In tomorrow’s chapter, Chapter 17—He Was So Done With the Goatmilking Posturing, three different people wield authority. Two of them never raise their voices. The third one shouts.

The contrast is doing work. I’m trying to write something about how real power sounds versus how performative power sounds. You might remember the old ad jingle, “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen,” as the entire room came to a standstill to hear what the brokerage advisor had told the investor.

The man who has authority doesn’t have to insist on it. He delivers a sentence at conversational volume, and rooms reorganize around it. The man who is performing authority has to shout to be heard, because nothing inside the words themselves is doing the work.

This isn’t just stylistic. It’s how real power actually behaves. A general who’s actually in charge speaks quietly, and his staff strains to hear. A bureaucrat losing control raises his voice, hoping volume will substitute for the obedience he can no longer command. And a judge — at least a good one — orders silence by lowering hers rather than raising it.

In fiction, my temptation is always to write power as loud — exclamation points, all-caps, the antagonist booming commands across the room. But that’s how stage villains sound, not how real ones do. Real ones speak softly because they know everyone is already listening.

Tomorrow’s chapter has a scene where one man stands at the center of a tense standoff and delivers his commands at the volume of an ordinary conversation. The whole room obeys. Another man, in the same scene, is shouting and being ignored. Watch what each volume is doing.

The chapter drops in the morning. Tell me which voice you’d rather have, in a room where everything depends on what you say next.

Today is Flag Day in the United States. I’m not going to spend much time here on bunting and parades — I am truly happy to celebrate this holiday, but I find I have a lot more respect for what the flag actually means when I treat it less like a celebration and more like a contract with a renewal clause.

Last week I argued that freedom is the result of a daily refusal to decide for someone else what they’re allowed to be. Today’s claim is the companion: even after you win it, freedom decays unless someone keeps refusing.

Freedoms that are won are weirdly fragile. People assume that once a right is enshrined or a constitution ratified or a struggle won, the work is done.

It’s not done. It’s never done.

There’s no rest for the weary here. Every generation has to choose again, in real conditions the previous generation could not have predicted, whether to keep refusing to impose on others. Because when the guardians of a freedom stop guarding it, freedom decays and becomes a target for others to overrun.

They stop for a lot of reasons. Sometimes a new threat looks like it justifies an exception. Sometimes the principle just starts to feel tired. And sometimes the people who would benefit from rolling things back are simply quicker than the guardians, who don’t notice anything has changed until it’s gone, or assume that everyone else feels as strongly about the freedom as they do.

In the books I’m writing, the Garden is the in-world version of this story. Valkyries in this world have extraordinary martial gifts that make them fighters without peer. Although the gifts are valued in Granblue society, the power structure was also afraid of what the Valkyries could do if they were not properly supervised and monitored. But the optics of a country outright enslaving a group of their citizens was also not desirable. So, instead, they were relegated to an ornate fortress. Which, over time, became a cage. The people who originally guarded it became the people who enforce it. The petals are confined for their own good now, by people they are sworn to protect.

That’s how every freedom that is won dies if no one keeps guarding it. The cause becomes a position, the position becomes an institution, and eventually the institution itself becomes the warden of the thing it was meant to defend.

The flag is a promise the country has made to itself. Today is a good day to remember that promises require people to keep them. The next generation will only have the freedoms the current generation is willing to refight for.

There’s an elite group in my saga called the Forty. It is, in the simplest description, a unit of forty soldiers under Joseph Tharnen’s command. A more accurate description would be that it is not only the institution that he created, but the institution that produced him.

The world in this saga has a myth about a man called the Reaper. The Reaper is a name whispered in taverns and in war councils — supposedly a single warrior who can end a battle or kill a king. The story tells itself easily: one man, one weapon, one fearful name.

What the world doesn’t see, and what the saga has been quietly correcting, is that the Reaper has always been forty people.

