Category: writing
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On Working LESS With AI and Why That Was Always The Plan.
Recently, I outlined more than 80 potential articles and story ideas for the Seen / Unseen Greenville project I’ve been working on. You may have noticed that I haven’t posted much over the last few weeks. You may not have noticed at all. Either way, it’s been intentional. Part of it is that I needed…
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A Note on Pricing
I’m thinking about releasing the ebook edition of The Recursive Man at $2.99 to start. Right now, it’s set to $4.99. Not because I believe the work is worth less—but because this book emerged through an unusual creative process, and I understand that process may raise questions for some readers. What began as an experiment…
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FROM THE ARCHIVE #1 — The Lonely White Walker (2012)
Going through old folders tonight, I found The Lonely White Walker—a Walking Dead fanfic I wrote back in 2012—and I was honestly stunned to realize people had reviewed it. Not just clicked on it… actually read it, followed it chapter to chapter, left thoughtful comments, waited for updates. I had forgotten that entirely. And honestly,…
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Why I’m Releasing My Novel When It’s “Not Ready”
For the last few months, I’ve gone back and forth on whether I should release my upcoming novel, The Recursive Man, in its current form. Not because I don’t believe in the book. I do. Actually, I think it may be one of the most honest things I’ve ever made. But because I know people…
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The Recursive Man: How a Recursive Ghost Story Became a Novel About Grief, Memory, and Staying Alive
There are books that arrive fully formed. And then there are books like The Recursive Man — books that evolve like weather systems, mutate across drafts, absorb years of life, and slowly reveal what they were actually about long after you thought you understood them. This wasn’t supposed to happen the way it did. At…
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Why Are We So Negative These Days?
One thing I’ve been realizing lately is that a lot of negativity starts much smaller than we think. A person encounters something unfamiliar, emotionally uncomfortable, strange, or simply outside their normal frame of reference… and their first reaction is: “I don’t understand this.” But instead of stopping there, that feeling often mutates into:“This is stupid.”“This…
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SEEN / UNSEEN GREENVILLE: What Happens When Multiple Visions of a City Collide at the Same Intersection?
A while back, I became involved in a project called Pleasant Roast — a proposed drive-thru coffee concept planned for a busy Greenville corridor. On the surface, it seemed simple enough: take an underused property, create a practical local business, and build something people would actually use. But the deeper we got into the process,…
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Fulcrum & Axis — Where the Work Stands
One of the strange things about building a long-term creative body of work is realizing that eventually the projects begin speaking to each other. At first, they feel disconnected:a memoir here,a horror screenplay there,a recursive literary experiment in another folder,a civic history project,a middle-grade camp novel,a political labor story,a fragmented notebook full of grief and…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: What South Carolinians Say They Actually Want
There’s a strange thing happening in South Carolina right now. On one side, the state is booming. Cranes everywhere. Subdivisions spreading into old fields and forests. Distribution centers. Data centers. Luxury apartments. “Top Places to Move.” “Fastest Growing.” “Business Friendly.” The official story is momentum. But underneath that polished story, there’s another South Carolina talking.…
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The Recursive Man, AI, and the Fear of Mirrors
Over the last few months, I’ve watched the internet turn the AI conversation into a war between extremes. Either: Either: Most of the conversation skips over the messy middle where real artists and real people actually live. As someone actively writing a novel while openly using AI in the process, I’ve found myself in a…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: The Weird Middle
Many Versions of Kind explores the moral and emotional side of Greenville’s growth and identity. This path asks harder questions about what it actually means for a city to be “good,” not just successful, polished, or profitable. It examines the difference between being nice and being kind, how systems affect belonging, who benefits from growth,…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: The 1946 Ideal Laundry Explosion — The Forgotten Explosion
The Map Beneath the Map is the historical spine of the Seen / Unseen Greenville project. It explores the idea that cities are layered — that modern Greenville was built on top of older systems, older neighborhoods, older conflicts, and older ways of life that still shape the city today, even when we no longer…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: Woodruff Road and Greenville’s Growing System Problem
Future City Greenville is the systems and planning side of Seen / Unseen Greenville. Instead of focusing mainly on history, it explores where Greenville is headed and how growth, infrastructure, development, traffic, housing, and city-county coordination shape daily life. At its core, it asks a simple question: What kind of regional system are we actually…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: What Kind of City Are We Becoming?
