The book "White Mirror" originated from a Twitter writing contest hosted by Jim O'Shaughnessy. The contest sought positive, technology-oriented story ideas as a counterpoint to the dystopian themes of "Black Mirror". Tinkered Thinking, who was already writing similar stories, decided to participate. Instead of submitting a brief idea, he submitted nine full short stories, adding a tenth later that same day. That tenth story was the one that ultimately won.

After appearing on Jim's podcast, Tinkered Thinking decided to compile a themed collection of these "White Mirror" stories. He created a mock-up cover and posted it on Twitter. Jim immediately responded, offering to publish it, which was a surprise as Jim's publishing company, Infinite Books, had not yet been announced.

He was like, I'll publish it. Which came as a surprise because he didn't have Infinite books at the time. He hadn't announced anything with regards to his new company.

Following the impromptu publishing deal, Tinkered Thinking began writing furiously, producing two or three stories a week. From a pool of around 56 stories, 31 were selected for the book. Realizing he needed assistance with editing, he reached out to Dylan O’Sullivan, who was an intern at Jim's new company. This marked the beginning of their collaboration on the book.

Dylan O’Sullivan found himself at a crossroads after finishing his master's degree. He was about to start a PhD program he didn't want to pursue, feeling it was the only way to support himself. A chance tweet led him to a writing course called Rite of Passage, sponsored by a man named Jim. After the course, Dylan sent a cold email to Jim, explaining his situation and offering his help with any projects. This led to an internship at Jim's new company.

Initially, Dylan's role wasn't clear, as his focus was on writing and editing, and the company's publishing arm, Infinite Books, hadn't been established yet. It grew alongside the development of the book, "White Mirror". His involvement began after receiving a direct message from an anonymous Twitter account, which turned out to be his collaborator. Their collaboration took flight in early 2023 through Zoom calls.

"White Mirror" is a collection of 31 interconnected science fiction stories that follow a character named Lucius through various futures. Lucius is described as a Renaissance man, an inventor, and an explorer, much like a futuristic Indiana Jones. The host notes a personal bias, as "White Mirror" is published by their company, OSV's Infinite Books. They were involved in many calls about the book's design and writing. However, their love for the book preceded their decision to publish it.

The science fiction genre is currently dominated by dark, dystopian views. The inspiration for a more optimistic and hopeful take on sci-fi comes from a general exhaustion with this pessimism.

Tinkered Thinking explains he was already writing in this genre before the idea of a "White Mirror" to counter "Black Mirror" gained traction. He had come to a realization about the state of modern sci-fi movies.

I love sci-fi movies and I remember one day coming to the realization that none of them are positive. I mean, I guess Arrival is maybe the most positive sci-fi movie that I can think of off the top of my head. But even it is just filled with so much unnecessary drama in this coordination problem among humans.

While older science fiction was often optimistic, the modern era has leaned heavily into negativity. This is especially relevant now, as technological progress appears to be speeding up. New tools and technologies are emerging, which many people find frightening. However, they can also be seen as expanding human ability, agency, and a sense of wonder if one avoids a purely pessimistic outlook.

When asked about their relationship with the sci-fi genre, both authors reveal they are not avid readers of it, which influences their unique approach in "White Mirror". Dylan O'Sullivan explains that he doesn't particularly love or read much sci-fi. For him, the genre elements are secondary to the core narrative.

I kind of see it as the backdrop and the stage itself without a compelling story and astonishing explorations of human nature is just inanimate. ... It was more a vehicle.

He is drawn to mind-bending fiction that explores the frontiers of imagination, like the work of Borges, and sees sci-fi as a useful stage for that kind of exploration, rather than an end in itself. Tinkered Thinking echoes this sentiment, admitting he has read an "embarrassingly small amount of sci-fi." He tried getting into Iain Banks's Culture series but found it had too much "Marvel variety of action" and relied on "flash bang scenery" instead of getting to the deeper concepts quickly. The works that did resonate with him include Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man" and Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," which he loves for its methodical, meditative focus on character moments. He notes he is a much bigger fan of sci-fi movies than books. His journey into writing sci-fi was almost accidental. It grew out of a daily writing exercise with a recurring character who could exist in any time period. When stories were set in the future, they naturally evolved into the kind of stories found in "White Mirror". This leads the interviewer to describe their work as a form of "first principle sci-fi," where the world-building exists to serve character-based explorations of the human condition, memory, and identity, rather than focusing on high-concept ideas like spaceships.

