The first time I built a world that other people could walk into, I was a kid who'd accidentally written a book at 14 — a teen fantasy doorstop that, in my own honest verdict, still reads exactly like a fourteen-year-old wrote it, because one did. The Swords of Darkness is what that same kid is attempting now, fifteen-odd years older and only slightly less out of his depth: a dark fantasy epic aimed at roughly 150,000 words across 600 pages. I want to be upfront before you read another line — it is in progress. Unfinished. Ambitious in a way I am not yet sure I can cash. I'm not showing you a finished book. I'm showing you a thing I'm still learning how to make, and the most interesting part of it, honestly, is everything I've gotten wrong on the way.
Because here's the real subject of this page, the thing underneath the swords and the gods: I am much better at starting big things than finishing them. That's not modesty, it's a diagnosis I've earned. The teen novel only got done because I tricked myself into it — I never decided to write a book, I just faked enough progress under cover of a gaming laptop that a manuscript snuck out the other side. Swords doesn't have that trick. It's the first big thing I'm trying to finish on purpose, eyes open, knowing exactly which habit I'm fighting.
The story I'm trying to tell
It's a tragedy about a man who sets out to fight evil and slowly becomes it — told from thirty years before the main series, so you watch the whole fall instead of hearing it referenced later. The one-line theme, the way I wrote it into the bible the day the idea clicked:
"Reverberating feelings of a man between evil and good. The journey from a victim of justice to the head of the Spirit Warriors to the murderer of the Spirit God himself."— from my own plot notes
The protagonist, Zirus, starts as a blade master whose one flaw is the cleanest line in the whole document: blind trust in institutional justice. The theme I keep on the wall is "justice is a tool, not a truth — you trust it too much," and the book's only job is to break that trust across his face. He's framed, imprisoned, escapes under cover of a storm, and stumbles on a pair of cursed swords abandoned at a campsite. After his first kill he despises himself — and then some quiet part of him takes pride in the win, and the feeling shifts, gradually, from guilt to "they deserved it" to "this is fun." The trick I'm chasing is that the reader slides down that ramp with him and only notices halfway down. He becomes a killer the world names the Red Curse; the order that should hang him instead redeems him and raises him to its leader — right before everything he loves is turned into the weapon that ends him.
I can't say all that out loud without wincing a little, because it's the kind of premise a fourteen-year-old would have also loved, and I'm aware of that. The difference I'm betting on is execution, not ambition. Anyone can want to write the dark epic. The question I'm living is whether I can build one whose darkness earns itself.
The one genuinely original thing in here
If I'm allowed to be quietly proud of one piece, it's the magic — mostly because it isn't decoration. The rules of the world are the reason Zirus falls:
"The souls of whoever the Alecreto Silver weapons slay are trapped in them and a part of their strength is transferred to the one who slayed them … which tends to make killing addictive."— from my own plot notes
That's the engine. Every warrior who wields the stuff has to overcome the high of killing before they're trusted on a battlefield, because each kill feels like bits of your body being reborn. So whether Zirus is corrupted by the swords or by his own heart is left genuinely unanswered — and that ambiguity is the whole book. A magic system whose central mechanic is also the protagonist's downfall is the one structural idea here I think holds up regardless of how the prose lands. The rest of the world I try to keep honest in a way I had to teach myself: there's a note in the folder, literally titled "hard trap," where I warn myself off lazy environmental determinism — the "this biome therefore this culture" shortcut — because real cultures come from history and migration and accident, not just what grows nearby. And my favorite worldbuilding belief isn't a spell at all; it's that most magic in the world shouldn't work — snake oil, charms, healing stews, a thin sliver of the genuinely real buried in a mountain of superstition a normal person would carry without ever knowing which bits held.
Where it actually stands (the honest inventory)
I'm wary of the version of this page where I list the cool parts and let you assume the book exists. It mostly doesn't yet. Here is the real state of it:
- Three drafted chapters, a separate stylistic experiment written in Patrick Rothfuss's voice, and several alternate openers — real volume, not just an outline, but nowhere near a book
- A full 17-chapter, ~80k-word three-act map with per-chapter word counts — the skeleton is planned even where the flesh isn't on it
- An original, consequence-bearing magic system that I'd defend over the prose any day
- A documented multi-model drafting process — I iterate plot through successive AI passes, keep every one, and overrule the model when it's wrong
And the honesty the inventory demands: the drafted prose is competent and AI-assisted, with the tic-phrases and the occasional looping paragraph you'd expect from that. It's promising, not yet distinctive. So I lead on the architecture, never the polish — I'd rather you judge the machine than the paint, because the machine is the part I actually built. Calling myself a "novelist" off the back of this would be a lie I'd have to maintain. I'm a worldbuilder who's still learning the craft of finishing the world.
The reason this page exists at all
There's one bit of the design I genuinely love, and it's the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to an unfinished manuscript. At the climax, Zirus deflects a god's lightning with one sword and leaves a teeny-tiny crack in the blade. Decades later — in a sequel I have not written, of a book I have not finished — a young warrior named Ichiro strikes that exact crack, and that single throwaway flaw becomes the entire win condition of the next book. Setting up a payoff a whole book early makes the work feel less like writing and more like building a machine that goes off later, and the machine-building is the part of me that can be trusted to follow through. That's the bet of this whole project: I take the same engineer's-brain that finishes software and I aim it at the thing my writer's-brain keeps abandoning.
It's also why D&D matters to me as practice. The world I run at the table is the same itch with instant feedback — six friends who cannot hide boredom, who will not pretend a flat scene worked. A reader puts a bad book down silently and you never learn why. A table tells you in real time. So I treat the campaign as the lab and the novel as the thing I'm trying to earn my way up to, and I steal everything the table teaches me about how a story actually lands on a person.
I keep one note from the origin story taped over all of this, because it's the only writing lesson I fully trust:
"Honestly, if I had just decided to write a book, I probably wouldn't have finished it. But because I had to fake progress, I accidentally built a real habit. Kinda makes me wonder—how many things could we actually finish if we just tricked ourselves into starting?"— me, on the book
That's a finishing lesson, not a writing one, and Swords is me trying to learn it the hard way — without the gaming-laptop con this time, with the failure mode named out loud where I can watch it. If it ever gets done, that'll be the real accomplishment, and it won't be the prose or the plot. It'll be that I finally finished the big thing I'd otherwise have started and walked away from, like all the rest. Ask me how it's going. The honest answer will probably be "slowly, but still going," and for me that's a sentence worth chasing a whole book for.
Keep going How I accidentally wrote a book at 14 · The D&D world I run