The Extras
Extras gather the pieces that live at the edges. Music. Visual fragments. Symbols. The connective tissue that deepens immersion without needing to move the plot. They are for readers who like to linger, trace patterns, and look sideways at a world once they’ve entered it.
Most Recent Entries
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Extra: The Playlist Before the Story
Music has quietly changed my creative life over the past year in ways I never expected. Not in a dramatic “artist discovers inspiration on a mountaintop” kind of way. More like opening a window in a room I didn’t realize had gone stuffy. For a long time, I treated music as background noise. Something pleasant.…
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Extra: The Strange Little Ecosystem Behind Tidewoven
Maybe the strangest thing about writing a long story is how many different forms it takes before it ever becomes a finished book. Parts of Tidewoven exist in notebooks. Parts exist in playlists. Some live as disconnected scraps of dialogue typed into my phone at inconvenient moments. Some are held together with random notebooks, arrows,…
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Extra: The Emotional Weather of Tidewoven
There’s something worth knowing about the Tidewoven playlists before you press play. They are rarely literal. Most of the time, I am not asking, “Would this character actually listen to this song?” I’m asking a very different question: “What does it feel like for this character to live inside this moment?” The playlists are less…
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Extra: Pressure Systems
Micah understands the world in terms of load. Not metaphorically. Practically. Weight. Stress. Failure points. What holds, what gives, what breaks. At work, that makes him very good at what he does. He can look at a system and see where the pressure is going, where it’s building, where it will fail if no one…
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Extra: How I Write Tidewoven
People sometimes ask how a story like Tidewoven gets built. The honest answer is that it begins small. Not with an outline. Not with a plot map. It begins with moments. A conversation that reveals more than the characters intended. A quiet scene where someone almost says the thing that matters. A fragment of pressure…
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Extra: The Quiet Rebellion Behind Tidewoven
Every story begins with a quiet rebellion. Mine started slowly, almost by accident. The more seriously I began to think about stories, the more my tolerance changed. Characters I once loved started to feel thin. Conflicts that once felt dramatic began to feel convenient. Endings arrived too easily. At first, I thought something was wrong…