Joseph Tharnen is one of them. He commands the rest. But the operations attributed to him are not solo operations. They are the work of a small, deliberately small unit of forty men and women who know each other’s victories, and each other’s fears. They would die before letting one of their own face a thing alone. The myth of the Reaper exists because the world finds it easier to fear one man than forty. The Forty itself prefers it that way — fewer names mean fewer targets.

I want to spend a Note on why the number is forty.

The number is the institutional design. Not too large for personal accountability. Not too small to do the work. In a unit of forty people, you cannot hide what you are. The other thirty-nine see you train, eat, sleep, panic, recover. They see who you actually are. The institution can’t carry careerists or bullies — there’s no anonymity to disappear into.

This is the opposite design from a standing army. Granblue’s army has thousands. Among thousands, you can be brave one day and craven the next and the system will mostly not notice. Among forty, the system notices everything. The accountability is the point.

It is also the cost. A unit of forty cannot grow. It cannot replenish quickly. Lose a third of it and the work changes shape. The Forty is fragile, by design, because fragility is what keeps it honest. It cannot afford to become something else; it would die first.

Joseph Tharnen returned to the Forty in the current chapters of the saga, after his world thought he was dead. Forty people had been keeping his shape alive among themselves while the world moved on. When he came back, they were waiting — older and scarred, but still recognizably the unit that had shaped him as much as he had shaped it. During his absence, they never stopped tracking him or keeping him safe. Because you don’t abandon your brother or sister—the core principle he taught them, paid back in full.

I find the Forty interesting because it is the answer to a question fiction usually doesn’t ask. Heroes are not produced alone. They are produced by institutions small enough to know them. The myth makes the hero. The institution makes the myth.

The Rangers, who I wrote about last week, keep a virtuous institution through auditable rules. The Forty keeps a virtuous institution through irreducible smallness. Two different designs. Same principle: never let the institution grow bigger than its accountability.

Next Friday, Juneteenth, I’ll write about an institution that broke this principle — one that grew so large its accountability could no longer fit inside it.

(SPOILERS for Chapter 16 dropping 6/10/26)

In tomorrow’s chapter, a young man with extraordinary power meets four armed women who decide they don’t like the look of him. By the end of the chapter, one of them has a broken hand. Three of them have surrendered.

None of them is dead.

That’s the chapter in four sentences. It also, as it happens, dramatizes the freedom thesis I started on Sunday and will spend the next four weeks building.

I argued this past Sunday that freedom is what results when you choose not to impose your will on someone else. All of my Notes and Reflections through July 5 will be about institutions — the Rangers, the Forty, the Garden, the Church, the slaveholders, the demagogues — that either pass or fail this test at scale. Tomorrow’s chapter is about a young man passing it under pressure, eight or nine times in a row, in the span of about two pages.

He could kill them. He has the speed and the training. The weapon is in his hand. The lead one put a knife to his throat; he could have ended her in the same exchange. It might even be justified as self-defense.

He doesn’t.

He breaks her hand instead. He asks the rest to stop. He explains that he doesn’t want to throw their daggers in the river because the balance is nice. He treats them, every one of them, as adults who get to choose what happens next — even after they’ve tried to choose harm.

That’s what his mother taught him, and the chapter title is built around what he says in the moment: “Kinda fits with what my mama told me.” That everyone deserves respect, and if they don’t give it, the work is to teach manners — not to enforce obedience.

The chapter drops in the morning. Tell me which moment you’d have escalated. Or not.

I’ve been writing toward this question for years now, and I think I’m finally ready to tackle this head-on.

Freedom isn’t an entitlement. It isn’t a right that some authority granted you and that you can sit back and enjoy. Those framings have caused a lot of mischief over the centuries — they let people believe they have freedom while they’re busy denying it to someone else.

The freedom I’m trying to write about is something you do. Every day. To everyone you have any power over.

Freedom is the result of your daily refusal to decide for someone else what they’re allowed to be.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. A parent who lets the adult child make their own choices, even bad ones. An employer who lets the worker have their own politics. A government that resists the temptation to manage what its citizens are allowed to know. There are a hundred versions, in every life. Most of us fail this test more often than we succeed.

