Wow, this is a surreal moment!
I actually did it, I wrote a whole sci-fi novel, and in less than a week you will be able to buy it! It has been one of those things that I knew I wanted to do for basically my whole life, but I had never quite felt ready to start until three years ago.
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I remember writing a short fan-fiction story about The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis when I was in elementary school. I made a short claymation film inspired by the Redwall books. My friend Lars and I were in the process of creating an alien card game (inspired by Pokémon and Fistful of Aliens and all the other awesome 90’s stuff we were immersed in), but we mostly just enjoyed coming up with cool aliens and not so much creating the game rules and mechanics.
In high school I took a class called cinema arts and made a series of surrealistic short films with my friends. I would sit and wait for ideas to appear to me, and then do my best to capture the feelings, moods, scenes, and interactions into a script and then on camera.
I went to film school and continued making surrealistic projects, but looking back I can see that somewhere along the way my spark faded in the face of “reality” – making money, making something marketable, making something that other filmmakers would like. I wrote a few short screenplays, won a screenwriting award, and had several feature length concepts in progress. There was one in particular that I really liked – a sci-fi feature concept about an AI entity that could travel back and forth between virtual spaces and physical reality. The thing was, I was learning more and more that I didn’t enjoy the actual work of being on film sets and producing my film ideas at that higher level. Thinking about all the logistics involved in producing a sci-fi project made me sick to my stomach, and I shelved it.
I was so tunnel-visioned into the film medium that I completely overlooked one of my first true loves – books. I was also a bit of a snob at the time, seeing film as the superior medium – plus I had just gotten a film degree, I couldn’t just throw that away and go write books, could I?
I also found that it’s hard to write anything original when you’re in your early 20s and have been raised on a steady diet of pop culture, books, and movies. At least that’s how I felt. I could write well – people would always compliment my prose – but I never felt that what I was writing had anything really real behind it. It always ended up being “my take on No Country for Old Men”, or “my take on The Matrix”, but the characters were hollow because they weren’t grounded in my own life experiences.
And so after college I didn’t write another serious project for over 10 years. I had my storytelling outlets – I created a couple very detailed campaigns for my DnD group. My favorite was a detective story set in a fantasy overcity/undercity rife with political espionage, corrupt food supply cartels, and waste management gangs. I also had fun writing a playful recipe email list for my friends. But it wasn’t until 2022 that I felt ready to give another long-form project a serious try.
In 2022 I was feeling pretty checked out at my corporate video job. I had created my personal brand on the side, The Actualized Alien, which started as a YouTube channel where I would interview artists and other creative people who had set out to live life on their terms. I began seeing patterns and themes across these interviews – things that I had experienced and felt myself but hadn’t always been able to articulate. My own imagination was sparking again, and the idea for a dreamlike story about an alien going to different planets and experiencing these different themes came to me organically.
I wrote my ideas in one of those pocked-sized mini notebooks, and once I felt like I had enough of a rough outline I created a new google doc and began to write. Every morning (well, almost every morning) for the next few months, I would sit down, put on some good ambient music, and tap into a meditative writing flow state. I didn’t go back and read what I had already written, I just kept going forward. I was surprised at what came out. The ideas evolved and new characters and planets appeared. I was going on the journey myself along with Xo, the main character.
And so Xo and the Unknowable Infinite was born.
I have a clear memory of reading back the first draft of the book in late 2022 on my new work laptop from my new corporate job (the one I quit a year ago), on a flight back from a work trip. It was a red eye flight and the lights were dimmed, and as I read the climax of the book tears started running down my face. Is it corny to cry while reading your own writing? Well, it happens to me pretty often so I take it as a sign that I’ve tapped into something deep, at least for myself and my own emotional world.
This book is my allegory of the search for fulfillment. Like Xo, with the power to manipulate matter however they wish with the power of their mind, yet trapped on a planet where they are only allowed to create “practical” creations, I have felt frustrated and limited in my work for most of my career. I have felt lost in space and adrift, and then found myself trapped once again within systems that I rebelled against over and over. Breaking free again in search of true fulfillment, freedom, and understanding. And forever pursued by the dark cube ships of responsibility, societal expectations, and money.
I love this book. I see myself and many other awesome people in it. I see the search for freedom and truth and trying to exist meaningfully in our current world. Not wanting to accept the rules that don’t make sense. Not wanting to accept a life of submission to a system that just wants to extract “value” from us. Searching for collaborators, for understanding, for fulfillment, and finding it, and losing it, and finding it again. I hope that is what you feel while reading the book.
So check it out, I would love to hear your thoughts! You can get a physical copy via Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and the ebook on Apple or pretty much any ebook platform. Just search Xo and the Unknowable Infinite, or click the links below.
Order here on Barnes and Noble
Never stop exploring my friends – through the ups and the downs, through the dark and the light, may your journey be full of joy and delight ❤️