(And look at that still frame! What a perfect encapsulation of the giddiness and excitement I’m feeling!)

If you haven’t caught it yet - please enjoy this conversation between me and my friend about my latest escapades.

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One of the things that is so gratifying about writing and worldbuilding is that they start to feel real, especially when you see others get excited about the world you’re playing with.

One of the core pillars of the Muses’ War world is the Grand University. It is part university, part conservatory, part theological seminary, part forge, part archive, and part extremely combustible collection of brilliant people with strong opinions. It is the home of the Collegium Bardica, the Musae Seminarii, the Armipotenschola, the Academie Illuminatore, and a number of other divisions that I’m sure will cause trouble later.

And now, because this is how my brain works, it has a bookstore.

Or at least the fantasy-world equivalent of one.

To have a proper fantasy-college bookstore you need seals, so I prompted (yes, prompted - if that’s not your jam, go in peace, my child) for them using the descriptions from my books as reference. I think they came out really good.

The initial collection includes:

• Classic collegiate-style T-shirts and sweatshirts

• Coffee mugs in black and white

• Die-cut stickers

• Die-cut magnets

I also intend to offer autographed/personalized books through the shop - once I refresh my stock of author copies for the store and for conventions.

Along with the Muses’ War collection, I’ll be doing a few other things that are Wallbanger Creative aligned outside of the novel universe. Look for them in the coming weeks!

The store is open now, and I’d love for you to take a look.

Whether you want a mug for your morning coffee, a sweatshirt for your next writing session, a sticker for your laptop, a magnet for your refrigerator, or a signed copy of the books, the first collection is ready.

And if you find yourself wondering which division of the Grand University you would belong to? That is an entirely reasonable question. I’m not saying it means you’re Muse-touched, but I’m not ruling it out, either.

Muses’ War: Fugue of Fire is out in the world, and I’m excited for you to read it. It seems that no launch, especially one where “The Big River Site” (as one of my author friends refers to it) is involved, goes by the numbers. Yes, we know the title has a little “extra” in it. At this point I’m just happy the back and forth didn’t delay the launch.

[Also, my ongoing admiration for She Who Makes Them Wear Pants at (IYKYK) for her ongoing windmill tilting with The Big River Site to get the title and other things sorted.]

Now that Fugue of Fire has launched, I wanted to take a little time to talk about one of the structural ideas behind the series: the way I’m shaping Muses’ War as something like a literary symphony.

That seems appropriate, given both my background as a musician and the subject matter of the story itself. Muses’ War is, at its heart, a series about art, inspiration, creativity, corruption, and the cost of bringing beauty into the world. So it made sense to me that the structure of the series would draw from music—not just in the titles, but in the way the books are built.

Some of that is obvious. Some of it is less so.

At the broadest level, the series is arranged around musical forms:

Overture of Shadow
Fugue of Fire
Intermezzo
Scherzo of Madness
Finale of Radiance

To be a little more precise, that means four main novels, with Intermezzo planned as a collection of short fiction between Books Two and Three. Taken together, I want them to feel like movements within a larger symphonic work.

A symphony, at least in the way I’m thinking about it here, is a form of musical storytelling. Each movement has its own character, tempo, emotional color, and often its own internal structure. Yet as the movements unfold, they begin to reveal something larger than any single section could express on its own.

One famous example that comes to mind is Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. I am not going to turn this into a full music-history lecture—there are plenty of better places to go for that—but what fascinates me about that piece is the way Berlioz uses recurring musical ideas to tell a story.

The famous idée fixe, the recurring theme associated with the artist’s obsessive, unrequited love, appears across all five movements in different emotional forms. It is not merely repeated. It is transformed. It is made tender, ecstatic, distorted, grotesque. By the time the symphony reaches its nightmare vision of a witches’ sabbath, the theme has become something very different from where it began.

That is the kind of literary approach I’m trying to take with Muses’ War.

The recurring idea is not a single melody, of course. It is a set of questions:

What is the role of art in society? What is the nature of inspiration? How does inspiration shape creativity? How does creativity shape culture? And how do art, beauty, truth, and goodness become things worth defending?

Overture of Shadow is meant to do what an overture does: open the work. An overture sets the stage. It introduces atmosphere, theme, color, and expectation. It prepares the listener—or in this case, the reader—for the world they are about to enter.

So Overture of Shadow establishes the central motifs of the series: Muse-touch, artistic power, corruption, hidden history, love, sacrifice, and the danger of treating inspiration as something to be possessed rather than received.

Fugue of Fire, then, takes those themes and begins to work them contrapuntally.

A fugue is a musical form built around a subject that is introduced and then explored through multiple voices. Those voices may enter at different pitch levels, answer one another, imitate one another, invert the theme, develop variations, create harmony, or create tension. They remain distinct, but they are also part of a larger design.

When I say Fugue of Fire is structured as a fugue, I do not mean it is a literal one-to-one musical diagram. I am not pretending I have written Bach in prose. But the idea of a subject moving through distinct voices and using those voices to transform, challenge, and reveal something different about that subject is very much the principle behind the book.

Fugue of Fire begins in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe at the end of Overture of Shadow. The veil between worlds has been torn. Eagle’s Wing, the kingdom’s greatest relic, has been sacrificed to bind that wound. What slipped through the breach is now loose in the world.

Breheimen is reacting not only to the catastrophe itself, but also to the hidden actions, old secrets, and institutional failures that made the catastrophe possible.

From there, the novel develops three primary “voices.”

The first belongs to Ilmarinen Steelhammer.

Ilmarinen is looking for redemption. He wants to repair something he feels responsible for breaking, and that desire sends him on the quest to reforge the kingdom’s sword of state. He is supported by Dorian Silversong and Dorian’s new apprentice, Revan, but the central question of Ilmarinen’s arc is this:

When does the search for redemption become something else?

When does noble purpose risk curdling into pride, obsession, or control?

In this world, those distinctions matter. Intention has consequences. Creation has consequences. The question is not only whether Ilmarinen can make the sword, but what kind of spirit is being poured into the making.

The second voice belongs to Phrygian Eobanus.

Phrygian was a supporting and mentor figure in Overture of Shadow, but in Fugue of Fire, he faces his own crisis. He recognizes his complicity in leaving the world exposed to danger. As a senior figure within the Grand University and the Church of the Muse, he understands that the problem is not merely personal. It is institutional, theological, and cultural.

Yes, I am very deliberately drawing on the historical Reformation here, even to the point of Phrygian attaching theses to the doors of the Musae Seminarii.

But I was also careful with this thread, because I did not want the Church of the Muse to become a caricature.

I do not want to write the tired (and frankly, woke) version of “the church is evil.” Human institutions are vulnerable to human corruption, naturally, but people inside those institutions often act from conviction, fear, loyalty, love, duty, pride, and genuine belief in the rightness of their cause.

Phrygian’s story asks: if you know something must change, what are you willing to risk to say so? What does penance look like when the institution you love is also part of what must be reformed?

The third voice belongs to Seraphina Ravenscroft.

Seraphina has always had an agenda. She is accustomed to using wealth, nobility, influence, and power to get what she wants. In Overture of Shadow, she seeks control and fails, and through that failure, she places her daughter at terrible risk. In Fugue of Fire, she moves into full maternal desperation.

Her question is one I find deeply interesting: What is a mother willing to do to save her child?

Raconteur Press explored a version of that question a few years ago in the All Will Burn series of anthologies. I had a story in the first volume of that series, and it is a theme that can go to very powerful (and very dark) places.

Seraphina’s line in the fugue explores that darkness.

What happens when love becomes bargain, sacrifice becomes ambition, and protection becomes something unexpected?

Her story also sets up the continuation of the larger series. By the end of Fugue of Fire, there is a resolution, but there is also a clear sense that the next movement is ready to begin.

There are other voices and ornamentations layered into the fugue as well. King Siegfried has choices to make, and plenty of people in his ear to offer advice. The court has its own intrigues and pressures. William Cantoren, the king’s court bard, has an evolving role as advisor, truth-teller, and moral counterweight. Those threads are not the primary subjects of the fugue, but they add color, tension, and resonance around the main lines.

That, to me, is part of the pleasure and the challenge of writing this book. Multiple storylines have to remain distinct, but they also have to speak to one another. They have to create harmony in some places and dissonance in others. They have to build toward pressure. In musical terms, many fugues build toward moments of stretto, where the subject entries overlap more tightly and create a sense of urgency before resolution. Structurally, that is very much what I wanted the back half of Fugue of Fire to feel like.

