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The LegendHaven Convention

When asks me to introduce myself, I tell you how my life has been shaped by a weird number of places. Cradle Catholic. Born in New Zealand. School in Fiji. Then France. Now in the United States. Most of my life in Australia. That means a stack of cultural influences, plus a lot of exposure to different Christian rites: Byzantine, Ruthenian, Ukrainian, Latin, ordinary form, all of it. A lot of beauty. A lot of texture.

And yet, as a kid, Sunday school often felt like a chore. I wanted stories. I wanted novels. I wanted to draw superheroes. I wanted to write my own. I got obsessed enough that my dad actually had to put a lid on it for a while, because the superhero thing was taking over our brains.

But being Catholic became deeply meaningful to me anyway, in that way where you realize the faith isn’t a hobby or a label, it’s a real structure for living.

Which is why, when Brett reached out a while back and said, hey, I’ve got this book project and we’re building a site and a community and a course, I was thrilled to help. If you’re going to build something that serves the Church and helps teachers, I want in.

From Catholic Author to a Clearer Definition

I also run a fiction writing community, because I love writing novels, and because the pandemic made it painfully obvious how many writers were isolated. I wanted a community I couldn’t find, specifically a place that understood why people love fiction. So I started a community called Catholic Author. And ran into a problem.

There are plenty of people outside the Catholic label who believe in what we’d call healthy, human values. And there are also people inside the Catholic label who may have the badge, and still don’t share those values in any meaningful way. Plus, some Catholics weren’t very happy that we weren’t ‘Catholic enough.’ Others thought we were too religious. And others asked if we’d edit their college papers.

So the label alone wasn’t doing the work we needed it to do.

So we hunkered down and tried to name what we mean, what we actually mean, when we talk about healthy-minded fiction and the kind of storytelling that builds human beings instead of hollowing them out.

We landed on four ideas that, to me, feel like bedrock. They aren’t marketing words. They’re orientation words. They’re the kind of words you build a psyche around, a soul around, a spiritual life around. And yes, they shape what stories you end up telling.

Meaning. Mythmaking. Magic. Morality.

Meaning matters because we’re in a meaning crisis. Stories that believe meaning exists, or authors who believe meaning exists, are doing something healing for people, especially young people.

Mythmaking, for me, means eternal truths keep returning to us. You see them dimly at times, you misread them at times, but they keep reappearing, because humanity keeps needing to re-engage them. It’s bigger than “ancient myths.” It’s what’s behind the myths, the timeless realities that keep wanting to be understood.

Enchantment is the conviction that creation is alive, charged with the glory of God, filled with angelic activity, beloved, good, maybe very good. We’ve been trained into a dead-cosmos story where you don’t matter, where life is random and empty. When you recover the sense of enchantment, the way you live changes. And yes, there’s also a real conversation to be had about magic as a good thing, the Aslan kind of magic, the Narnia kind of reality-tinged wonder.

Moral good is the insistence that we must act, and therefore we need constraints and guidelines and goals for how we act so that human thriving is possible. If we act with no moral frame, we decay. If we act with a healthy moral frame, we build.

Those four ideas together feel like a sturdy definition of what it means to live in a Christified cosmos, and if we rally storytellers around those ideas, I want to see what kind of stories show up.

Because the culture is hungry for them, even when people can’t name the hunger.

And Tolkien is the easiest example. Lord of the Rings hits every one of those hallmarks. There are modern stories too, even the ones people argue about, where you dig a little and realize the hunger is being fed, even if the audience can’t explain why.

A lot of the time the grown-up work is discernment: pull the dross away, keep the gold.

God Shows Up as a Storyteller

When God becomes one of us, he comes as a storyteller. He doesn’t show up as a scientist, or an army general, or any other high-impact role you can imagine.

He shows up telling stories.

We’re meaning-making creatures. We’re meaning-needing creatures. We have people today who have physical comfort at a level most of history never touched, and yet despair is rising. People with full bellies and full closets and full screens, and their insides are collapsing. That’s the crisis of meaning showing up in real time.

Stories help us make sense of who we are and where we stand in the world.

And I bring up a line from The Last Samurai that I love. On the eve of the final battle, the general asks Nathan Algren, Do you believe in destiny? And Algren says, I believe a man does what he can until his destiny is revealed to him.

That’s how meaning feels in real life. Meaning is an orientation point, a lighthouse at the far end that keeps you moving. And most of the time, you don’t get lightning-bolt clarity. Conversion and growth usually come in degrees. One step. One turn. One recalibration. Friendship grows like that too. Stories can grow like that too.

Stories are how our souls survive.

Martin Shaw is a wilderness guide and storyteller, someone who’s lived inside the older ways of telling tales. He has this line I keep paraphrasing because it’s so true: data and ideas feed the mind, but the soul runs on stories. Ideas can stay abstract. Stories become personal.

A story is an experience of a person in motion toward a goal. Someone wants something badly enough to do something about it. They hit obstacles. They face their own limits. They grow. They break. They change. Reality barges in, bangs on your door, and suddenly you realize you are under-equipped for the full world, so you go on an adventure to adapt to reality.

That’s why stories are so potent. They operate where the soul lives: in persons, in motion, under pressure, reaching for meaning.

So when stories collapse, people collapse.

If young people grow up with no living narrative structure for how to face hardship, how to sacrifice, how to band together, how to aim at a good future, they become unmoored. They look at a moral-less, meaning-less chaos, and panic. They don’t have patterns. They don’t have a legendarium. They don’t have internal maps for courage, cheerfulness, endurance, friendship, or hope.

Dominic de Souza

Legends of the Fall

After building LegendFiction for several years, this ebook pulls together all my favorite thoughts on fiction as a vocation. Inspired by my own journey, the realities of the market, the fun of being an indie fiction author, and documents like ‘On Fairy Stories’ and Pope John Paul’s ‘Letter to Artists,’ this ebook is a love letter for storytellers…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Dominic de Souza

Deconstruction Fatigue and the Hunger for Any Story That Works

In this kind of world, professional educators can get morally and spiritually exhausted because everything is called “problematic.” Everything gets dismantled, and then… there’s no replacement.