The reason this matters for the books I’m writing is that all the great evils in this story are versions of the same failure. The Church decides what ordinary people are allowed to understand. The Garden decides what its petals are allowed to choose, down to their name. The Crown decides what its subjects are allowed to know. The aliens decide that humanity is livestock.

Each of them has reasons, some good, some less so. The reasons are not the point. The point is that someone made the decision for someone else.

Freedom, true freedom, is the result of not making that decision. Even when you’re sure you’d make a better one than they would.

We’ll spend four more Sundays on this. The next one is about why freedom decays even after you win it.

In the saga I’m writing, a young woman named Mercedes Tharnen applies to join the Raleigh Rangers and gets asked the standard intake question: why do you want a badge?

She knows the answer that’s expected. Justice.

Mercedes doesn’t say justice. She says, “I want to leave the road straighter than I found it.” When the captain pushes back — most folks want justice — she answers, “Justice is for judges. You asked about Rangers.”

That’s an institutional ethic in two sentences. I want to spend a Note on why I think it’s the right one in this world.

Institutions that overclaim their mission tend to drift, in my opinion. The Rangers don’t claim to deliver justice. Justice is an abstract good. It’s hard to deliver, harder to verify, and easy to use as cover for whatever you wanted to do anyway.

Captain Mallory, the Ranger commander in my saga, delivers the Rangers’ commitment to the people they serve as something narrower and more checkable. “Most folks say they want justice,” he tells his new recruits. “We make sure people sleep through the night. That’s the short of it.”

The narrowness is the point. You can fail justice in a thousand ways without anyone being able to prove it. You cannot hide whether a town slept through the night, or whether you kept your temper, or whether the road got straighter or worse on your watch. The rules are auditable.

There are nine Rangers’ Rules. They are not theological. They are operational.

There are nine Rangers’ Rules. They are not theological. They are operational.

1. Guard the innocent before yourself.

2. Obey the Law, even when the Law forgets you.

3. Speak truth always.

4. Keep your temper.

5. Don’t look away when it’s your turn to look.

6. Don’t make your partner carry you.

7. Keep your partner alive.

8. What disturbs the peace answers to your hand.

9. Leave the road straighter than you found it.

None of them tell you to “be just” or “be righteous.” Those are claims you can hide behind. The Rangers’ Rules don’t let you hide.

Joseph Tharnen, Mercedes’s father, sums it up the morning she leaves home: “You don’t owe anybody lightning. Just daylight.”

You’re not a hero. You don’t have to be. You just have to keep showing up, doing the work, leaving the road slightly straighter than you found it.

The Rangers in my saga have been around for several generations. They’ve stayed honest, mostly, because they kept their rules small enough to remember and concrete enough to verify. Their members are auditable. Their mission is humble enough to actually accomplish.

The Rangers don’t have anything elaborate. They have a road. They walk it, with a few hard sentences about how to walk it without making the road worse.

It’s a rare kind of institutional design. Rare in fiction. And in life. Worth writing about. I’ll write about another institution designed like it next Friday.

A craft principle running through tomorrow's chapter: the moment you name a thing, you've usually lost it. Or as some folks phrase it – show, not tell.

The strongest reveals, I believe, are the ones where the reader gets there before anyone in the room does. I like to think my readers are intelligent adults, who would rather figure things out for themselves, instead of being explicitly told.

A character notices something the reader has already pieced together two pages back. Someone says the words for what's been quietly true, and the reader nods because they've known for a while. The recognition feels like a discovery you made, not one you were handed — because you did make it. Personally, I love that feeling. Say what you like about Mr. T, but The A-Team always excelled at making me feel that a plan was always coming together.

Tomorrow's chapter has one of these. Someone develops a strange new quality, and the chapter shows it three times before anyone names it. By the time a character recognizes what's happening, the reader has gotten there twice over. The narrator never says "this is what's happening." The reader figures it out and trusts themselves for it.