Over the past few weeks, this project has honestly felt a little chaotic at times. I’ve produced a flood of material:-history posts,-city planning discussions,-maps,-timelines,-personal memories,-civic frustrations,-philosophical essays,-local observations,-and probably far too many long-form posts for the average Facebook scroll session. At times, I imagine it has looked less like a coherent project and more like…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: The Map Beneath the Map
Welcome to The Map Beneath the Map- a historical branch of Seen / Unseen Greenville exploring the older layers underneath modern Greenville When most people think about Greenville, they think about the version they can immediately see. Falls Park. Main Street. The bridge. The restaurants. The polished downtown that shows up in tourism campaigns and…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: The Truth About Greenville, South Carolina
Greenville, South Carolina sits in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, tucked between Charlotte, Asheville, Atlanta, Charleston, and Columbia — close enough to all of them to feel their influence, but increasingly its own thing entirely. Once known primarily as a textile mill town, Greenville has reinvented itself repeatedly throughout its history: from frontier…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: Reading the Budget Like a Map
How a city reveals itself through money, priorities, and infrastructure. I’ll admit something upfront: I did not sit down and fully read Greenville’s entire proposed FY2027 budget. What actually caught my attention was a Facebook post from the City of Greenville summarizing some of the major priorities: transportation improvements, trails and greenways, affordable housing initiatives,…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: Distinctly American. Distinctly Southern.
(What Does It Even Mean to Be American—or Southern—Right Now?) People usually look to places like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or Washington when they want to explain America to itself. That makes sense. Those cities dominate media, finance, politics, entertainment, and cultural mythology. But honestly, I think cities like Greenville may tell us more…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: A Timeline of the City Beneath the City
What came before—and what never fully left Greenville can feel like a new city. A growing city.A successful city.A city figuring itself out in real time. But that version of Greenville—the one most of us experience day to day—is only the latest layer. What makes Greenville interesting isn’t just what it is now. It’s how…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville- Pleasant Roast: A Case Study
What happens when a city says no—and what replaces it? I still drive past that lot sometimes. Most people probably don’t notice it. It’s just another piece of land sitting beside a road already carrying more traffic than it was designed for. Cars pass it every day without thinking. Another in-between space in a city…
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The Fulcrum and Axis: The Seen and Unseen- A Diatribe on Trying to Figure Out Life, the Universe, and Everything
Today we are going way up our own butts. I just want to establish that immediately so nobody thinks this is about to become a grounded and practical discussion about taxes or lawn care or whatever emotionally healthy people spend their Sundays doing. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about threshold moments in stories. Those…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: What Is This Actually About?
The other day, I asked my mom about the Ideal Laundry explosion. I expected her to look confused. Instead, she looked at me like I was the crazy one. “Of course I’ve heard of that.” For anyone unfamiliar, the Ideal Laundry explosion happened in Greenville in 1946. A propane leak at the Ideal Laundry building…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: The Map of Schools
The Map You Don’t See If you laid a map of Greenville County on the table and marked school performance, it would look one way. If you marked income levels, it would look another. But when you put them together, the two maps start to overlap. Not perfectly. But clearly enough to notice. What We’re…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: The Hidden Origins of Segregation
What It Looked Like Up Close Growing up, I lived in the Augusta Road area near the Cleveland Street YMCA. Just a few blocks away was Nicholtown—what people would have called “the Black side of town.” It wasn’t far. Close enough to walk. Close enough that people moved through both areas every day. But it…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: A City Divided
There are parts of Greenville that feel like they’ve always belonged together. Downtown.The parks.The places people point to when they talk about how far the city has come. And then there are the other parts. The neighborhoods you don’t end up in by accident.The streets that don’t connect the way you expect them to.The invisible…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: When Everything Started Pointing Downtown
This weekend, downtown Greenville is overflowing for Artisphere. And honestly, that is a good thing. Twenty or thirty years ago, the idea that Greenville would host a nationally respected arts festival drawing huge crowds into downtown would have sounded almost absurd to a lot of locals. The city built something real here. People genuinely want…
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The Soundtrack of Becoming
I’ve been thinking lately about how strange my music taste probably looks from the outside. One minute it’s Neurosis. Then Don Williams. Then Atreyu. Then Matisyahu. Then Manchester Orchestra. Then Nine Inch Nails. Then U2. Then some strange ambient soundtrack piece that sounds like a machine trying to pray. On paper, it probably looks chaotic.…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: How Greenville Got Its Name
The The Simpsons takes place in a fictional town called Springfield. The name was chosen for a simple reason: there are so many Springfields across the United States that it could feel like anywhere. In that sense, Greenville isn’t all that different. There are Greenvilles in multiple states—North Carolina, Mississippi, Texas, and beyond. The name…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: Whatever Happened to the Clock Restaurants?