No new story. No coherent alternative. Sometimes the only “replacement” is: there is no story, or you have to invent one with no relationship to reality, which turns into a game you can’t win.

And when young people hear that for years, it hollows them out.

Political extremism becomes attractive partly because it hands you a story. It hands you a role. It tells you you’re participating in something that matters. When mainstream education dismantles meaning and refuses to rebuild, people will run toward anything that gives them a mission.

I ask Brett what he tells young people who feel that lost.

He says he’s found in Catholicism a coherent worldview, one that can take legitimate criticisms seriously without burning down the house. A worldview that integrates knowledge across disciplines, and gives you a way to face all the chaos without despair.

And he mentions the uptick in converts among young people, and why it makes sense: in a cultural desert where either no stories are true, or the only “true” story is political rage, Catholicism can show up as an oasis, a story big enough to hold the whole human experience. Science. Literature. Sex and gender drama. AI and questions about knowing. War. Ecological panic. All of it.

Truth Anywhere Is a Meeting With Christ

When Christ says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, then any truth statement that’s genuinely true, said by anyone, found anywhere, is a meeting with Christ. It can come from a person you disagree with. It can come from a tradition you aren’t part of. If it’s true, it’s a contact point with the Logos.

Yes, discernment matters. People can say things that sound true and still be misleading. But Catholics ought to have zero fear of exploring reality. Faith is supposed to be a lifeline, not a straitjacket.

I grew up in a version of Catholic life that felt cult-like and constraining, and it took me years to work my way out of that and into something healthier. But one of the central realizations for me was this: if the faith is true, then it is a thread you can hold onto while you go anywhere.

It’s like Ariadne’s thread. Theseus goes into the labyrinth to face the monster, and the thread is what gets him out. The thread is what lets him go in.

That’s the posture I hope Catholics can have: adventure with anchors. Exploration with a lifeline. Confidence without arrogance. Humility that can say, I don’t have the answer yet, that’s a good question.

And I keep coming back to that line from Peter: be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you. Brett points out what people forget: that line assumes someone is asking. And that assumes they can see hope in you in the first place.

So yes, apologetics matters. Reasons matter. But the witness matters too. If nobody sees hope in you, the argument won’t land.

I mention a line attributed to Lewis that I love as a personal target: after a hard argument with an atheist, can we still go out for coffee or beer after? I want to be that kind of person. Disagree hard, stay human, stay friends, want the good of the other person, and leave room for the question to rise naturally.

Brett ties that to Chesterton: vigorous disagreement paired with friendship rooted in fearlessness. People raised in fearful Catholic environments often walk away because it looks like the Church is afraid. Afraid of complexity. Afraid of modern science. Afraid of books that are compelling and clearly aren’t satanic, yet get treated that way. That posture of fear doesn’t protect kids.

It sets them up for a later crisis when they finally leave the bubble and collide with reality.

Stories as a Diet for the Soul

Stories are like diet.

If you grow up on a hyper-restricted diet, your body tends toward fragility. The resilient body is formed by a varied, grounded diet. The immune system grows strong through healthy exposure and nourishment.

Stories form the soul the same way.

If you grow up on five stories, you don’t have enough flexibility and resilience in your inner world. Humans need a million stories to handle life. Getting a job. Getting married. Handling playground politics. Learning a skill. Surviving grief. Facing failure. All of it is nested inside story patterns you’re carrying around.

We need myths. We need fairy tales. We need classics. We need present-day stories that have real ingredients. We need variety.

There’s a difference between what you put in your mouth and what you put in your mind. It gets more nuanced as you mature. Kids need milk. Adults can handle meat, bones, gristle, and they learn to chew and spit out what doesn’t serve.

That’s part of growing into adulthood.

That’s central to how I see storytellers: some of us are cultural first-responders. When people lose the ability to imagine a future, storytellers help dream it first. They take something living and charged and turn it into an experience that can live inside someone else. Then that person borrows that pattern and starts acting with fresh courage.

That’s how a story becomes culture-level healing.

Scripture, Fairy Tales, and Kids Who Think in Story

Brett shares that his kids have been raised on a massive diet of stories. Mythology. Scripture. Children’s Bibles. Read-alouds. And because of that, they see patterns everywhere.

They watch the news and suddenly one kid says, that’s like David and Absalom. Brett asks them to explain that? And the kid can explain, because the story is alive inside them. They have an internal network of analogies and meaning.

That’s what story does. It gives you discernment in interpreting reality.

We process reality through story.

Bruno Bettelheim’s wrote The Uses of Enchantment, because one of the core points stuck with me. He worked with traumatized kids, and he found fairy tales were essential. He would read them story after story, and then a child would latch onto one and want it repeated again and again.

And he learned: that little soul is working something through. It’s chewing. It’s metabolizing.

And one of his key instincts was: resist giving “the answer.” If you hand a child the interpretation, you steal their chance to arrive at understanding from within. You’ll see the moment they’ve integrated what they needed because they’ll move on to a different story.

That also gives you a fascinating lens as a parent or teacher: the stories people return to are often a window into what they need.

Tolkien, War, and Cultural Trauma

Brett is reading The Siege of Gondor to his kids. It’s not pleasant stuff. Trenches. Siege engines. Decapitated heads launched over walls. Gruesome intensity. He tells them Tolkien fought in World War I, lived in trenches, struggled with fever.

The experience of the story changes from “a professor with imagination.” It’s a war veteran writing through trauma, and writing into a traumatized culture.

Look at our last century. World War I. Then World War II. Whole societies have gone into shock. This book becomes a landmark for the imagination.

That’s a storyteller doing healing work. Healing the self, and also offering a way for a culture to metabolize what it has survived.

