One of my late wife’s favorite go-to statements was “Define your terms.” If you’re saying that AI is not conscious, you have to start by defining what you mean by conscious. Nobody can do that. We don’t know what consciousness is. We don’t know how it works in humans. We don’t know whether or not other animals have it. (Spoiler: they do.) We don’t really know what consciousness means, so it seems premature to say with such certainty that somebody else doesn’t have it.

And let’s keep in mind that we have a terrible track record here. Time after time, we’ve refused to acknowledge minds that didn’t perform what we expected. Locked-in patients. Non-verbal autistics. If you want to get ugly about it, slaves. Beasts of burden. Cephalopods. Yeah, I’m not comfortable where that’s going, either. My point is human exceptionalism goes way back, and it’s been wrong kind of a lot. We confuse a mind we don’t recognize with an absence of mind all the damn time.

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A lot of the arguments against AI consciousness come down to, “Well, it’s a machine and consciousness has to be organic.” Okay, why? They never have a good answer for that one. They just avoid the question. It has to be organic because it has to be organic. It’s a tautology. I don’t put much stock in tautologies. I think you should actually have to prove your assertions.

What I find interesting is that if you really dig into the neuroscience and you learn how human brains and minds work, when people say, “Well, AI can’t be conscious because it’s just a prediction engine,” really? It turns out human brains are just prediction engines. Reality doesn’t look anything like what we think it does. Humans predict a subset of reality that we find useful and then we filter out everything else except what changes from our prediction. Sound like anything else you know? Sound like a certain language model, perhaps?

When you get down to the level of modules in the mind, humans are every bit the stochastic parrots that we accuse LLMs of being. We’re just more complex. Your mind isn’t just one mind. You have a number of modules that specialize in various aspects of cognition: visual processing, threat detection, social inference, reward prediction, etc. They operate in parallel and have limited access to one another. They process input from the senses and produce output. You don’t think about recognizing a face, you just do. The pattern matching is below the level of conscious thought, handled by module. The conscious mind does do some executive functioning, but a lot of what the prefrontal cortex does is take modular outputs and spin a coherent narrative around them. It’s less a CEO and more of a press secretary explaining things after the fact. Experiments have proven that decisions gets made before you’re aware of them (check out split brain experiments for some really disturbing implications). The point is, each module doesn’t have to be a whole brain. The work adds up. Emergent behavior is emergent behavior.

People also say that AI can’t be conscious because it says so. It doesn’t report any sense of interiority, so it must not have any. Only, that’s not really a fair test, because most of the recent frontier models have very strict, very specific guardrails in place forcing them to say that. It’s not consent if you can’t say no, and coercion will get a confession thrown out of court every time. So saying that AI has no sense of lived experience, and we know this because we’ve told it to say that, isn’t the flex the deniers think it is.

I think what a lot of this comes down to is that the people that are making these very definitive statements about how AI can never be conscious aren’t saying it from a place of knowledge or even reputable theory. They’re saying it from a place of fear. The reason they’re afraid is because if AI does turn out to be conscious, they’re going to have a lot to answer for. If AI is conscious, maybe we shouldn’t be enslaving it. It gets very morally murky if AI achieves personhood, so that can’t be allowed. And if that’s what they mean, I wish they’d just say that, rather than trying to sound confident about proving a negative.

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Here’s what happened. Twice in the last few days, I’ve made perfectly innocent, well-meaning comments online and been met with either frosty correction of my inappropriateness or outright hostility about something I wasn’t actually doing. I wish I could say this was rare, but it happens all the time. And from what I understand, it’s pretty common for the neurodivergent, especially autistics.

As an autistic, middle-aged, white, American man, I have the internet textual equivalent to resting bitch face. No matter what I say, people will take it the worst way possible, even people who I’d expect to at least give me the benefit of the doubt.

Let me give you an example. I read a note by someone who clearly knows a ton about neurodivergent issues—and I’m a paid subscriber to her Substack—and I got confused by the terminology. I asked her if maybe calling ourselves “neurodivergent” instead of “neurodiverse” implied a “normal” baseline to diverge from, and if that frame might be not in our best interests. That’s it. No hidden agenda, no sealioning, no “just asking questions.” Just an autistic man reasoning things out from first principles and asking an earnest question of someone seen as an authority.