The next major novel will be Scherzo of Madness.

A scherzo traditionally carries a sense of speed, contrast, and unpredictability. In practice, that instability can become nervous, volatile, violent, or uncanny, depending on the composer. That makes it the right word for the book where the series’ tension turns furious.

I am not promising guillotines, though Berlioz gives us one memorable musical example of fourth-movement violence in Symphonie fantastique. In that movement, the artist is marched to the scaffold, and just before the fatal blow, the beloved’s theme flashes back one last time and is cut off as the blade falls, complete with a descending arpeggio representing the head rolling into the basket.

What I am promising is that Scherzo of Madness brings the story to a crisis point.

And then comes Finale of Radiance.

A finale is exactly what it sounds like: the movement that brings the whole work to its conclusion. But a strong finale does not merely stop the music. At its best, it gathers what came before and makes the ending feel earned.

That is what I want for Finale of Radiance. The themes return. The conflict resolves. The cost of peace is finally counted. The corruption must be faced, and the world has to arrive at whatever new normal its people have fought, suffered, and sacrificed to achieve.

Before that, though, there will also be Intermezzo.

My current plan is to collect the existing Muses’ War short stories, add a few more, and release them as a collection later this year. The purpose of Intermezzo is to give readers a pause between the larger movements. It lets us change color, explore the edges of the world, catch our breath, and spend time with stories that are not necessarily part of the main symphonic line but still belong to the same musical world.

So that is the architecture I’m working with: a series built like a symphony, with individual books and stories acting as movements, and Fugue of Fire specifically structured as a fugue of three primary voices—redemption, reformation, and maternal sacrifice.

Whether I pulled it off is ultimately for readers to decide.

But I hope this gives you a little more context for how I’m thinking about the series, where these choices come from, and why music is not just decoration in Muses’ War. It is part of the design.

If you’ve read Fugue of Fire, I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are tremendously helpful, and so is sharing the book with friends who might enjoy epic fantasy about music, magic, faith, art, corruption, and the cost of creation.

The Muses’ War continues.

The Church of the Muse and the Custody of Illumination

From De Institutionibus Breheimensis: Crown, Church, and University, prepared for incoming students of the Grand University

To speak of Breheimen as a kingdom of sword and song is to speak incompletely. The Crown may command armies and preserve the peace; the Grand University may order the arts and sciences; yet neither alone can answer why creation matters, nor why inspiration should be received as gift rather than seized as possession. That charge belongs to the Church of the Muse.

It is tempting, particularly among foreign commentators and younger students overfond of tidy diagrams, to place the Church beneath the Crown or within the University, as though it were either a royal chapel writ large or a theological faculty that had forgotten its academic modesty. Such reductions are convenient, and therefore wrong. The Church is neither servant nor rival to the other powers of Breheimen, but one of the three pillars by which the realm has long understood itself. The Crown guards order. The University orders knowledge. The Church teaches the kingdom what order and knowledge are for.

Its power lies not only in chancels, councils, abbeys, or solemn halls, though it has no shortage of these. Its truer influence is woven through the habits of the people: in the blessing spoken before a child’s first lesson, in the song raised over a new forge, in the oath sworn by a Master before accepting an apprentice, in the quiet given to mourning, in the taboo against false Muse-touch, in the reverence paid to a work made beautifully and without vanity. The Church governs not merely worship, but meaning. Where the Muse touches a life, the Church asks what that touch requires. Where beauty moves the heart, the Church asks whether it also moves the soul toward the Virtuous, the Glorious, and the Veritable.

Yet the Church did not descend upon a faithless people. Reverence for the Muse is older than Breheimen, older perhaps than crown, charter, or school. Wherever the Muse-touch has manifested, men and women have bowed, sung, carved, whispered thanks, or fallen silent before the mystery of inspiration. A bard before his audience, a smith before the first heat of morning, a mason setting the keystone of an arch, a mother humming over a cradle: all have known some instinct to honor what does not seem to arise wholly from themselves.

Before the Accords, such reverence remained various in form. Ironmount kept its forge-hymns and hearth-oaths, preserving the old saying: Forge is life. Forge is strength. Forge is home. Forge is hall. In the northern settlements, to let the forge go cold was not merely inconvenience but a kind of communal diminishment, for fire meant work, shelter, armament, memory, and kinship. Hinterhold kept winter rites and oath-songs by which endurance was sanctified. Lyrialia cherished sea-canticles and lyric devotions, understanding longing itself as a kind of sacred tension. Ferrendell blessed gem, hearth, and house, finding reverence in clarity and refinement. Silea favored civic ceremony, ordered procession, stone, light, and the visible dignity of office. Breheimen itself, first city and later capital, gathered these voices as it gathered artisans, diplomats, scholars, traders, and the Muse-touched from every road that touched its gates.

The genius of Karelia’s settlement was not to abolish these older forms, but to harmonize them. The old songs were not silenced; they were tuned.

Thus the Church of the Muse, as Breheimen knows it, belongs to the age after the Accords. Queen Karelia did not invent Muse-veneration, nor did she claim for herself the office of prophet or priest. Rather, perceiving that the newly bound kingdom required common meaning as well as common law, she called together bards, scholars, artisans, holy teachers, and keepers of older rites. From that gathering arose the first ordered liturgies of illumination, the earliest Articles, and the office that would become Praeceptor Summa. It is often said, with more poetry than precision, that Karelia convened, Owein Rhydderch gave voice, and the first Praeceptor Summa gave form. Rhydderch remains to this day the only one to have served as both Court Bard and as Praeceptor Summa (though in separate tenures).

From the beginning, then, the Church was an institution of synthesis. It taught that the older customs of the baronies were not rivals to illumination, but partial answers to it. The forge, the hall, the sea-song, the oath, the gemstone, the carved lintel, the tower bell, the copyist’s lamp: all might be understood as gestures toward the same mystery, provided they were ordered toward humility rather than possession. Yet this harmony was never without strain, for any institution that orders many voices must decide which notes belong, which must be softened, and which it dares name discord.

The Articles of Illumination remain the foundation by which such judgments are made. They are not a catalogue of every ruling rendered by the Ecclesiasticum, nor a rule for every circumstance of worship, craft, discipline, or learning. They are the Church’s first principles: the lamps by which lesser canons are read.

Chief among them is the confession that the Creator is the source of being, order, and beauty, yet remains beyond direct mortal apprehension. No mortal mind may possess the Creator’s fullness. No eye may hold that light and remain merely itself. Mortals therefore receive such illumination as may be granted, and receive it through veils, signs, works, conscience, reason, and, most mysteriously, through the Muses.

The Church venerates the Muses not as the Creator, but as intercessors of illumination: bearers of creative vision by which mortal minds may approach the universe’s meaning, though never master it. Through them, the faithful are drawn toward the Three Lights of Illumination: the Virtuous, the Glorious, and the Veritable. The Virtuous orders desire toward the good; the Glorious reveals beauty as more than ornament; the Veritable binds inspiration to truth, lest wonder become delusion. Where these three sound together, the Church names illumination.

From this follows the Church’s central ethic: creation is vocation and offering, not possession. To make truly is not to claim mastery over the Muse, but to answer what has been entrusted. The sculptor does not own beauty because he has shaped marble; the bard does not own sorrow because he has sung it well; the scholar does not own truth because she has clarified an argument. All true making is received before it is formed. Therefore, gifts that touch the soul must be governed by reverence, lest inspiration become domination, pride, or shadow.

This is why worship in the Church of the Muse has never been confined to sanctuary walls. The sanctuary gives worship its common form, as a vessel gives shape to water; yet the water must still be poured. The faithful gather for canticle, reading, exhortation, silence, and offering, but they are no less bound to worship at bench, loom, forge, desk, hearth, field, and road.

A common rite of illumination begins in quiet. The faithful enter not because speech is unclean, but because attention must be made before song can be truthful. A Cantor, Prelate, or Praeceptor invokes the light granted through the Muses. The Common Canticle follows, and here the whole body of the faithful sings. It is no small matter that the Church requires the untrained voice beside the trained one. If worship belonged only to the excellent, the Church would already have betrayed its own doctrine.