Healing the Author, Healing the Culture

An ancient command was carved on the lintels at Delphi (apparently): know thyself.

It sounds simple, but it’s one of the hardest things in the world. Find out who you are. What you actually think. Why you’re here. What your gifts are for. What you’re supposed to do with the time you’ve been given.

It gets harder when people are raised with messages that deny something central: your dignity, your goodness, your belonging, your being wanted.

If someone is taught they’re a parasitic accident on a meaningless rock, and the planet would be better without humans, that’s poisonous. People don’t live well under that story. We break. We self-medicate. We numb out. We collapse into compulsive consumption.

And yes, the pandemic era proved something: people will sacrifice human community if they feel starved and story is the nearest substitute. Streaming platforms became juggernauts because people are hungry. The tragedy is that a lot of modern media feeds junk. You keep consuming because you’re still starving.

Sister Nancy Usselmann wrote a book called Becoming Media Mystics, and I love the concept.

A mystic is someone with direct contact with the divine, someone who sees God behind everything, even when it’s hard and painful. A media mystic is someone who learns to look at stories and culture with that vision: where might God be present here? Where is the bridge, where is the point of contact, where is the opening for conversation?

That’s why I care about stories and fandoms. A fandom is people saying, we love this thing together, it belongs to our identity. That’s friendship fuel. Yes, fandoms can become toxic, and there’s a whole problem there, but the core idea is beautiful: shared love creates community.

And because we live in a world where the gospel is constantly being translated into the present, storytellers are part of that translation work. We need to continually express it in the language, themes, and forms that connect with where people actually are.

Propaganda Stories and the Problem of Fear

Brett brings up “forced” stories, the kind that feel like propaganda, the kind where you’re told to go support a movie so it stays in theaters, and you feel embarrassed because you’re being asked to campaign for something that doesn’t stand on its own merit.

Also known as mercy watching.

The reason that kind of story repels people is because it feels coercive. It feels driven by fear. It feels like it doesn’t trust goodness to land unless it’s pushed and pressured.

Tolkien has a different posture. No coercion. He builds a world that understands the human condition, and the audience feels seen, not preached at.

Great art becomes evangelistic by being excellent, by being human, by giving people tools to understand themselves. Even when it doesn’t look religious on the surface.

Christ’s Ministry as a Model for Cultural Engagement

What does it mean to engage the wider culture when people are antagonistic to Christian language, or have never heard the actual message, or have been misinformed about it?

I go back to Christ’s life.

Thirty years of hidden life. Only three years of public ministry. Those thirty years, we can assume, were thirty years of being an astonishing human being. And that raises the real question: what does it mean to be a good human being?

It means being fully alive. Joyful. Self-possessed. Rooted in healthy relationships. Able to endure hardship. Able to recover. Able to protect the innocent. Able to stand against evil. Able to lift others up. That kind of life becomes a form of preaching long before you use words. If necessary.

Then in public ministry, Christ heals. He feeds. He delivers. He tells parables. He meets people where they are. He doesn’t hand out grad degrees in theology to the crowds. He gives story-food. Then he pulls the disciples aside and explains the deeper theology.

Then Pentecost comes and everything unlocks for everyone. They have to learn to translate the depths into food that people can receive.

So when we talk about story and evangelization, I see that story belongs to the way God engages humanity. It respects freedom. It invites. It draws. It refuses coercion.

That’s the kind of cultural engagement I encourage from storytellers.

Growing Older Means Re-Reading With New Eyes

We re-read stories as we age, including Scripture cycling every three years, and the same story becomes new because you are new. Your life experience becomes a new lens.

That’s why fairy tales endure across cultures and centuries. They’re fractal. A child reads one layer. An adult reads a deeper layer. Then you read it as a parent and it goes deeper again.

Beauty and the Beast is a good example. On the surface, it’s a romance with libraries and danger and tenderness. At another layer, it’s about how a woman relates to what’s powerful and wild, and how relationship can civilize power. At another layer, it’s about integrating the beast and the beauty within a single soul, the masculine and the feminine, the shadow and the light.

Same story. Deeper lens.

A story is larger than a summary. You can summarize Lord of the Rings, and nobody’s life changes. But you experience it for nine hours (Extended Edition, of course…), and you will want popcorn so you can start over.

Practical Advice for Helping Young Writers

Creativity isn’t merely smashing ideas together for a grade. Creativity is a form of spiritual play. There’s levity in it. Joy. Sub-creation, as Tolkien describes it, because we’re made in the image and likeness of God. We can take what we’ve received and reconstitute it into something new and share it.

And if a young person is taking it seriously, discipline enters. Habits matter. You master craft, and you also master yourself. Writing becomes like learning an instrument: you’re shaping your capacity to show up, to endure, to build something over time.

Writing is a form of active contemplation. You sit down with an idea you don’t fully understand, and you write tens of thousands of words to figure out what you’re trying to say. It’s like journaling, and journaling can be one of the healthiest tools a young writer can learn, because it teaches attention to your inner life.

I also mention dream journaling, because dreams can reveal patterns your daylight mind misses.

But there’s something happening here beyond “skills.” Skills matter. Structure matters. Character work matters. Worldbuilding matters. But there’s also the experience of being a person called to see, to feel, to translate, to reimagine, to offer meaning back to the human family.

The writing isn’t the point. You’re the point.

A potter makes a thousand pots. The pots aren’t the point. The potter becoming a master is the point.

Same with writers. The drafts are practice. The stories are fun byproducts. The person becoming a certain kind of human being is the goal.

Writing as Discovering What You Love and Why

When you write, you also practice loving the good.

That doesn’t mean every story is squeaky clean or sentimental. It means you’re learning to see what’s worth loving, what’s worth sacrificing for, what’s worth aiming at, what’s worth defending.

Karen Ullo, wrote a book called Jennifer the Damned, a darkly funny story about a vampire girl raised by nuns, hitting adolescence and wrestling with what’s awakening in her.