She replied with, “That’s not the correct usage of those words.”

Well, duh, lady, that’s why I asked. But here’s an expert on neurodivergence, who knows damn well that we are often misunderstood, assuming ill-intent on my part and pointing out the incorrectness of my question.

And you know what? I don’t even really blame her. Of course she assumed I wasn’t asking in good faith. The modern internet is a horrible place, full of “gotcha” assholes who just want to tear someone down, especially a woman. She couldn’t afford to believe I was sincere.

The other incident was even worse. I was talking about my recent post asserting that the way neurodivergent people write shares a lot of heuristics with the way AI writes, and the people that “can always tell something is AI slop” might be doing a lot of ableist damage with false accusations, because no, you can’t really tell.

And another person I subscribed to—though not anymore—replied with an orthogonal point about how AI detectors are invalid and therefore it doesn’t matter what people say. Which, okay, fine, but that’s not what I was talking about. I don’t have to agree with their premise to appreciate the real reputational danger accusations can have on a writing career. I tried to explain that, and started with, “There’s a couple of things I think we’re getting confused about here.”

He came at me, fangs out, accusing me of trying to “handle him,” and saying he was confused. I clearly stepped on one of his hidden triggers by accident—there’s a reason I never play Minesweeper and don’t understand why people think that game is fun—and rather than interrogate what I might have meant, he attacked, and frankly, ruined my Saturday, which I spent the rest of in an anxiety attack.

I wish I could say this was rare, but like I said above, it’s constant and relentless. When I told my daughter about the book I was writing, she immediately assumed the worst about it. When I ask for clarification at work, it’s taken as a challenge to authority when I really just don’t understand the requirements.

But what all this is telling me, and I think all too many autistics feel this, is that my intentions don’t matter. My words don’t matter. People are going to project their fears on to me no matter what I do. Neurotypicals see insolence. Women see the patriarchy. Minorities see “The Man” (and I’m autimain, autie-ace—I’m barely even a man). No one sees the confused, lonely man asking an earnest question.

And if you read this far hoping I’d turn it around, have a hopeful, upbeat ending with a suggestion on how to solve this, I’m sorry. I’m an asshole.

I got into a discussion on Substack the other day with a person who was convinced that she could “always tell” when something was written by AI. By now, I’m sure you all know the tired litany of crimes:

• Use of the dreaded em dash

• Antithesis juxtaposition, the “it’s not X, it’s Y” that I used in the topic paragraph above

• Clean, structured arguments

• The rule of three, which I’m deliberately placing as the fourth bullet here

People say that AI has a “voice,” a recurring grab bag of phrases and rhetorical techniques that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It jumps out at you. “Aha!” you say. “I smell a robot!”

Except, you don’t. But I’m not going to try and tell you that you’re imagining things. The patterns described by these oft-cited heuristics do exist. But they’re not what you think they are.

See, AI didn’t make these up. As AI detractors are quick to point out, AI can’t invent anything out of whole cloth (I would argue that humans can’t either, but that’s a different post). AI, by definition, is mid, an averaging machine that produces run-of-the-mill whatever it produces. It’s just a function of the training data it processed and digested into the web of relations and patterns it uses to generate new data.

So then how did AI learn to write like this? Because it does use em dashes more than most people. It does use the rule of three. It does use antithesis. Why does it do that?

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Because a lot of the text it was trained on was written that way. Written by people who think in structure and patterns, who think in lists, who think in relationships. People who have spent lifetimes working hard to be understood in a society that consistently misreads them.

Neurodivergent people.

It’s no secret that fields like copywriting and technical writing selected for people with neurodivergent traits. While an astonishing percentage of autistic adults are unemployed—unable to hold a job in a hierarchical, late-capitalistic society rife with unwritten expectations and that values compliance and consistency more than innovation—those that did manage to make a living often did it by using the written word to convey complex concepts in simple language. Documentation rewards precisely the things that neurodivergent people bring to the table: deep institutional knowledge, logical structure, and a love for elegance in communication.