Tinkered Thinking describes the character Lucilius as intentionally a bit flat. This is because he was created to serve conceptual ideas, rather than being a fully realized character who drives the story. There are two primary ways to write a short story. One is to watch a character in your mind so closely they become real, and then write down what you see. The other is to start with a conceptual idea and create a character to populate it. The Lucilius stories follow the second method.

Calling the stories "parables" was a deliberate choice. It sets the expectation that the story is simple and meant to convey a moral, point, or concept, rather than focusing on intense character development. This is similar to concept-driven science fiction, where characters can sometimes be incidental to the larger idea being explored.

A parable is a simple story and if you're reading a parable, you're not expecting this intense character development and driven story. It's sort of like, oh, there's purposely some kind of moral or point or concept that's trying to be pushed towards me.

Despite his flatness, Lucilius has distinct traits. He is calm, patient, curious, and childlike. He's accepting of what happens and never gets frustrated or upset. Like Sherlock Holmes, he finds difficult problems exciting and loves the chase. The parables were originally written as an exercise for the author himself, providing an example to follow and an alternative to being consumed by negative emotions. It was a way to "write yourself into a different person," which was a foundational reason for starting Tinkered Thinking.

Dylan O’Sullivan described the process of editing the anthology as both difficult and easy. The modular nature of an anthology made it simple to edit each story, as they all had their own internal logic and style. However, the challenge came when trying to retrofit a holistic element to connect the stories, aiming for a final book that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Regarding the character Lucilius, Dylan explains he is intentionally flat yet mysterious. This is a deliberate choice for the short story format, where "white space is everything." What is left unsaid is powerful, requiring the reader to engage with subtext to understand the character.

We couldn't develop him because the stories are going back and forward through time. And that kind of idea of like parallel worlds and interlacing timelines and stuff was kind of central. So it'd be weird if he just aged. If you had a coming of age line to cut through the middle, I think that would actually take away.

Because the narrative is scattered across time, Lucilius couldn't have a traditional character arc. Instead, he acts as a "Forrest Gump of the future," thrust into various settings. He is a man of few words, and his vast expertise in subjects like molecular biology and physics is left unexplained. This makes him a kind of cerebral action hero who can do everything, allowing the reader to project their own ideas onto him.

Reality has rapidly caught up with some of the futuristic visions presented in the book "White Mirror," especially concerning AI. What once seemed like distant sci-fi, such as AI sentience and advanced neural interfaces, now feels much closer with the advent of technologies like ChatGPT and AI voice assistants.

Tinkered Thinking highlights a specific story from his book that is now entirely technically possible. The concept involves an AI system that leverages the fact that phones are always listening. If a couple has a fight, their phones could capture the entire conversation, along with all prior context. An LLM with infinite patience could then analyze this data to help them resolve their conflict productively.

This AI would have a major advantage over a human therapist. A therapist gets a limited, biased account of a conflict after the fact, which is filtered through memory and self-interest. As Tinkered Thinking points out, people are naturally the heroes of their own stories.

It's a game of telephone that's highly corrupted by bias where of course everyone's the hero of their own story. So they're going to say things in a way that's framed so that it's quite charitable to themselves.

An AI with full, real-time context could provide unbiased prompts to guide the couple toward resolution. Tinkered Thinking explains that this technology isn't limited to personal relationships; it could also be applied to larger issues like international conflicts. An AI could serve as a mediator, overcoming language and cultural barriers that complicate diplomacy and peace efforts.

A story called "Old Fashioned" imagines people using AI as a dating wingman, a scenario that is already possible with current technology. One person shared an anecdote about an older man at a gym who was shocked that women in their mid-30s conduct "NSA level" online research before a date. This digital vetting is already happening, but AI is taking it a step further.

People may not say that that's what they're doing, but how many text messages on Tinder, on WhatsApp, whatever, are actually written by AI or co-written by AI? People are already dating through AI right now.

An example of this is a video of a girl using AI to text a guy. The AI fed her real-time, expert-level insights about his favorite soccer team. The guy was smitten, believing he'd found a beautiful woman who was also an expert on his passion. This use of AI is described as a form of "cultural makeup" or "epistemic makeup." Just as physical makeup alters appearance, this AI-driven knowledge makes a person seem different than they are.