Thereafter come the readings: from the Articles, from approved commentary, from histories of the faithful, from hymns, letters, or accounts of great works made in humility. An exhortation may be given, usually by a Prelate, though Praeceptors speak on high feasts and in times of doctrinal weight. Then may come the Offering of Work, by which a song, carving, tool, loaf, poem, design, repaired vessel, copied passage, or testimony of labor is presented before the congregation. Such offerings are not judged as competitions of excellence, though excellence is never despised. They are received according to truthfulness, humility, and service. A child’s uneven carving may be more fittingly offered than a noble’s jeweled commission if the former is given in reverence and the latter in display.

The rite closes often with Silent Attunement, in which each soul listens according to its capacity, and with the Sending, by which the gathered faithful are charged to create, mend, teach, preserve, and serve.

The Muse is honored in the sanctuary, but answered in the work.

It follows, and the Church has ever maintained, that the Muse-touch is vocation, not measure. The indwelled are not more beloved of the Creator, nor are the unindwelled deprived of illumination. For the Muse indwells few, but illumines many. Beauty may instruct the eye that has never seen a vision; conscience may sound in the breast that has never known indwelling; reason may order truth without the Muse’s inward flame; and reverent participation in song, craft, mercy, study, and contemplation may raise the humblest soul toward light.

Yet here the Church carries one of its subtlest perils. What doctrine distinguishes, custom may exalt. What begins as reverence for the Muse may become reverence for the Muse-touched. The Articles condemn the Error of Reflected Holiness, though common homilists more often call it vessel-pride: the presumption that the honor owed to the Muse may be claimed by the vessel that bears it.

No canon entirely quiets this temptation. The Muse-touched live longer, heal more swiftly, recognize one another, and produce works whose effects cannot be explained by talent alone. Their objects may be certified; their performances may still a room; their discoveries may reorder whole disciplines. They rise, by long custom and formal law, to the highest offices of the University and the Church. Thus the Church declares indwelling a burden, while the world admires it as a crown.

There is also an answering wound among the unindwelled, no less perilous for being less often confessed. If indwelling is mistaken for favor, then the absence of indwelling may be mistaken for rejection. Among houses accustomed to honor, refinement, patronage, and command, this error may take particularly bitter root. A child’s silence before the Muse becomes not mystery, but insult; not waiting, but humiliation; not vocation withheld, but judgment pronounced. The Church teaches patience before mystery. Pride demands an answer. And where pride cannot bear silence, it may come to prefer any voice that answers.

This tension is visible even in the Church’s own offices. A Praeceptor is the equivalent of a Master or Mistress in the other divisions of the Grand University, and all Praeceptors are Muse-touched. They are full theological masters, authorized to teach, examine, interpret doctrine, and bear the greater burdens of sacred scholarship. Senior Praeceptors form the Ecclesiasticum, the governing body of the Church Proper and of the Musae Seminarii. The Praeceptor Summa presides over that body as the Church’s highest doctrinal officer.

Prelates, by contrast, are educated but unindwelled servants of the Church, roughly equivalent to Journeymen in the other divisions. They may be learned, faithful, capable, and wise. They administer rites, govern houses, preach, teach at lower levels, serve bishoprics, tend the faithful, and often understand the ordinary life of the Church better than the Praeceptors who outrank them. Yet they do not sit as Praeceptors, for they are not indwelled. Thus the Church proclaims equal dignity while maintaining unequal authority, and must forever examine whether such inequality is ordered toward vocation or hardened into privilege.

The Church is properly understood in two senses. In its narrower sense, it is the Church Proper: the Praeceptor Summa, the Ecclesiasticum, the Senior Praeceptors, the Praeceptors, the Prelates, and all offices empowered to teach, censure, license, and preserve doctrine. In its broader sense, it includes the many Orders that have arisen beneath its mantle.

These Orders are not exclusively monastic, nor are they uniform in habit, rule, or speech. Some are contemplative houses of prayer and copying. Some are charitable fellowships tending the poor, wounded, mad, orphaned, or newly awakened. Some preserve sacred music; some travel the roads as mendicant teachers; some guard dangerous works; some cultivate arts of healing, illumination, memory, or burial. Each may possess its own titles, vows, insignia, and customs. Yet all owe fealty to the Church Proper. No Order may claim private doctrine above canon, direct possession of the Muse, or exemption from Ecclesiasticum oversight.

The Musae Seminarii stands at the meeting of Church and University. It is the theological division of the Grand University, yet governed by the Ecclesiasticum. Its halls are therefore never merely academic, nor merely ecclesiastical. There the Church’s doctrine is studied with University discipline; there the University’s inquiry is bound to sacred caution. It is one of Breheimen’s most brilliant inventions, and one of its most delicate tensions.

No less delicate is the Church’s relation to the Crown. It is a common error among foreign commentators to suppose that the Sovereign of Breheimen rules the Church as a lord rules a manor, or that the Praeceptor Summa stands apart from the Crown as a rival prince in vestments. Neither account accords with our history. The Church was not founded against the Crown, nor beneath it, but beside it, under the concord first articulated in the years after the Accords.

The Sovereign is named First Guardian of the Church: not master of doctrine, but protector of the realm’s common reverence. The Praeceptor Summa preserves the teaching of the Church; the Grand University orders inquiry into the works of creation; the Crown protects the peace in which both may serve. Thus the Sovereign may convene, admonish, and shield, but may not proclaim dogma by royal will. Likewise, the Ecclesiasticum may censure, instruct, and guard sacred knowledge, but may not sever its judgments from the good of the kingdom entire.

This threefold concord is sometimes called, in later commentary, the Triune Accord. The phrase is imperfect, but useful. Crown, Church, and University are each sovereign in their proper spheres, and each incomplete without the others. When they sound together, Breheimen approaches harmony. When one claims the whole melody, discord follows.

Canon law exists to preserve such harmony. It applies the Articles of Illumination to worship, Orders, teaching authority, vows, Muse-touch ethics, restricted knowledge, sacred works, and discipline. Its ordinary remedies are admonition, inquiry, censure, disputation, restriction, recall, and, in grave cases, dissolution of an errant Order or exile of an errant teacher. The severest remedy is inquisition, and for that reason the Church has rarely invoked it without later regret.

The Cinderglass Inquest remains the most frequently cited warning. In the fourth century after the Accords, the Order of the Sevenfold Pane, once celebrated for devotional glasswork said to deepen prayer and awaken contemplation, came under accusation of inducing false visions through Muse-touched light. The charges were not wholly empty. Abuses had occurred, and certain patrons had begun to treat illumination as spectacle, status, and inducement. Yet the zeal of the inquiry exceeded the wound it meant to cauterize. Works of true beauty were broken beside corrupt ones, houses of honest craft were shuttered, and a generation of sacred glassmakers learned to fear the very Church that had once blessed their hands. The Inquest preserved doctrine, perhaps, but at the cost of trust.

Not every controversy has required so fearful an instrument. The Disputation of the Common Canticle, held in the second century after the Accords, concerned whether local congregations might preserve regional variants within the shared songs of worship. Some Praeceptors feared that improvisation would fracture common doctrine; others answered that a Church built upon reverent creation could not command the faithful to sing as stones. The Ecclesiasticum’s judgment was characteristically Breheimic: the melody was to remain common, but local verses and sanctioned ornament might be retained where they served humility, memory, and truthful devotion. Thus unity was preserved not by flattening difference, but by ordering it.

This, at its best, is canon: not silence imposed upon discord, but discord taught to resolve.

Yet the Church’s failures often arise from virtues grown fearful. It guards restricted knowledge because some knowledge truly is dangerous. Works corrupted by pride can harm the soul; techniques of coercive inspiration invite imitation; records of ancient error may fascinate the ambitious; false illumination can spread more swiftly than wisdom. The Church’s caution is not without cause. Its error, when it errs, is seldom that it loves darkness. More often it fears what light may do when placed too suddenly in trembling hands.

Still, stewardship may become ownership. Custody may become concealment. The hand that shields a flame may also hide it. An institution founded to steward illumination must therefore submit, again and again, to illumination itself.

In every age the Church has stood between reverence and fear. It has blessed the hand of the maker, comforted the unchosen, restrained the proud, preserved works that would otherwise have perished, and taught generations that beauty is not ornament but obligation. It has also mistaken order for truth, hierarchy for holiness, and secrecy for peace.

No honest account of Breheimen can despise the Church of the Muse. No honest account should flatter it beyond recognition. It remains what Karelia’s settlement made it: sanctuary and school, judge and servant, lamp and hand around the lamp. Where the Crown commands and the University questions, the Church teaches the kingdom what its questions are for. Whether it shall be remembered chiefly as faithful steward of illumination or as jealous keeper of a light held too closely to its own breast is a matter no age can settle for the next.