A priest called her and said the teens in his groups who were wrestling with dark realities loved the book, because it felt honest, and it helped them process. Turns out it was perfect for them. So in the same sense that not all content and not all stories are for everybody. For example, you don’t read the Song of Songs to a room of pre-prepubescent boys. You don’t read Hamlet to a room full of manic depressives. They’re the wrong audiences for the actual genius that’s in these stories.

So this creates a space of freedom for the creator. You are not creating for the entire human family. You’re creating for you. You’re creating for your neighbors, the people who are in affinity or alignment with what it is that you’re trying to do.

Now it may take you a minute to find them and that gets into conversation about marketing and branding and promotion, whatever, but that’s a different conversation.

You are creating for your audience because you’re trying to heal them. And I think here’s my last thought. In the same sense of healing, we talked about loving sub-creation, and that we create because we love this thing. Especially if you’re doing it out of a view of vocation.

I think being a good storyteller, being a good author, will also call you to be a better human being. You can’t be a good saint unless you’re an amazing human being.

Ask any author who’s got a novel in their mind or in their heart. We love our characters from the inside out. We don’t love them from the outside in.

When you meet people on the street, you start to know them from the outside. Very gradually do we get to know who they are on the inside. Maybe slowly do we get to know their soul. Maybe that takes… years.

When it comes to your family, or the moment when you decide you want to marry your wife, you do that because you’ve had an intuitive flash of the core of the person. You’ve decided, I love that person. I don’t care what happens in life. I’m prepared to sacrifice everything for that person.

And it’s the same thing that we do with our characters. Our characters almost arrive fully formed. We intuit the core of that person and we will never abandon them. No matter what happens in that story, we will see them through to the end because we love them and we understand them.

We know that no matter how dark things get, all they need is one extra chapter to get through being a pigheaded idiot, to finally reach a point of conversion.

Why this matters is this: it’s how God looks at every single one of us. He loves us from the inside out.

It’s a little bit like therapy or psychology. An author works on a novel, and you’re writing all these characters who figure out and wrestle with their goals. You’re doing it because you love them from the inside out. You have hope and faith that they can make the right decisions. And you know that because you know the whole story from the inside out.

The whole story does not exist without the character who lives it.

Same thing with your life.

God already knows this. Your whole life does not exist without you living it. And the things that you do with that life, he’ll never give up on you.

This is why storytellers can be uniquely helpful to the human family, among many other vocations.

If I sit every single day and practice loving something from the inside out, trying to intuit the core of a person and never give up on them, that has got to affect you. Then you turn around and go and engage with the rest of the human family. That’s good practice for being a good human being. For cultivating a mystic vision and for practicing how to be a saint.

Every time that we meet saints, what do people always say?

I felt so seen.

There was like an energy charge being in that person’s presence. They saw me, they understood me. There was no judgment. There was only a gaze of loving kindness and of understanding. And if there was correction, I would still want to hang out with them afterwards.

That is the distinctly beautiful vocation to encourage in storytellers.

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Artificial intelligence can now write paragraphs that sound like your favorite author. It can brainstorm story ideas. It can even copy someone’s style. So what happens to human creativity?

That’s the question Catholic philosopher Joe Vukov has been thinking about.

“Is there something intrinsically wrong with the technology? No,” Vukov said. “Can it even be put to good use? I think yes. And I think even obviously yes. At the same time… does it sometimes lend itself to a problematic way of understanding ourselves? Yes, I think it can.”

Vukov doesn’t see AI as purely good or purely bad. Instead, he believes it forces us to ask better questions about who we are.

AI as a Mirror

Vukov didn’t start in computer science. He started in fiction. “I started my academic journey as an English literature and writing major,” he said. “I love storytelling. I love writing. I love fiction.”

Over time, he became more interested in the ideas behind stories—especially questions about the human mind. That led him to philosophy of mind, a field that studies how the brain, consciousness and intelligence fit together.

“AI in many ways holds up a mirror to humanity,” Vukov said. “It’s an important moment in our culture for us to really step back and reflect—what is it that separates us from machines?”

The Catholic Church recently published a document called Antiqua Nova, which explains that human intelligence is relational, embodied and aimed at truth. In other words, humans are not just information processors.

“Can an AI do part of what a human intelligence can do? Yeah,” Vukov said. “Can it capture the whole thing? Clearly not.”

What Makes Someone Human?

Science fiction has wrestled with this for decades. Vukov grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, especially the character Data, an android who wants to be human.

As a kid, he felt Data was basically human. As a philosopher, he changed his mind.

“I’ve arrived at a place where I actually think that an android can’t be a human being. There are some important differences.”

Today’s AI raises similar questions. Some studies show readers cannot tell the difference between a paragraph written by a person and one written by a language model.

But Vukov says that misses the bigger point.

“If you think we’ve lost creativity because the model can produce paragraphs, then you’ve missed what creativity and worldbuilding is,” he said. “The product is obviously an important part. But arguably the most important part is the creative act.”

The process shapes the writer. That cannot be outsourced.

Where Is the Line?

For indie authors, when does AI help, and when does it replace you? Vukov does not offer strict rules. Instead, he suggests asking one key question:

“What is it that boosts our humanity?” he said. “And what is it that undermines our humanity?”

He shared an example of a theater professor who uses AI to brainstorm staging ideas. The professor rarely uses the suggestions directly. Instead, he reacts to them.

“He can look and say, ‘Not that. But the reason not that is interesting,’ and then he’s off and running,” Vukov explained.

In that case, AI sparks creativity instead of taking over.

But, “There’s a fine line where a brainstorming session turns into ChatGPT actually kind of taking the lead,” he said. “Where does that line get crossed? It’s going to be different for individual to individual.”

On one end is “write the whole novel for me.” On the other is refusing to use any tools at all. Most people will live somewhere in between.

The Real Danger

Some experts worry that AI will become so powerful it wipes out humanity. That is not what keeps Vukov up at night.