Normally I don't know shit all about soccer, but with this new fancy GPT makeup, suddenly I'm an expert in it.

This mask is aspirational in a lazy way. It's a shortcut to being the person one wishes they were, without putting in the actual effort to gain the knowledge or interest. The truly dystopian scenario emerges when both people in the interaction are using AI to pretend. The conversation becomes two AIs exchanging information about a topic that neither of the humans actually cares about, a purely performative interaction with a "human wrapper."

The idea of living in a simulation is a frequent theme. Dylan O’Sullivan doesn't dwell on it, questioning what would change if it were true. He humorously notes, "I'm already trying. Why am I playing a simulation where I'm rich? I'm giving it my best."

Tinkered Thinking finds the concept useful as a mental model. He recalls a time he was going through a rough patch and had started meditating. While walking to the grocery store on a dreary day, he had a thought: what if this was a video game level? The point of the game wasn't just to get groceries, but to see how much he could enjoy the necessary experience and be present.

What if the point of the game is how much can I actually enjoy this necessary experience and how much can I just be present and notice it? I remember having that thought, looking around and being like, damn, the graphics are really, really good. And that just cheered me up.

This mindset is similar to meditation practices like vipassana, which train you to observe your own mind. It allows you to step back from intense emotions, like anger, and observe the chaos in your brain instead of being consumed by it. This creates space to choose a response rather than reacting impulsively.

This links to a philosophical point: we don't have direct access to reality. Our brains are inside a dark cranium, interpreting lossy signals from our senses to recreate an internal version of reality. In that sense, we are already living in a simulation. On top of this biological simulation, there is a social one. As we grow up, we realize many adult interactions are a game with unwritten rules. Politeness and social norms are a performative facade used to keep society functioning.

The conversation then shifts to the lack of clear rites of passage in Western culture. Unlike aboriginal cultures with rituals like the walkabout to mark the transition to adulthood, Western societies have no clear demarcation. This lack of a formal transition may contribute to the feeling that nobody really knows what they're doing, even as adults.

The story "The Last Cathedral" was the final one written for the book and the only one created with a conscious awareness of all the other stories. While the other stories can exist independently, "The Last Cathedral" functions as a keystone piece. It has the power to unify all the separate narratives, allowing the collection to be read as a cohesive novel rather than simply an anthology. The choice of a cathedral as the central metaphor was inspired by a Jordan Peterson quote suggesting that there are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see them.

Tinkered Thinking notes that religion is often purposely absent from his work. He finds that ancient, stale myths still have many adherents today, even in the face of modern technology. This makes him wonder if an update is required for these belief systems. He expressed a deep curiosity about what a new Bible might look like in a modern sense.

This theme is explored in the story "The Last Cathedral," which was heavily influenced by Andy Weir's short story, "The Egg." In "The Egg," a person dies in a car accident and meets a deity. The person learns they are going to be reincarnated, this time as a Chinese peasant girl in the 14th century. The deity explains that this has happened millions of times before. The profound revelation is that every person who has ever lived in that universe is the same soul. Once that soul has lived every single human life, it will be born as a deity. The universe itself is the egg. This means the person was not only Gandhi but also Hitler, as well as the millions Hitler killed.

This perspective is meant to be beautiful and productive. It allows one to approach others with more grace, recognizing that their actions and beliefs stem from a unique backstory. If you had their experiences, you would likely be saying and doing the exact same things.

If I'd had their backstory, I'd probably be saying exactly what they're saying.

Dylan adds that "The Last Cathedral" was a difficult but keystone story for their book because it explained the entire book in a meta way. Another significant influence was Borges's story, "The Library of Babel," which inspired the library element at the end of their story.

A puzzle was included in the book, raising questions about its difficulty and purpose. The host compares it to Kryptos, a famous sculpture at the CIA that remains partially unsolved after many years. Tinkered Thinking reveals that the puzzle is incredibly challenging. After walking Dylan O’Sullivan through the entire thing, his reaction was one of disbelief.

I think his response was that no one is ever going to figure this out. I said, what's the point? Just take it out. No one's ever going to ever get that in a million, million years.