The Muse is honored in the sanctuary, but answered in the work. So too, perhaps, is the Church.

PREORDER NOW!

I’m very pleased to share that Muses’ War: Fugue of Fire, the second book in the Muses’ War series, is now available for preorder, and it’s my sincere hope you’ll choose to give it a go.

I’m also excited to share my new series-specific website at museswar.com.

MusesWar.com

You’d think the second time around would be easier, but I still feel very babe-in the woods over the idea that I’m sharing this story with you, and that we’re only at the halfway point (at least I think that’s where we’re at, ha!) in this epic fantasy series about the place of art and beauty in culture. I am continually grateful for my friends at for believing in this story, and in me.

Fugue of Fire picks up after the events of Overture of Shadow. The veil between worlds has been torn. Eagle’s Wing, the great sword of state, has been destroyed—sacrificed to repair the rift. What slipped through the breach before it sealed are loose in the world.

You may notice that the titles of this series are styled as symphonic movements, and that is by design. To me, a novel series like this is a symphony of storytelling, so using musical forms is natural to me, given my background in orchestral music. (The final two ‘movements’ of this literary symphony are planned to be called Scherzo of Madness and Finale of Radiance, respectively.)

For this novel, Fugue is an appropriate title. A fugue is a musical form that takes a subject and explores it with at least two, but frequently more voices. Like a musical fugue, the story of Fugue of Fire is built from three separate voices that echo, answer, contradict, and reshape one another.

Master Dorian Silversong, with his new apprentice Revan Aethelstan, accompany Master Ilmarinen Steelhammer in his quest to reforge Breheimen’s broken symbol of unity, gathering rare materials and Muse-touched artisans from across the kingdom.

Praeceptor Phrygian Eobanus challenges the Church of the Muse from within, forcing old doctrines, hidden truths, and buried fears into the light. Mistress Lydian Gleamingharpe and her restored apprentice Mixolydian “Mixie” Thornecrest support and defend Phrygian from threats both obvious and hidden.

Lady Seraphina Ravenscroft, desperate to save her daughter from an ancient darkness, is drawn toward a bargain no sane person should make.

The sword quest is adventure. The Church arc is reformation. Seraphina’s story is tragedy. But all three are asking versions of the same question:

What do we do when the thing that once gave us meaning becomes dangerous?

That question sits at the heart of Muses’ War as a series. The Muse-touch is a gift, a powerful one. It is inspiration, beauty, craft, genius, devotion, amplified supernaturally. But power is never only power. It has consequences. It can be misunderstood. It can be institutionalized. It can be hoarded, corrupted, weaponized, or mistaken for holiness.

That is where Fugue of Fire lives.

It is a fantasy adventure first. There are strange roads, dangerous politics, craft never before attempted, court intrigue, impossible choices, and at least a few people saying things they probably should not say in rooms where they absolutely should not say them.

But underneath all of that, this book is also about facing hard truths and having the courage to call for change. It’s not simple; change never is, and it comes with steep cost.

The kind where institutions have to reckon with what they protected.

The kind where good people discover they were complicit.

The kind where righteousness arrives late, costs dearly, and still has to be spoken.

Over the next few days, I’ll also be publishing some new worldbuilding posts here on Substack, and eventually on museswar.com. As I did with Overture of Shadow, my goal is to make them feel like artifacts from within the world: pieces of scholarship, history, theology, and cultural memory that help explain how this kingdom understands itself.

For readers who enjoy the “how does this world actually work?” side of fantasy, these posts should be a lot of fun. For readers who mostly want the story, they should add texture without requiring homework. That balance matters to me; I love deep, meaningful lore, but I also believe worldbuilding should serve the emotional life of the story, not replace it.

If Overture of Shadow was about discovering that creativity is power, and that power can be corrupted, then Fugue of Fire is about what happens after the revelation.

Thank you, sincerely, to everyone who has read Overture of Shadow, encouraged the series, asked questions about the world, commented on characters, shared posts, or simply followed along while I tried to turn music theory, theology, bard magic, political fantasy, and ancient cosmic power into something that reads like an adventure.

I hope you’ll preorder Fugue of Fire, and I hope you’ll enjoy the worldbuilding pieces coming over the next few days.

The Muses’ War continues.

In my continuing quest to do better at engagement, I start a lot of notes and articles, usually an attempt to have a pithy response to something I’ve seen. Many of those times, I hover over the submit button, and then think “That isn’t pithy, that’s snarky, and not in a good way,” or “No one will like this,” or “Some rando will be offended and make my life miserable.” Then I close the tab and my ADHD brain wanders off to the next thing.

Not the best of processes, I know.

A few days back, I managed to push past all of that, actually went and made a simple imgflip meme and put this note out:

Lo and behold, it did pretty darned okay out there, at least by my standards. More views by far that my standard fare.

Yes, there’s opinions hiding behind that meme, which I may spin into a whole different article. That will wait until after I finish up collaborating with my copy editor on line edits for Muses’ War: Fugue of Fire, which should be another couple of weeks. We’re still on track for a May release.

I have an awesome copy editor, by the way. She’s putting em dashes IN my manuscript, ha!

wallbangercreative.com is now on the interwebs.

I’m happy with how it’s turned out - there’ll be plenty to work on but the foundation is in place - bio, links to all my books, media mentions and a free story for subscribing to the Substack.

(If you are a current subscriber and would like the story, add a comment and I’ll send it to you.)

The free story - called Wrath of the Wolpertinger - is a Wyrd West tale drawn from my heritage and upbringing in southeastern South Dakota.

My lovely spouse and I will be heading to Dallas, Texas this weekend for FenCon XXI, taking place at the Crowne Plaza Dallas Market Center - Love Field. The inimitable will be hitching a ride south with us. Comments on my navigational skills will be given exactly what they deserve.

It’s gonna be a busy time for me. Amongst the usual revelry, socializing and hanging out in the bar with the crew:

• I’m the host of the gaming room. We’re bringing three full bags of our boardgame collection and BYOG is encouraged. If you’re attending, the gaming room is on the first floor of the hotel, in the Flex Meeting Space.

• I’ll be reading from my new novel Muses’ War, Fugue of Fire.1

• I’m participating in a bunch of panels. My schedule as it stands:

  • The Great Conspiracy Build-Off - Friday 4:00 PM Churchill

  • Nat 1 For the Win! - Friday 6:00 PM Newbury

  • The Plot Thickens Live Play After Dark - Friday 8:00 PM Churchill

  • The Plot Thickens Live Play - Saturday 12:00 PM Churchill

  • D&D but Everyone’s a Disaster - Saturday 1:00 PM Windsor 1

  • Reading - Saturday 3:30 PM Churchill

  • Let’s Build a Space Cult! - Sunday 12:00 PM Manchester 1

  • Everything! The Musical - Sunday 1:00 PM Newbury

Hope to see you there!

After a period of time where life was tossing me more beanballs than curveballs, I am happy to have this in, perhaps a little later than I wanted but still soon enough to have it out and ready for the summer convention season, the biggest of which is LibertyCon in June.

So without further ado…SONG OF TRIUMPH TIME, BABY!

Watch this space…2026 is just getting started!

And so, gentle readers, we arrive at that point of the year where people take time to reflect.
To look forward.
To plan, set goals, and review where they are.

It’s what all the cool kids do in the last week of the year, right?

2025 was an interesting year for me.

If I were to put it in professional soccer terms, from my perspective it was a good, solid mid-table performance. No real threat of relegation, though there were certainly some challenging moments. Perhaps not the breakthroughs or successes that catapult you into the air-quote next level—but all in all, it could have been worse.

And I’ll gladly take that over the alternative.

Many people who do this kind of reflection segment their year: professional life, personal life, creative life. Especially creatives.

I’ve never found that framing particularly helpful.

I’m a whole person. Those areas bleed into one another, influence one another, and occasionally throw spanners into plans from completely unexpected directions. So what follows touches on all of it—but always as part of a single, interconnected whole.

Before I go any further, I want to say this plainly: I know how fortunate I am. I know how blessed I am.

Even when things are frustrating—when they’re exhausting or infuriating—I try to remind myself that I have it better than so many. That perspective requires humility. It requires being circumspect.

So… let’s begin.

Professionally

Professionally, this wasn’t a terrible year.

