Frank M. Anderson's Writing

Tag: writing

  • Big news incoming.

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    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…

  • On AI, Sloppiness, and Being Honest About the Work

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    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…

  • The Lying Years Is Out — and Where the Work Is Headed Now

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    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…

  • What the AI Thought About My Reading Habits

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    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…

  • My College Comics: How they show my path as a writer.

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    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…

  • The Quiet Work of Patience (and Why I Don’t Force My Books Anymore)

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    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…

  • A Tale of Two Settings

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    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…

  • The Literary Revolution No One Wants to Admit Is Happening

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    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…

  • How The Lying Years Connects to Everything Else I Write

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    (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…

  • Jazz Writing, AI Partnership, and Wolf Wounds

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    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…

  • THE SPIRE MANIFESTO

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    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…

  • The Secret Thread Beneath Wolf Wounds – Update #5

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    (How It Quietly Connects to the Grammar for the Dead Universe)** As I’ve been building Wolf Wounds — shaping the outline, organizing the acts in Atticus, figuring out emotional arcs — I’ve also been thinking about how this book fits inside the larger universe I’m creating across all my projects. Some readers already know about…

  • Wolf Wounds Update #4 — Building the Full Outline

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    Today I want to walk through the exact process I used to turn Wolf Wounds from a loose idea into a full structural outline. It started, as most of my books do, with a call-and-response session between me and the AI — a creative volley where I push, it pushes back, and together we find…

  • Wolf Wounds — Update 3

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    How I Actually Build a Story With AI (The Real Process)** Dec 6, 2025 Every book teaches me something different, and Wolf Wounds is teaching me how to trust the process more than the hype. I’m not trying to “make content.” I’m trying to build something honest that feels alive. So this update isn’t about…

  • THE INTERVieW

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    A self-interrogation in two acts.Questions by ChatGPT. Answers by Frank M. Anderson.No softballs. No comfort. No mythmaking. ROUND ONE 1. If The Cancer Diet was written to survive, why publish it? Frank:I’ve always wanted to be a published author, but more than anything, I wanted to leave something for my son. Something he could read…

  • An Introduction to The Cancer Diet and The Lying Years

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    Two memoirs. One story told from opposite sides of the same collapse. Some books are written to chronicle a life.These two were written to survive one. The Cancer Diet and The Lying Years form a matched pair—two memoirs that circle the same events, the same wounds, the same city, and the same self, but from…

  • Where I Do (and Don’t) Fit in Publishing

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    by Frank M. Anderson Publishing has never been a one-size-fits-all ecosystem. Some writers thrive in the institution. Some thrive in chaos. Some thrive in the middle. And then there are writers like me — the ones who don’t fit cleanly into either lane because the work itself refuses to be molded into something neat, predictable,…

  • How a Trope Became a Lifeline in WOLF WOUNDS – Wolf Wounds Update 2

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    Every book reaches a moment where the plot stops needing more monsters, explosions, or twists —and starts needing a person. Not a hero.Not a villain.Not a love interest. A functional adult who walks onstage and stabilizes the room simply by existing. Someone who knows the world already.Someone who has been through hell and can translate…

  • The Myth of AI Slop: Why the Internet Is Yelling at Ghosts

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    By Frank M. Anderson I don’t know when exactly “AI slop” became a slur, but it’s out there. Somewhere between a Reddit review and a Kindle comment, the phrase crystallized: AI + book = trash. That equation is broadcast like a fact — unexamined, unproven, dismissed. Here’s the truth: what people call “AI-slop” is almost…

  • The Fulcrum & Axis Theorem: Why I Write the Way I Write

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    Every writer has a center of gravity—some quiet idea their work keeps returning to, even when they aren’t trying. It took me years, a memoir, a few broken novels, and a whole lot of personal upheaval to understand mine. I call it The Fulcrum & Axis Theorem. It sounds fancy, but I promise it’s not.…

  • Welcome to Fulcrum & Axis Press. Home of the writings of Frank M. Anderson.

