Category: Author Commentary

I didn’t write Alien I Am to be consumed quickly. I didn’t write it to be skimmed, raced through, or finished in a weekend and forgotten. And I didn’t write it to compete with the loudest, fastest science-fiction stories out there. I wrote it for a very specific kind of reader—one I didn’t fully understand until the book was finished. This page exists to tell you, plainly and respectfully, whether Alien I Am is meant for you. This Book Is For Readers Who… Feel out of sync with the world.If you’ve always sensed that the volume of human suffering, noise,…

On the Layers of Lore and How They Work Together So the book is organized into seven different sections. Basically, the first section is the Anomaly Files 1 through 51. That’s the core story. That’s Emily’s story. Everything starts there. It’s the surface layer, but it’s essential, because everything else grows out of it. The second section—which is really the gateway into the different layers of lore—is called the Shard Logbook. As you read the Anomaly Files, you’re going to encounter the little diamonds, or chevrons. Those chevrons lead you into the Shard Logbook. That first entryway—or gateway—into the deeper…

Paperback Was the Intended Format The first thing that everyone should know is that this book was intended to be read in paperback form. Not because the author cares about getting more money for a paperback, but simply because of what the book is and how it works. There is a physicality to the way the story and the lore are structured that naturally fits a printed book. Sticky Notes for the Deep Read If you have the cognitive ability and the curiosity to go as deep as all the lore takes you, I would suggest having a few sticky…

Author Commentary: There’s a scene in Alien I Am that I debated removing from the book more than any other scene. It’s the scene where Emily and Amanda are sitting at the kitchen table after the first day of Integration. Now, Integration in the book is where the marked young people have to help the aliens “sack” the rest of humanity into pods—people who are not going to make it. The unmarked. And marked is literal. It’s a physical mark on your arm that happens through abduction into an alien spaceship. So only a certain amount of young people are…

Author Commentary When I first started writing Alien I Am, I wrote it from the perspective of the aliens. That version mattered to me because it helped me frame the “big” questions—what they want, why they’re here, and what’s really happening behind the curtain of the human story. But it also had a limitation: it didn’t land in the heart the way I wanted it to. It was cosmic, conceptual, and strange in the right ways… but it wasn’t grounded in the part of life where most of us actually live. And then, eleven years later, I made a decision…

FILE 015 – 2:37AM The famous room number in the movie The Shining is Room 237. This number was changed from 217 in Stephen King’s original novel because the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, where the movie’s exterior was filmed, actually had a Room 217, and the lodge’s management was worried that guests would avoid it after the film’s release. Kubrick chose 237, a number that did not exist in the lodge, and it also had a connection to his earlier film, Dr. Strangelove, where 237 is the number to initiate a nuclear strike. In the novel, the room number is…