Most will say they use software like Google Docs, and proudly proclaim their use of Grammarly as a helper. The funny part to all this is both of those tools are AI (artificial intelligence) powered behemoths. It’s only humorous because writers and authors will proclaim their hatred of anything AI and vow to unfollow anyone on social media who uses it. “Oh, but those aren’t actually writing it. They’re just tools.” Barf.

Even Microsoft Word has AI muddying up our world. So, what do I use?

I write with LibreOffice Write and LibreOffice Calc, Word and Excel doppelgängers, respectively. It’s free, and it runs on the big three operating systems: Linux, Microsoft, and Mac. It also has a poorly rendered, but functional, smartphone app called Callabora Office. I’d love to talk to the developers of that app and let them know some of my little annoyances… but… it’s free so I can’t really complain.

Yes, LibreOffice has a grammar checker. It may have AI somewhere in it. I don’t care, and I don’t publicly shame people who use AI while making lame excuses for my “tools”. I will avoid people who write an entire book for sale using AI as the book’s author, unless they admit it. I’d probably avoid them regardless, but I wouldn’t curse their existence.

Let me make this clear. If you use software from a huge company, you are using and feeding AI. Shut up about people who use it. Being holier-than-thou on social media while posting your Grammarly stats make you look like a moron.

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Alma Ólafsdóttir was born and raised by her widower father in Akureyri, Iceland. The Goddess Ymir chose her, as a young teen, to be her hands and eyes in the Anthropic Universe, and to save the human species from extinction… at least that’s Ymir led Alma to believe. Terrified of her new-found unimaginable power, and the cold influence of Ymir’s hatred for imperfect humans, Alma hid from people on her family farm for almost seventy years.

Warning, Spoilers

Throughout the book, Ymir tests Alma. Some of these tests are brutal, torturous, cruel, but all of them require teamwork and loyal friendships. Although she’s mostly omnipotent, she has limitations. These limitations are the basis to her forming connections with other powerful characters, like Dawn, and David.

Ymir is a crafty god. Alma’s tests are not only for her. They are also for her friends, particularly the Trinity. While she grows stronger, they do as well, and as the Trinity grows more powerful, so does Ymir.

These trials come to a head when a war breaks out between humanity and a little understood species called the Æsir. It becomes clear that the Gods are at war, and they’re using the humans and the Æsir as their proxy fighters in our Anthropic Universe.

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Dawn is a reoccurring main character in my Ascension novel/novella series. She is introduced in chapter 1 of Ascension, The Ymir Trinity and features prominently throughout the book.

Warning, Spoilers

In the beginning, she’s kind of cute and bubbly… well… except for the bug scene in the library. It doesn’t take long to realize she may have something wrong inside her head. As it turns out, she hears voices. Cold, logical voices with near zero empathy for the suffering of people, and insects.

Dawn is a demigoddess who acts as the mouth and ears of Ymir. She is one of three people, The Trinity, chosen by Ymir to act as her (yes, in my book Ymir is female, or at least Dawn thinks she is) tools in the Anthropic universe… our universe.

Throughout the book, she slips in and out of psychopathy, until she finally embraces her persona as Alma’s (another member of the Trinity) enforcer, assassin. As the Trinity slowly gains power over three species, Humans, Kohor, and Trey, Dawn’s connection with Ymir and other Gods grows stronger. At some point, she becomes the focal point of worship among the Human and Kohor people.

Dawn’s physical relationships are many and varied. I hint at her once living with her girlfriend. In the beginning, she seems obsessed with Air Force General David Trauger. She and Air Force Captain Stacey Martin become partners until… spoiler. After Stacey, she hooks up with Navy Admiral Ander Falk. There’s a strange affair with a Kohor woman who she continues to see while engaged to Admiral Falk. He’s cool with it.

Dawn is my favorite character. Her apathetic psychopathy and intense belief in the power of eugenics rings a little true inside my extremely logical brain.

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As a father of two boys, I watched it happen. My sons loved reading books, like the Harry Potter series. Then came the… distraction. Nope, not girls. Video games.

I can only speak as a man, for some men, so here it goes. Video games give men something they crave above all other things, a sense of competition. The power of gaming didn’t take over quickly, it took time and an innovation that transformed all sapient life on Earth. With the internet, men could play together as teams and fight to the virtual death with other men. Once online multiplayer games became ubiquitous, male readership numbers tanked, hard.

The men of our species want to compete with each other. It’s built into our DNA. It’s why we work overtime, play sports, associate with professional teams, or wave our nation’s flag. You can’t compete with other men when reading a book. Well, you can, but that’s weird.

How do we fix this? We can’t. It’s over for male readers. Yes there will always be a handful of us who read, but stories can’t compete with the excitement, camaraderie, and the subconscious sense of accomplishment video games provide. Barring some kind of catastrophic event that breaks the internet forever, male readership will never bounce back.

Here’s a bit of fun (read, horrible) news for authors. Women are getting into gaming more and more each year. Their reader numbers will fall as well. The only thing I can imagine bringing a few of them back is lowering the bar for reading. No, not making stories dumber. Make them shorter, like snacks. People love snacks.

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A lot of writers and authors pretend they write for themselves, then turn around and whine on social media about low sales. It’s basic business. To make money, you have to create the most popular product as cheep as you can, and push it out into the wild. Of course, there are always exceptions, but here’s a bit of cold truth, you are not the exception, and neither am I.

