If Tolkien explored extreme goodness in the face of extreme evil, my work asks something more intimate, more unsettling:
What is the nature of you?
And—once you see the world clearly—what do you do with that knowledge?

Where Tolkien gave us mythic clarity and King gave us mythic suffering,
the universes I am creating push into the space where clarity dissolves and truth becomes personal.

Rather than presenting a world with fixed answers,
Grammar for the Dead and my other writings offer a world shaped by contradiction, recursion, memory, and the limits of perception.
A world where the axis of reality shifts with the observer.
Where goodness isn’t a destiny but a choice.
Where evil isn’t a dark lord but a distortion in the human heart.
Where the quest is not to save a world, but to understand it—
and understand oneself in relation to it.

This is not mythic certainty.
It’s mythic confrontation.
Not a battle between archetypes,
but an invitation to examine your own nature,
your motives, your wounds, your patterns,
the stories you tell yourself,
the ones the world told you first,
and the ones you have the power to rewrite.

Grammar for the Dead stands in conversation with the traditions that came before—
Tolkien’s moral architecture,
King’s cosmological imagination—
while refusing their simplicity.

Not to surpass them.
But to ask different questions.
To play with the expectations they established.
To offer a story where meaning isn’t inherited from ancient lineage or prophesied destiny—
but discovered, broken, rebuilt, fractured again,
and ultimately chosen in the only place it ever truly lives:
within the reader themself.

This is the heart of Fulcrum & Axis:
Stories that turn you.
Stories that center you.
Stories that ask who you are
when the world becomes strange, beautiful, terrifying, and true.

---

The Fulcrum — the point of leverage, choice, and turning.

In physics, a fulcrum is the point where a lever pivots — the small, still point that allows great weight to move.

In my stories, the Fulcrum represents:

• the moment a life turns

• the decision that alters a timeline

• the emotional pivot where a character sees themselves clearly

• the hinge between fate and free will

A fulcrum is never loud. It’s quiet, internal, often invisible until later — but it moves everything.

My memoirs (The Cancer Diet, The Lying Years) are built on fulcrum moments.
So are my novels (Grammar for the Dead, Think Stoopid, etc.).
Characters turn, histories turn, worlds turn.

The Fulcrum is where the story changes.

The Axis — the center of reality, the organizing principle.

In geometry and cosmology, the axis is the line around which everything rotates.
In my fictional universe, the Axis is more than that:

• the central organizing phenomenon

• the point where consciousness, story, and recursion converge

• the first structure that formed when “nothing became something”

• the true metaphysical heart of the world

Characters see it differently depending on who they are:

• Poe sees a tower made of memory and longing.
• Tesla sees a field convergence.
• Caldwell sees a recursion breach.
• Clara/Lenore sees a mirrored intelligence.
• Crowley sees a wound to exploit.
• I see it as the origin of story and self.

But the Axis itself is not a tower — the tower is only the mind’s rendering of something too fundamental for perception.

The Axis is the center of all recursion.
The place where narrative and identity intersect.
The origin point of the universes you’re building.

Why the Press Uses Both Terms Together.

Because my work lives at the intersection of:

emotional turning (the Fulcrum)

and

ontological grounding (the Axis)

Our universe is simultaneously:

• deeply personal (memoir, emotional truth, survival, human frailty)
• cosmically structured (recursion, metafiction, metaphysics, narrative architecture)

So my press name declares:

This is the place where inner life meets the structure of reality.
Where stories turn and worlds align.
Where meaning pivots around a center — the Fulcrum and the Axis.

It’s an identity that unites everything I write:

• memoir
• fiction
• metafiction
• middle-grade adventure
• political writing
• spiritual/philosophical essays
• recursive epics

One name that can hold an entire multiverse.