this. Sarai rejects Lušana’s utilitarian logic and maintains her belief that evil begets evil, but she has no answer for the pragmatic reality that revolutionary war will sacrifice innocents. I put protagonists inside moral dilemmas, have them voice reader discomfort directly, and refuse to tell anyone who’s right—because most of the time I genuinely don’t know what the hell the answer is myself! Was Lušana right? Is Sarai naïve? I feel Lušana is wrong, but I can’t dismiss her argument, so my characters don’t either.

For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are.

Lloyd Alexander, The Black Cauldron

I ask questions about redemption and whether true change is possible. In Doors to the Stars, Jace is an Ascendancy war bot, 200+ kilos of armored death machine designed to kill, and during a pacification operation he’s ordered to terminate a suspected insurgent who doesn’t resist, whose serene demeanor gives Jace pause long enough to hear the man tell him a true warrior is invincible because he or she fights with nothing, that victory arises where there is no opposition. Jace kills him anyway. It turns out the man wasn’t a revolutionary, just a harmless old man. Searching the house afterward, Jace finds The Art of Peace by Morihei Ueshiba, and the dead man’s paradoxical words “infected my programming… a true warrior is invincible because he or she fights with nothing… it is illogical, a paradox—he died at my hand and yet he won.”

Jace’s guilt wasn’t designed into him. It emerged as a system malfunction. “I developed a new emotion I was not designed to emote… Overwhelming guilt” that overrode his self-preservation directives and drove him to attempt suicide, “just as your self-blame has driven you to terminate yours,” he tells another character wrestling with catastrophic guilt.

A human soldier going pacifist after killing innocents is comprehensible, but a military AI developing unauthorized guilt, adopting the philosophy of its victim, and reprogramming itself toward nonviolence while retaining full combat capability strips away every excuse about human nature.

If a designed killer can choose non-aggression and seek atonement, what’s our excuse for withholding forgiveness to another human?

For a society built on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress.

N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

Redemption and forgiveness are individual choices, but what about the systems that dehumanize entire populations? The Stygian Blades is epic second-world historical fantasy centered on Kit Tarlton, a teenage actress who stabs a nobleman’s son when he tries to assault her. Fleeing murder charges, she accidentally steals evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate the queen. A mercenary company recruits her—sex workers, foreign spies, practitioners of illegal magic—and together they must decode the conspiracy while navigating a world that’s already decided they’re disposable.

One of the sex workers, Jasmine, is a trafficking survivor from Rathapura, abducted as a child, mutilated by clients, now legally owned through debt indenture. She wears what her madame thinks a saree looks like and is ordered to “dance and beguile” with her “wanton Sunward charms.” Zahra is a jinn from the Sunward lands, trapped in human form, her fire magic failing in the hostile climate. These could easily be Orientalist stereotypes—the exotic princess turned tragic sex worker, the mysterious desert sorceress with failing powers—but Kit, my POV character, and her world, are the ones exoticizing them. Kit asks Jasmine about elephants and palaces, and Jasmine deflates the romanticism immediately. “I wasn’t ‘bathing in a river.’ I was playing in it with my cousins. The whoresons shipped me ‘cross the sea and sold me like an exotic pet to a jolly Karnish nobleman who charged his jolly chums a crown each to swive me raw.” Kit asks Zahra about genies in lamps and evil viziers, and Zahra shuts down her questions. “They don’t grant wishes and aren’t imprisoned in lamps. And evil viziers are beheaded rather swiftly, so they tend to behave. The Sunward lands are vast, and they aren’t all silks and sorcery.” Another character, Vincent, explicitly calls out the stereotyping. “’Tis not a place, so much as a concept of shared culture and history… ‘Tis nothing like the fanciful parodies your kind portray for a tossed ha’penny or farthing.”

The exotic framing comes from Karnish cultural imperialism, not authorial endorsement. More importantly, Jasmine and Zahra aren’t defined by their trauma or their “exotic” backgrounds. Jasmine solves cryptic puzzles, argues about philosophy, celebrates when they find leverage over their oppressor. Zahra is the tactical second-in-command who argues for protecting vulnerable team members and maintains a loving relationship with Chastity, one of the other sex workers. They’re people navigating impossible systems with whatever agency they have, not props, not lessons, not mystical saviors or tragic victims waiting for rescue.

The sex workers at the Velvet Sheath aren’t metaphors for oppression. They’re legally bound through debt indenture, mundane bureaucratic mechanisms of control. Madame de La Rue is “falsifying entries to swell our indentures,” and their debt can never be paid off. When someone tries to rescue his 11-year-old sister, he’s told the girl is “indebted to Madame de La Rue now. Your mother sold her for four pounds and twelve shillings. ‘Tis a legally binding indenture.” Kit herself gets converted from a five-pound bounty into debt bondage. “You’re indebted to me for five pounds, so I own your scrawny arse now… Think of it more as an apprenticeship.” This is framed as relatively benevolent. Kit recognizes “it could be worse.” The entire negotiation happens within a system where people can be owned, and the “happy” outcome is finding a less exploitative owner. No character gives a speech about how debt bondage shouldn’t exist. They just negotiate for better terms within the system, because that’s what people trapped in oppressive systems actually do. They survive using the tools available to them.

