All Writing

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.