All Writing

Release dates, a spine that has to line up, the part of advance reading I can't stand, and a small hint of what comes after The Emotion Engine.

A week back home in Missouri: a Chiefs overtime game at Arrowhead, the best BBQ of my life, six classes at my old high school, and fifty books sold at Basement Books KC in Liberty.

Five months in, 71,197 words, and the machine at the center of The Emotion Engine is finally on the page. A look at the last stretch of the draft and what it feels like to write toward an ending you already know.

Sheffield was mine from the ground up. The two books that came after it belonged to somebody else first. On a childhood in the folklore section, a teenage table where I always got stuck being the DM, and the forgotten tales hiding underneath Tatwitt and The Emotion Engine.

Before the website, the signings, and the third novel, there was just a boy walking in the woods — and a Kansas City Chiefs easter egg hiding in plain sight on the front page of the book.

Six hundred and thirty-seven copies, or sixty at full price, depending on which number I decide to believe today. On sales dashboards, the voice in my head, and doing the work without a guarantee.

After fifteen years of writing from Japan, a week home in Missouri: a Chiefs game, family, and my first in-person signing on home soil, at Basement Books KC in Liberty on September 25.

You cannot invent just one alien animal. Building the wildlife of The Emotion Engine meant building a food chain, one creature at a time: the six-legged hexlings, the velokai that hunts them, and the scrappion in the tunnels below.

Shaden processes the world as data. I process it as a flood. On writing a man who feels nothing, as someone who feels everything.

Seven notebooks, six chapters, and a detour back to the beginning of The Emotion Engine — finding the things that didn't make it into the manuscript the first time.

A recap of the May 31st signing at Infinity Books — the first in-person author event, two readers named Masako, a bookshop cat, and the best biryani in Tokyo.

After four covers and two years, Sheffield finally has the cover it deserves. Here's the full story — and why I kept starting over.

A writing problem in Chapter Six of The Emotion Engine — and the real NASA mission that solved it.

A science fiction story about survival, emotional absence, and a hostile alien world — and why it might be the most personal thing I've written.

There is a very specific kind of loneliness that comes from watching your football team score a game-winning touchdown while the rest of the world is asleep.

What changes when you've already proved to yourself that you can finish a novel — and how that shapes everything that comes after.

How Tatterhood became Tatwitt, and why the American Southwest was always the right setting for this story.