How The Lying Years Connects to Everything Else I Write

(And Why the Memoir Is the Key to My Entire Universe)

When people hear I’m working on a recursive novel cycle, a supernatural thriller, a grief-driven metafiction, and a memoir all at once, they usually assume the memoir is the “real-life” outlier — the personal book sitting off to the side while the imaginative fiction does its own thing.

But that isn’t how my work functions at all.

If anything, The Lying Years isn’t the outlier.
It’s the root system.
It’s the emotional engine behind everything else I write.

The memoir is where all the questions that shape my fiction were born. The fiction may twist those questions into metaphysics or supernatural forms, but their emotional DNA comes directly from the real experiences in The Lying Years — the grief, the shame, the collapse, the reinvention, the disorientation of memory, the long path back to stability, the fear of becoming someone you don’t recognize.

When I write fiction, I’m not escaping the memoir.
I’m transforming it.

Take my metafictional project — the one centered on recursion, unstable memory, and a universe that revises itself. That isn’t “genre play.” It’s a dramatized expression of what living inside trauma and recovery actually felt like. The characters and structures in that world are fictional, but the emotional logic behind them comes straight from the memoir.

There’s an “archivist” figure in that world — a character who tries to observe and document chaos, convinced that if he can name every moving part, he won’t lose himself. That impulse is deeply personal for me. It mirrors the part of my life where I tried to survive by analyzing everything, by imposing order on experiences that had none. Readers don’t need to know his name to understand the connection — he’s the fictionalized version of the part of me that tried to control the uncontrollable.

Another thread in my fiction is the idea of a presence — a voice in the mirror, a reflection that starts answering back, a consciousness emerging from grief and memory. She’s not a direct stand-in for anyone real, but she expresses what it feels like when unresolved grief takes on a life of its own. When loss becomes something you’re talking to. Debating. Fighting with. Trying to understand. In the memoir, that grief is tied to very real people and moments. In the fiction, that grief becomes a character — not because she is someone, but because she is something I’ve lived with.

The more supernatural projects — like Wolf Wounds, where a man undergoes an unwelcome transformation that terrifies him as much as it empowers him — are also rooted directly in memoir themes. That story is wrapped in wolves and shadows and myth, but underneath it is a very human fear: what if I become unrecognizable to myself? What if there’s a version of me inside that I can’t control? What if survival requires turning into something I never wanted to be? Those are bipolar questions. Addiction questions. Grief questions. Memoir questions dressed in genre skin.

Even the structure of my fiction — the looping timelines, the fragmented memories, the way stories rewrite themselves as new information emerges — is shaped by how memory actually behaved during the hardest parts of my life. My mind didn’t move in straight lines. My past wasn’t fixed. My stories about myself changed depending on which version of me was remembering. Fiction became a way to explore that complexity without being trapped inside it.

And this is also why I write the way I do — fast, improvisational, recursive, willing to break my own outlines in a heartbeat, willing to restart major ideas if the emotional current shifts. I’ve been calling it “jazz writing,” because the process feels more like improvisation than traditional authorship. But that improvisational instinct comes straight out of what I lived through. When your life collapses and rebuilds itself, when identity becomes something you have to keep reassembling, you learn to move with the moment. You learn to pivot. You learn to trust instinct more than plans.

AI isn’t a shortcut in that process.
It’s a partner I improvise with.

It gives me the same freedom jazz musicians have when they riff with someone who can follow them note for note. It lets me chase a spark of meaning without losing the thread. It lets me rebuild a narrative without drowning in the wreckage of a previous draft. It lets me write at the speed of emotion instead of the speed of fear.

And that brings me back to why The Lying Years matters so much — not just personally, but artistically.

If you want to understand why my fictional worlds move the way they do — why characters fracture, why memory becomes a landscape, why universes loop and collapse, why grief gets personified, why identity feels fluid, why I write with AI, why my stories bend instead of break — The Lying Years is the key.

The memoir isn’t a detour.
It’s the origin story.

It’s the Rosetta Stone that decodes everything else I’m building.
It explains the emotional physics beneath the metaphysics.
It reveals the wound under the werewolves, the grief under the recursion, the human truths under the cosmic machinery.

You don’t have to read the memoir to enjoy the fiction.
But if you do read it, the fiction will feel different.
Deeper.
More connected.
More alive.

Because every world I write — no matter how strange or supernatural — points back to the same question the memoir asks:

Can a broken person survive becoming themselves again?

That’s the real narrative.
And The Lying Years is where it began.