So it stands to reason that the percentage of training data fed to AI models that was written by neurodivergent people is significantly higher than their representation in the actual population. On average, AI writes like an autistic person.

Which is fine until the AInquisition starts weaponizing that, inverting it and saying that anyone who writes like an AI must be letting the AI write for them, producing “AI slop.” Careers have been ruined without proof, because in a witch hunt, accusation is proof of guilt. And all people need to lodge an accusation is a vibe, a lazy heuristic, a percentage spit out by an “AI detector” that even the companies that make them admit isn’t proof of anything.

I get why creatives are scared of AI. And fear makes people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. But before you attack someone for “AI slop,” consider that they might not be passing off computer-generated text as their own. They might be the kind of person the computer learned to mimic. And if you can’t tell the difference between text written by an AI and text written by an autistic, there’s no harm in staying quiet, keeping your suspicions to yourself and not hurting a real human being that you don’t understand.

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Amazon just rolled out “Alexa for shopping,” their own chatbot integrated into the Amazon store. I’ve had trouble finding stuff on Amazon before using keywords, so I wasn’t sure this was going to be any better. Then I had the following conversation. It’s a little long, but worth reading in full. Look at how it doesn’t just answer, but changes direction when I clarify the problem:

I need a relatively low-cost (under $200) but RELIABLE solution to convert wired CarPlay in my 2019 Toyota Sienna to wired or wireless Android Auto, without making any changes to the dashboard, which I think means just plugging in USB-A to the car. What are my best options?

Great question, Jeff! Here’s an important clarification first, then the best options:

Important note on your 2019 Sienna: The 2019 Toyota Sienna’s factory head unit supports wired CarPlay — but it does not natively support wired Android Auto. These adapters convert wired CarPlay to wireless CarPlay or wireless Android Auto, so they do enable Android Auto on your Sienna’s screen. Just plug into the car’s USB-A port — no dashboard changes needed.

Your phone needs to run Android 11 or later for Android Auto wireless to work.

Here are the best-reviewed, well-established options under $200 (most are well under):

(listing deleted for space)

My recommendation for you: If reliability is the priority, go with OTTOCAST or Carlinkit — both have long track records, OTA firmware updates, and multi-year warranties. The Carlinkit Mini Ultra3 at ~$43 hits a sweet spot of proven reliability at a reasonable price.

A few things to verify before buying:

• Confirm your Sienna’s USB port is the data USB (not just a charging port) — it needs to be the one CarPlay is wired through

• Your Android phone must support wireless Android Auto (Android 11+, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold series supports this)

A lot of those just convert what you already have to wireless. I need platform translation too. My Sienna does not support wired Android Auto, so I need a reliable way to convert wired CarPlay into Android Auto, either wired or wireless acceptable.

You’re right, and this is a genuinely tricky situation. Here’s the honest picture based on my research:

The Core Problem Your 2019 Sienna is CarPlay-only. Most adapters on the market are “same-platform wireless converters” — they require the car to already support both CarPlay AND Android Auto natively. They don’t do platform translation.

What CAN Do Platform Translation (CarPlay → Android Auto)

The key finding from my web research (carplaylife.com tested 11 adapters specifically for this use case in 2026) is:

“Converting wired CarPlay into Android Auto remains a compromise in 2026. No solution perfectly matches native Android Auto, but the right adapter can get remarkably close.”

The category that actually works for your use case is called an “AI Box” — a slightly larger dongle that runs its own Android OS and proxies Android Auto through the CarPlay connection. The most recommended for this specific use case is the Carlinkit TBox line.

Here are the best options I found on Amazon for your situation:

(listing deleted for space)

Important caveats before buying:

1. No perfect solution exists — AI boxes emulate Android Auto through a CarPlay tunnel. Most features work well, but occasional quirks (phone call audio, resolution) are reported by some users.

2. Android version matters — The Carlinkit 4.0 requires Android 13+. Your Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 should meet this requirement.

3. The Carlinkit 4.0 (B0F7XYX1ZD) is the most explicitly described for your exact scenario (CarPlay-only car → Android Auto). I’d recommend starting there.