If you grew up in Greenville, chances are you have a Clock story. I do too. But before I even think about The Clock or Pete’s, I think about Como’s Pete’s. As a kid, that place felt permanent. I can still see it clearly — sitting in the booth, staring at the menu longer than…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: How Fiction Influenced My Reality
I’ve talked a lot recently about Greenville, development, local history, gentrification, empty spaces, civic vision, and the strange contradictions that seem to sit underneath this city I love. Some people have probably wondered where all this came from. A year ago, I wasn’t writing essays about urban planning, Cherokee history, or why certain projects get…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: A Nice Greenville Isn’t the Same as a Kind One
Greenville is a nice city. That’s not sarcasm. It’s not a setup. It’s just true. It’s clean. It’s welcoming. It’s easy to enjoy. People are generally friendly. The parks are good. The downtown is polished. The trail system is something most cities would love to have. If someone comes to visit, it’s not hard to…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: Can We Avoid Woodruff Road (Part 2)?
Everyone who has seen Jaws 2 knows a few things: the shark is back and mad, and the same mayor is still in charge, doing the same damn things all over again. That’s the feeling you get if you look at what’s happening on Laurens Road—and what could be coming next. Because if we’re not…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: GVL2040 and the Gap Between Plan and Reality
Most people in Greenville haven’t read GVL2040. That’s not really a knock on anyone. It’s a long-term planning document, not exactly light reading. But it is one of the most important things shaping what Greenville becomes over the next 15–20 years, whether people realize it or not. GVL2040 is the City of Greenville’s comprehensive plan…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: Unity Park, Social Justice, and the Tower to Nowhere
There is a lot to admire about Unity Park. It is beautiful, spacious, and full of life. It transformed long-overlooked land near the Reedy River into one of Greenville’s most impressive public spaces. Families gather there, kids play there, people walk and rest there, and for many residents it has become a genuine source of…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: What Do We Want These Buildings to Be?
Lately, as I drive around Greenville and through other parts of South Carolina, I keep returning to a question that became much more personal after my own attempt to open a coffee shop: What do we actually want these empty places to become? That question sounds simple until you try to build something yourself. From…
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I Enjoy AI, but Don’t Trust the Rollout.
I use AI often now. More often than I expected to. It helps me think. It helps me organize ideas. It helps me challenge my own assumptions when I remember to ask it to do that instead of just flattering me. It helps me write, reflect, brainstorm, plan, and sometimes simply sort through a mind…
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Four Greenvilles
When people talk about Greenville, they usually talk about it like it is one place with one shared experience. A single city moving in one direction with one story to tell. But that has never really been true. Greenville is several Greenvilles at once. Different versions of the same city, living beside each other, shaping…
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Fear of a Post-Knox White Greenville
It is an odd thing to worry about a city after the departure of a leader who has been in office so long that many residents barely remember life before him. But that is where Greenville may now find itself. For nearly three decades, Knox White has been one of the defining faces of modern…
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Greenville Is Too Small
Many of us work in hospitals, restaurants, warehouses, offices, schools, hotels, construction sites, retail stores, government buildings, and service industries. We help power the city of Greenville’s success, then return home to communities that may have less funding, less visibility, and less influence over the place they help sustain. That is why, even if it…
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The Whitening of Greenville: Gentrification and Pushed-Out People
Greenville’s Favorite Story About Itself Greenville loves the story it tells about itself. It is a story of redemption, polish, and smart civic leadership. A former mill town that once struggled with decline reinvented itself into one of the most celebrated small cities in America. Downtown was revived. Main Street became a destination. Falls Park…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: Cherokee Ground Beneath Greenville
Greenville is a city that likes to talk about what comes next. We talk about growth, new restaurants, bike trails, development, rankings, housing prices, and whether traffic has finally become unbearable. We talk about what Greenville is becoming. That makes sense. Growing places often become a little obsessed with the future. But places are not…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: Polished Surface, Divided Ground
Welcome Back to Seen / Unseen Greenville This blog will still go wherever life takes it—family, politics, recovery, culture, memory, and whatever else feels worth talking about. But I wanted to mark a direction I’m especially excited about. Seen / Unseen Greenville will be an ongoing series where I take a closer look at this…
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Seen / Unseen Greenville: Let’s Begin With Our Cherokee Roots
Welcome Back to Seen / Unseen Greenville This blog will still wander where life takes it—family, politics, recovery, culture, memory, whatever feels worth examining. But I wanted to mark a direction I’m especially excited about. THis will be an ongoing series exploring this place more deeply—its history, growth, contradictions, bright spots, blind spots, and the…
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Seen/Unseen Greenville: This Place Has Never Been One Thing
Welcome to Seen / Unseen Greenville This blog will still have all kinds of posts. Politics, family, recovery, culture, whatever life puts in front of me. That part isn’t changing. But I wanted to mark a new direction I’m excited about. I’ve lived in Greenville most of my life, and like a lot of people,…
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What’s Going On Here (And Who I Am)
If you’re a regular reader here—or just stopping by—I wanted to take a moment to explain what exactly this blog is, what I’m trying to do with it, and who the person behind it actually is. Because like most things in life, the answer is both simple and complicated. What’s Going On Here? Honestly, I’m…
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Greenville, SC and the Business of Drinking
I started drinking young. Twelve or thirteen, somewhere in there. Young enough that it should sound absurd now, but normal enough that it barely raised eyebrows then. Drinking looked fun. It looked grown. It looked like what adults did when they wanted to celebrate, loosen up, laugh louder, and become bigger versions of themselves. For…
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Who Tells the Story of Greenville, SC?