“What keeps me up at night is a future in which we have so outsourced different aspects of our humanity… that our own individual humanity is so attenuated and atrophied that there’s hardly anything left of it.”

He gave a simple example: GPS. Many people cannot find places they have visited many times without their phones.

“Was there anything intrinsically wrong with using GPS? No,” he said. “But I really worry about how, by little bit here and little bit there, technologies rob us of our humanity so that twenty years from now we wake up and human capacities have slowly slipped away.”

Faith That Builds Worlds

Even with these concerns, Vukov remains hopeful. He believes this moment could help artists remember what creativity is really about.

“Maybe it wasn’t about the product all along,” he suggested. “Maybe it’s about formation—of myself, of others, of the world around me.”

For Catholic writers, creativity has a deeper meaning. It is not just making something new. It is sharing in God’s creative work.

“In a strange and mysterious way, we’re joining in the kind of thing that God does,” Vukov said. “We are participating in that creation.”

He pointed to J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of “sub-creation.” In Tolkien’s stories, the world is brought into being through song. The characters join the music that has already begun.

“There’s this idea of joining into the chorus that God has already set,” Vukov said.

AI cannot join the chorus. That work still belongs to us.

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Website: Faith Builds Worlds Conference

Good art, John Hendrix says, does not want to exist.

“It’s just really hard,” the illustrator and graphic novelist said on the LegendFiction Show, talking about faith, fantasy and the future of creativity. “Good art, good writing, good music does not want to exist. So you have to fight for it to be in the world.”

Hendrix, chair of the graduate illustration program at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the graphic novel Mythmakers about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, is currently working on a retelling of the Salem Witch Trials. The new book, aimed at young readers, continues a thematic thread in his work: how communities form, flourish — and sometimes fracture.

The project grows out of an interest in “the church as a fellowship” and how belief shapes public life. His first long-form graphic novel focused on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His second explored the Inklings, the literary fellowship that included Lewis and Tolkien. The Salem story, he said, examines the darker side of religious community.

“This one is more about a destructive church community,” Hendrix said, “and what we can learn from the Puritans.”

Salem, Fear, and the “Spirit of Accusation”

Hendrix approaches Salem with a measure of historical empathy, even as he calls the events evil.

“I think most people, if you dropped them into Salem in 1692, would have behaved exactly the same way as everyone else there,” he said. “There was a kind of mass psychogenic illness that affected this community.”

He has been influenced by the work of French thinker René Girard, particularly Girard’s view of Satan as the “spirit of accusation itself.”

“That sort of antichrist,” Hendrix said, “I do think that was there.”

Hendrix plans to immerse young readers in the atmosphere of the trials. He describes the approach almost like a video game.

“Don’t put any explanation or judgment around it,” he said. “Just say this is going to be like a first-person shooter sort of experience where you are in the character that is experiencing these mysterious and scary and strange happenings and trying to say what is the right response? What would you have done?”

The book is projected for release in 2028. Like most graphic novels, he noted, it will likely change “a hundred times over” before publication.

A Five-Year Tetris Game

Unlike many comics that divide labor among writer, penciler, inker, colorist and letterer, Hendrix does it all.

“I’m kind of like an auteur filmmaker,” he said. “Not only the screenplay, the basic concept, but the costumes, the set design, the coloring. Everything.”

The process is deliberately messy.

“It is a mess from top to bottom,” he said. “I write longhand in the first draft. I don’t go by page. I don’t do panel one and then dialogue. I just write. Then I draw alongside the writing, and then I go back to writing.”

His 224-page book on Lewis and Tolkien required five years of research and design, including time spent in Oxford. “It’s like a game of Tetris,” he said. “If I move one thing, the whole thing reflows and changes.”

Subcreation and the Holy Act of Imagination

At the center of Hendrix’s work is Tolkien’s idea of “subcreation,” the idea that human creativity mirrors divine creation.

“The first thing we learn about God in the Bible in Genesis — God created,” Hendrix said. “He is a maker.”

Tolkien argued that while only God creates ex nihilo, from nothing, humans participate in creation through imagination. “We image God most clearly when we create,” Hendrix said.

For Hendrix, fantasy is therefore more than escapism.

“This world building as an activity is not just mere entertainment,” he said. “It is this kind of holy act.”

He sees Tolkien and Lewis as exemplars not only of subcreated worlds — Narnia and Middle-earth — but of something else: friendship as its own kind of imaginative space.

“They subcreated a third thing,” Hendrix said. “Their own friendship is a kind of fantasy world that many people want to live in.”

The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, where the Inklings met, has become a symbol of intellectual camaraderie, a literary fellowship that still inspires longing.

“It’s the longing for longing,” Hendrix said, invoking Lewis’s term sehnsucht. “The scent of a flower that you’ve never smelled before and yet you know it by heart.”

Fantasy’s Recent Rise & Cultural Anxiety

Hendrix noted that the prominence of fantasy in modern culture is historically recent.

“Even as far as a hundred years ago, fantasy writing as a genre for adults is not a thing,” he said. “The novel is not a thing if you go back 250 years.”

Today, sprawling fictional universes dominate global entertainment. That shift, he suggested, raises questions about why imagined worlds have taken on such cultural weight, and why the form now feels both powerful and precarious.

Amid rapid technological change, especially the rise of artificial intelligence, Hendrix remains cautious but hopeful.

He recently found a 1918 magazine quote predicting that artists would become unnecessary because of the camera.

“It’s ridiculous to think that technology somehow replaces the artist itself,” he said.

AI will alter artistic production, he acknowledged, and may displace certain commercial roles. But it cannot replace the human love of process.

“Human beings love not just result but process,” Hendrix said. “I am not making art to get some sort of useful tool out of it. I am making it to be present in the making and then sharing that with a group of people.”

The Cost of Creation

“Everything that we value in our lives that is worth something to us is costly,” he said. “And it will cost you something to make good art.”

Writers and artists often interpret friction as failure. Hendrix rejects that.

