Field notes
Blog
Release news, world-building, and the occasional dispatch from the series.
October 29, 2026
Questions to Read Shadows of the Forgotten With
A short set of reading questions for Book One, for a book club or for reading on your own. No answers and no spoilers, just things worth noticing along the way.
October 27, 2026
Tell Your Agent When to Stop and Ask
An agent that never stops to ask will guess instead. A few plain stop rules (unclear, can't be undone, costs money, doesn't match) keep a guess from turning into damage.
October 24, 2026
New to The Shadows Series? Short Answers to Plain Questions
Where to start, what Book One is about, how to try it free, which formats exist, and what's still being written. A plain start-here guide to the series and this site.
October 22, 2026
Where Hope Lives in a Hard Dystopia
A dark story still needs hope. Not comfort, and not a promise about the ending. A note on where I think hope belongs in a book like Shadows of the Forgotten.
October 20, 2026
Agents Forget Between Sessions. Leave Them a Handoff Note.
When an agent's session ends, what it knew ends with it. A short handoff note (what's done, what isn't, what was decided, what's only assumed) is a cheap fix that works.
October 17, 2026
A Frozen Eval Set Beats a Moving Scoreboard
If you change the test every time you change the model, you can't tell whether you got better. Keep a frozen held-out set so scores mean something over time.
October 15, 2026
What the Free Chapters Are For (and What They Aren't)
The free chapters of Shadows of the Forgotten are an honest sample of weather and voice — not a pitch deck, not a spoiler tour, not a map of the whole company.
October 13, 2026
Give the Agent Read Access First. Write Access Is a Later Decision.
Start tools and agents on read-only access. Write, delete, send, and spend are a separate decision after you know how they fail.
October 10, 2026
Why AI Models Get Worse When Trained on Their Own Outputs, and What Real Human Data Is For
Training on model outputs isn't automatically bad. Training on model outputs instead of real data is.
October 8, 2026
Why the Story Starts on the Ground, Not With the Company
The story starts with a man on cold pavement under a ruined skyline. It does not start with an explanation of the company that owns the city.
October 6, 2026
Self-Hosting an Open Model vs. Paying for an API: When Each One Is the Cheaper Bill
Self-hosting tends to win when the machines stay busy. A hosted API tends to win when the work comes in bursts.
October 1, 2026
Control Dressed as Care
Techno-Synth sells unity, safety, order as care — soft tyranny as weather, not a user manual. Book One keeps the wound.
September 26, 2026
Trust Is Scarce Here
In a city that edits people, every alliance is a bet. Book One earns rebellion — it does not soft-land it.
September 26, 2026
Nothing That Belongs to Him
Allen Mercer wakes with a skyline and a headache — and no proof the face in the glass is his. Book One begins in the gap.
September 22, 2026
The Billboards Never Blink
Unity. Safety. Order. The screens keep selling the lie while the street refuses to forget the dark. Book One of The Shadows Series.
September 18, 2026
She Offers Him a War
Mia Turner does not offer comfort. She offers a war. Book One of The Shadows Series begins there.
January 7, 2025
Welcome to the Shadows
Shadows of the Forgotten is out. Here is why I wrote a series about erased memory, AI control, and the people who refuse to disappear.