I want to be the kind of writer who gives you that. The reader should be the first one to know. If they’re paying attention.

A lot of important things in real life work this way. We notice before we name. The colleague who's about to fall apart or the relationship starting to fray — we register all of it before we have words for any of it. Fiction that respects this is closer to how attention actually works than fiction that explains itself.

Chapter 15—The Inconvenience of Nonviolence in a Fight drops tomorrow morning. Tell me what you noticed before it was named.

Strangeleaf observed in the comments last week: no human being has ever started their day believing they were the villain in their own story.

I want to follow that idea this week.

If it’s true (and I think it is) then the empathetic villain isn’t really a separate category from the absolute one.

The empathetic villain is what the absolute villain looks like from the inside. The man emptying the world isn’t telling himself he’s emptying the world. He’s telling himself he’s fixing something. The reader sees one thing; the villain sees another. The story lives in that gap. Which means the most useful villain in fiction isn’t the one we recognize. It’s the one we recognize ourselves in.

Sauron is terrifying because he wants to dominate the world. With Saruman it’s worse — his arguments make sense right up until they don’t. And then there’s Azelea Morcant, who is most dangerous of all because every grievance she names is real. The reader who’s done well by the world can dismiss Sauron with a wave. The reader who has felt powerless and unheard will sit a lot longer with Azelea. The story tests whether you can keep your bearings inside an argument you’ve half-felt yourself.

That’s why I think both kinds of villain matter. The flatly evil one tells the reader: this is what we are running from. The empathetic one tells the reader: this is what we might become, if we let the wrong injury organize our lives. Neither is the right villain in isolation. The mirror is.

That’s where I’m leaving this thread for now.

Thanks to all the people who’ve been wrestling it with me — the conversation has shaped my thinking. I’ll switch topics for June, but I’m not done with villains forever. Alric Rusk will return. And he has work.

—First posted in Notes on 5/31/26

Here’s a paradox from the deep history of the Blood & Iron universe: the most peaceful civilization in this world became peaceful by command.

For nearly two thousand years after the Scouring, the elves were a warrior culture. Strength decided everything. The strong took, the weak yielded, and the elves who were on top were stronger than everyone else.

Their legal system codified it — combat resolved disputes, and the winner had the right to command the loser. You wanted something? Someone? It was yours or they were yours if you were strong enough to take it. And then strong enough to keep it. The whole framework was rigged so the strong stayed strong.

Then one human killed four of the seven elven high lords in a melee and forced the other three to surrender. The Hammerfall, the elves came to call it. Under their own laws, that placed him at the top of the hierarchy — two thousand years of elven civilization with a new sovereign, and no legal mechanism for refusing him.

His first command, as the elves preserve it, was simple: love the Light and one another.

What Mac actually said had goats in it. He had just killed several dozen men and was tired, and soldiers under that kind of stress don’t tend toward liturgical phrasing. The elves cleaned it up. Cultures do that with their founding moments — the rough words of the man smooth into the history of the people.

That’s the strange thing about this story. The pacifism wasn’t chosen — it was issued. An order from a lawful conqueror to a culture that had built its entire legal apparatus around obeying lawful conquerors. They became peaceful because they had to.

What I don’t yet know — and what the books are working out — is whether nine hundred years of commanded love eventually become the real thing. Whether obedience to a moral order, sustained long enough, ripens into the moral order itself. Or whether what looks like virtue is still, underneath, just an elf following orders.

Worth thinking about for any commanded virtue, anywhere.

The conventional move is the big providential plot beat. The cavalry arrives. The lost item is found. The miracle happens at the moment of greatest need. It works, sometimes, but readers smell it coming, and when they do, the moment loses its weight. To me, grace as plot device is usually grace failing as theology. I’m not satisfied with that. It deserves better.

