Writing
Original writing
Novels, essays, and long-form work. Books are free to download as PDF or EPUB.
Featured · Nonfiction
The Wrong Lessons
The more vivid the experience, the more confidently we draw the wrong lesson from it.
From the officers who watched the machine gun win in Manchuria and still went home preaching the bayonet, to the gambler who mistakes a streak for skill and the country trapped in a failing war, one engine keeps turning hard-won experience into false certainty. Drawing on war, leadership, and behavioral science, The Wrong Lessons follows that error across the disasters it has caused, then asks why, in each one, a few people saw clearly anyway. Their edge was not talent or better information. It was distance, and distance can be borrowed.
Series
Contemporary Problems
Two novels set in the same city, looking at the same event from two distances. Book One stays close to one person inside the window. Book Two pulls back to the 180,000 people living through it alongside her.
Book 1
What the Water Carried
A neuroscientist has forty-eight days to finish work only this version of her can do.
Something in the Gainesville water supply made the whole town brilliant. The phenomenon has a clock, and she is counting. What she is doing inside the window she could not have understood six months ago, and it has to be finished now, because afterward she will have no way to audit it. By day twenty-two, she catches herself checking her own reasoning the way you would check a stranger's.
Book 2
What the City Carried
180,000 people woke up smarter. The city wasn't built for it.
The hospital wasn't staffed for it. The courts had no precedent for it. The city offices were never supposed to be making these decisions at all. Four people in ordinary jobs try to hold the seams together while 180,000 newly enhanced minds find reasons to pull in every direction at once.
Standalone
What the Darkness Kept
Built to destroy. Retired to grow pears. Not as hidden as he thought.
He settles his neighbors' arguments and tends his orchard, and the war he was made for is a long time gone. Then someone from the capital starts asking questions about the district, and the answers keep pointing toward something that should not still exist.
Writing on a security architect's site
Building systems and writing use the same muscle: holding a complex structure in your head, finding the load-bearing joints, and testing whether the thing holds under pressure. Different tools, same discipline.