Despite the difficulty, some people are making substantial and meaningful progress. The hope is that a person will eventually solve it, not an advanced AI like GPT-7. To thwart AI attempts, the creators filled the white text in the book's PDF with fake information to generate nonsense if fed into a model. And the reason for including such a complex puzzle? Tinkered Thinking simply said it was "just for fun."

Discovering an Easter egg in a piece of media shows that someone is paying close attention. This is the opposite of the offensive feeling you get when someone is on their phone during a conversation, which signals that you are not worth their attention. When someone finds a hidden detail, it shows they were so immersed in the created world that they noticed tiny, consciously placed elements.

This might sound weird, but it's like a form of intimacy across space and time, which I've experienced many times just reading classic literature.

This experience can happen when reading a book and a single line floods you with emotion. It's an intense feeling generated by ink on paper, arranged by another person who was fully attuned to their work. Embedding a puzzle or an Easter egg into a book is another way to expand the potential for this connection to happen. It is a way to wink across space and time to someone attentive enough to see it. This engagement from an audience comes from love. People gather on platforms like Discord to solve puzzles because they care and want to go deeper into the work. Tinkered Thinking shared his own experience with this, describing how a reader listened to his entire new audiobook and immediately started it over again on the first day of its release. He found it an incredible honor for someone to give that much attention to something he made.

Non-fiction writing has a lot to learn from fiction. Fiction has mastered the art of grabbing, holding, and even strangling the reader's attention. It achieves this by focusing on structure, finding patterns in information, withholding details, using foreshadowing, and bringing ideas full circle. A writer like John McPhee can make a topic as simple as oranges completely gripping without dramatizing reality. He just uses these perennial storytelling shapes.

These same principles apply to non-fiction. The greatest storytellers often just relay what really happened, but they do it in an interesting way. In contrast, much of modern non-fiction seems to believe it can get away with being poorly written, as if the prose itself has no responsibility to keep the reader's attention.

You read a lot of non-fiction now and it's just like, this is the topic I'm going to talk about. Here's an interesting anecdote. I'm talking about the topic. Another interesting anecdote, reference to a study. And summarize what I was talking about. And then chapter two, no thought put in. It's completely formulaic and boring.

This formulaic approach ignores the power of beautiful prose. When you read something like 'Gödel, Escher, Bach', the writing is so beautiful that even fiction writers would struggle to match its quality.

Writing fiction presents a unique and dizzying challenge. Dylan O'Sullivan compares it to the Borges story, "The Garden of Forking Paths." At any given moment, a fiction writer faces a thousand possible directions with no intrinsically right choice. You can focus on character, scene, internal psyche, or description. In contrast, non-fiction writing quickly develops an internal logic. An argument begins to condense the options, and a clear path emerges that the writer can follow.

This dilemma of infinite choice mirrors life itself. When you have a day to yourself, you face the same blank page as a fiction writer. However, most adults have a backlog of life's backstory and to-do lists that provide structure. The real challenge is making an unstructured life interesting. Tinkered Thinking suggests that adults are out of practice with this kind of imaginative freedom, as it's been hammered out of them by tedious jobs and schooling.

Children, on the other hand, have no issue with this. A four or five-year-old can organically create a fictional world where a couch becomes a fortress and a broomstick becomes a weapon. Most adults have become imaginatively impoverished and fill their time with passive consumption like television. The difficulty in writing good fiction lies in returning to this childlike state, turning off the internal critic, and allowing creativity to flow unencumbered.

There's some art teacher and his kid asks him, 'What do you do all day?' And he's like, 'Oh, I teach adults how to paint.' And she's like, 'You mean they forget?'

There is also less forgiveness for bad fiction than for bad non-fiction. Bad non-fiction might still offer some nutritious facts, even if poorly presented. But bad fiction offers nothing of value. As Dylan puts it, "Non-fiction is vegetable, and good fiction is like ice cream. And bad fiction is like bad potato chips or something." It has zero forgiveness, much like bad poetry.

Dylan was asked about the biggest challenge in editing Tinkered Thinking's work. He explained the primary difficulty was internal, as he had never edited fiction before. This led to what he calls the "dizziness of choice." When providing feedback, especially in the developmental stage, he aimed to offer various possibilities—parallel paths or slight deviations—to take the work in a more interesting direction. However, he found it challenging to select the single best suggestion from the many options he could envision. Despite this, he emphasized that the collaboration was a lot of fun. A good sign of their positive dynamic was always looking forward to their calls and enjoying their in-person work sessions.

