Man Amongst
the Clouds

This book started as a note on my phone in March 2017. A single idea: What if magic was memory?

I didn’t know it would take nine years. I didn’t know it would live in every notes app, email thread, and text-to-self I owned. I wrote when the compulsion hit — at 2 AM, in parking lots, in voice memos that autocorrected “spread” to “Spanish.”

The notes were scattered across Evernote, Google Docs, Scrivener, Apple Notes, emails to myself, texts to myself. For years, the novel existed as fragments — a scene here, a character sketch there, a magic system that kept evolving until it was larger than the story it was built for.

The protagonist was originally called Nim. He became Aelo — “breath of remembering” — when the magic system crystallized into something I hadn’t expected: a story about what it costs to hear the world, and what it costs to be heard.

The man I was in 2017 couldn’t have written this book. He had the bones, but he didn’t have the depth. Nine years of living gave me that. Nine years of grief, of love, of carrying things for a long time and learning what the carrying costs.

And then, honestly, I almost let it die. The manuscript sat for years — buried under life, under doubt, under the weight of a thing that felt too big to finish. It would have collected so much dust that light would have never touched it again.

What brought it back was my son.

Carter started writing his own novel — Ash to Fury. Watching him write it — watching his dedication, his discipline, the quiet fire he brought to every chapter — reminded me of what it felt like to believe a story was worth finishing. His commitment was so sincere, so total, that it shamed the part of me that had given up. If my son could build a world from nothing with that kind of devotion, I had no right to let mine rot in a drawer.

Carter’s book gave me back my own. I owe him that. This novel exists because he showed me what it looks like to not quit.

I’m grateful for every year of the gap. The book is better for it. I am better for it. And I am grateful, beyond what words can hold, for my son.

I didn’t outline this book. I didn’t sit down with a story structure or a whiteboard or a plan. I had notebooks — physical ones, cheap ones, ones that got wet and dried warped. I had notes apps. I had voice memos. I had emails to myself with subject lines like “dog scene” and “castle stuff” and nothing in the body but three half-sentences. Thousands of fragments, spread across years, dictated into my phone at red lights — the voice-to-text mangling every other word so badly that “spread” became “Spanish” and “thin” became “fin” and I’d come back to a note six months later with no idea what I’d been trying to say.

A good portion of it was written in a canvas hot tent in the woods outside Boonville, New York. In winter. The company I was working for paid for hotels — warm beds, someone to make them for you every morning. I turned them down. Hotels depressed me. The sameness of them, the fluorescent quiet. But the woods did something else. The cold, the effort of keeping a fire going, the silence that wasn’t really silence — it opened something up. I needed the struggle of it. I needed to feel the weather on the other side of the canvas to write about people who lived close to the world, who felt it pressing against them. Some of the earliest scenes in this book were written by lantern light in a tent that smelled like woodsmoke and frozen canvas, and I wouldn’t trade that for any hotel room on earth.

That was the process. If you could call it that. But underneath the chaos, something was building.

This story didn’t come from other fantasy novels. It came from life.

I grew up with parents who always had their nose in a book. By third grade I’d read hundreds. I would read thousands more. My father was a writer himself — he’d compose prose and poetry while working in the middle of the Sahara Desert in Africa, inspired by the landscape and by Hemingway, imagining he was following in his footsteps. That was the house I grew up in. Stories weren’t entertainment. They were the way you made sense of being alive.

Fletcher — the name of the ancient king whose bloodline runs through the entire novel — was the name of a dog I had as a kid. The best dog I ever had. Other names in the book carry similar histories, borrowed from people and places and animals that mattered to me in ways I didn’t always understand until I gave those names to someone in the story and watched them fit.

In 2004, I was overseas with the military. I walked through palaces in Baghdad — real palaces, built for real kings — and something about the scale of them, the silence inside them, the way power leaves a residue on stone, stayed with me. It’s in the bones of this book. In the way I write about thrones and chambers and what it does to a man to sit above everyone for too long.