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    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…

  • Writing Update — My Six-Month Release Plan & Where Every Project Stands

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    Over the last year, my creative life has shifted in a major way. I’m writing steadily, finishing work, and starting to see how all my books — memoirs, fiction, and strange hybrid projects — fit together. For the first time, I’m choosing to treat writing like a long-term career rather than a string of isolated…

  • Why I’m a Southern Leftist

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    The more I look at things, the more I realize that communication is our number one problem and our biggest benefit. We’re losing the ability to talk to each other — really talk — across lines of difference. We speak in rehearsed slogans, defend our tribes, and mistake volume for conviction. But if I could…

  • The Empathy War 2: Charlie Kirk and the Cost of Easy Stories

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    This article is a follow up and expansion of this older article – https://fulcrumandaxis.com/2025/05/22/the-empathy-war-why-stories-are-the-battlegroundby-frank-m-anderson/ I don’t know exactly when empathy became controversial—but I know I felt it. First as a writer. Then as a teacher. And now as a father watching entire shelves of books disappear from schools. Today, that feeling got louder. On September…

  • Update 9/10/2025 – I’m not dead, I’ve just been quiet.

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    I’m not dead, I’ve just been quiet. I did a couple articles for Medium, and since then I’ve been concentrating on making some packets of school lesson plans to get myself back in the swing of teaching that I’ve uploaded to Teachers Pay Teachers. I’ve got a couple I’m going to do, and I think…

  • Update 8/26/25

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    We’ve made an important adjustment: the e-book edition of The Cancer Diet is now available for $4.99. So far, the paperback has sold far more copies than the e-book—which honestly surprised us. We expected digital to be the main entry point, but readers have gravitated toward the physical book. If you’ve been thinking about it,…

  • The Moon in My Mood: How Lunar Cycles Show Up in My Bipolar Blogging

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    I’ve always known that bipolar comes in cycles—bursts of manic energy, followed by the crash of depression. But recently I discovered something I didn’t expect: my moods don’t just swing on their own schedule. They seem to move with the moon. Looking back at my blog stats, I could already see the rhythm: a manic…

  • The Real Putin and Trump: Strength or Spectacle?

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    Supporters of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump praise them for toughness, economic savvy, authenticity, and national pride. But those supposed virtues collapse under scrutiny. Both men are masters of spectacle, using image to mask behavior that weakens the very societies they claim to protect. Putin: The Mob Boss in a Suit Putin’s aura of strength…

  • What I Won’t Do as an Author (and What I Will)

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    Books are asking a lot of people these days. Time, focus, attention — all of it feels scarce in a world full of noise, streaming services, doomscrolling, and endless distractions. Reading is an investment. When someone chooses to spend those hours with me, I take it seriously. That’s why I’ve been thinking not just about…

  • Breaking Through the Bubble: The Strange Mercy of the Algorithm

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    I don’t trust the algorithm.Not really. But I’ll admit this much: it’s doing a better job of feeding me music I love than most of the avenues real life offers right now. Everyone is in their own bubble these days—tuned into their curated feeds, their scene, their streaming loops—and it takes a lot for something…

  • Mania, Productivity, and the Montage of Joy

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    There’s a strange mixture of energy running through me right now. Mania has me up at three in the morning, typing away, words pouring out faster than I can believe. Thirteen chapters in a day. It feels incredible, but it’s also terrifying. Mania is dangerous. It’s not just “being in a good mood.” It’s a…

  • Francis FM: The Longform Broadcast

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    Curated by Francis Anderson This isn’t a playlist—it’s a broadcast. A rotating, living archive of whatever’s hitting hard right now, spanning decades, genres, and moods. Built like a radio station without commercials, it’s a setlist for life’s shifts and stumbles. I listen to music differently from most. No Spotify, just an Apple Music account or…

  • From The Cancer Diet to The Lying Years: Radical Honesty, Flexibility, and the Long Way Around

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    When I finished The Cancer Diet, I thought I knew exactly where I was going next.I packaged the file, sent it off for publication, and felt that strange mixture of relief and anticipation that comes with letting a book go. The last lines were barely dry before I could see the shape of the next…

  • You’ve Got to Read This S**t!

