Ryan Williamson Commentary, Politics

Setting the Record Straight: The Fandom Pulse Hit Piece

Today, hours after calling out coordinated harassment from WarGate Books community members, Fandom Pulse published a hit piece framing my political essays as “Trump Derangement” and my platform migration to Bluesky as defeat. It’s not journalism—it’s retaliation from Jon Del Arroz, a documented serial harasser with DV allegations, platform bans, and a pattern of targeting critics because I’m guilty of being a Traitor to the Tribe. The irony? Del Arroz champions Nick Cole, whose entire career is built on claiming victimhood from being cancelled… while WarGate cancelled me for criticizing extremist dehumanizing rhetoric. Let me correct the record with receipts, timestamps, and publicly verifiable facts.

Ryan Williamson Dark Dominion

Mešvi 2.3 Conlang Update

The Mešvi language has expanded with Version 2.3, adding 157 new words and establishing a distinction between sacred and everyday speech. It now features 423 vocabulary entries and 53 phrases, enhancing theological terminology and cultural expressions. These developments support the upcoming serialization of the book "Immortal," reflecting deep cultural concepts.

Ryan Williamson On Writing

Empathy is Everything in Storytelling

Can AI ever write a truly masterful story? I asked Claude—and even the AI admitted its own limitations. “Pattern matching can produce competent genre fiction,” Claude told me. “It cannot produce the purple thread line, because that line doesn’t come from craft—it comes from consciousness shaped by experience.” That moment in my manuscript—where Wulan sees bruise-colored thread and thinks of her dead brother—emerged from empathy, not algorithms. From understanding how grief ambushes you through concrete details. AI can recognize what makes prose emotionally resonant. But creating that resonance? That requires something no training data can provide: a consciousness that’s actually lived. It requires empathy.

Ryan Williamson Commentary, On Writing

I Fed Two AIs Nearly 100K Words of My Story and They Couldn’t Write the Next Scene

Everyone’s worried AI will replace authors. So I decided to test it. I fed Claude Sonnet 4.5 nearly 100,000 words of my YA space opera—the complete novel, 5,000 words of a prequel I’d already written, character guides, alien speech patterns, explicit instructions about my protagonist’s psychology. Then I asked it to write the next scene. The result? Competent genre prose that lost my protagonist’s voice entirely. It could analyze what made her voice work, explain it back to me perfectly, then defaulted to templates anyway when asked to generate prose. Grok 4.1 failed the same experiment. This isn’t about whether AI will improve. It’s about understanding what AI fundamentally can’t do—and what that means for writers.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ryan Williamson Commentary

The Real Threat to Indie Authors Isn’t AI

Any author who’s actually seen what AI models produce when attempting to write fiction and is still worried about being replaced is worrying about the wrong threat. (Or they’re a spectacularly mediocre author, but I digress…) And before you say “market saturation,” hold that thought. Because it’s moot. The market is already saturated by content … Continue reading The Real Threat to Indie Authors Isn’t AI

Ryan Williamson On Writing

The Myth of the Prolific Indie Author

Every week, someone on Twitter defends the ultra-prolific indie author pumping out ten novels a year. They invoke “pulp speed” and cite million-word-per-year math. They insist it’s possible if you just work hard enough. They’re selling you productivity courses. Here’s the problem: they’re confusing typing with publishing. I write fast. I’ve banged out 134,000-word first drafts in six weeks. My peak year was 500,000+ words. And I still can’t hit seven published novels annually. Not even close. The bottleneck isn’t typing speed. It’s revision, editing, proofreading—everything that turns a first draft into a finished book. When you account for that work, the math collapses. Which means when someone consistently publishes 7+ novels per year, I’m calling it: they’re using ghostwriters.

Ryan Williamson Dark Dominion

Mešvi 2.2 Conlang Update Notes

Mešvi 2.2 formalizes three mechanics revealed by stress-testing: (1) Geminates—when compounding creates identical consonants at morpheme boundaries, both are retained and pronounced as lengthened consonants (bîn + nêf → bînnêf, "BEEN-nayf"); (2) Four-morpheme limit—standalone compounds max out at four lexical roots (class markers don't count), beyond which possessive phrases are used; (3) Expanded class-shifting—âšemân (sky) and darêkh (path) now shift between practical Mother class and cosmic/prophetic Crone class based on register. The update also adds vocabulary for space navigation (vacuum, star systems, nullspace), formalizes theological distinctions (qi/Darêkhâkh/šeib'qi), introduces five-tier religious law gradations, and documents poetic compounding methodology that uses source etymology to find culturally resonant metaphors. No grammar changes—just clearer rules and richer vocabulary for the Dark Dominion setting.

Ryan Williamson Dark Dominion

Introducing Mešvi 2.1: Language as Culture in Dark Dominion

The first iteration of Mešvi was Persian with centuries of simulated linguistic drift. But as I developed the Mešvi people—their matriarchal society, prophetic traditions, and goddess worship—I realized the language needed to be rebuilt from scratch. A language shapes and reflects the culture that speaks it. Mešvi 2.1 is what happens when you ask: what would a language look like if it were designed by a nomadic, matriarchal, and prophetic culture that sees the world through cycles of life and divine knowledge? The answer is a language with no pronouns, where names change with life stages, where the verb system encodes how you know what you know, and where the very act of possession is constructed differently than in English. Mešvi doesn’t just describe the world—it reveals how the Mešvi people understand reality itself.

Ryan Williamson Doors to the Stars, Tutorials

Designing a Conlang Backwards

I invented an alien accent by ear, then had to reverse-engineer the grammar that would naturally produce it. When Vylaraian pickpocket Lari said “I’s tryin’ t’ be you friend,” I wasn’t thinking about linguistics—just making her sound right. But months later, writing a reader magnet, I needed actual Vylaraian words. I couldn’t just make up random phonemes. The accent was data. Every “mistake” was evidence. “You bag” instead of “your bag” revealed possessive suffixes, not separate pronouns. “I is” pointed to unconjugated verbs and VSO word order. Consistent “th” to “d” shifts showed missing phonemes. The patterns weren’t random—they described interference from a complete linguistic system. Traditional conlangs work top-down: grammar first, then dialogue. I went bottom-up: dialogue that sounded authentic, then discovered the grammar hiding inside it. The accent became a skeleton key, unlocking an entire alien language.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ryan Williamson Dark Dominion

Love in the Wasteland: Mikhael and the Art of Gentle Defiance

Mikhael was engineered to be the Dominion’s perfect weapon—a super-soldier who can teleport through combat and heal from anything. When they sent him to kill a rogue operative, he made a different choice: he saved her instead. The woman is Sarai, pregnant with the god-emperor’s child and marked for termination. She’s also the girl Mikhael grew up with and never stopped loving—though she doesn’t remember him. A blaster bolt destroyed those memories along with any chance of the future they might have had. Now he’s a traitor with a termination order, protecting a woman who doesn’t remember his name and a child who isn’t his. He doesn’t care about prophecy or revolution. He just wants one more morning with her. Reading time: 10 minutes.