FAQ

Yes. The Blackened Prophecy universe has many more planned books and other surprises. The immediate follow-up is The Shadow War series coming in 2025. You can check the progress status from the main page.

The events following the discovery of Titan ruins, which revealed the existence of intelligent life within our solar system, caused societal changes. While Sol retained the dominance of monotheistic religions, polytheism also gained ground, especially outside the core worlds. Current Abrahamic religions still exist in the book's universe, and so do others.

The current plan is to offer print-on-demand hardcover and paperback editions of the books at the end of summer 2024 (could be fall, depending on editing speed). This includes the compendium that was previously offered as a digital-only subscriber exclusive.

Good question. The series does not include any detailed sex scenes. Love, relationships, and a hint of sexual intercourse are present, but the depiction is neither explicit nor detailed.

The story features battles against aliens, people, cosmic forces, monsters, dirty politicians, and corporations. Therefore, there is violence in the story with a certain level of detail to support the progression. However, graphical content does not exist just because. I hate reading unnecessary, explicit violence just to create shock value, so I do not write it either.

It is a living world; therefore, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and other content exist at varying levels.

Religion, politics, equality, diversity, and morality are also part of the stories wherever they fit. Although it is a space opera, not hard sci-fi, social concepts are still expected to be present in the stories.

This is very hard to answer. While I enjoy reading some, I do not like writing pure good versus evil stories, nor do I believe life is anywhere close to white or black. So, my stories happen through a scale of gray tones. Some parts are darker, and some parts are lighter.

While I do not write as grim-fun as Joe Abercrombie, he is one of my favorite authors ;).

Anything is possible, given the right circumstances. If life allows me to write faster, I will write faster. I am not known to be a slacker, but I sometimes have to prioritize things.

Tom Edwards of Tom Edwards Design. No AI.

I do not use AI in the creative aspects of my work (art, writing, composing, design) because my art expresses my thoughts and feelings. It is my way of blowing off steam. While I understand how AI works as an industry insider (I am a B2B senior product designer outside of my creative world) and have no issues with people using AI as long as the approach is ethical, it simply does not suit my creative needs.

One exception: I used AI to modify digital art I created in 2022 for benchmark testing, with ethically sourced segments from licensed providers and photos I have taken. This was for creating marketing A/B tests, and once the tests were complete, I replaced the AI-modified art with recreated artworks of my own from scratch. I even learned how to do CAD to achieve that. Fun times. I have been doing digital design for over two decades now. While I appreciate AI's ease of use, I am good. I also love working with illustrators, and Tom Edwards now handles the art for my book projects.

However, I use AI for non-creative tasks like marketing, keyword analysis, record tracking, financial planning, copyediting and proofreading, organizing research, file structuring, and maintaining a private wiki, which helps with the repetitive parts of my work. For these, I use everyday tools like MS Word, Excel, etc. Visualizing my descriptions is also a great exercise to see what it comes up with and whether the vision fits what I am trying to describe.

For music, I use no AI or automation. It is fun to do things bit by bit on my own and curse at it at the end of a project, swearing never to do it again and then doing it again anyway :). You can find individual artist information for the albums under their relevant pages.

Thank you for sparing the time to check my work out. I appreciate it.

At first, it was about proper communication etiquette and preparing thorough demos and plans showcasing intent.

In the later stages, it is mostly networking and friendships, as I have been doing what I have been doing for over two decades. Still, I prepare thorough demos and guides when working with a guest. I respect my guests' time and the craft.

My suggestion to new artists, regardless of their art type or genre, is to learn business etiquette. Learn how to communicate effectively and be respectful of other people's time. Just learning how to write a proper email would dramatically elevate your potential.

For Maegi releases, you can check maegi.bandcamp.com to find physical and digital releases while stocks last.

For Neverland, AFM Records owns the rights to anything Neverland. I have no control over bonus tracks and releases in that regard. I tried buying the rights to no avail a few years back and am no longer interested in pursuing such ventures.

For Dreamtone, if someone else from Dreamtone wants to handle the releases, cool. My Dreamtone chapter closed long ago.

While I enjoyed being on stage and sharing the energy, I realized my distaste for touring and the pre-post-show stress as someone who has an anxiety disorder. To be honest, I prefer composing and producing albums. I also like to sleep in my own bed, so I am not a huge fan of traveling.

Hence, I think it is not something I want to do.

Ha! Very long answer, but I will try to keep it short.

Writing:

Joe Abercrombie, Raymond E. Feist, J. R. R. Tolkien, James S. A. Corey, Timothy Zahn, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick are some names I read regularly. There are dozens more if not hundreds. While writing this, I remembered King, Herbert (senior), Weis and Hickman, early Salvatore, and many others (like, my whole SF Masterworks, literature classics, and The Dresden Files collections are staring at me). Not going into non-fiction.

Music:

I have several thousand albums in my collection. I love music, so I will give a list of the top 10 albums that deeply affected me.

In no particular order:

• Blind Guardian - Nightfall in Middle Earth
• Blind Guardian - Somewhere Far Beyond
• Symphony X - The Odyssey
• Iron Maiden - Somewhere in Time
• Bruce Dickinson - The Chemical Wedding
• Harry Gregson-Williams - Kingdom of Heaven OST
• Basil Poledouris - all of his works
• Anathema - Alternative 4
• David Bowie - all of his works
• Michael Hoenig - I love his Baldur's Gate OSTs

I love movies, series, anime, nature, history, psychology, sociology, and philosophy to list some general influences.