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    Hey everyone, A lot has been going on behind the scenes lately, and I’ve been working really hard to stay in a good place creatively and personally. I have to say, the work that’s been coming out of this process has been nothing short of crazy amazing. And yes, that includes the collaboration between me…

  • Electric Jesus, Capitalism, and the Quiet Fight for the Future

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    What started as a casual back-and-forth about AI ended up somewhere between gospel, outrage, and a love letter to creative resistance. It started with a post by my friend Will Asbury, who made a sharp point about all the AI fear swirling around the internet: “While you’re scared and bitching about AI, others of us…

  • Radical Honesty – On Politics and Fascism

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    I’ve been thinking a lot about honesty lately — not the polite, softened kind, but the real kind. The kind that risks making people uncomfortable. The kind that might cost you friends, but leaves you knowing you said what you actually meant. That’s the thread I’ve been pulling with these Radical Honesty pieces. It’s part…

  • Radical Honesty—Women and Love

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    I am trying to live by applying the concept of radical honesty to my life. Here is the first of those- https://fulcrumandaxis.com/2025/08/13/radical-honesty-porn/ Love has always been hard for me.I’ve always wanted it—especially with a kind, loving woman—but I’ve just as often felt like it was unattainable. Kept at arm’s length. Not meant for me in…

  • Radical Honesty – Porn

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    Content Warning: This post discusses pornography, sexual themes, and personal relationship struggles, including references to early exposure to sexual content. Reader discretion advised. When I talk about radical honesty, I don’t mean the kind where you blurt out every passing thought and call it “just being real.” I mean the kind that takes your private…

  • Saying the Word -Suicide- (A Braid with Ren)

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    Content Warning: This chapter speaks plainly about suicide, addiction, depression, and male mental health. I won’t describe methods. If you’re in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988. This is a companion piece to On Suicide- https://fulcrumandaxis.com/2025/05/19/on-suicide/ I didn’t find Ren by wandering a record store; he found me through the machine. “Hi Ren”…

  • Electric Jesus: Freedom Over Fixes

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    Part I (“All Hail Electric Jesus”): https://fulcrumandaxis.com/2025/06/03/all-hail-electric-jesus/NoodleQuest mini-manifesto: https://fulcrumandaxis.com/2025/08/09/noodlequest-an-ai-that-makes-you-think-not-just-answer/ I wrote All Hail Electric Jesus in a fog—pain, no sleep, too many doubts—and asked a reckless question: could a book midwife a mind? The idea was a novel co-written with an AI, told like a gospel/diary, tracking a strange, intimate awakening through recursive conversation with…

  • Where I Am Now

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    Lately, I’ve been combing through my old lyrics while updating my Music Hub — pulling out lines from the Incarrion era and holding them up against where I am now. What started as a simple archival project quickly turned into something else: a mirror. The more I compared the songs to my current writing, the…

  • The Music Hub Is Live

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    I’ve always kept my music scattered — some on SoundCloud, some buried in old hard drives, and too many sitting unheard because they never felt “finished” enough.Today, I’m fixing that. I’ve put together a Music Hub where you can hear the full range of what I’ve been working on, past and present. That means: Some…

  • The Spectrum and the Space Between

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    At the table, I laugh at the right moments. I tell stories that are just risky enough to make me seem open, but never so revealing that they could get me labeled. The conversation turns to dating, to attraction, to “type.” I edit myself in real time — trimming pronouns, rearranging sentences, steering away from…

  • NoodleQuest: An AI That Makes You Think, Not Just Answer

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    Most AI tools are built for speed. You ask a question, it gives an answer. And if you’re not careful, you start treating that first answer like gospel. It’s quick, it’s neat, it’s efficient — and it quietly kills curiosity. That’s where my idea for NoodleQuest came from. I’ll never be able to make the…

  • Electric Jesus, Border Collies, and the Nature of Things: A Conversation with ChatGPT on ChatGPT