But it was a challenging one.

Without getting into details that don’t need to be aired publicly, I started 2025 as a mid-tier executive at a firm I’d been with for four years. A new C-level executive had joined toward the end of the prior year, and that gave me genuine hope.

Hope that long-standing frustrations—around growth, development, and pursuing the next stage of my career in IT and consulting—might finally change.

I was excited.

One of the very first things we did, somewhat ironically, was a performance review. During that process, I was told:

“This is a clean slate. I haven’t been here long, and I want to judge for myself where you’re at.”

On its face, that’s reasonable.

What became clear, though, was that the slate wasn’t actually clean.

A number of things—some of them untrue, whispered behind backs with political agendas—carried forward, and I found myself refuting claims, providing context, and explaining history. The process left a bad taste in my mouth; it cost me money, and it forced a realization I didn’t particularly want to have:

The changes I’d hoped for were probably not coming.

As the months went on, that proved to be true. Things didn’t improve. In some ways, they became more difficult.

I still love what I do. I still love consulting. I genuinely believe that helping people avoid suffering the way I once did as an end user is a noble thing—a good use of vocation.

But even then, I recognized that I needed to start making plans.

The kids call it quiet quitting. To an extent, that’s fair.

I did what was necessary.
And I started preparing.

Building relationships.
Exploring opportunities.
Making sure that when things came to a head, I wouldn’t be caught unprepared.

That moment came in September.

Because of the preparation I’d done, while there was disruption professionally, there wasn’t a significant financial impact.

And during that same period, another long-standing plan began to move forward.

I’ve wanted to either build something of my own—or join a partnership where I’m not the boss, but building something shared. Something others can invest in. Something that grows deliberately, and on my terms.

As I write this, those plans are in motion.

And my hope is that when I write this again next year, Founder will be among the professional titles I can honestly claim.

Creatively

If you’ve been following my journey here on Substack, you already know much of this story.

This year, I achieved a goal I’d always wanted but hadn’t fully committed to until last year (2024 for those paying attention):

I wrote a fantasy novel.

Muses’ War: Overture of Shadow came to life in May, after the better part of the previous year spent shaping ideas and telling a story that—quite frankly—I’m proud of.

When I look at where Overture of Shadow is today, I remind myself to measure against the right metrics. I’m not going to sell thousands of books immediately. But measured against what a new, unknown author in a challenging genre typically achieves, I’ve done well.

And I’m deeply grateful—to my publisher, to my collaborators, and to everyone who has supported and believed in me along the way.

Knowing how many people are rooting for me matters more than I can easily say.

I also had the opportunity to edit an anthology with my friends at Raconteur Press, and I’m proud of that collection as well, including one of my own stories.

That said, the professional challenges I mentioned earlier absolutely ate into my creative battery. I didn’t do as much as I wanted to. I had wanted to get a collection of my short stories released. I had wanted to revisit ideas and expand on them.

Still, I made real progress on the sequel, Fugue of Fire. At this point, I’m about three or four weeks of solid work away from finishing it, after which I’ll hand it off to my friends at Raconteur Press. I’ve partnered with two wonderful editors on this book, and I’m genuinely excited about that collaboration.

If all goes according to plan, Fugue of Fire should release around the same time in 2026 that Overture of Shadow did in 2025.

If I’m being honest, I wish I’d done more.

One thing that suffered while my brain was stuck in professional survival mode was simply showing up. Not just promoting my own work, and not just selling a book, but being present—supporting friends, fellow travelers, and people doing good work.

I fell down on that.
And I regret it.

It’s something I intend to do better in 2026, because helping build a healthy culture around good stories matters to me.

I’m also still deeply involved in music. I sing and play in my church choir and orchestra, both as a vocalist and a brass player.

Earlier this year, our longtime music minister retired, and we welcomed a new one from within the church—someone I know, like, and respect. It’s the first time I’ve really experienced the age reversal of bein the “elder” working with someone early in their musical career, and I want nothing but success for him and for my church’s music ministry as a whole.

That love of music even crossed into my professional life this year. I had the opportunity to work with a major Christian broadcaster, helping them focus their IT, customer support, and station infrastructure deployment processes in ways that could save money—money that could then be redirected into their ministry.

For me, that was a rare and meaningful convergence of personal passion, professional skill, and calling.

Creatively, I feel fulfilled.

But I also know there’s still much to do.

This is a lifetime of growth, development, and incremental success.

Personally

On a personal level—relationships, community, the people I love—this has been one of the most meaningful years I can remember.

For every struggle I’ve faced, it pales in comparison to the growth and satisfaction I’ve found in deeper relationships, stronger community, and what I can only describe as found family.

Through no fault of anyone’s, my wife and I have often found ourselves at the periphery of social circles. Wherever we’ve lived, we’ve had plenty of acquaintances and plenty of relationships structured around institutions—schools, churches, and the like.

But relatively few close, high-quality friendships.

That began to change when we found a creative community that was, in many ways, self-selecting and assembling in North Texas.

With every trip, every convention, and every conversation—on Discord, text, or Messenger—we found ourselves moving from the margins toward the center.

Not just known.
But included.
Not just welcomed.
But wanted.

There is real strength in that kind of connection—strength that makes it easier to carry the frustrations and challenges that inevitably come with life.

I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to share 33 years with my wife, and I look forward to spending the rest of my life with her. I have a daughter I’m immensely proud of, who is charting her own course on her own terms.

Despite our differences, we love one another deeply.

We gather around a table regularly—to break bread, to play games, to simply enjoy one another’s company.

To have that and a wider circle of friends who care for us as much as we care for them—who share passions, worldviews, and a desire to build something meaningful together—is a gift.

It’s the reason I bought land.
It’s the reason I want to build in North Texas.

Career disruption has delayed those plans, and that’s frustrating. But I’m hopeful that disruption can be addressed in 2026, and that our plans to move south will continue.

It’s not something I’m willing to abandon.

Looking Ahead

As I look back on 2025, the simplest word I can use to describe it is transition.

Transition toward something better.
Toward something greater.

I go into 2026 with a profound sense of optimism. Despite the headwinds. Despite the distractions. Despite a world that often seems hell-bent on tearing itself apart.

I feel excitement.
Anticipation.
A genuine desire to see what’s over the next hill.

I believe there is opportunity ahead—professionally, personally, creatively—to build something long-lasting and deeply fulfilling for myself and my family.

I also recognize how lucky I am to be where I am. Hard work matters, yes—but being in the right place at the right time matters too. That’s a blend of good fortune and, I believe, divine intervention.

I feel like I’m on the path I’m meant to be on.

And if nothing else, that knowledge is deeply comforting.

My hope for all of you is that you find yourselves in similar places, with similar optimism.

May you have a blessed 2026.

It’s a grand adventure—
and it begins tonight.

Well.

Forgive your humble scribe, for the past few weeks have been a bit topsy-turvy.

I’m not fond of “real life” getting in the way of the things I love, but like for so many of us, it is part of what we deal with on a daily basis.

In this case, a day job disruption has sucked a lot of my time and mental capacity. Fret not, my friends; I am able to pay bills at the moment. I’m good at what I do and lined up contracting work pretty quickly. I’ve been here before; and there are multiple reasons to be optimistic, even with the current state of play.

Regardless, I need to get back to this.

Some quick updates on the creative front:

• I am about 75% through the draft of Muses’ War: Fugue of Fire, and Act I of that draft is in the hands of my early readers. I’m to have the manuscript ready for submission to Raconteur Press by year end.

• I am doing a collaborative project under a closed pen-name (because spicy), which has been a nice way of cleansing the palate and keeping my writer battery going when the epic fantasy isn’t flowing.

• Was out at Author Nation a couple of weeks ago, which was fun, invigorating and educational. It’s not the typical convention, and it’s in a place (Las Vegas) that holds a lot of memories for me, and an important place in my heart. That’s deserving of a post of its own at some point.

Back to life - I’ll do my best not to drop off again.

I had an epiphany recently.

In both my primary career in technology management consulting, and in the “writing community” that I hang in the peripheries of, there is lots of chatter, advocacy, wailing and gnashing of teeth around generative AI. Every tool, every platform, every app seems to have an AI-based angle to it now, and it’s working its way into every facet of our online lives.

In my job I talk to clients at all levels of their businesses, from the C-suite to the front lines. Everyone is trying to figure out where generative AI actually helps, where it misleads, and how to adopt it without lighting reputations on fire. That conversation often starts with a fear, particularly on the front line: Will this replace me? This post isn’t diving into that question (though I have opinions). We should, however, acknowledge the ambient truth; technologies are shifting quickly, and Pandora’s box is open.