There was a time when every city had a stronger sense of itself because it had people whose job was to pay attention. Not perfect people. Not always brave people. Not always right people. But reporters. Editors. Photographers. Columnists. The kind of people who sat through zoning meetings so you didn’t have to. The kind…
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Politics, Morality, and the Cost of Tuning Out
Why the Issues That Divide Us May Be Hiding the Ones That Matter Most I’ve been thinking a lot about why politics feels so exhausting right now. Not just frustrating—but draining in a way that makes you want to step away from it completely. The kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from caring too much,…
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Roundup Post: What I’ve Been Writing Lately (And Why)
I’ve been writing a lot lately. Not in a structured, “this is the plan” kind of way, but more in a way where one idea leads into another, and before I realize it, there’s a thread running through everything. I didn’t fully see it at first, but looking back over the last few posts, it’s…
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Tales of a Midlife Drifter
I watched a video recently where a guy described himself as a 35-year-old loser. His message was simple: don’t end up like me. Start now. Build skills. Take action. Stop wasting time. And I get it. There’s truth in that. Drifting too long, avoiding responsibility, never committing to anything—that catches up with you. Time does…
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I Shouldn’t Be Here Or: On Faith and the Never-Ending Story
I have nearly died more times than I can count. That isn’t hyperbole. I’ve been in hospitals, in rapid decline, close enough to death that it stopped feeling abstract. It’s happened often enough that I can’t even give you an exact number anymore. The closest was a heart attack that killed 14% of my heart…
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The Etiquette of Disagreement (Or: How Not to Lose Everyone)
I have about three conservative friends left on Facebook. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s also not something I ever set out to do. If anything, I’ve resisted it. I don’t like cutting people off. I don’t like curating my life down to only the people who agree with me. That feels brittle. Unreal. Like building…
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Politics, God, and Grief in Greenville, SC
I I’ve always wanted a real relationship with God. Not just belief. Not just ritual. Something that actually holds up when things get difficult or unclear. Something that means something when the world doesn’t feel like it’s making sense. And living in Greenville, faith is everywhere. It’s part of the culture. Part of how people…
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Hope Is Not Passive
I’ve always wanted to have a relationship with God. Not just belief, and not just ritual. I want to understand the why behind things—the how. I want to know that there is something beyond myself I can turn to when my own mind runs out of answers. I spoke about doubt recently, and today I…
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Prayer, Mercy, and the Sound of Now
How U2 and President lead me to prayer. Music anchors my life. It always has. It fills the silence in a way nothing else can, a constant companion when everything else feels uncertain. There are times I step away from it—intentionally, even—but those breaks never last. I always come back. I need it. Part of…
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I Worry About the World My Son Is Growing Into
I worry. A lot. I worry about myself. I worry about my son. I worry about the world we’re handing him and whether we’re even being honest about what that world looks like. Because if I’m being real, when I look at the people in charge right now, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. It makes…
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Why We Accept the World As It Is
I want to start with something simple. A small game I’ve been playing lately. I call it watch the problem spread. Next time you’re stopped at a red light, don’t reach for your phone. Just look around for a second. Watch the cars. Watch the people. Most—if not all—will drop their heads almost immediately. The…
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Life Feeds on Life: The Cost of Being Alive
I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of human existence lately. It feels like the path—if there is one—is something like this: First, know yourself.Then, learn to love and accept other people.Then, maybe, you can begin to understand and love God. I don’t think you can skip steps. I don’t think you can jump…
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Easter, and the God of Doubt
I’ve started to wonder if we’ve been thinking about God the wrong way. Not as something hidden from us—but as something that lives in the very doubt we struggle with. That idea would have frustrated me before. It still does, if I’m being honest. Because if God is real, if any of this matters, then…
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What I Couldn’t Say To My Son
The other day my son told me he might want to join the military. Or maybe become a police officer. My heart dropped. I didn’t react the way he probably expected. I didn’t argue. I didn’t lecture. I didn’t tell him he was wrong. But inside, something in me tightened immediately. Because I value having…
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Where the Writing Stands Right Now
