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As my friend circles begin a strangely unified cycle—starting new creative works all around the same time—the question of how one goes about writing a story has come up regularly. In our weekly calls and bits of banter, it’s evident that we all get inspired differently; we tackle stories from different angles; we accomplish different goals through the construction itself. As for my own process, well, I’ve found it’s somewhat difficult to pin down. When I describe it, it sounds like it shouldn’t work; there’s no conflict, no drive, no engine in itself. When I mention other works that seem to resemble it, I have a hard time characterising those works as sharing the process.

In short, I think of myself as starting with metaphysical premises—ideas about how reality operates for a set of beings—and then exploring the experiential consequences of existing under those conditions, sometimes taking time to unveil the whole premise under layers of ‘everyday life’.¹ I’m interested in what it feels like to live within inhuman logics, to be subject to forces that don’t care about how humans make sense of the world. I think of nature as a dominating force with its own systems and pressures; and I think of the supernatural as just a superset of nature. I sometimes wait for an inevitable Outside to break into these premises, or into human structures of domination.²

I can pinpoint these concerns from really early works, too. It’s a pretty clear throughline to me, but it manifests differently depending on what metaphysical premise I’m working with.

Take Forgotten. In that brief game, you boot up a computer, you access areas of memory, and after being given a eulogy for yourself by an inhabitant of that area of memory, accessing the memory then causes it to be forever corrupted. The creature inside of it is destroyed. This goes on until the game itself becomes too unstable and crashes.

The premise was something like, what if animistic presence accumulates in computational objects, constrained by the technical limits of the machine? If I assume that the beings in my computer are alive, have an animistic presence, then by being left with the power on long enough, something would accumulate. Spirit? Memory? I don’t know. But given the constraints of the computer involved, that spirit matter would be fragile, too big to be contained. It’s as though every object in the world has its own memory, as though every thing in the world is endowed with spirit, but the abstraction machine’s second-order lifeforms have artificial rules that lead to some nightmarish connotations.

The construct of the video game itself creates troubling expectations from the inhabitant as to what the user is, what its role is, what it means to deviate from the role. The user is just a human being. It’s not confined to its role. But the second-order spirit in the abstraction machine is synonymous with its role, so this asymmetrical commitment to participation in a simulated world creates unspoken gaps, a discontinuity that finally gets recapitulated at the moment of death.

So all that’s to say, in the case of Forgotten, the player gets placed into a nonlinear exploration that just faintly points at the metaphysical premise and its actual impacts on inhabitants and then ends. I didn’t even really name the characters; I left names in code based on a scheme of supposed bosses from an Ultima game (if I recall correctly). The only conflict is that playing the game casts you as the grim reaper for doomed automatons.

Inhuman intelligences

Note that nearly everything I described here isn’t in the game itself. You talk to these creatures in this game world that seem like conscious beings; but in my own internal planning they are not quite human; they’re limited, structured as objects with properties they can’t defy or grow out of. This elision has bit me before—when you create characters that experience the world through fundamentally non-human constraints, readers sometimes expect human interiority that isn’t there.

I’ll give another example. Let’s say Teleceph, a novella I put out in 2020. I remember walking around Toronto coagulating premises from loose fibrin:

• What if you could schedule human cognition like it’s some sort of compute substrate across fleets of drone bodies? What happens if the substrate defies the analogy in the face of its creators?
• What if people lived in a game world nearly full-time and developed their own language and culture?

This brought us somehow to stuff like

• What if self-consciousness is emergent based upon the perception of the other? How might personhood continue when disconnected from allocated attention?
• What if the game world, the allocated attention drone bodies, and the spaceship functioned as three layers of existence like Hell / Purgatory / Heaven or like Id / Ego / Superego? What if drones tried to send stray cognitive threads back “down beneath” by severing their process identifiers?³

There was some mass hibernation event used as a pretence to renovate the global economic system, placing most people in a video game VR world most of the time—some to make money, some to pass time—and some of them get taken and made into brain vats and scheduled into piloting bodies. But given the limitations of how fast human attention recognises objects (100ms) and the roundtrip ping (another 50-600ms), the bodies can’t move very quickly; they’re forced to just sit at the controls.