That said: We’ve been here before. To explain the moment we’re in, I’ll tell a story.

It was the summer of 1993. I was between my junior and senior years at St. Olaf College, working at the Academic Computing Center, supervising the student help desk during the school year, and working special projects while helping faculty and students on campus in the summer. When I’d arrived in 1990, “the Internet” meant email, Usenet and newsgroups, Gopher menus, MUDs, and IRC—cultures you learned by immersion, and you were tossed into the deep end immediatley. You picked up netiquette because there wasn’t another way to behave when all you saw of a person was what they typed.

I wasn’t unfamiliar with computers; my first one was an Apple II+, but we had no modem, nor could we have afforded the long distance charges to connect even if we did. When I got my first email account (wwaltner@stolaf.edu), I became part of a well-established circle of life. Each September, a wave of freshmen like me would appear, blissfully unaware of the norms. New friends helped me acclimate; by October the waters calmed and I was part of the culture. The next fall I paid it forward by helping the next wave of first-years.

Then AOL opened the floodgates and the calendar stopped mattering. What had been an annual learning curve became a constant one. Old-timers warned that the “great unwashed hordes” were coming; they were only half-joking. The upside of democratization was real; so was the disruption.

I distinctly remember the staff meeting in the basement of Rolvaag Library when we first learned of AOL’s plans, and the collective unease we felt at the impending “all newbies, all the time” reality we were facing.

Historical sidebar: what “Eternal September” actually was

• The inciting event. In September 1993, AOL gave its users access to Usenet, connecting hundreds of thousands of mainstream subscribers to a culture that had been seasonal and self-teaching. Dave Fischer would soon coin the phrase “the September that never ended,” capturing the sense that the usual autumn influx never stopped.

• The phrase’s origin in the record. Fischer’s line—“September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended”—shows up in early 1994 newsgroup posts (first in alt.folklore.computers) and is widely quoted in retrospectives.

• Why “great unwashed hordes” didn’t feel like hyperbole. The scale really did jump. Internet host counts (a common proxy then) rose from roughly 1.3 million (Jan 1993) to 2.2 million (Jan 1994) and 4.9 million (Jan 1995)—a visible acceleration as commercial ISPs came online.

• And AOL itself? It crossed ~300,000 subscribers by mid-1993, passed 1,000,000 subscribers by Aug 16, 1994, and grew to ~6.2 million by mid-1996—a pipeline that kept the influx steady. That’s what made it feel “eternal.” (Note: Some sources place AOL’s Usenet gateway in early 1994; contemporaneous lore and multiple retrospectives tie the cultural pivot to September 1993. Either way, the effect was the same: onboarding never stopped.)

The AI Parallel (and why it matters)

We’re in a similar moment with generative AI. The tools are dazzling: they draft, summarize, compose, and speak in confident tones. But most first-time users don’t yet understand what these systems are doing. Generative AI is not human understanding; it’s statistical pattern completion. That’s why it can be brilliant one sentence and confidently wrong the next—especially when you give it thin context and ask it to guess. The results look finished; they aren’t.

Because we’re an instant-gratification culture, people accept the first pass. That’s where you get hallucinations, weak facsimiles of thinking, and “good enough” work that—at scale—becomes costly. The fix isn’t to sneer at the tools. The fix is literacy.

Like Usenet then, AI use now suffers when newcomers mistake interface for intelligence. Three recurring traps:

• Oracle syndrome. If it sounds right, it must be right. (It isn’t.)

• One-click creativity. Expecting brilliance without iteration yields wallpaper, not work.

• Speed ≠ understanding. Fast output can still be wrong, biased, or misaligned.

The antidote is unglamorous: define the objective, prompt clearly, iterate, verify, and edit with taste. That’s how you turn a shiny demo into a reliable teammate.

And there’s a cultural piece we can’t skip. We survived Eternal September because communities taught each other: FAQs, style guides, moderators, mentoring. The same apprenticeship model works here. Share your best prompts. Build review checklists. Teach one person; now you’re scaling literacy.

What to do (and what to stop doing)

1) Treat AI output as a draft. Use it for ideation, scaffolding, and acceleration, then apply human judgment before anything leaves your desk. Supporting your personal brainstorming is where these tools can shine if used properly and in the right spirit.

2) Prompt like you’re making a wish with a djinn. Vague prompts invite mischief. Specify audience, purpose, constraints, length, format, and tone. Then iterate—one shot is rarely the best shot. Apply the rule of three. If you’re building an assistant, have the LLM rewrite the instruction set three times, and ask for more detail each time.

3) Compare and refine. Ask for alternatives, run A/B/C prompts, and pull the best bits forward. The value is as much in curation as in generation.

4) Verify aggressively. Treat facts as hypotheses. Ask for sources, then check them. If stakes are high, keep a breadcrumb trail of model versions and prompts.

5) Keep the human layer intentional. Ethics, voice, and accountability don’t emerge from probability tables. They’re your job. Re-write output outside the model to ensure your voice is primary.

And yes, the old saw still applies: a fool with a tool is still a fool. AI just lets that fool ship faster. Carelessness will be exposed, and your reputation will suffer — not because you used a tool, but because you used it foolishly.

A closing nudge

Don’t panic. Panic rarely produces wisdom. Do the quieter, more valuable thing: get literate. Learn what these tools can and can’t do. Treat AI as a force multiplier for your judgment, not a substitute for it. If you do that—and help the next person do it—you’ll turn this “Eternal September” into something productive instead of a noisy shrug.

Pretty sure this was a Nair ad at one point. (Kids, ask your parents!)

Long hair, skinny jeans…you can hear Stairway to Heaven in this picture.

I mean…they’re not wrong. Even I was sporting a perm as a teen in the 80s.

These touch on a universal theme: There are things we ought not know about our matriarchs. I mean, sure, your very existence requires you to accept that your mom had at least one roll in the hay. But that’s not something you’re supposed to…you know…dwell on.

On the other hand, we’re all humans, right? And humans do human things. That’s fine so long as we keep that in the abstract.

It’s the moments when those things become less abstract that make for stories.

It was summer of 2021 and I was hip-deep in cleaning out my late mother’s house in Vallejo, CA. The adobe-brick residence at the end of Virginia Street had been in my family for nearly a century. My maternal grandfather, who spent his entire four-decade working life at Mare Island Naval Shipyard building submarines, purchased the newly-built house in the 1930s and lived there the remainder of his life.

[As an aside: this is the same base that ’s dad was stationed at and was frequently visited by in his active duty days. It truly is a small world.]

Nana outlived Papa by quite a bit, and continued to live in the house until she passed at the age of 100 years and 11 days. Mom and Dad lived there next; the family had paid the house off in the 60’s and was still under the terms of Prop 13, so the taxes were reasonable.

As a result, that lovely house with the 20-foot tall holly tree in the front yard had three generations of “Don’t throw that away, we might need it someday.” In many ways understandable, given my grandparents lived through the depression and my parents grew up in the shadow of World War II and Korea.

I was in the kitchen, cleaning out drawers and cabinets. Deep in a junk drawer, I discovered what appeared to be a small wood cutting board with a handle.

[Note: the word “appeared” is doing load-bearing work in that sentence.]

Age and disuse paired with being in the back of a junk drawer for who knows how long had left it grimy to the point that you couldn’t really tell its original color. I held the board by its handle, and some of the sticky residue clung to my hand. I made a face, but my hands were already dirty from the work so I examined it further.

It’s on the small side for a cutting board…maybe it’s for display? I thought to myself. The entire thing was about a foot long and maybe five inches wide before it tapered into the handle, which was just the right size to fit comfortably in my hand. A hole was drilled through the handle and a leather cord threaded through it, knotted at both the end of the handle and at the ends to create a loop to hang the board from.

Firmly trapped in curiosity, I went to my box of cleaning supplies to find something strong enough to cut through the grime but gentle enough to not strip the original treatment. My eyes lit up when I found a half-full bottle of Murphy’s Oil Soap - success! Cloth in hand, I put a small amount of the light amber liquid on the board and began wiping it down.

It took time, and a bit of elbow grease, before I broke through the layer of grime. While there were spots that simply would not budge no matter how much I tried, most of it came off. The original stain was on the light side, and as the cloth picked up the old dirt, words revealed themselves…

Lambda Pi Spring Formal 1957

1957…Mom would have been a sophomore at Chico State.