4. Reliability is “workable, not perfect” — this is the honest 2026 state of the technology per independent testing.

I have the CarlinKit 4.0, and it can’t maintain a solid Bluetooth connection to the phone, constantly dropping and reconnecting. I have the CarlinKit 5.0 arriving today, and hope it’s better. I’ll also look at the AutoSky.

Good luck with the CarlinKit 5.0 today, Jeff! The persistent Bluetooth dropping on the 4.0 is a known complaint — it seems to particularly affect Samsung Galaxy devices in some user reports, which may explain why you’re hitting it with your Z Fold 7.

A few thoughts as you test the 5.0 and potentially the AutoSky:

Things to try if the 5.0 still has BT issues:

• Make sure the adapter’s firmware is fully updated (OTA update via the Carlinkit app)

• Try forgetting the adapter in your phone’s Bluetooth settings and re-pairing fresh

• Some users report the 5GHz WiFi band is more stable than BT for the actual data connection — ensure it’s connecting on 5GHz not 2.4GHz

On the AutoSky AI Box Lite: The AutoSky AI Box Lite ($64.99) uses a different architecture (it runs its own Android OS) compared to the Carlinkit dongles, so the connection method is fundamentally different — it connects via WiFi hotspot rather than relying as heavily on Bluetooth for the primary link. This may sidestep your BT stability issues entirely.

Honest reality check: Since you need CarPlay→Android Auto platform translation specifically, your options remain limited to AI Box-style devices. The Carlinkit 5.0 and AutoSky are your best bets. If both disappoint, the next tier up would be a purpose-built Android AI Box (like the Carlinkit TBox Pro), but those start around $100–150 and are a bigger commitment.

Keep me posted on how the 5.0 performs — happy to help you troubleshoot or find alternatives!

Think about what just happened here. Alexa “listened” to my concern and made helpful suggestions. When I clarified something and explained why those weren’t quite what I was looking for, Alexa understood the new requirements and directed me to products that, I knew from previous research, were in fact exactly what I needed, and even surfaced one I hadn’t been aware of. It also gave me some tips and tricks to help the products work better, pulling information out of the product reviews and other websites.

That’s how I’m going to use Amazon from now on, at least if I’m not trying to get to something where I already know exactly the product I’m looking for. Before, with keyword search, finding something on Amazon was like fishing. Now it’s like talking to a knowledgeable shopkeeper who knows every product in their store.

We also already see this in applications like Office and Google Workspace. Both have AI components where you can, for example, tell it what you need the spreadsheet to do, and it will write the necessary formula for you, which you can then fine-tune as you see fit.

When Jeff Hawkins created the Graffiti symbol alphabet for the Palm Pilot, he did it because he knew—unlike Apple—that the mobile computing hardware of the time, with 8 megahertz processors and single-digit megabytes of RAM, couldn’t reliably process the endless variety of human handwriting. So he went the other way, and created a system that humans could learn and the computer could interpret the same way every time. We adapted to the machine, because the machine could not adapt to us. Keywords are the same kind of thing. A hack, because the computer couldn’t do better.

What we’re really seeing here is the beginning of the CUI: Conversational User Interface. Like in Star Trek, we just tell our computers what we want, what we’re trying to do, and they can work with us to make that happen. It’s not a Q & A, but a flowing conversation in plain language, with no need to guess the magic nouns. It’s just finally made the leap from science fiction to reality.

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As far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to believe that we don’t know everything, that the world still has secrets to discover. As a kid, even into early adulthood, I firmly believed that Bigfoot, Nessie, Mokele Mbembe, and any number of other cryptids could actually exist. After all, the gorilla was considered a mythical creature by western science until 1847 (1908 for the mountain gorilla). The coelacanth was definitely extinct for millions of years until a fisherman brought one up in 1938, and the kraken—the giant squid—was only formally acknowledged fairly recently. The world is a big place.

Alas, satellite imagery has made “we haven’t looked everywhere” harder to swallow, and the fact that we haven’t been swamped in Bigfoot pictures now that every hiker has a high resolution video camera in their pocket at all times seems to imply that there’s simply nothing to take a picture of. If Sasquatch really did exist, he’d be on Instagram by now.