Decades ago I had an epiphany while watching an episode of American Idol. The show displayed a packed field of talented singers. This is when it became clear… no one is special now that we can see billions of people via television and the internet. A great singer in a rural farm town isn’t all that unique on the global stage. Singers are everywhere, and they’re all good, but none of them are particularly special. Again, there are outliers. Take Taylor Swift for example. She’s a great singer, but she has more than her voice. She crafted an entire business out of a persona that spoke to a wide audience of young women and girls. Pandering to her base, not her voice, made her a billionaire.

I will never be a famous author. Infamous? Maybe, but famous, never. It’s not that I’m unwilling to pander, I simply don’t know how.

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While I love the architecture of the late Viking era, adhering to their documented customs makes little sense to me. If you took a Viking kingdom and gave them all the power of modernity, I have no doubt they’d embrace it… and probably use it to subjugate the weak.

What I really love about them is their fascination with exploring. It’s why I like Elon Musk, Jacques Cousteau, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and so many more. They are driven to expand our knowledge, and thrust our species out into the universe, for better or worse. My love for the Vikings extends to all the daydreamers who push the boundaries of human engineering and science.

By extension, I have little to no empathy for those who don’t at least want to expand human knowledge. If a person simply exists with no useful drive, I want nothing to do with them. The idea of wasting resources on useless eaters repulses me.

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I live without fear of consequences when it pertains to my career or hobby decisions. You want me to build a shed from reclaimed driftwood? Sure, I can do that… probably. I’ve never done it before, but I’m certain I’ll figure it out along the way.

No, I’m not a psychopath, at least no professionals have ever labeled me as such. I don’t wish ill or harm on anyone, but I don’t fret over their self-inflicted suffering either, and my definition of self-inflicted is extremely broad.

This is where make-believe comes into play. At some point during my midlife crisis, I stopped seeing events as ruling my life. Everything became a story, like a book, television show, or movie. Each situation compartmentalized into its own silo, a silo I could just walk away from and forget about while I visited another silo. There are a lot of disparate silos in my head.

Basically, every aspect of my life exists independently of the others. My make-believe multiverse of reality is a catalog of shows that I choose to live inside until I get bored or frustrated and move on to the next show.

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The Ascension Multiverse asks, “What if nature was, herself, a God?” Imagine all the horrors that have befallen humankind, and Earth in general, were her intentional hand clumsily wiping away mistakes. Hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, wars, famine, disease… these were necessary components to the evolutionary process.

She crafted humanity into her greatest creation, her masterpiece, but in doing so, she produced something impervious to her cold and brutal scalpel. At the peak of human intelligence, the species she created diverged into factions of the powerful, the builders, and the unproductive. Could a war cull the useless eaters, the parasites who do nothing but drain resources and encourage the powerful to focus on their immense wealth on the wrong things?

Somehow, over the eons, she cultivated an overwhelming empathy in her children. It was her undoing. Obsessed with protecting their weak, humanity regressed enough to allow the worthless among them to accumulate numbers that paralyzed the powerful into pandering to their demands.

Now, imagine there is a second sapient species, designed by another God, out there, one that was never poisoned with empathy that crippled their natural evolution.

This is the Ascension Multiverse I have created in my mind, and committed to documenting.

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Everything I write has a sturdy foot planted in the remorseless lottery of natural selection. You may think you’re a nature lover, but when you point at a pretty flower, my brain wonders how many iterations of that flower had to parish before this one proved itself worthy to continue living in our hostile world. I love nature on an entirely different level than most people. The apathetic code that lies within the heart of every living thing on Earth fascinates me.

My book series, Ascension, embraces this fascination. It’s about a universe of Gods who despise mental and physical weakness in the sapient creatures of our anthropic universe. How did I come of with this god-awful concept? It came to me in a daydream while I wandered around Saint Augustine Florida on my lunch break. I like to think these Gods are real, and my writing is them using me as a tool to communicate with the human species.

The more you get to know the writer version of me, the more you’ll see that I’m broken by current Western Civilization standards. I don’t believe every live has intrinsic or even equal value. I don’t see empathy as a strength. If you spend enough time talking to me, you’ll realize, deep down, you are more like me than you’ll want to admit.

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One advantage of the third person past tense narrative is its flexibility in presenting multiple viewpoints. The narrator can switch focus from one character to another, offering insights into the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of various characters without the limitations of a single perspective. This can enrich the story by providing a more comprehensive understanding of the plot and the dynamics between characters. Additionally, it allows for the development of subplots and secondary characters in a way that feels natural and cohesive.

The third person past tense narrative also enhances the sense of realism and authenticity in storytelling. This narrative can draw upon historical or factual details to ground the story in a specific time and place. This can help to create a vivid and immersive setting, making the story more engaging for the reader. Furthermore, the past tense can lend a sense of finality and inevitability to the events, emphasizing the consequences of the characters’ actions and decisions.

Lastly, this narrative style can create a sense of suspense and intrigue. Because the narrator is recounting past events, they have the ability to foreshadow future developments or reveal key information at strategic points in the story. This can keep readers invested and eager to learn more, as they piece together the narrative puzzle. The third person past tense narrative, with its combination of flexibility, realism, and suspense, remains a popular and effective storytelling technique in both literature and other forms of narrative media.

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