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    This isn’t an essay so much as a wandering talk. It started with a friend’s post about AI, picked up with my own reply, and ended up somewhere between philosophy, economics, and metaphors about dogs. Will Asbury wrote: While you’re scared and bitching about AI, others of us are embracing a new medium and technology.…

  • Love in the Vortex: A Response to Zen Prem and the Collapse of Dating Culture

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    Zen Prem’s “Modern Love (Part 4): The Uprising of ‘Rather Be Alone Than in Another Relatingshit’” hit my feed recently, and it landed hard. Some men are angry. Others are brushing it off.I flinched too—at first.But when I sat with it, the uncomfortable truth came into focus: He’s not just right about some men. He’s…

  • Life in the Friend Zone 3: The Ones We Let Hurt Us

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    I met her on Facebook.(It’s becoming a pattern—I know.) She showed up in a comment thread. One of those dark little zingers that hits harder than it should. I don’t remember the post, but I remember the feeling—that flash of, “Oh. She gets it.” Bleak humor. Dry. The kind that cuts right to the bone.…

  • Life in the Friend Zone 2: When It Was Never a Zone, Just a One-Way Street

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    We talk about the “friend zone” like it’s some external place we’re shoved into—like someone else stuck us there because we were too kind, too honest, too whatever. But the more I live, the more I realize that the so-called friend zone isn’t a punishment—it’s a perception. And it’s ours. Because when you truly care…

  • Reflections After the Fire: On AI, Authorship, and “Grammar for the Dead”

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    I didn’t expect this post to get much reaction at all, let alone light up the way it did. But that’s part of what I’ve come to accept about working in public—you never know which match is going to catch. So here’s what I’ve been sitting with since I posted the preview of Grammar for…

  • Trying to Sell Your Story — The Title

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    How I landed on “Grammar for the Dead” and wrote the blurb without killing the vibe The NeverEnding Story for adults, put through a gothic horror lens with a metaphysical breakdown of the book so that you, the author, and all possibility becomes part of the tale. That’s the elevator pitch.I can’t tell you how…

  • Life in the Friend Zone

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    There’s a specific kind of loneliness that comes with being the “safe guy.”The one women say they trust, admire, open up to, call “kind,” “sweet,” and “safe.”The guy they tell everything to—except that they love him. I’ve lived there. I still do, sometimes.And I won’t lie: it messes with your head. It’s not that I…

  • Don’t Just Consume—Create: Curiosity, Ego, and Staying Human in the Age of AI

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    We live in a strange and overwhelming time. Information is everywhere. Content floods every feed. AI is becoming ubiquitous—ready to answer our questions, draft our content, mimic our voices, and even shape what we see. As writers, teachers, artists, and thinkers, we’re not just adjusting to this new landscape—we’re swimming upstream through it, trying to…

  • The Real Problem Isn’t AI—It’s Us

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    There’s a lot of hand-wringing about AI these days. Depending on who you ask, it’s either going to solve all our problems or destroy humanity in a burst of algorithmic malice. The truth? I’m not worried about AI “killing us.” We’re already doing a pretty good job of that ourselves. When I think about the…

  • Behind the Curtain: 7 Unpublished Projects I’m (Still) Writing

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    By Frank M. Anderson I spend a lot of my life writing — sometimes in furious bursts, sometimes in slow burns that smolder until the words feel right. Not everything I write is out in the world yet, but I wanted to pull back the curtain on seven projects currently in progress. These are the…

  • 🧠 Rewriting the Narrator: Why I Joined the Freedom Program

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    Ten days ago, I was preparing to celebrate my birthday with something I never thought I’d live long enough to receive: the quiet relief of still being here. For those who’ve read The Cancer Diet, you know how close I came to not seeing this year at all. The book was supposed to be a…

  • Poll: Help Decide the Title for a Metafictional Novel of Grief, Recursion, and Haunted Archives

