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There is a point in a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral where the music changes. The procession toward the cemetery is slow, solemn and heavy. The dead are being carried. Grief has weight. The music understands that. Then the burial ends. The procession turns. And on the way back, the rhythm changes. The grief is still there. Nobody has forgotten who died. Nobody is pretending loss no longer matters. But the living are still alive. So the music begins to move. That structu

Today, The Box of Dead Heroes is officially out in the world. That sentence feels strange after everything that went into getting here. For months, this book has existed as drafts, notes, proofs, corrections, cover files, conversations, questions, and an increasingly intimidating number of documents with words like FINAL in their filenames. Now it is simply a book. A finished thing that other people can pick up, open, and make their own decisions about. This is where A Funera

In two days, The Box of Dead Heroes will stop belonging only to me. That is a strange thing to write. For months, the book has existed in a space where I still had some control over it. I could revise a sentence. Change a paragraph. Move something. Reread a chapter and decide that a line was not quite doing what I wanted. Even once the manuscript was finished, there were proofs, corrections, formatting, covers, descriptions, metadata, release plans. There was always one more

There is a particular way people sometimes talk about AI and writing that has never quite matched my own experience. The comparison is usually implicit, but it is there: using AI to write is like getting into a self-driving car. You tell it where you want to go. You sit back. The machine does the work. You arrive at the destination and then claim that you drove there. I understand why people make that comparison. More importantly, I think there are people using AI exactly tha

When I began A Funeral for the Living, I did not write The Box of Dead Heroes and then wonder whether there might be a sequel. I knew I was writing a trilogy. I knew the story had to grow beyond one man, beyond one room, beyond one crisis. I knew where the emotional movement was heading, and I knew that the questions raised in the first book could not be answered entirely within it. That matters because, although these are three books, I never really experienced them as three

I have been thinking a lot lately about representation, empathy, and the strange ways stories teach us to understand people who are not like us. Part of that came from rewatching Doom Patrol. Danny the Street is openly queer, uses they/them pronouns, and exists as a refuge for people who often feel pushed outside the shape of what the world considers acceptable. That matters. But what struck me on this rewatch was that Danny never seems interested in making belonging conditio

Making Cruelty Look Ordinary When I moved from science fiction into dark fantasy, I thought I was leaving some things behind. Technology, certainly. Corporations. Artificial intelligence. Digital systems. All the machinery that had occupied so much of my attention while writing Technomancers Rise. Then I started building Titan, the occupied city at the centre of A Funeral for the Living, and realised I had not actually left one of my favourite subjects behind at all. I had on

I only meant to take a break. I had been working, thinking, writing, doing all the usual things that keep my brain running long after it should have stopped, and I decided I needed to put something on television and switch off for a while. So I went back to Doom Patrol. I had not watched it in some time, and somewhere in the middle of that rewatch I had one of those strange moments where something familiar suddenly looks completely different. Not because the show had changed.

On September 9th, 2008, I married Joanne. Eighteen years later, I could write the usual anniversary post. I could talk about finding my best friend, about eighteen wonderful years, about how I would do it all again without hesitation. I could find a photograph where we both look particularly happy, write something sentimental underneath it, and leave the difficult parts outside the frame. None of those things would necessarily be lies. They just would not be the whole truth.

Apparently, if you spend long enough writing stories, eventually somebody points out that you keep writing the same things. Not the same plots. Not the same worlds. Not even necessarily the same genres. But the same questions. I noticed it properly while putting together an image recently. I had myself surrounded by characters from three very different corners of my writing life: A Funeral for the Living, Technomancers Rise, and the much older Olyndar/Titan stories that grew

Fantasy has a habit of beginning with people who are about to become important. Young people leaving home for the first time. Soldiers discovering what they are capable of. Heirs learning who they really are. Apprentices finding power. Chosen people being told that the world has been waiting for them. There is nothing wrong with those stories. I have loved plenty of them. But when I began The Box of Dead Heroes, I wanted to start somewhere else. I wanted to begin with someone

Hope Is Not a Speech Hope is one of those words that becomes less useful the more desperately you need it. When things are going well, “have hope” can sound encouraging. When you are exhausted, frightened, grieving or depressed, it can sound almost insulting. Hope in what? Based on what evidence? And what exactly am I supposed to do with it? That question ended up becoming much more important to A Funeral for the Living than I expected. When I began writing The Box of Dead He

Birthdays come with instructions. You are supposed to be happy. Grateful. Reflective. Celebratory. People ask what you are doing, what you are getting, where you are going, what you have planned. There is an assumption built into the day that the date itself should produce a certain kind of feeling. Tomorrow I turn forty-five. And I am not entirely sure I feel like celebrating. That is not because there is nothing good in my life. There is. I can recognise that. I can list it

For the last few years, most of what I have written has been science fiction. Technomancers Rise was built from technology, identity, systems, corporations, artificial intelligence, politics, and all the things that happen when human beings build machines complicated enough to start changing the people who made them. I still love science fiction. I haven’t abandoned it. But somewhere along the way, I realised that the next thing I needed to write wasn't science fiction at all

Book Two has landed. Grab it here: https://a.co/d/gBJD0YF In this chapter of Technomancers Rise, Fahrenheit and Ellemental push through...

Tomorrow October 1st 2025 , Burning through the neXt goes live. Formats at launch: ebook, paperback, and audiobook (with Blake Hamilton...

We’re one week out from Book Two of Technomancers Rise. The heat’s coming, the corridors are lying, and our duo is ready. How to read...

When I drafted Echoes of the neXt , Fahrenheit and Ellemental weren’t built to carry the whole city on their backs. They were...

After Echoes of the neXt , Fahrenheit and Ellemental are pulled deeper into the technomancer conflict—where allies turn, corridors...

Today, the recursion begins. Pandora Theory is officially live on Amazon , available now in Kindle and Paperback . 👉 Read Pandora...