And so the drone bodies themselves stitch together experience, keeping a cache of words and recognitions; the brain itself is allocating attention to “recognise” objects, recall words, to “form conclusions” (or “calculate” or whatever) while feeling the total emotional experience of what’s occurring. The accumulation of emotional experience creates subconscious imprints on the human substrate. The subconscious of the brain itself invisibly spawns its own creations, ‘orphans’, that come from that; they reify as creatures outside the scheduler that serve to kill drones and bring them back down into the brain, to re-unify the underlying person.

So we have a book where nearly all the characters aren’t people, but extremely shallow imitations of people that are actually… all the same person, just split across a bunch of bodies. Obviously, the dialogue isn’t going to be natural; it’s going to be slow, stilted, like a child gently internalising what it sees. I felt like it was actually hard in practice to execute this as a consequence—the premise generated constraints that made traditional narrative satisfaction difficult.

Natural forces

I’ll conclude with some thoughts about paravalence ~with my angel, which just came out here in 2026. I don’t know. Spoilers if you haven’t read it, but I’ll keep it really broad.

So in paravalence, there are various layers of existence above the physical world; those various layers have respective entities, and all of them are in various stages of manifestation onto the physical plane. Humans, like all creatures, have an existence on all these planes; when they’re born, fragments of previous astral bodies (that is, memories, emotions, temperaments) all form a coagulation, and our life is just about mediating that particular burden, refining it into something purer, like pure love, to return up to the Divinity. Anything that remains gets placed back into reincarnation.

At the same time, there are entities that are “unnatural”; these emerge both through cosmic accident and through human intervention (i.e. magical ritual). Magic is a matter of “tipping the scale,” of placing harmonious manifestations in sequence so as to influence affairs; it’s about trying to make what you desire more probable to manifest by living in concord, by acknowledging the various layers, by keeping their properties in mind within your own life.

There are also rituals that are meant to break the unidirectional flow of being and so to reach back up to the heavens; these are either temporary invocations or they are shamanic mergers. These rituals leave permanent ‘scars’ on the site of the ritual that allow for potential loopholes or manipulations. If everything is trying to make itself manifest, then manipulating actors that can manipulate manifestation itself is often the path of least resistance, especially when it intersects with these sites of ‘malleability.’

Paravalence is about several such entities manipulating humans who are insistent that life is ‘normal,’ and about, well, ‘right seeing,’ of operating with those layers in mind, making the esoteric exoteric as an adaptation. It’s about how violence against life is violence against life; that all sentient beings are their own becomings, that everything is tied upward in the same way, that the consequence of that violence is supernatural manipulation; something accumulates, denied by the purely empirical process. It’s the third act of the story that tries to embrace seeing across all layers to actually assess a problem.

This one is kind of disordered compared to the prior stories. Instead of a clean metaphysical premise generating predictable consequences, it describes a chaotic karmic tapestry where you’re arbitrarily endowed with feelings from some other life, you can arbitrarily embrace them or deny them, and they arbitrarily cause effects that bleed out into all other lives.

You might have a permanently “distorted” way of experiencing the world that you didn’t choose, but through all these intersubjective distortions, all this incoherent feeling and suffering, some sort of sanctification can occur, something can be retained across all life; even if the story unravels into a set of cosmic accidents and overlapping rituals.

Decohering realities

At times I felt betrayed by my intuition, like my act structures didn’t make any sense; I would deliver story-changing information in the third act, retroactively changing the understanding of everything we read up until now, but not strongly enough that I could say it was some sort of Kishōtenketsu structure.

But I think this is just what happens when you start with metaphysical premises, rules or forces, rather than character conflicts. I don’t often set rules and follow conflicts between characters; I try to establish how reality works in a given world and then explore what it feels like to gradually understand that reality.⁴ The world loses coherence the more you learn—not because the world itself is incoherent, but because human frameworks for understanding break down when confronted with inhuman logics and need to either be dispensed with or adapt to another way of seeing. I’m less interested in stories where characters overcome obstacles and more interested in stories where they have to fundamentally revise their understanding of what kind of world they’re in.⁵