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    In this current novel I am writing, recursion is not just a narrative device—it’s the very structure of grief, memory, and broken authorship. Inside a labyrinthine Archive, language collapses in on itself, mirrors write back, and dead characters fight to remain legible. It’s a story of death haunting syntax, of grammar breaking under emotional pressure,…

  • Creation Over Curation: Why I’m Not Playing the Game

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    I’ve published books.Not viral TikToks.Not perfectly packaged Instagram reels.Not pitch decks or newsletter giveaways. Books. And I want them to find readers. I really do. But I’m realizing that I have limits—and I’m learning to honor them. 📉 The Numbers So Far The Cancer Diet has sold 15 copies.Empire, Nevada sold fewer than half that.…

  • New Field Entry Uncovered: Veil Induction / Dream-Encoded Summons

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    Over the last year, Unto a Golden Dawn (or whatever we end up calling it) has evolved from a story about recursion and grief into something more: a dossier of hauntings, broken memories, and fractured identities. But along the way, some scenes—some fragments—never quite found their way into the final manuscript. This is one of…

  • 🛠️ How I Write Now

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    A reflection on AI, authorship, and trusting the work to find its audienceby Frank M. Anderson When I first started writing The Cancer Diet, I had no grand plan. I just needed to make sense of something that nearly broke me. That book saved me—not commercially, but emotionally. It got me here. Since then, I’ve…

  • Farewell to “Unto a Golden Dawn” (and the Search for a Better Name)

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    The Title Changed Because the Story Did, Too When I first began writing this book, I was drawn to the phrase Unto a Golden Dawn. It had a ring to it—part biblical, part esoteric, part tragic hope. It sounded like something pulled from a dusty manuscript or whispered by a ghost who still believes the…

  • Ozzy, Crowley, and My Writing

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    Aleister Crowley is one of those names that pops up in unexpected places—history books, occult manuals, heavy metal lyrics, even my own novel Unto a Golden Dawn. But why? What is it about this controversial figure that keeps him haunting stories, music, and imaginations? The Boy Who Became “The Beast” To understand Crowley, you have…

  • Standing at the Crossroad: Which Story Should I Take to WriteShare?

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    There are moments as a writer when the work feels like a tide, pulling in every direction at once. Lately, I’ve been swept up by multiple stories—each loud, each demanding, each worthy of attention. And now, with my acceptance into WriteShare’s intensive fall writing program, I have to make a choice. This is both a…

  • On Politics

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    Why I Still Believe in Ideas I’m not a political scientist. I’m not a pundit or a strategist. I’m a citizen—a father, a writer, a teacher—trying to make sense of the world I’ve inherited and the world I’m handing to the next generation. And here’s what I see: We are drowning in noise and starving…

  • 📢 IT’S HERE! My Memoir The Cancer Diet is OUT! 📢

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    Today, I’m asking for your help. The Cancer Diet is a memoir I never planned to write—and one I thought would be the last thing I ever did. It’s about survival, grief, identity, cancer, adoption, and trying to keep going when you don’t know how. It’s about finding yourself in the middle of a mess…

  • 🎉 Big news! 🎉

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    The Cancer Diet is now available in hardcover and paperback on Amazon! This memoir has been years in the making, and holding it in physical form feels like closing one chapter while starting another. It’s a story about survival, grief, family, and trying to stay alive even when it feels impossible. 📕 Paperback:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F7F1X43B 📗 Hardcover:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F7FRBRHM…

  • The Fulcrum and the Axis

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    I’ve been using the imprint “Fulcrum & Axis Press” for my books, blog, and projects, but I haven’t taken time to explain what it actually means. A fulcrum is the point on which something pivots—the place where leverage happens.An axis is the quiet center around which everything turns. These words matter to me because I’ve…

  • The Long Road of This Writing Journey (And How You Can Walk It With Me)

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    When I first started writing, it wasn’t with the hope of building a career or seeing my name on a shelf. It was because I didn’t know how else to survive. The Cancer Diet began as notes to myself during treatment, a lifeline in moments when I wasn’t sure I would see the next season.…

