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The nature footage is research. This is what it turns into.
If you got here from a swamp video, you are in the right place and nothing is out of order. I film wild things and look closely at them, and then I write worlds that do not exist and make them behave like the ones that do. Four steps, about twenty minutes, nothing to buy until the last one.
Watch
Pick the one that matches how much time you have.
All three are the same thing at three lengths — me in the mud, noticing, then saying out loud what it is going to become on the page.
27:15 Finding Monsters in the Mud: Worldbuilding on a Tidal Creek
The whole method in one piece. A tidal creek, a lot of waiting, and the moment a real animal turns into one that is not.
15:59 I Went Looking for Stories. The Swamp Delivered.
Forty bug bites, a sinus infection, and more usable material than any week at a desk has ever given me.
Short No Questions, Only Birds
Probably the one you already saw. Here it is again, and now you know what it is for.
Read
One post, and you will know whether you like how I write.
I keep a notebook called Field Notes on this site. If the writing does not work for you, you have spent four minutes and you can stop here with no hard feelings.
Field notes · 7 July 2026
Life from a Rotting Log
A swamp-soaked piece of dead wood, taken apart slowly. It is about what is living inside the thing that looks finished — which turned out to be about more than the log, as these things do.
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The Belrose Journals
A botanist goes into the Amazon in 1924 to find a missing man and writes down everything he sees. Rat beans. A great owl. A stone city on an impossibly blue river. On the last night his lamp burns in a cave, and the world he wakes up in is not the one he walked into.
This is the closest thing I have to a sample of the real work. Eight dated entries, three illustrated plates, in a steady scientific hand right up until it stops being steady. It is also a piece of the next novel — Henry Belrose is a main character in Fall of the Ten Clans, and the journal ends on the day that book begins.
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Eight entries. Three plates. Yours free.
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Then, if you liked it
Start at book one. It is three dollars.
Two series, both young adult, neither connected to the other. If you only try one thing on this page that costs money, make it this.
Echo Island · Book one of five
The Clan Games
A masked thief hands fifteen-year-old Calum O’Brian a wooden box and tells him not to open it. Behind the Great Wall the Ten Clans have spent three hundred years deliberately holding their own progress back. The box is an invitation from a people who are not human, and the technology inside it is botany rather than magic — which is the part that came straight out of the swamp.
Free on Kindle Unlimited · everything about book one
If you would rather have science fiction than fantasy: Subterrania is the other door. Humanity fled underground seven hundred years ago, and a sixteen-year-old cannot stop going down the tunnels she was told to stay out of. It goes darker than Echo Island, and it is also book one of three.