This…is not a cutting board.

I was still grieving the loss of my mom…and in its own, strange way, this brain-breaking moment became a key turning point in that journey.

Road Trip “Reading”

Well, listening via Audible, but it still counts!

The round trip from KC to Chattanooga is almost 20 hours - so Audible is our friend. We listened to the first two books in Shami Stovall’s Cronos Chronicles series: Time-Marked Warlock and Cronos Warlock. Mechelle and I absolutely adored both - I had listened to Shami do a reading from Time-Marked Warlock at P-Con last September and knew I wanted it on the To Be Read pile. Each book is about 10 hours on Audible, so it was just the right length to listen to - one on the way out and one on the way back. A cool mix of urban and progression fantasy with memorable characters and a protagonist you can’t help but root for, you will not be disappointed! Go buy them!

Stopped for the night in Clarkesville rather than push the whole way to Chattanooga Wednesday. We made a stop at the Krasnovian Embassy (Waffle House). We’d just had a storm front go through and got this lovely picture:

Thursday Arrival

As it happened, Shami was one of the first folks we saw at the Chattanooga Marriott when we arrived Thursday so got the chance to let her know how much we enjoyed it before heading off to a Costco run for the room party we’d be hosting Friday and Saturday nights.

We got back, unloaded and headed to the bar - hung out with Shari and , Rick and and Greg and Cathy Gagnon, amongst others. We then joined a group of friends to go to City Diner including Todd Caldwell, Alex Thomas, Rob Howell, Bryant Kingry, and a couple of others whose names are escaping me.

Friday

On Friday I sat down with rising BookTuber Jonathan Koan for an interview about Overture of Shadow.

I also did a “Meet the First-Timer’s” panel moderated by which was as much of an educational experience for the panelists as for the audience! I shared the stage with my fellow novelist and with Charli Cox, who recently released her first novel in Cannon Publishing’s Fae Wars universe.

It is definitely a fist pump moment when you answer a question and John Effing Ringo says “That’s the kind of answer I wanted!”

Friday night was the first of our room party nights, which were a joint book release party for myself and a Raconteur Press party. We plastered the walls with cover art from fifty-plus projects, had coolers full of beverages, and snacks galore.

While it was a lot of work, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and I’m happy to continue Raconteur’s tradition of being a fun place to hang with cool folks.

Below, my writing group colleagues MG Martin and enjoy the celebration with me.

Saturday

Saturday was the GoH brunch, which was quite enjoyable - everyone’s remarks were interesting.

Shortly afterwards was the RacPress panel, where I got to say a few words about the novel. It was there that I also got to meet who has been my most enthusiastic supporter to date, and I’m so happy to have had the chance to sign her book!

I also had my turn at the autograph table, but alas, the combination of timing and not being quite that famous yet meant it was a bit slow - to be honest I signed more books away from the table than at it. No worries - it’s still very early days.

I got invited along to another dinner at a Chattanooga landmark - Uncle Larry’s, a proper hole in the wall with great fried fish, shrimp and hushpuppies.

Went to support MG at her reading - go buy her book Necromantic Nights. After everything she went though to get it up on Amazon in the first place, she deserves to get as many sales as she can. As an alpha reader in her writing group, I’ve gotten to see this book develop and it’s a lot of fun.

And of course, another evening of revelry at the room party.

Sunday

Sunday began with breakfast with Peter and Dorothy Grant, then made an appearance at the KaffeeKlatch, then did my own reading. Once that was done, I had to go clean up the party room so it could be vacated and checked out. Many thanks to upstanding citizens , , Deej, Pierce, and Lisa Moore for the help tearing down. Many hands make light work and that was especially appreciated Sunday afternoon.

Once everything was sorted out, I took my editorial team (Deej and Lisa) out for dinner to discuss progress and direction on Book 2 of Muses’ War, currently titled Muses’ War: Fugue of Fire. I’m happy with where we are - had about 10k words from the manuscript of Overture of Shadow that is being repurposed into Fugue of Fire, and I’ve written another few thousand words to re-contextualize the content from Book 1. I know the destination of the key plot arcs for Fugue of Fire, and now need to BICHOK it out. My current goal is to have Fugue of Fire out early 2026. I also want to get a collection out and a Muse-themed anthology put together yet this year - ambitious, but doable.

Homeward Bound

Honestly, the hardest part of the return journey was figuring out how to get everything in the dang car! Took a bit of creativity, trial and error, and tipping the valet crew with snacks, but we got it all Tetris-ed in!

Unloading was almost as painful as loading, but we got it all in and then slept the sleep of the just.

My next literary outing is Writers Cantina in four weeks, then BasedCon in September.

Four years ago far away - June 10th, 2021.

A hospital room at Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center far away.

After a long discussion with her doctor and in accordance with my mother’s written directives, we took her off the battery of prescriptions that was keeping her alive. She’d been in and out of the hospital for the past few months - and what time she wasn’t in the hospital she had daily home care visits. She had been losing ground every day, it seemed - and moreover, she’d lost the will to fight.

We’d lost Dad three years earlier, in 2018. Mom had been his primary caretaker up to the point where she couldn’t do it anymore. Prior to that she had been taking care of my Nana. She’d wanted to travel again, once she’d grieved, and recovered physically. The second part never really came about though.

Committing to an end-of-life care plan was emotionally devastating, and knowing it was what she wanted — we’d talked about it many times — was no comfort.

The doctors believed it would take a day or two before the medicines were processed out of her system, other than the painkillers. I was exhausted, so decided I’d go back to the adobe-brick house at the end of Virginia Street and come back in the morning.

It was just before midnight when the hospital called.

There is a part of me that will always regret not being at her side in the moment…but it really wouldn’t have changed anything.

I’m fortunate to have good memories of both my parents; not everyone is so lucky, for a variety of reasons.

But since it falls unto my lot that I should rise and you should not

I’ll gently rise and I’ll softly call ‘good night and joy be with you all’.

“Can you be in Caracas on Monday?”

It was Thursday.

A lot of things went through my mind at that moment, holding the then-current Nokia 6300 series cell phone to my ear.

Context: It was June 13^th, 2002, and I was sitting in the kitchen of my in-law’s house. The previous week we’d sold our condo in the Twin Cities and brought all our things to Kansas City in anticipation of closing and moving into the house we were building in southern Johnson County, Kansas, within the next few weeks.

That Monday, I found out that I’d been laid off from the enterprise software company that I’d worked for, as said company had filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Rumors had been flying for the past few weeks. “Enron-like” accounting errors being found, regulatory authorities circling like wolves around an already wounded deer. Folks were going to go to jail—and they did, including the CEO. I’d talked to my colleagues, managers, and leaders that I trusted. The consensus was that something was going to happen, there would be restructuring, and while there would likely be layoffs, folks who were revenue-generating, in key areas and had key skills would be safe, and I checked all those boxes. The expectation before the news broke was that about 25% of the almost 5,000 employees would be impacted. There were no guarantees, but I felt okay following through with the move. It was important to my wife to be closer to her family and to escape the bleak winters of Minnesota.

The reality? 80% of the company workforce was let go. No severance, immediate cessation of benefits.

I was literally Meathead. Unemployed and living with my in-laws.

I was still in the “road warrior” phase of my career – the technical landscape of the time did not afford the luxury of not being on-site. I was doing out-Sunday-back-Friday work trips around forty-five weeks out of the year; my daughter thought I worked at the airport for most of her early childhood! I’d already done stints in Canada, the UK and Germany, so I was comfortable with international travel. I was young enough that I still enjoyed seeing the world – it fed my wanderlust, and I met so many interesting people in my journeys.

But it was Venezuela, and I’d have zero support system. A lone gringo in a not-particularly safe place. It was not nearly as bad as it was today, and Hugo Chavez had not shown the world his true colors (or perhaps more accurately, the internet was not so far along to be able to show the world what he was hiding from the public). There was a real chance I could get myself into serious trouble and have precious few options.

But after a bunch of phone calls, emails, and prayers over the previous three days, this was the first offer of paying work I’d gotten. It was a good rate, reflective of my skill and experience, and a bit more – in any other context it would probably have been called hazard pay.

I said I’d need an advance to cover expenses. They agreed.