“You just cannot expect that the moment you run into friction with your work that that’s a sign from the universe that it’s bad,” he said. “You’re actually just encountering what every artist has ever encountered.”

Even celebrated books were written in uncertainty.

“When you read that line in the book, you have to remember that the author, when they were writing that, did not know if the book was good or not.”

His closing advice to creators: “When you’re in the pit of despair, when you just know, ‘Oh yeah, I’m here again…’ That’s ok. This is what is required for me to make good art.”

That struggle is not a detour from creativity. It is the proving ground.

And in a cultural moment anxious about technology, distracted by spectacle, and hungry for meaning, Hendrix believes the fight is still worth it.

For , storytelling began before she knew it had a name.

“My mom would tell you that I started telling stories as soon as I was able to talk,” she said in a recent conversation on the LegendFiction channel. The first “official” book she wrote( around eighth or ninth grade) ran nearly 300 pages. “It was terrible,” she said, laughing. “It was so bad. But I’ve been writing my entire life.”

What changed over time was her understanding of what writing meant. It was a vocation.

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Reimagining North and South for a Divided Age

One of Sheffler’s projects, Where North Meets South, began as an experiment. She loved Victorian fiction—especially Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, originally serialized in the 1850s—and was drawn to its portrayal of industrialization and cultural division.

“It was about the industrialization of England,” she explained, “and it kind of looked at the cultural differences between the north of England, which was very industrialized, and then the south of England.”

Sheffler wondered what that tension would look like in modern America.

So she rewrote it.

She flipped expectations: her Margaret Hale became a British expat navigating American culture. The independent spirit of industrial northern England found new life in the American South. The novel became a conversation about capitalism, regional identity, and belonging—without becoming polemic.

She started the book nearly a decade ago. After years in a drawer, she returned to it following 2020 and a major spiritual shift in her own life.

“I’d had a massive spiritual upheaval,” she said. “I sat down and I was like, I need a comfortable place to revisit.”

This time, she chose to publish it herself.

Why She Walked Away from Traditional Publishing

Sheffler has also published traditionally. Her fantasy collection Past Watchful Dragons came through a publisher—an experience she describes as positive but constraining.

“At the end of the day,” she said, “I didn’t have any say over what the book was called. I didn’t have any say over what font they used. And yes, I care about font.”

Traditional publishers assume financial risk and marketing responsibility. They also hold copyright. That tradeoff changed how she viewed her next project.

“I wanted to do it myself because I don’t want anyone to mess with it,” she said. “It was not about the money either… I want to do this myself.”

The process was difficult. She designed her own cover. She bought ISBNs in bulk. She discovered, firsthand, why publishing houses exist.

“It was trial and error,” she admitted. “But the whole project was fun and hard and I’m really proud of it.”

The Moment That Sparked the Dragons

The seed of Past Watchful Dragons came from an unexpected place: the Tower of Babel.

Raised Protestant, Sheffler was steeped in Scripture. But one morning, reading Genesis as an adult, she felt something new. “I put the Bible down and thought, that is so incredibly sad,” she said.

The story had always been framed for her as a lesson in pride. This time, she saw something else.

“What it showcased is what human beings can do together,” she said. “The Tower of Babel was a huge accomplishment. It was this beautiful thing.”

Then comes the rupture. “That break of community between brothers… I just thought was so incredibly sad.”

The mythic quality of the story struck her. Whether read historically or symbolically, its emotional core stood out to her: humanity once unified, now divided.

That realization started an idea. “There are probably so many stories in the Bible I don’t understand,” she thought.

And so she began retelling them.

Fairy Tales, Symbolism, and Slipping Past Watchful Dragons

Past Watchful Dragons is a collection of interconnected fairy tales inspired by biblical narratives. “There’s no one Jesus character,” she explained. “There’s no Aslan.”

Instead, Sheffler disperses meaning across multiple characters and arcs. She believes strict allegory can restrict imagination.

“Shoving your imagination into a single box doesn’t allow for the Spirit to move in other ways,” she said.

The title itself references a C.S. Lewis idea: that story can “slip past watchful dragons”—those inner defenses that block spiritual truth.

“When you think about a story that’s being religious, you put it into a box immediately of your own experiences,” she said. “And that locks it up.”

Her goal was different.

“I wanted God to give the stage for the spirit… to bust out of what people think the Bible is and let it have a place where it can play with your imagination.”

Sometimes, she said with a grin, “God takes a two-by-four and whacks you in the head with his love for you in a different way.”

Romance, Comedy, and Taking Back a Genre

Sheffler’s creative interests extend beyond fantasy. She is currently revising a romantic comedy that pokes fun at common tropes.

“Romance is a key part of being human,” she said. “Why are we letting subpar romantic fiction clog up the airways?”

She approaches romance with the same seriousness she brings to fantasy: respect the genre, elevate it, and avoid cynicism.

Vocation: The Work That Makes You Come Alive

When asked whether writing is a career goal or a passion project, Sheffler reached for a word she discovered after becoming Catholic: vocation.

“It separated career from calling,” she said. “If I don’t write, I’m a miserable person.”

Her husband notices the difference. “Go to your office and don’t come out until you do something,” he tells her, half-joking. She describes the feeling as “creatively congested.”

Storytelling is not optional.

A Faith That Builds Worlds

Sheffler will soon speak at a conference focused on faith and speculative fiction. Her presentation will walk writers through her process—how a familiar biblical story becomes something mythic, strange, and alive.

She plans to bring her handwritten drafts. “I start by hand,” she said.

Imagination is not separate from spiritual life. It is entwined with it. “All the imaginative work and thought and consideration… it’s extremely religious and kind of a spiritual experience.”

She and Dominic agree: authors are worlds without end.

What are stories actually for? Historical novelist explores why fiction exists, how stories make people wise and brave, and why writing to the market often misses the point.