I don’t consider myself a religious man. I’ve never felt comfortable in any particular denomination, though I feel like I’ve sampled them all over the years. But it did not escape me that the ground I walked on in Iraq held some of the oldest stories ever told. Ancient Babylon. The Tigris and the Euphrates. I would think about that a lot — that the Bible, whatever you believe about it, probably holds truths I may never understand, and that my boots might be standing where the prophets had stood, where the disciples had walked, where history became scripture. I don’t know if any of that is true. But I liked imagining it. And those questions — about what ground remembers, about what stories outlive the people who lived them — are all over this novel.

I did a stint working for a uranium exploration company in Colorado and Utah and I’d find chip piles out in the desert — places where hundreds of years ago someone had squatted down and knapped out an arrowhead, and all the flakes were still there, untouched. Sometimes a few feet away I’d find the arrowhead itself. I’d sit there and wonder about that person. What his life was like. What he believed. What he saw when he looked up at the sky. What he thought happened after death.

I used to write stories about that — the question of what comes after — for a college publication years earlier. I’ve decided I’ll probably never know the answer until the time comes, and I’m OK with that. It would have been a poor choice to pick one answer and say this is true and build a life around it when I knew in my heart that it probably wasn’t the whole picture. Those are the fundamental questions I kept asking myself, and a lot of that philosophy — that willingness to sit with not knowing — went straight into this story.

I was inspired deeply by Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey. Not just as a narrative structure, but as a way of understanding what human beings go through when they’re called to become something they didn’t know they could be. It shaped the architecture of this novel. It also led me to create a men’s retreat built around those same ideas — heroesjourney.camp — because the questions this book asks aren’t just fiction. They’re the questions I’ve been living with my whole life.

Years later, I worked at a remote camp in Nunavut, Canada. The Inuit there told me that some of their people could whistle and call in the northern lights. I thought they were pulling my leg. Then I watched one of them do it. I saw the sky move. I still can’t explain it. There’s probably some logical reason buried in there somewhere, but I’ve never looked for it. I want it to be magic. I will say to this day that it was, and you will never convince me otherwise.

There are so many stories like that woven into this novel. Moments I lived that I couldn’t explain, places I stood that changed the way I thought about what’s possible. I didn’t set out to write a fantasy book. I set out to write down the things I’d seen that felt like they belonged in one.

I researched everything. Not methodically — obsessively. I watched hours of videos on the Five Element Theory from Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is where the elemental magic system first took shape before it became something else entirely. I studied spagyrics — real alchemical processes for extracting the essence of plants — because I needed the magic to feel like it had weight, like it followed rules even when those rules were strange.

I went deep on herbalism. Tincture-making tutorials, grimoires with hundreds of plant entries, tours of Chinese herb dispensaries where every drawer held something with a name I couldn’t pronounce and a purpose I wanted to steal. That research became Jalo’s knowledge — the herbs he uses to suppress a boy’s magic, the remedies he keeps in jars he won’t explain.

I studied medieval timber construction so the villages would feel built by hands. I studied the largest castles in the world so Varas’s seat of power would feel earned, not invented. I read about garnet crystals used in aggressive magic and color correspondences and metalwork. The Elder Stones grew out of that research — not from fantasy novels, but from real traditions about what stone can hold.

The breakthrough came when I stopped asking what magic was and started asking what it cost.

The earliest notes describe a world built on elements — fire, water, earth, wind, each region defined by its primary magic. That’s a fine world. It’s not this one.

This one arrived when the question changed. What if magic wasn’t a force — it was a conversation? What if the world remembered everything, and magic was just learning how to listen? And what if listening cost you something you couldn’t get back?

That’s when “Magic is Memory” showed up. And once it did, every note I’d ever written reorganized itself around it. Every fragment found a home. Nine years of chaos became a system — not because I planned it, but because the idea was strong enough to pull everything toward it.

The protagonist’s name changed that day too. He’d been called Nim for years. He became Aelo — “breath of remembering” — and the novel finally knew what it was.