I’m in a different phase of the work now. For a while, what I needed most was to get things out of my head and onto the page. A lot of that material had been building for years—some of it since I was a kid—and it needed release before it could be understood. Now the…
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Learning the Rhythm of the New Room
This is the new room. Not finished. Not optimized. Just honest enough to work in. It’s where the desk lives now. Where the drums sit close enough to matter. Where I can make noise—literal and otherwise—without worrying about shared walls or quiet hours. A house instead of a condo. More air. More room to think…
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On Change, Catastrophe, and Balance
For a long time, I believed that change meant death—or at least the possibility of it. Not metaphorical death. Not ego death. Real, physical, catastrophic endings. That belief didn’t come from nowhere. It came from impact. From accidents. From moments where the world didn’t just shift, but hit. The waterfall incident. My teeth. A baseball…
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One Last Session Here
So this is my last session sitting in the brain of this operation. This place has been my office and my condo here in Greenville, South Carolina—near downtown, by the YMCA, close to where I grew up. And today it’s making me a little wistful. This space has been a kind of protective bubble for…
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Big news incoming.
Things have been brewing quickly in the mad scientist’s lab of my brain, and the results are almost ready to escape into the world. How soon? Weeks, not months. Here’s what’s going on. Trying to Be Good Trying to Be Good is a small, quiet book.It isn’t a memoir in the traditional sense, and it…
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On AI, Sloppiness, and Being Honest About the Work
When I was a kid, I used to get out of trouble by punishing myself harder than anyone else could. I’d replay mistakes in my head, pick them apart, scold myself privately until whatever authority figure was involved decided I’d clearly “learned my lesson.” In reality, I was just being left alone with my thoughts—and…
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The Lying Years Is Out — and Where the Work Is Headed Now
I quietly released The Lying Years this week. There wasn’t a launch plan or a marketing push. I didn’t run ads or build anticipation. I posted about it a few times and let it go. That wasn’t avoidance. It was intentional. What The Lying Years Is The Lying Years is the second of two memoirs…
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What the AI Thought About My Reading Habits
Based on the Books and Comics That Shaped Me If you really want to understand a writer, don’t ask them about their influences.Ask them what they consumed when they were too young to know they were forming a worldview. When the AI looked at the books and comics that shaped me, it didn’t see a…
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My College Comics: How they show my path as a writer.
By Francis Anderson When I think about how I became a writer, I don’t picture the usual origin scenes. I don’t picture myself reading The Chronicle of Narnia on my bedroom floor, or staying up late with Stephen King novels I was far too young to understand. I don’t even picture the first time a…
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The Quiet Work of Patience (and Why I Don’t Force My Books Anymore)
I’ve learned something about myself as a writer that I wish I’d understood years ago: My best work happens when I’m not working. Not in the literal sense — I write constantly. But the real shape of a book doesn’t come from typing. It comes from the quiet, invisible stages in between. I move through…
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A Tale of Two Settings
Two places shape my world more than any others:the Veil and the Axis.They are the quiet machinery behind every fracture in reality,two halves of a single moment when everything began to separate. THE VEIL The Veil is where the world forgets its outline. A thin, unmapped space of fog and almost-forms,where landscapes fade after a…
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The Literary Revolution No One Wants to Admit Is Happening
By Francis Anderson, Fulcrum & Axis Press For most of my life, writing felt like a lonely act — a private wrestling match with memory, imagination, and the page. Then, almost overnight, something changed. A new tool arrived, not with fanfare or permission, but with a quiet suggestion: “Try me.” People expected a calculator.Or a…
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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…
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Jazz Writing, AI Partnership, and Wolf Wounds
I’m gearing up for a second round of Wolf Wounds work, and before I dive back in, I need to explain something about my process—because I’m beginning to see that I work differently than most writers, and that difference is going to matter for anyone following along. A few nights ago, I joked that I…
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THE SPIRE MANIFESTO
How My Stories Connect, Why I Write Across Genres, and What the Spire Really Is I don’t write books the way other people do.I don’t pick a genre, plant a flag, and stay there. I can’t.My brain doesn’t work in straight lines. My life didn’t either. Instead, I write the way I live: in recursion,in…
Frank M. Anderson's Writing 