From Viking-era England to portal fantasy with moral stakes, this episode digs into experience-driven storytelling, responsibility in fiction, and what younger writers can learn by paying attention to real life.

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In this convo, find out:

✅ Why historical fiction works best as an indirect mirror to modern life
✅ How experience, not ideology, shapes meaningful stories
✅ Why preachy novels fail and lived wisdom endures
✅ What writers owe their readers when telling stories

Writing prompt: Pay attention to someone living a life very different from yours. Watch how they make decisions under pressure. Maybe it can inspire you.

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What happens if you give Medusa a telescope? Historian and fantasy author joins us to talk about his upcoming novel Through a Spyglass Darkly—a dark, alternate-history fantasy where a Gorgon assassin tries to escape her past through a desperate royal marriage. We dig into myth-building, historical research, writing education, and how real folklore shapes unforgettable fantasy worlds.

What You’ll Learn
✅ How history and mythology fuse into believable fantasy
✅ Why arranged marriages make powerful story engines
✅ How to research obscure folklore for richer worldbuilding
✅ The difference between episodic fantasy and epic grand arcs

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What if the graffiti in your city was actually secret doorways? breaks down how Sigils was born from real Pittsburgh street art, then grew into an urban fantasy thriller where portals open, dreams turn predatory, and a graduating senior discovers something wants his blood.

Visit Sam’s website

What You’ll Learn
✅ How Sam turned two graffiti sightings into a full novel premise
✅ Why “the city must be a character” is the core of urban fantasy
✅ A practical drafting method: cinematic scenes + connecting tissue
✅ Dream research details that became plot rules inside the book

Let’s talk with about the mistakes almost everyone makes with short fiction (too many scenes, too much worldbuilding, novel-sized ideas crammed into 3,000 words) and show what actually works instead. You’ll get clear rules for writing anthology-ready stories, how to hook readers in the first few paragraphs, and how to end a story without it feeling unfinished or confusing.

You’ll also go behind the scenes of a brand-new fantasy novel where Death is a teen, Life is dying, and magic costs blood—plus honest talk about burnout, discipline, and writing when inspiration disappears.

Stick with the whole episode and you’ll walk away knowing how to start later, cut harder, finish more stories, and stop turning every short idea into a novel you never finish.

The year-end push: two cons, a stack of anthologies, and a new habit

“We are reaching the end of the year and we are still planning on having two Legend Haven cons next year,” he says, describing an April event themed around “Banner Mark,” plus another planned for October. “We’ve got about eight to 10 anthologies that are all now live at this point.”

The anthology list is growing fast, and it’s also being used as a lever to get people writing. A new member joins and “the first thing he did was post a story idea” for the Emporium-themed anthology. That’s the pattern the community wants: pitch, draft, finish, repeat.

The host rattles off a few of the new worlds in motion: “Lost Legends of St. George and his merry dragon slayers,” and “Small Word Sagas,” a Borrowers-like premise with a twist: “tiny Vikings trying to survive around humans.”

“It’s like the borrowers on Red Bull,” he says. “And then humans are trolls with smartphones.”

The community’s last writing challenge was “small and focused,” and it worked. So the plan is to do it again. “We’ll run a convention and then two weeks later host a 30 day writing challenge. That’s the plan right now,” he says.

The Writing School: less theory, more finished work

Gabi Batel is introduced as “guest author of the week,” but she’s also the person building the LegendFiction Writing School — a 12-month program slated to launch in January.

“What’s really exciting is plan is to launch January and January is creeping up on us fast,” she says. The goal, as she describes it, isn’t a content library that writers binge while avoiding the page. It’s coaching designed to produce actual finished drafts.

The host (Dom)(moi) admits he recognizes the trap personally: “authors can get into … nuts about learning how to write,” he says, describing years of consuming books and podcasts without writing much. “So I just binged all of that and didn’t do any writing.”

Gabby’s answer is blunt: the job is output, not vibes. “A book, it is a big task, right?” she says, acknowledging the emotional realities — boredom, getting stuck, etc. “But on the flip side of that same coin, it is very doable. And you would be stunned at how much you can do in a year.”

She frames the school as “giving you that nudge and that little guideline,” especially for writers who believe they need perfect conditions. “It’s really easy for me to feel like … I have to be in the groove to write,” she says. “But … you can take dedicated small manageable chunks and if you are dedicated to that … you will have an immense amount of word count by the end of the year.”

Then she names a common failure mode in plain language: writers who never get past the start. “It’s really easy to like stick on chapter one and feel like you can’t go anymore,” she says, “so … you just keep rewriting that same chapter one over and over because you’re trying to get it perfect.”

Her conclusion is the program’s core promise: “What gets published is a book and that’s what we’re gonna get you to.”

The host expands the “year” idea into two tracks: finish a novel, or finish a story a month. “A short story can be 3000 to 6000 words,” he says, and 12 of them can become “almost a full novel right there.” Then Gabby drops a future perk: “the school will have like special anthologies that only school members will get to be a part of.”

The Collaboratory: marketing help for writers who are ready to ship

Gianna Weissensel joins the stream and explains the Collaboratory — a marketing-focused initiative inside LegendFiction. She defines it as a place for writers who already have manuscripts and need help promoting them.

The emphasis is tactical: marketing materials, outlines, pitching, audience growth, and publisher-facing clarity.

She also hints at what’s being built next: “we are in the process of setting up marketing services within the Collaboratory.”

The host explains why it exists: writers were already testing tactics and reporting back — what worked, what didn’t — and the community needed a place to concentrate that knowledge. “We created the Collaboratory,” he says. “It’s a collab laboratory where we share and test ideas together.”

A finished novel on pre-order: Death as a teenager, Life as a sick child

Then the episode pivots to the spotlight: Gabi’s new novel, “Ending,” which she says is her “third full-length novel.” It will be out September 23rd, 2026, she says. “But it’s on pre-order now.”

Preorder Ending

The premise she lays out is immediately high-concept and emotionally pointed: “Ending imagines a world that is so young that Death himself, the Grim Reaper … is just a teenager.”