It was one of the most stressful three weeks of my life. The work was the easy part – the client was PDVSA, which ended up having its advantages. The visa letter that had been overnighted to me on official government letterhead presumably saved me from intrusive scrutiny at Simon Bolivar International Airport. The corporate building the IT team worked in was part of a nicer area of the capital district, and close to the high end hotel I stayed at. Even so, it didn’t take much to see the vast gulf between the haves and have-nots in Venezuelan society. I got on well with the team I was working with, and all of them could speak more passable English than I could speak Spanish.

Still, I was constantly nervous, doing my best to be observant, to not be alone except once in my hotel room, and otherwise make myself inconspicuous. There were a couple on the team that took genuine interest in me, at least in part because they were curious about the US and could tell me things they might not otherwise say in “polite” company.

In some ways I still marvel how uneventful the trip was and thank God for His watching over me. The gig provided the funds needed to close on the new house and was the first of many for that particular partner.

Be mindful what you pray for. You might just get it.

Well, I held out for as long as I could today, as I was expecting the preorder link for the paperback and full eBook for Overture of Shadow to go live today and wanted to include that in today’s post. Instead, I got a dose of ABA (Amazon being Amazon), so I don’t have a link yet. But we do have the rest of the soundtrack to get through, and I didn’t want to wait to get it to you. Let’s finish strong.

11. “The Battle” – Hans Zimmer (from Gladiator)

The Turning Point

When everything hangs in the balance—when shadow surges and creation itself is threatened—this is the sound. Heavy. Heroic. And not without cost. The stakes are not just survival, but meaning.

I cheat a bit here - using a orchestral soundtrack out of its original context. But oh, do I love Hans Zimmer, who I rate on par with John Williams for greatest cinematic composer of the current age. There’s a point in here where he channels Gustav Holst’s Mars, Bringer of War and I adore it. Holst is also one of my favorite composers - between him, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger I can spend days just listening to all of them.

12. “The Scarlet Tide” – Alison Krauss

The Aftermath

A song about choices, legacy, and quiet sorrow. Krauss’s voice carries all the unspoken grief of those who stood, fell, and kept going. This is the ache of victory. This is what’s left when the last note fades.

Again, I luxuriate in my personal biases. Alison Krauss’s voice is the most beautiful in all recorded music, and I will die on that hill. This song is also part of a soundtrack (Cold Mountain) and earned both Oscar and Grammy nominations, but I had heard it on Alison’s A Hundred Miles or More: A Collection album long before I’d seen the movie.

13. “Divenire” – Ludovico Einaudi

Closing Credits

“Divenire” means to become. It starts simply, then swells into something transcendent. It doesn’t shout—it builds. This is the final heartbeat of the novel: not a return to peace, but an ascent toward something new. Not untouched. But still whole.

14. Bonus Tracks

Songs from the heart of Breheimen

Far Away (Chapter 1)

I’m a Holder (Chapter 30)

There are two original songs Dorian sings in Overture of Shadow. Far Away is a love song I wrote 25 years ago when I was active in the Society for Creative Anachronism. I’m a ‘Holder is a drinking song I wrote specifically for the novel, but also takes its heart from those memories of my days in the SCA. The production values leave something to be desired, but that I can do this at all is a far cry from what I had available to me in my twenties.

Final Notes: The Music Behind the Magic

Every key character in Muses’ War is, in a way, shaped by the mode they are named after—the musical seed of who they are.

Dorian ascends but questions, shaped but not defined by his melancholy.

Lydian shines but longs, the perfect mirror for Dorian.

Locrian collapses inward, his corruption unable to completely destroy the beauty within.

Mixie (Mixolydian) dances through the lines, on her terms and hers only.

Phrygian is rooted in ritual but sees the need for relationship.

These pieces aren’t just background. They’re another way of telling the story. So if you’re curious, or if you’re already immersed in the world, put on your headphones, close your eyes and let the music take you to Breheimen.

Here is the full playlist on Spotify. Once I’ve got the paperback/full eBook link I’ll share.

Today’s portion of the Muse’s War soundtrack looks at the rest of our musical mode-inspired characters. You’re getting a bonus in this episode - I promised three and you’re getting four!

7. “Lamentations of Jeremiah” – Thomas Tallis

Phrygian Eobanus’s Theme – The Ritualist

I grew up in a culture that valued choral music, both in school and church. We sang harmony from the pew and the choir of my childhood church was built on a foundation of classical sacred music. That prepared me well for college; while I was an instrumental music major, I sang in choir as well, and also in our early music chamber group. That background informs my vision of the sacred music of the Church of the Muse in Breheimen, represented both in the character of Phrygian and the Church overall.

The Phrygian mode is old, sacred, slightly dissonant—fitting for a character who represents a religious elder mentor. This music evokes reverence touched by dread; sacred tradition tinged with uncertainty. It’s the sound of a mentor whose teachings may no longer be enough.

8. “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” – Traditional (Picardy tune)

The Church of the Muse

This chant reflects the broader faith woven into Breheimen’s identity. The melody appears as a motif in the novel, a sacred refrain echoing through cathedral halls—and into spells cast in shadow.

As they walked down the central aisle, their footsteps echoed softly against the stone, mingling with the distant, open harmonies of the cantors. The voices of the choir resonated throughout the cathedral, their haunting melodies weaving a tapestry of sound that seemed to fill every corner of the immense room.

Muse, whose breath doth stir every art

With thy whispers pure and bright

Kindle flame in every heart

Guide us through the endless night

For your hand doth lift the mortal soul

Seeking e’er the higher sight

Angel bright of heaven’s fire

Calls her chosen’s hand to move

Fill the heart with pure desire

To create, to dream, to prove

Bathed in Virtue’s light, your wisdom flows

Testament to Muse’s love

Waltner, Wally. Overture of Shadow: Serial 2 (Muses' War) (pp. 61-62). Raconteur Press. Kindle Edition.

9. “Dust to Dust” – John Kirkpatrick

Locrian Heartcaller’s Theme

And now for something completely different.

The Locrian mode is dissonant, unstable, and infamous for its inability to resolve. It is perhaps the most challenging mode to compose for, but when you pull it off, it works in an appropriately unexpected way. It’s the natural minor scale (Aeolian) with its dissonance turned up to eleven.

It’s perfect for Locrian, a man of brilliance hollowed out by ambition. He is seductive, persuasive, and intelligent—but fundamentally broken. This is someone who doesn’t just challenge the system—he wants to unravel it.

10. “The Butterfly” – Traditional Irish

Mixie’s Theme – The Dancing Trickster

Mixolydian is a favorite mode of folk songs, and especially slip jigs like this one, as it's happy but a little wild. It almost resolves, but that lowered seventh gives it swagger, instability, and an undercurrent of unpredictability. Mixolydian is joyful but unpredictable—major with an edge. This traditional fiddle tune mirrors Mixie’s spirit: clever, chaotic, full of mischief and motion. She’s not here to break the rules maliciously—but she’s certainly not following them either.

Last Call for Serials!

Today (May 24th) is the last day serials are available on Amazon. The paperback and full eBook with the prime cover, new interior art and bonus content releases Wednesday (May 28th) and the pre-order link goes live tomorrow (May 25th).

Tomorrow we’ll also wrap up the soundtrack entries.

Serial 1

Serial 2

Serial 3

We continue the soundtrack of Muses’ War: Overture of Shadow with three more selections.

4. “Londonderry Air” – Traditional

Lydian Gleamingharpe’s Theme

Another familiar tune, and a personal favorite of mine, particularly Percy Grainger’s arrangement for orchestra and band, but for this soundtrack I wanted a lighter arrangement that let the tune shine forth. This piece embodies the Lydian mode—bright, noble, elevated, and just a little unsettled. Lydian, as a character, strives toward something higher—principled, passionate and idealistic; someone pulled between loyalty, love, and responsibility. Her theme floats above the noise, always reaching.

5. “La Prima Vez” – Savina Yannatou

Dorian & Lydian: Long-Delayed Intimacy

An old Sephardic love song with delicate ornamentation. This represents a quiet emotional turning point: when love, once delayed, begins to speak. There’s warmth and ache here, in equal measure, which comes through even in translation from the Andalusian-influenced Spanish:

6. “The Parting Glass” – Traditional

For What Was Lost

A song for mourning and remembrance. There is loss in Overture of Shadow—personal, cultural, creative. This piece honors it, raising a glass not just to endings, but to what made the journey meaningful. A wonderful, heartfelt song that is both mourning and celebratory.

Three more songs tomorrow!