Dylan O’Sullivan's contribution to the project was fundamental. He was responsible for dialing in the language and smoothing out the clunky first drafts. The result was a text that reads like "warm butter"—smooth and fluid, even with some challenging ideas. The goal was to create something akin to "nutritious whipped cream," a phrase used to describe The Great Gatsby, meaning it's enjoyable while also being good for you. Dylan was essential in getting the project closer to that ideal.

The first drafts Dylan received were described as "ragamuffins," written at light speed due to time constraints. Many parts had to be cut and sacrificed for the sake of better writing. This was a direct result of the writing process, which prioritized speed and completion over initial perfection. The method involved writing an entire story in a single sitting without getting up, a muscle developed from daily writing practice.

Instead of getting caught up in the editor brain, where that halts the process of writing the story and actually getting the whole thing onto paper, I really focus, when I sat down to write a story, I would not get up until the story was done. Speed is really important in that, in terms of just making sure it gets done. But again, that means you're going to have a pretty clunky, not smooth item that then I pass off to Dylan.

This process ensures the story gets finished, but it produces a rough product. Dylan's role was to take this raw material and perform the necessary cutting, rewording, and refining to make the final version as smooth and delicious as it turned out to be.

The concept of chiastic structure, also known as chiasmus or a chiasm, is essentially an inversion or a mirroring. The name originates from the Greek letter Chi (X), which visually represents this reversal. On a basic level, if the first part is A then B, the second part will be B prime then A prime, creating that X-like inversion.

A simple example illustrates this principle effectively:

Never let a kiss fool you and never let a fool kiss you.

In this case, the words 'fool' and 'kiss' reverse their positions in the second clause. This mirroring or juxtaposition can be applied on a sentence-by-sentence level or on a larger structural scale.

A chiastic structure is a literary device used in storytelling, following a pattern like A, B, C, D, C, B, A. This mirroring creates a focal point on the central element of the text. The Greek epics and much of the Bible use this structure. The Odyssey is a prime example. The story begins with Odysseus as a glorious warlord, plundering a village right after leaving Troy. At the end, in a mirrored inversion, he returns to his kingdom disguised as a humbled, decrepit old man.

This structure forces focus onto the center of The Odyssey, when Odysseus visits the underworld to get advice from the prophet Tiresias. The key advice is not just about appeasing the gods. As Tinkered Thinking explains, Tiresias's most important message is a warning.

If you and your wild men cannot curb your wild desires born of war, then you're never going to get home.

This reveals the Odyssey's deeper theme: the necessary transition from a warrior state back to civilian life. The wild desires that help a warrior survive in battle are not useful at home. The story serves as a prescription for this psychological journey. This contrasts sharply with the modern experience where soldiers are flown home and expected to immediately reintegrate. Tinkered Thinking notes the jarring juxtaposition of killing someone on a Monday and being back with family on a Thursday, suggesting this lack of a transitional journey might contribute to issues like PTSD.

Another example is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is structured as a letter within a letter. At the book's exact center is the moment the monster sees his reflection in a puddle for the first time. This literal mirroring marks the story's turning point, as the monster realizes he will never be part of human society.

Dylan O’Sullivan explains he loosely used a chiastic structure to arrange the stories in his book, "White's Mirror." He compared it to the lost art of ordering an album so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He offers a puzzle, noting his book has 31 stories. While one might assume the 16th is the center, he suggests treating the final story as an epilogue, which would shift the focal point. He also reveals he wrote the first story last, after the ending was established, to frame the entire collection.

When asked what he hopes readers take away from his book, Dylan O'Sullivan states his primary goal is for the work to be unforgettable. He wants it to leave an imprint on people's lives, regardless of whether they ultimately like it or not. The aim is for it to be memorable and different, something that readers can't shake long after finishing it.

He clarifies that the book is not intended as a simple optimistic counterpoint to pessimistic views, like those in 'Black Mirror'. He wasn't aiming to be an annoying evangelist for a technologically amazing future. Instead, he questions the effectiveness of optimism as a tool against pessimism.

What's actually effective against pessimism? Is it optimism? I don't think so, because that just creates more tribalism that actually doesn't win anyone over.