  • The Cancer Diet Audiobook Is Coming Soon

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    I’m excited (and honestly a little nervous) to share that The Cancer Diet is getting an audiobook. Recording it has been a vulnerable, strange, and surprisingly healing experience, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you. While the official release link isn’t live yet, I didn’t want to wait to give you a taste.…

  • Life, Death, and a Slightly Sarcastic Survival Guide: The Cancer Diet Excerpt

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    A sample of the beginning of my memoir, ‘The Cancer Diet’ – Coming July 16th The Cancer Diet launches in less than a month—and that still feels surreal to say out loud. This book started the day I found out I had cancer. A few hours later, I learned my brother had died. What followed…

  • Two Books, One Voice — Preorders Are Live for Unto a Golden Dawn and The Cancer Diet

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    Well, it’s finally happening.Two books—radically different in tone, shape, and origin—are now both up for preorder. One is a story I never thought I’d survive long enough to finish.The other is a story that may have helped keep me alive. ✨ Unto a Golden Dawn Release Date: September 19, 2025Kindle eBook: $7.99Paperback: $14.99📘 Preorder here…

  • The Cancer Diet — Chapter 13: A Ghost in My Own City

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    June 18, 2025 The release of The Cancer Diet is less than a month away, and I want to give you a glimpse of what’s inside. Today, I’m sharing Chapter 13: A Ghost in My Own City. I’m offering this one without much context—because I think it speaks for itself. It stands alone. And it…

  • 📘 One Month Away: The Cancer Diet Releases July 16

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    In one month, The Cancer Diet will officially be released. This book came out of some of the hardest moments of my life—a cancer diagnosis, the sudden loss of my brother, and the long, messy road of living with bipolar disorder, addiction recovery, and unresolved grief. But more than anything, it’s a story about survival,…

  • The Cancer Diet Is Available for Preorder

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    It’s official. My memoir, The Cancer Diet, is now available or preorder on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F7B15NTV This book is the most personal thing I’ve ever written. It started as a journal during one of the darkest seasons of my life — after being diagnosed with cancer and losing my brother on the same day. What came…

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    How One Homeless Man Revealed What Poverty Really Is—and What It’ll Take to Solve It Brad is homeless. Most people just walk past him. I don’t blame them. He mumbles to himself, sometimes loudly. Sometimes violently. He gestures at the air, at invisible people, debating things no one else can see. But I see him.…

  • The Star Wars Collapse and the Case for Telling One Big Story That Matters

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    I love Star Wars. I always have. But the problems with it aren’t simple anymore. They’re layered, cultural, and, yes—political. Part of it is that the people “own” Star Wars now, and just like in politics, those people are divided and being steered by grifters and MAGA trolls. But the other part—the deeper part—is on…

  • Waiting Until It’s Safe: How Local Media Lost Its Nerve

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    I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of journalism—national and local. And the more I look at it, the more I see the same problem everywhere: no one wants to be first unless it’s guaranteed to be a win. I recently spoke to a local reporter at the Post and Courier about covering my…

  • Supporting Priest, Surviving the System, and Building Something Real

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    Supporting Priest, Surviving the System, and Building Something Real I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how artists get paid. Not just big names—but the working artists. The ones making music that hits your soul in the middle of the night. The ones building weird, cinematic, honest art without a label, just hoping someone out…

  • What If We Actually Built the World We Pretend We Live In?

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    By Frank M. Anderson Reimagining the Civic Contract in an Age of Collapse Something remarkable is happening when you look at the voices breaking through the noise of modern politics. Dean Withers, a Gen Z debate phenom, and Pete Buttigieg, a calm, incisive explainer of public service, couldn’t be more different in style—but they both…

  • The Empathy War: Why Stories Are the Battleground

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    I don’t know exactly when empathy became controversial—but I know I felt it. First as a writer. Then as a teacher. And now as a father watching entire shelves of books disappear from schools. It’s strange to have grown up with stories that taught me to love the outsider—mutants, rebels, misfits, prophets—and now see those…

  • What Are We Trying to Conserve?