What I’m trying to do is show the way I see grace show up in daily life: through small gestures delivered by other characters who may or may not matter to the story itself. A friend hands a protagonist a cup of coffee at the moment her grief is most acute. A vendor adds a cookie to the order, on the house, with the casual assurance that today will be a good one.

The protagonist doesn’t recognize what’s happening at the time, just like real life. The reader, half a beat later, does.

This is what providence looks like, if you believe in it: not a parted sea, but a kind man with a baked good. Not the cavalry, but a stranger who noticed.

Grace doesn’t usually arrive looking like grace. It arrives looking like a Tuesday.

I think fiction that takes that seriously has a richer texture than fiction that doesn’t. How about you?

Over the last several years, I’ve noticed a growing trend—part of it’s escapism, part of it’s dissatisfaction with our ordinary lives, but it seems like most fiction today seems to revolve around grimdark or asymmetrical relationships. Power fantasies. The brooding, alpha male with a tender spot inside. The bad ass woman who has just never met the right man— because their world doesn’t have anyone like that.

Where are the stories about a good woman or man, not a superhero, not perfect, just someone who’s flawed and trying to do the best they can? Encountering people of like mind and outlook—and maybe change the world along the way. Where are the people who act not out of a desire to be heroic but because at their core, they want to be loved and they do what it takes to live a moral life?

To me, those are the stories of true strength. Men and women who changed the world just by showing up every day. Even when it’s hard. Or perhaps, especially because it’s hard.

Well, you know what they say when you ask a question like that, you need to be willing to do the work not just expect somebody else to do it. Sounds like I know what my next book‘s gonna be about now.

The conventional wisdom says door number two. Real evil is banal. Real evil shaves in the morning and walks the dog and calls its mother. The villain who genuinely believes they’re saving everyone — they’re complicated, they’re contemporary, they’re literary.

I’m not sure I buy it.

The empathetic villain, like Alric Rusk or Azelea Morcant in my own works, is harder to write than people think. To make them work you have to give them a moral framework that holds up under examination, which means you have to take their argument seriously, which means by the end of the book the reader has to reject something the writer spent two hundred pages building. A lot of attempts collapse at that point. The villain becomes the protagonist’s moral equal, and the resolution feels arbitrary.

The flatly evil villain is unfashionable, but it does one thing the other can’t: it lets the story be about something else. Sauron exists so Frodo can be tested. Voldemort exists so Harry can grow up. The villain you don’t have to argue with frees the book to argue about something more interesting.

The honest answer is that both work, for different stories, and the writer who’s good at one is probably bad at the other.

I’m not sure yet which one I am. Or which one I can write better. Let me know what you think after reading my stuff.

First published on Notes on 5/24/26

Some grand event happens — a war, a king dies, a god intervenes — and the whole society reorients overnight. To me, that reads as wish fulfillment. Doesn’t actually look like history.

What real cultural pivots look like, when you study them, is much smaller. A treaty that didn’t have to happen. A bored teen emptying a chamber pot on his brother as a prank. Two people who fell in love when they weren’t supposed to.

In the book series I’m writing, one civilizational pivot in the deep past — the one that turned an entire society from might-makes-right to a refusal of violence as a first answer — happened because of a love story.

One man, one woman, a marriage that wasn’t permitted, a fight that wasn’t supposed to be winnable. The structure of an entire culture changed because two people refused to accept that they couldn’t have what they wanted.

That’s the right scale for it. Big abstract forces don’t move civilizations. Specific people, refusing to give up specific things, do. The historian writes the pattern after; the people doing it just want to live their lives.

Worth thinking about as I write the next one. Tell me if you think I’m doing that well, or if I’m missing the mark.

The conventional move is the grand defiant gesture — a courtroom speech, or a refusal that costs everything, or a line drawn loudly enough that everyone present has to take a side. It works, sometimes. But most lives don’t actually look like that. Most people under coercion don’t get the cinematic moment. They get the long quiet weeks or years of going along.

