Sit down before reading
The Back of a Mirror
Stories of Reality, Darkness, and the Unexpected
That’s the title of my upcoming book, planned for release around December 2026. It compiles nearly all the short stories I’ve written over the last two decades, and if that sentence alone doesn’t make you mildly curious, you might want to check your pulse.
Science fiction. Fantasy. Horror. Those are the genres at the core of the book, which should surprise no one who has spoken to me for more than ten minutes. Many of these stories are purely fictional. Others are based on things that actually happened to me — incidents I reinterpreted, filtered through imagination, and shaped into something stranger and sharper. It’s never hard to take an ordinary moment — a comment someone made, a news item, a wrong turn on a Tuesday — and, with enough dedication to the craft, turn it into something that keeps you up at night.
A Word About the Author (This Is Where It Gets Honest)
I love storytelling. I love ideas. I love the way literature lets you build entire worlds out of nothing but nerve and language. I’m also, I’ll admit, a playful person — someone who finds genuine pleasure in constructing theories and concepts and releasing them into the world dressed as fiction.
Fiction, as it happens, is remarkably convenient. If a story gets uncomfortably close to something real, the “novel” label offers elegant plausible deniability. Nothing strange will ever stick to a fiction author. We say odd things all the time. It’s part of the brand.
Which brings me to a disclosure: I have no advertising budget. What I do have is a story — either a brilliant marketing stunt designed to generate curiosity about my book, or something that actually happened to me and that I still haven’t fully processed.
You’ll have to decide which. Now that you know I may be messing with you entirely, let me tell you what I’m about to say.
The Most Anticlimactic Extraordinary Thing That Has Ever Happened to Anyone
I waited my entire life for something impossible to happen. And when it finally did — it was so mundane, so unremarkable in the moment, that I nearly forgot about it by the time I got home.
Let me set the scene properly. I have a B.S. in cinematography, so video clip transitions are a professional language I speak fluently. There’s a specific effect called a “dissolve.” When applied between two clips, the first fades out while the second fades in — both overlapping briefly, one disappearing as the other materializes. Simple. Widely used. Unmistakable once you’ve seen it.
What I was not prepared for was experiencing a dissolve transition in real life.
IH-35, Austin, TX — Sometime After Noon
I was driving. Peak traffic hours through downtown Austin — the kind of crawl that makes you question your life choices in real time. I became irritated. And then, without ceremony or warning, I was no longer in downtown traffic.
I skipped — or something made me skip — from the busiest stretch of IH-35 to somewhere near Buda, TX. The experience was a perfect dissolving transition. One location faded. Another materialized. No sound effects. No dizziness. No blinding light. No sensation of movement. Just two video clips, quietly, smoothly exchanging places.
And the world kept going as if nothing had happened. Because, apparently, nothing had happened.
The Part Where Nothing Happens
Here is what follows: nothing. No men in black materializing at my doorstep. No shadowy agency offers me a position. No patents. No profit. No dramatic revelation about the nature of reality. Just the quiet, nagging suspicion that the world might behave more like a hologram — a simulation — than anything solidly physical.
Teletransportation, it turns out, is apparently a mundane thing. I simply wasn’t aware it was on the table.
That’s what left me most unsettled — not the event itself, but its aftermath of total indifference. The universe offered me something genuinely inexplicable and then immediately moved on, the way it does with everything else.
So. About That Book.
The Back of a Mirror: Stories of Reality, Darkness, and the Unexpected will be out in December 2026. Around 230 pages. High-quality entertainment — or, depending on how you read it, a detailed record of things that may or may not have happened to someone who may or may not be entirely reliable.
Whether any of what you just read is true is, frankly, none of your business. But the book is coming up. And somewhere in those pages, tucked between fiction and darkness, might be an answer or two.
Make of that what you will.
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