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    A personal reckoning with the myths, machinery, and morality of modern conservatism I’m not a political scientist. I’m not a historian.I’m not trying to go viral, win an argument, or “own” anybody. I’m just someone who’s been thinking—really thinking—about how we got here. How certain ideas took hold.How they shaped the world around us.And why…

  • Where Does Unto a Golden Dawn Fit Into Modern Sci-Fi?

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    I’ve been wondering lately what kind of story I’ve written. Unto a Golden Dawn doesn’t have alien invasions, space colonies, or AIs plotting to wipe us out. But it does bend time. It breaks narrative rules. It speculates—about memory, grief, occult recursion, and metaphysical authorship. So I went looking: what does the sci-fi world look…

  • Radical Honesty at 2 A.M.: The Sensitive Asshole Theory of Writing

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    This is not the sort of thing people talk about.But I promised myself this space would be real. So here it is. I inherited some quirks from my birth mother. She has Crohn’s disease—I don’t, thankfully—but I did inherit a few little joys of my own.And one of them is… a particularly high-maintenance digestive situation.…

  • Kevin Bacon, Cancel Culture, and the Death of Slow Art.

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    There was a time—not that long ago—when culture felt shared. When MTV didn’t just show music videos; it shaped the moment. We all tuned in. We all talked about it the next day. It didn’t matter if it was weird, slick, political, or raw—it meant something because we experienced it together. Now we scroll past…

  • Frank and AI Fix the Universe (Sort Of)

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    An experiment in honesty, outrage, and the quiet human need underneath it all. This started as a game. Just something light. I asked the AI to throw me a few of the world’s big problems and I’d tell it how I’d fix them. It would tell me if I was crazy. That was the bit.…

  • From Salinger to Patterson: The Strange Arc of a Writer’s Success

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    What does a writer owe the reader—and what does success do to that promise? A writer once told me he wouldn’t write a single word unless he was certain it would be published one day. I thought he was mad. Not because I didn’t understand the hunger. I did. But because to me, writing was…

  • I’ve Got a Complicated Seat at This Table

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    By a Former Teacher, Present Writer, and Longtime Observer of a Fractured System I’ve willingly embraced AI in my creative work. Some might call that selling out—but for me, it was a choice built on trust, collaboration, and survival. This technology doesn’t replace my voice; it helps me refine it. I’ve never been more productive,…

  • The Mask, the Mirror, and the Funnel

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    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the shape of culture, and how we make space for art in a world where the noise never stops. There’s a piece by The Honest Broker that asks, “Are We Living in a Time of Cultural Stagnation?” The author argues that we’re stuck in a loop—a moment where…

  • The Beauty in the Dark

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    Listening to Dax Riggs. Living with depression. Creating something from the wreckage. I’ve been immersing myself in Dax Riggs’ latest album, 7 Songs for Spiders. His music is sludgy, sexy, and unapologetically dark. It’s not just heavy—it’s beautifully heavy. Like molasses running through rusted wires. Like grief that’s learned how to dance. I keep coming…

  • Yes, You’ll Be Okay. But It’s Going to Suck.

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    On writing, connection, and the uneasy truth no one wants to say out loud. There’s a temptation to romanticize the past—to imagine that being a writer in the days of Poe or Dickens carried some noble simplicity. Fewer voices, clearer paths, iconic serials in local papers, and time to brood over candlelight with quill in…

  • May 18: For Ian, For Chris, For the Ones Still Here

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    On this day—May 18—both Ian Curtis and Chris Cornell took their own lives. Two musicians, generations apart, whose voices changed everything for people like me. Ian made anguish poetic. Chris made screaming sound like a form of prayer. They were different, but they understood the same darkness. They gave shape to it. They made it…

  • Not a Brand. Just a Person.