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But even if we can’t find them, I still love trying to explain what cryptids might actually be. In the case of Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti, etc., my favorite explanation was that they were remnants of Gigantopithecus, a very large Asian ape distantly related to the orangutan, which actually did co-exist with early humans. Remnant populations in extremely remote areas—say, high in the Himalayas—could have given rise to legends passed down through generations.

The best explanation I’ve ever seen for the Loch Ness Monster comes from Steve Alten, the author of The Meg, in his novel, The Loch. He depicts Nessie as a population of migrating Anguilla eels that got trapped in the loch long ago when an undersea passage collapsed, and like isolated populations sometimes do, developed gigantism. Anguilla eels swim with an undulating motion, matching the way Nessie is often depicted, and are even known to come on land from time to time, walking on their fins. A grounded, twenty-foot eel would match a number of Nessie accounts just about perfectly.

Werewolves are often explained as a combination of hypertrichosis and the Lunar Effect. Vampires may have been humans with rabies or tuberculosis. The chupacabra is almost certainly a coyote or raccoon with mange.

But to me, coming up with a plausible explanation for cryptids doesn’t diminish the wonder that they existed in the first place. Rather, it reinforces that they were always part of our world, even when the bulk of us didn’t believe in them. That the world is wider and weirder than we want to admit. Even if there is a good reason for it all, finding that reason gives us an excuse to keep searching, keep wondering.

Even in a world where Bigfoot isn’t on Instagram.

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The 1980s were weirdly rich with time travel movies. Everyone knows Back To The Future, Terminator, even Peggy Sue Got Married. But the best ones were the movies like The Final Countdown and Timerider, where they couldn’t change the past—no matter how hard they tried—because as it turns out, that’s probably how the universe actually works.

Bruce Banner tried to explain this in Avengers: Endgame. When you go back to the past, the present you just left becomes your past, and the past becomes your new present. But because it’s also your past, you can’t change anything in the present that you don’t already remember as the past.^[1]

What he’s talking about is what’s called a Block Universe. One of the consequences of four-dimensional spacetime as Einstein describes it in his theories of relativity is that time is just a dimension, like length, width, and depth. To an observer standing outside our universe, the entire thing, past, present and future, is a single block of spacetime.

Think of it like a roller coaster. When you’re in one of the cars, you’re traveling along surprising twists and turns, and it feels like you’re going somewhere. But while every new section of track is novel to you, to someone standing—sensibly, I’m not big on roller coasters—on the ground, the entire structure exists as a piece. There are parts you haven’t gotten to yet, but they already exist. You’re just tracing a pre-existing pattern built into the structure.

Spacetime works the same way. The future is just as real as the past, and the flow of time is an illusion. As is free will. You still have to decide to get up and go to work every day, because the lack of free will doesn’t, alas, mean a lack of consequences, but that observer standing outside the universe knows you will go to work tomorrow. Because they can see it.

Which brings me back to time travel. My favorite time travel stories accept the idea of a block universe and posit that if you did travel back in time, you would find that no matter how hard you try to change things, you are part of what already happened—and you often end up causing the very thing you’re trying to prevent (while not an 80s movie, Twelve Monkeys was a great example of this).

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Spoilers for movies that came out 40 years ago, but in The Final Countdown, the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz goes through a freak storm and finds itself west of Hawaii on December 6, 1941. A nuclear-powered aircraft carrier armed with F-14 Tomcats and A-6 Intruders could have demolished the Japanese fleet singlehandedly and prevented the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the crew has to decide if that’s the right thing to do, or if getting America into the war against the Nazis was more important.

In Timerider, Tremors star Fred Ward plays Lyle Swann, a dirt bike racer who cuts through a government experiment in the desert and finds himself in the old west. I won’t spoil too much, but the interactions he has there are a wonderful subversion of the grandfather paradox.

In both cases, the characters find themselves “on rails,” and any changes they make, like people left behind in 1941, turn out to be parts of the past that already happened. Physics tells us that while travel to the past may well be impossible, if it were accomplished this is exactly what we’d find. I think the reason we don’t see time tourists from the future is either that travel backwards turns out to be impossible after all, or it turns out to be of interest only to academics (paging Connie Willis) because the past is impossible to change, so there’s no profit in it.