Dylan suggests that when two opposing, tribal groups argue, their arguments often just deepen the divide between them. The arguments are not truly meant to persuade the other side. Instead, they function as virtue signaling for their own group, using the opposing side as a convenient foil.

Tinkered Thinking worries that his book's title, White Mirror, might give people the wrong impression. He suggests that the true antidote to pessimism isn't optimism, but rather a sense of wonder. Instead of labeling potential futures as good or bad, the goal should be to simply look at a spectrum of options. This allows people to suspend judgment and take in more possibilities.

He explains that while some stories in the book might lean towards a Black Mirror-style dystopia, they are presented in a more meditative light. The intent is to avoid the horrific, pessimistic drama characteristic of shows like The Terminator or Black Mirror. A recent review captured this spirit perfectly. Dylan reads from the review:

The writing is clean, poetic, and imbued with purpose. It reminded me that wonder doesn't have to be so loud sometimes. It's in the soft hum of an idea that won't leave you. This book didn't just entertain me. It expanded my perception.

Dylan emphasizes that the book is not merely the opposite of Black Mirror, because just being the opposite of something is a way of outsourcing your thinking. The book models a character who is curious about the future, has agency, and wants to solve problems and explore. It is not about being unthinkingly cheerful, but about engaging with the future thoughtfully.

The sci-fi book "Project Hail Mary" is praised for its central theme: the genesis of a wonderful and beautiful friendship. The audiobook version is particularly recommended for its special audio features that enhance the story.

This portrayal of friendship is notable because friendship is arguably the purest human relationship. Unlike relationships with a spouse, children, or parents, which can involve fights and ugliness, friendship has a unique purity. With great friendships, there's infinite flexibility. You can reconnect with an old friend after many years and pick up right where you left off, even reverting to the person you were the last time you saw them.

There's no strings attached. There's no bad incentives. There's no agenda. Even with a spouse, there can be little mini agendas that can become quite insidious and toxic where, you know, someone just doesn't do the laundry and that becomes a thing. You just don't have that kind of erosion in a good, pure friendship.

This quality may make friendship the most durable relationship available in the "buffet of life." Marriages can fail and family members can become estranged, but a pure friendship is robust. It isn't subject to the irritants that affect other relationships, such as the dramas of living in close proximity or the strain of not seeing each other for a long time. Despite being such an important bond, this type of relationship is not often depicted in film or literature.

There seem to be few great friendships in fiction. Often, the central archetype is the loner or outsider, especially in existentialist novels that explore a character's internal psyche. This focus on interiority inherently isolates the main character, reducing friends to subsidiary roles. In genres like romantic comedies, the friend often serves as a prop who appears to crack a joke or advance the plot at an opportune moment before disappearing again.

An interesting counter-example is The Lord of the Rings, where friendship and camaraderie are central to the story. Tinkered Thinking notes a specific detail about this: Frodo and Samwise Gamgee weren't close friends before their quest. It was the mission itself that forged their powerful bond. This illustrates the concept of a "band of brothers," where people come together for a specific, shared purpose.

Tinkered Thinking likens this dynamic to his experience working on a book with Dylan. The collaboration felt like a mission, creating a partnership similar to the rare and famous ones between authors like Hemingway or Faulkner and their editors. He found the process of working with Dylan to be even more enjoyable than the act of writing itself.

I didn't want the editing of the book to end because I was just having such a good time. And now that it's over, I'm like, well, damn it. Now I'm writing another book. Because it's like, all right, well, if I get this book done, it's good enough, then I'm gonna give it to Dylan, and then this is all gonna happen again.

Tinkered Thinking acknowledges that his blog is currently a bit stale. However, there is a substantial archive of content for people to explore, including a thousand essays and 250 short stories. He used to post daily but let the project slide to focus on his book, "White Mirror."

The blog has remained on pause because a new idea emerged. Last October, a new character and what became the first chapter of a novel appeared in his head, fully formed. After letting the idea bounce around for a few months, he finally wrote it down to see if it was just a short story. Now, he is 12 chapters into the new novel. He recognizes the need to create a dedicated schedule to continue making progress on this new project.

An idea came into my head. A totally different brand new character what ended up becoming the first chapter, just like fully formed, popped in my head with this character. It kind of bounced around my head for a few months and I was finally like, all right, I need to write this down.