I am a longtime writer, artist, and professional data scientist who has apparently decided that one perfectly reasonable use of adulthood is figuring out how fictional villages regulate property disputes, preserve dangerous books, build harbor infrastructure, and remember events that happened five hundred years ago.

My particular weakness is worldbuilding from the small things outward. I am less interested in inventing another empire than I am in discovering what its people complain about, what they repair instead of replace, what children are told not to do, which jobs exist because of some disaster three centuries ago, and what everyone in town knows that nobody has ever thought to write down.

I have long been fascinated by history, genealogy, mathematics, systems, and the peculiar ways people turn circumstances into institutions and institutions into traditions. Those interests tend to follow me into my fiction. I like worlds with accumulated history: places where laws have edge cases, buildings have been altered by generations of owners, stories disagree with the archival record, and customs survive long after anyone remembers why they began. I

also have a great affection for subverted expectations. Give me the article with the title that seems as though it cannot possibly belong in a fantasy world. I want the harmless plant with alarming implications, the ridiculous municipal office that turns out to be indispensable, the children's game that preserves a piece of forgotten history, or the mundane household object that tells you more about a civilization than its royal genealogy does.

My current principal worldbuilding project is Evenshade, a small village on the River Chionthar in the Forgotten Realms. Much of Evenshade is written from inside the setting through oral histories, archival transcripts, field records, laws, correspondence, marginalia, and other documents whose authors are occasionally mistaken and sometimes have reasons to be. Evenshade will probably not be my last world. I am increasingly interested in seeing what happens when I take the same approach somewhere with entirely different assumptions, histories, and rules.

For now, though, there is still an unreasonable amount left to discover in one small village.

Welcome!