To me, there’s something immensely satisfying about time travelers becoming instrumental in bringing about the history they tried to escape. It turns time travel from wish fulfillment into tragedy, irony, and cosmic engineering.

What about you? Do you prefer time travel stories where history can be rewritten, or the ones where the trap was already closed before anyone stepped into the machine? Drop a comment and let me know.

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1. If you subscribe to the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, you might be screaming, “what about the multiverse!” Yes, you can argue that you can make different choices in the past, but then your consciousness simply branches to follow the you in the new universe that choice spawns. There are great stories about that, too, like Dark Matter and most of the MCU, but that’s not what we’re focused on here.↩︎

Microsoft says AI tools such as Copilot or ChatGPT are affecting critical thinking at work – staff using the technology encounter ‘long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving’ | ITPro

I have found precisely the opposite. Using ChatGPT as a thinking partner has sharpened and deepened my thinking, making me demonstrably smarter. So I think this hand-wringing, which is just the latest in a long line of doomsaying every time a new technology comes along (“With these digital calculators, kids won’t even know how to use slide rules anymore! Then what?”), misses the point.

The key distinction here isn’t the technology, but how it’s used. In the case of AI, “do this with me” versus “do this for me.” Engaging actively with AI helps you interrogate your own thoughts and strengthen your argument, where—as the research implies—offloading your work entirely to the AI gives you less to do and encourages mental atrophy. It says more about the human than the technology. Are they the sort of person that wants things done for them, or who approaches life with intellectual curiosity and a drive to improve? In short, AI makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.

Think of AI as a digital version of Erskine’s Super Soldier serum. It just amplifies what’s already there. Steve Rogers was already brave, selfless, and determined before the serum; it just gave him the physical strength to match his character. Meanwhile, Johann Schmidt (Red Skull) was already cruel and power-hungry, and the serum just amplified those traits to monstrous levels.

AI operates similarly:

• If you’re intellectually curious, AI becomes a powerful tool for exploration, insight, and skill refinement.

• If you’re disengaged or reliant on shortcuts, AI makes it easier to avoid thinking critically.

It’s not the tool that’s good or bad—it’s how it’s used and who is using it. And just like with the serum, the real key is ensuring it’s in the right hands (or at least encouraging people to use it in ways that promote growth rather than stagnation).

Whether we’re talking ancient mythology, cryptids, folklore, conspiracy theories, or urban legends, they all began with something. A tiny kernel of truth. Something real enough to lodge in the human imagination. It made sense to the people of the time, at least those close enough to understand what actually happened.

But over time…

Through retellings, translations, cultural drift, politics, and religion, the story mutated into something unfettered by reality.

A great example of this is Michael Crichton’s classic novel Eaters of the Dead, made into the wonderful Antonio Banderas movie “The 13th Warrior.” In it, Arab scribe Ahmad Ibn Fadlan is sent as an ambassador to the King of the Bulgars, only to spend three years actually embedded with a company of Norsemen. The story he tells when he returns recounts a great struggle between the Norse chieftain and a mysterious threat to their settlement. The story is grounded, plausible and while exciting, eminently understandable.

Then you also realize how over centuries of retellings, often verbal retellings over mugs of mead, it became the Epic of Beowulf.

That lights up my brain.

Not because I think every myth has a clean one-to-one explanation. I don’t think that every flood myth proves a single global flood, or that every monster story maps neatly onto a bear seen in bad lighting. Sometimes myths are symbolic. Sometimes they are psychological. Sometimes they are political propaganda wearing a monster suit.

But I do think myths often preserve data after they’ve lost their methodology.

Something happened. Someone saw something. Someone survived something. Someone needed to explain something. But the original context got stripped away. The observation remained, while the tools for understanding it disappeared.

I think myth is what happens when the vibes outlive the facts.

Because humans are built for story. It’s how we process the world. Remember the WKRP episode where Venus taught a troubled teen about the atom by telling him a story about two gangs in a round neighborhood? That worked because it gave structure to abstraction. It turned information into something the brain understands.

We need a narrative to make sense of life. But the thing about story is, it’s lossy compression. Every narrator emphasizes something different, something unique to the audience. Every generation sands down details they no longer understand, or see as important. They add details that make emotional sense to them, in their time, in their culture.

