Some context, because I don’t talk about my day job very often:
I’ve been writing professionally since 2014.
I have a minor in creative writing, a bachelor’s degree in photojournalism, a master’s in secondary English education, and I’m currently working on a second master’s in marketing.
Over the years, I’ve worked in journalism, communications, content, editing, and marketing.
So I spend a lot of my life thinking about words.
How people read them.
How information is structured.
How much context someone needs.
How dialogue sounds.
How to make something complicated understandable without flattening it into nothing.
And I think all of that has absolutely followed me into my fiction.
One thing I’ve heard about The Tome of Talula is that it’s dense.
It is.
There’s a lot going on in Amblem: history, politics, magic systems, religion, factions, relationships, timelines, different regions, and an unreasonable number of people making questionable decisions.
But I’ve also heard that, despite all of that, the actual writing is fairly easy to follow.
I think my professional background has something to do with that.
I’m used to taking a lot of information and asking:
How do I make this readable?
That doesn’t mean making it simple.
It means giving the reader enough to understand what matters without stopping the story every five minutes for a textbook lecture.
And then there’s the banter.
I write professionally for a living.
I write fiction because apparently I still had words left over.
So when I finally get to let characters talk?
They TALK.
They argue.
They interrupt each other.
They make jokes at inappropriate times.
They annoy each other.
They develop running jokes.
They occasionally say something deeply important and then immediately ruin the moment because apparently nobody in Amblem knows how to behave.
That part is probably just me.
I’ve been putting my writing in front of strangers for more than a decade now. Journalism, communications, marketing, professional content, fiction—it’s all different, but every form of writing has taught me something that eventually found its way into Amblem.
So yes, The Tome of Talula is dense.
Yes, there is a lot of banter.
Yes, there is enough lore on my website to concern a reasonable person.
But there is a method to the madness.
Mostly.