What I’m trying to write — what I think is harder and truer to lived experience — is agency in the corners. Not the speech, but the way a judge nudges a gavel two inches to the left after she’s been told how the case has to come out. The small private gesture that marks the boundary between what she surrendered and what she still owns.

Two inches don’t change the outcome. They mark a place where the self refused to be assimilated.

In real coercive systems I’ve looked into, this is mostly how people survive with their dignity intact. The clerk who “loses” a document. The husband who reads his wife the forbidden book in whispers after the lamp’s been put out. None of it stops the machine. But it says: I am still here.

The chapter where this gets tested drops Wednesday. Tell me where you see it in the chapter or in your own life.

It isn’t an institution. The Church believes it’s protecting humanity. The Garden believes it’s preserving something irreplaceable. The Crown believes it’s keeping order. Each is correct about its own motives, and wrong about what those motives entitle it to do.

It isn’t a hero. There is no single person in this book whose moral clarity is sufficient to make the choice for everyone else. The characters who think they are that person are usually the antagonists. Usually.

What the series proposes — tentatively, because I’m not done writing it — is closer to: no one gets to choose, but you have to act anyway. The work of being human in a world where someone else has decided what you’re allowed to be: refuse to make that same decision about anyone else. Even when you think you’re right.

I’m still figuring out whether I believe it. The books are teaching me as I write them. And my characters certainly have opinions on the matter.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Some more vocal than others.

— First posted on Notes on 5/17/26

The villain whose argument you can dismiss in one read is decoration. The villain whose argument you can’t refute at all is a problem; the resolution will feel arbitrary. The threading of the needle is the villain who’s diagnostically correct and prescriptively monstrous.

Yes, this institution is a prison. Yes, the people who tell you it’s for your own good benefit from your obedience. Yes, no one in power will free you voluntarily. Yes, this is Not Good.

Yes. All true.

But the freedom they’re offering you isn’t freedom — it’s a different cage, sold by a different liar. And the cost is paid by people whose names you don’t know or stopped saying.

The protagonist’s job in those scenes isn’t to win the argument. It’s to find the reason to refuse that comes from somewhere deeper than the argument. Usually a name or a face. Usually a memory of someone the cure would consume.

The chapter testing this hypothesis drops Wednesday. Tell me if you see it land

The Scouring is in the deep past of Blood & Iron. Old enough that no living person remembers it, other than a handful of elves, who won’t speak about it. Recent enough that everyone alive lives in its shadow.

What’s been forcing itself on me as I write is the question of what actually survives when a civilization breaks. The technology goes first — too complex, too dependent on a chain of specialists who all died together. Language survives, badly. Stories survive, transformed. Religion survives, sometimes with the labels changed. Practical skills survive when someone bothered to teach them.

But the thing that survives most reliably, I believe, is the shape of grievance. We see this in the real world today. What was done to you, or to your ancestors, gets carried forward as a feeling, as a worldview, long after the facts are forgotten. Three thousand years later, the wound is still organizing the politics. People know they were wronged. They are increasingly unsure by whom.

Any story about a post-apocalyptic world that doesn’t take that seriously is missing something fundamental. The catastrophe is the easy part to write. What people remember about the catastrophe — and what they tell their children — is the hard part.

It sounds like an easy answer until you sit with it. A parent makes that choice for a child every day. A doctor makes it for a patient who can’t speak. A government makes it — for better and worse — for everyone inside its borders. We don’t usually call any of those tyranny.

But the line moves. And the people standing on the wrong side of it are almost never the ones who think they’re standing on the wrong side. The slaver believed the slave was better off. The reformer believed the heretic needed saving. The general believed the city had to burn so the country could live.

Blood & Iron is, among other things, a book about people trying very hard to do the right thing for someone else who hasn’t asked for their help. I don’t know that I have an answer to the question. I’m not sure the book does either. But I’m pretty sure that any story pretending the answer is obvious is lying.

—First posted as a Note on 5/10/26