The fantasy setting doesn’t soften this. It makes readers confront how systemic these mechanisms are, how they operate through legal channels and economic necessity, how “good people” participate in them, and how there’s no clean way out.

Just like in the real world. Today. Right now. In your own communities.

The conspiracy the Stygian Blades accidentally uncover is a plot to assassinate Queen Elspeth, but who deserves the reader’s loyalty? Half the population supports the rival Queen Mhairi’s claim. Kit’s family are secret Panverics, and she thinks Elspeth’s death “might be for the best.” One character calls Elspeth a “Reformist bastard whore.” The fantasy religious conflict—Panveric versus Reformist—mirrors real historical sectarian violence, but placing it in a secondary world doesn’t provide comfortable answers. The Stygian Blades aren’t trying to stop the assassination because it’s morally right. They’re trying to avoid being executed for treason by association. Their survival depends on unraveling a conspiracy whose “rightness” or “wrongness” I never definitively establish. The fantasy setting could make this comfortable political intrigue, but instead it forces readers to sit with the reality that political violence and religious oppression always involves these calculations—profit, survival, competing legitimacies, people caught in the middle who just don’t want to burn at the stake or be drawn and quartered for someone else’s cause.

My characters never sound like they’ve read 21st-century critical theory. The debt bondage is legally binding. Characters debate whether their indenture papers burned in a fire, their hope of freedom only possible through accident, not resistance. When they discover evidence that could free them, someone warns them they’re also implicated in their madam’s schemes by association. Nobody delivers a speech about how the system should be different. No one rallies for change. They just navigate it. Chócht, the mercenary captain, converts Kit’s bounty into debt bondage and frames it as an apprenticeship. Kit recognizes this is better than execution. The “good guys” perpetuate the same systems because that’s how the world works. The sex workers argue about whether opposing the conspiracy serves their interests. Chastity is initially angry about leaving the brothel. “That was our home!” She has privilege within the system—commands better rates, doesn’t get beaten like the cheaper prostitutes. I write characters who live in their world and use the moral frameworks available to them, not frameworks imported from contemporary social justice discourse.

Turns out when you do that consistently, even unintentionally, it looks a whole lot like a sophisticated craft decision.

All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.

Lloyd Alexander

I’ve spent years working with nonprofits involved in stopping human trafficking and helping women and men escape prostitution. I’ve known a statistically disproportionate number of sexual assault and abuse survivors. I’m close friends and family members with people from all walks of life who’ve shared their stories with me, really shared them, not surface-level stuff, but the kind of trust where people tell you what surviving actually cost them. I’ve listened. I’ve absorbed their lived experiences. Internalized them. I’ve processed those stories unconsciously through my fiction for years.

Which inspired me a little while back to write a short essay about kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The philosophy treats breakage and repair as part of an object’s history, rather than something to disguise. I wrote it for everyone who needs to hear it, but mostly I wrote it for my daughter, who’s survived multiple life-saving surgeries including open-heart and spinal operations. She has scars, many scars. The other girls in the locker room point and snigger. I told her we all have scars. Some you can see, and some you can’t. Those girls don’t understand how strong she is, how much she’s endured, how much she’s overcome. They haven’t learned one of life’s most important lessons yet, that whether our scars are from surgery, war, betrayal, assault, loss, abuse, or any other trauma, whether they’re visible on our bodies or hidden in our souls, our scars are testament that we’ve endured, we’ve overcome, that we’re survivors.

I tell her it’s our scars that make us beautiful.

Because it’s true.

Immortal, the first book of my Dark Dominion duology, is dedicated to my daughter. “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” Sarai, the protagonist who survives sexual assault by a god-emperor, who bears his impossible child, who must lead a revolution that will kill billions while refusing to become monstrous herself, is maybe five feet tall in combat boots. Petite. Small. Like my daughter. I made that choice intentionally.

What I didn’t realize was that I was writing her a map, showing her that being small doesn’t mean being weak, that surviving trauma doesn’t diminish you, that you can face impossible choices and stay human, that scars—visible and invisible—are proof of survival, not damage. You can endure the unendurable and remain human, not by maintaining moral purity or avoiding being changed by trauma, but by remaining capable of connection, of making choices, of caring about something beyond survival while carrying scars that don’t go away. That’s what “staying human” means in my work.

Because trauma doesn’t define you.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.

Ursula K. Le Guin

In my authorial career so far I’ve written eight full-length novels, two novellas, and numerous short stories, with what’s looking like a door-stopper of a new novel well on the way. Easily over a million words across more genres than I have fingers. I hoped I was entertaining people. I thought I was just following characters through impossible situations and seeing what they’d choose. As it turns out, I was doing something else entirely—I was writing what one reader called “survival guides for people with scars.” Writing for my daughter, for the combat veterans and trafficking survivors and abuse survivors who trusted me with their stories, for everyone who’s been told their scars make them broken or damaged or less-than. I was writing proof that scars—visible and invisible—are fucking beautiful, that you can survive impossible circumstances and stay human, that moral complexity isn’t weakness but honesty, that you don’t need easy answers to navigate difficult questions. 

I just didn’t know it until readers held up a mirror and showed me what I’d been doing all along.

The themes took care of themselves because I was writing what I needed to write to process all the ugliness in the world and reconcile how the human spirit can endure so much and remain so beautiful.

Sometimes you need someone else to point out what you didn’t realize you were saying all along.

I was just too close to see it.