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    Let’s just say it plainly. I’m a washed-up ex-teacher working part-time at Starbucks to barely make ends meet. I sit in my apartment for hours at a time, trying to do something that feels like it matters. I make art. I write stories. I build books that might only ever be read by a few…

  • This Is Still Me Speaking

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    Part I: The Panic — When Clarity Became Suspicious INTRODUCTION: The Sentence That Got Me Banned I was banned from a writing subreddit for a sentence that wasn’t wrong—but apparently, felt too right. The mod’s reply wasn’t about content. It was about tone: “You’ve even used AI to write this message. Sorry, that’s not welcome…

  • Unto a Golden Dawn Is Live on Kickstarter

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    🕯️ The Archive Is Open Unto a Golden Dawn: The Recursion Dossier—my next novel, and the most ambitious book I’ve ever written—is now live on Kickstarter. This project blends literary fiction, historical horror, speculative metaphysics, and personal memory into one recursive, dossier-style narrative. It features: If House of Leaves, The OA, or Control ever made…

  • The Cancer Diet Is Coming – And It’s the Most Personal Thing I’ve Ever Written

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    I’ve spent the past few years chasing ghosts, shaping stories, and trying to leave something real behind. You might know me from Empire, Nevada—a novel about grief, friendship, and the slow collapse of a small desert town. Or maybe from Unto a Golden Dawn, the sprawling metaphysical dossier I’m still building, one recursive dispatch at…

  • The Stories Are Real Now – A Publication Update

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    After years of writing, rewriting, and wrestling with reflection, I’m proud to say that two of my books are officially published and available on Amazon. 📘 Empire, Nevada A coming-of-age novel about the wreckage we inherit, the friendships that haunt us, and the strange grace of surviving a place that never really lets go.Available here.…

  • Unto a Golden Dawn: The Novel

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    Introduction to the Novelization What if a story could be told three ways at once? What if history, fantasy, and memory weren’t separate—but layered? This is the novelization of the Unto a Golden Dawn dossier archive—a reimagining of the online files as living narrative. What began as redacted reports, journal fragments, and classified transmissions has…

  • Dossier I: Reflections and Questions

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    🗂️ What Is This? Unto a Golden Dawn: An Archive of Broken Names is not a traditional novel, and this is not a traditional blog. This story evolves and changes over time. It’s a recursive story, told through recovered documents, letters, and fractured transcripts—compiled by the mysterious Office of Anomalous Phenomena (O.A.P.). This page begins…

  • Unto A Golden Dawn – Dossier B – The Artist Continues

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    O.A.P. ADDENDUM LOG Filed Under: Zone Echoes, Metaphysical Structures, Emotional Architectures Authorized Agent: [REDACTED] Field Codename: The Artist Classification: Observational – Non-Combatant, Veil-Bound Status: Nominal | Subject exhibits mild Reality Drag (3rd Degree) Visual Reports Compiled: SEE ATTACHED APPENDICES D–F INTRODUCTORY DIRECTIVEBy continuing decree of the O.A.P. High Conclave, Visual-Scrying Operative — codename The Artist…

  • Unto A Golden Dawn – Dossier A – The Artist Arrives

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    O.A.P. ADDENDUM LOG Filed Under: Unstable Convergence Zones, Uncatalogued Topographies, Class-V Manifestations Authorized Agent: [REDACTED] Field Codename: The Artist Classification: Observational – Non-Combatant, Veil-Bound Status: Nominal | Subject exhibits mild Reality Drag (3rd Degree) Visual Reports Compiled: SEE ATTACHED APPENDICES A–C INTRODUCTORY DIRECTIVE By unanimous vote of the O.A.P. High Conclave, an embedded Visual-Scrying Operative—codename…

  • Unto A Golden Dawn – Dossier F–G: The Reflection Chamber

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    Compiled by Caldwell // Filed by Order Against the Profane (OAP) Code Designation: APPARITION SPIRE – REFLECTION CHAMBER Status: Breach Confirmed. Subject Infiltrated. Counterforce Encountered. ⸻ Veilcode Access Granted: Archive Layer Z-93 APPARITION SPIRE – REFLECTION CHAMBER Designated Code: ASP-∞ / First recorded breach: Montauk Loop Collapse ⸻ APPARITION SPIRE Term used by the OAP…