Deep thoughts and other shenanigans
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 expecting to report on a monster. She found a middle manager instead—a bureaucrat who spoke in clichés, followed orders, and never thought about where the trains were going. Evil wasn’t demonic, she argued. It was banal. Ordinary. Thoughtless. Now, seventy years later, the banality of evil has a retweet button. When Donald Trump accused Haitian refugees of eating pets during a presidential debate, thirty-three bomb threats followed. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, conservative circles erupted in eliminationist rhetoric against half the country. And millions of ordinary people hit “share” without thinking about what they were amplifying or where this pattern historically leads. This is Arendt’s framework applied to America in 2025 in real-time, while we still have a chance to stop where history warns we’re headed. Reading time: 28 minutes.
I used to call myself an “author of dubious literary merit”—half joke, half truth. I write stories to follow characters through impossible situations and see what choices they’ll make and how they’ll live with them (and hopefully entertain readers in the process). I never set out to explore specific themes or craft philosophical arguments. Then a reviewer recently said my novel “Born in Battle” was “one of the top 5 books I’ve read this year” out of over a hundred novels 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.” That made me stop and take a hard look at what I’ve actually been writing over the last few years, and why. Turns out I’ve been in conversation with authors like Lloyd Alexander, Ursula K. Le Guin, and N.K. Jemisin all along.
After writing my essay arguing whether “Game of Thrones” is nihilistic or hard-won humanism, I realized the real debate isn’t about Martin at all—it’s about Tolkien. Reformed apologetics has so thoroughly appropriated “The Lord of the Rings,” flattening its Catholic sacramental theology into moral triumphalism, that even Martin’s sophisticated critiques argue against the appropriation rather than the actual author. Tolkien wrote about grace redeeming failure despite permanent wounds. Martin inherited that same Catholic framework for analyzing tragic dilemmas—situations where both choices are objectively wrong—but stripped out the eucatastrophe. Reformed readers can’t see what either author does because they need moral order to reassert itself. The irony? Martin thinks he’s correcting Tolkien’s naïve triumphalism when Tolkien never wrote that. Both work from Catholic tragic moral theology. One just doesn’t believe in Grace anymore—or so he tells himself.
The critics who call Game of Thrones nihilistic have never been at the lever when the trolley’s barreling toward both tracks. Everyone “knows” honor matters—until honor costs you your head. Everyone condemns oathbreakers—until you’re sworn to both king and realm and your king plans genocide. Everyone thinks they’d never make Daenerys’s mistakes—until they’re holding power with advisors dead, ideals crashing against reality, and no good options left. Martin doesn’t write nihilism. He writes the gap between moral philosophy in the classroom and the trolley problem in real life. Between theoretical principles and the moment you’re actually forced to choose—knowing both tracks lead to blood and neither choice will let you sleep. The people calling that “unrealistic”? They’ve had the luxury of never pulling the lever.
The Annex 