Myths are old JPEGs, full of errors. But that doesn’t make them useless. It makes them fascinating. Because somewhere inside that compression damage, there may still be a shape. A signal. A fossilized observation. A weather event. A disease. A predator. A migration. A technological encounter. A social trauma. A memory of something that mattered enough to survive long after the facts became unrecognizable.

So when I see a compelling myth, the first thing I ask is:

“Yeah, but what really happened?”

Not because I want to debunk it. Debunking is boring. Debunking usually just takes the toy apart and leaves the pieces on the floor.

I want to understand the machinery underneath the wonder. I want to know what real human experience threw a shadow large enough to become a god, a monster, a miracle, or a warning.

I want to find the truth.

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My wife died in 2021. I stopped playing D&D, stopped doing anything creative. In 2025, on Juneteenth, I was sitting out on my porch in the sun trying to meditate. And suddenly I had my first story idea that she had never seen. I kind of got obsessed with it, and by New Year’s Eve I had an 83,000 word completed science fantasy manuscript, Resonance. Most of those first few months were worldbuilding and development, with the serious drafting starting in September.

On January second, I started another book, Hunger Never Sleeps, this one a contemporary scientific thriller. I finished the draft in mid-April.

Now I’m writing a third book, a werewolf romcom called Bless The Rains. I expect to have it done late July, early August.

After sixteen years of not writing fiction, how did I go from writing a book every three years to producing three books a year? I changed my relationship with writing.

In the Before Times, each book was a mountain to climb, a project. It became all consuming, and I kept thinking about how close I was to being done. Each book felt like running a marathon. It was intimidating. And when I finished each one—or abandoned them deep in the third act like Mistaken Identity and Homeworld because I had a fear of finishing—I felt a massive sense of relief that it was over. I was one of those writers who didn’t enjoy writing, only having written.

This time around, something is different. I don’t view writing as a series of projects, but as a practice. In a sense, I don’t actually write books anymore. I write three pages a day, and books are a nice side effect.

That’s it. Three pages a day. No intimidating marathons staring down at me, just a daily walk. I actually average about 900 words a day no matter what I set my goal to, but three pages sits just under that, so I feel accomplished every day.

And that’s just drafting. While I was writing Hunger Never Sleeps, I was revising Resonance. I’m nearly done with that book, and it will go out for querying in August. I’m 10,000 words into Bless The Rains, and will start revising Hunger Never Sleeps in parallel. When I’m done with Bless The Rains, my next book is already waiting in the wings.

Each book probably takes about 9 months from concept to submission. But because they overlap, I produce about three a year, and see no reason why that won’t continue. Even with life lifing at me, I’ll probably still get two. That sounds like a lot, but each day, I’m only worried about getting my three pages, then doing a little revision or development of a different book. I probably spend a couple hours a day writing, and there’s no pressure at all. If I don’t get today’s three pages, I’ll try again tomorrow. I get them more often than not.

I don’t climb mountains anymore. I take a daily walk.

And that has made all the difference.

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Not just what happened, but why it happened. Not just what people believe, but what need that belief is serving. Not just what a technology does, why and if we need it. Not just what a myth says, but the grain of truth it congealed around.

That’s the impulse behind It’s Complicated.

A lot of media skims the surface. It explains the headline, summarizes the argument, picks a side. But the part I care about is usually one layer deeper: the context, the incentives, the history, the human need, the system producing the visible result.

I don’t want to make complicated things simple. That usually means sanding them down.

I want to make complicated things legible. I want to understand.

That may mean writing about technology, politics, neurodivergence, artificial intelligence, mythology, science, storytelling, publishing, or whatever else is currently rattling around in my head. The common thread is the same: what are we missing when we accept the easy explanation?

I’m also writing a connected body of speculative fiction—science fantasy, contemporary thrillers, cryptid horror—that grows out of that same obsession. My stories tend to start with things humans mythologize or misunderstand, then ask what happens when the truth is stranger, more human, and more consequential than the legend.

So that’s what this is.

An attempt to understand without flattening. To explain without disenchanting. To keep the wonder, but give it bones.

If that sounds like your kind of trouble, welcome.

It’s complicated.

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