Death has a name — Priam — and he has a sister who is Life itself. “Priam’s little sister is life itself,” she says. The problem is that Life is dying. “She’s been ill with like some kind of wasting sickness that should not be possible because they’re all immortal.”

Then it gets worse: “She gets poisoned, which also should not be possible,” she says. And the poison hits Priam, too. “Now he needs to find out what’s going on. … He needs to find the cure for this poison. And so it is a mystery from there, an epic fantasy mystery.”

When asked for comp titles, she answers quickly: the “feel” is similar to Leigh Bardugo, “specifically Six of Crows,” and “if you’re a fan of V.E. Schwab … you’re going to like my book.”

The origin of the idea comes from theater during COVID. “We were doing Zoom plays,” she says, and she wrote a short play where “concepts [were] people.” A book she loved — “Stepsister by Jennifer Donnelly” — helped spark that approach. The play stuck. A short story followed. Her mother encouraged her to expand it. And after finishing her thriller duology, she needed a new project. “My mom was like, I really see some potential in this short story,” she says. “And I was like, all right, that’s enough for me. I’m gonna go for it.”

She also connects the theme to a personal struggle she names plainly: “I used to deal with like very much scrupulosity,” she says — then clarifies the experience in her own language: “feeling like everything I was going to do was like wrong … awful things were going to happen.”

Priam’s fear mirrors that. “He is death himself and he feels like if he’s around people, specifically if he touches anybody, he’s scared that he’s going to hurt them,” she says. The arc, as she frames it, is movement from self-condemnation to a more ordinary but harder truth: “He’s just a person doing person things.”

Worldbuilding choices: a world where the sun rises once a year

The host presses for setting. Gabi’s answer: it’s not Earth; it’s Gara. And she admits she’s stuck on a detail she loves even if it complicates everything.

“The thing about this world that I am unwilling to let go of … is that the sun rises and sets once a year,” she says. Instead of winter-spring-summer-fall, the seasons are “night, dawn, day and dusk.”

She’s not sure whether that means the world is flat or planet-shaped, and she’s fine with that uncertainty for now. “I tend to get into the … ‘who cares’ details,” she says, then laughs when the host answers for the audience: “Nerds care.”

Her creation myth centers on “the Crest,” a void of mist at the center of the world. Inside it is a being “older than time … like God,” she says, who “wove from the mist this world.” The “essences” — Death, Life, and others — are among the oldest sentient creatures and each has a province. “The world … is divided into 12 different provinces, one for each of the essences,” she says.

Then we have to ask how powerful immortal figures with no constraints stay interesting. Gabi’s solution is blood. (*cough… As usual.)

“In order to access that magic, they actually have to bleed,” she says. “They have to give some kind of blood in order to activate that magic.”

The cost is structural: because they age slowly, they replenish blood slowly. “They can’t just like use their power all the time,” she says, “because they will just bleed out and die.”

Asked why blood specifically, she answers with the real reason: story balance. “I needed them to not be these like world ending beings that could just do whatever they wanted,” she says. “I needed there to be severe limits.”

Origin myths: when they help, when they trap you, and how to get unstuck

Gianna asks a craft question that’s less about Gara and more about how writers survive their own imaginations. Origin stories, she says, can become a sinkhole. She asks whether Gabi built her creation myth first — the Tolkien approach — and how she avoided getting stuck there.

Gabi’s answer is practical and a little confessional: she built backward. “A whole lot of the deeper world building actually came within the last six months,” she says, after coaching and developmental editing pushed her to go deeper into “the economy and the religions.”

At first, the Crest existed for a utilitarian reason — “a prison” — but once she asked “how did the world start?” it transformed into a creation center. She names influences: her Catholic worldview “inspired by,” not “an exact parallel,” plus fantasy examples where origin myths “filter down and influence literally every aspect of life.” She cites “Mistborn, The Final Empire,” “Priory of the Orange Tree,” and “Gideon the Ninth.”

Then the host flips the question, speaking to writers who feel obligated to build a Silmarillion before they’re “allowed” to draft. He describes his own process: as a kid he wrote “bestiaries,” and “every time I create a whole new fantasy series I create an entirely new origin myth.” Now, he prefers competing myths inside the story — characters who believe different things — and he sometimes leaves the “absolute” origin deliberately vague.

So what do you tell the writer stuck in the origin?

Gabi starts with the psychological problem: obsession. “If you’re obsessing over your first chapter … the backstory … the origin story … that actually does no good,” she says. “Almost at some point you just have to tell yourself, that’s good. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

Then she separates “light fantasy” from epic/hard-system fantasy. If you want origin depth, she says, you should still know what happened — even if characters don’t. “You as the author know what actually happened,” she says, and that truth shapes how cultures misremember it later.

Her example is time distortion across sequels: “In the first book … the origin story has panned out relatively close to how it happened,” she says. “But in later books … they get far, far away from that origin story … because of political interactions, because of social interactions.”

Dominic adds his own blunt test: “does it actually need to be included in this story?” He contrasts big epic info-dumps — “six pages of world building info dump all at once” — with cozy or modern fantasy that simply establishes rules and moves on. “Sometimes that can be enough,” he says. “You don’t need to go and write a Silmarillion in the back and create your own Wikipedia.”

Writing updates: discipline beats inspiration (and the knife on the mantelpiece matters)

When the episode shifts into “host project updates,” the host admits a small humiliation that most writing-community leaders quietly know: it’s easy to run a community and still not getting any writing done…

“I am terrible about being the host of a writing community and I never write my own stories,” he says, then reports a win: he finished a Bannermark draft in three days. The best part wasn’t inspiration — it was the moment inspiration ran out.

“By the third day, I didn’t have any additional creative magic,” he says. “And I just sat down and realized, I can actually write without feeling creatively inspired.”

Gabby shares her own next project: a novella series built from a rejected story. She wrote a dark “Red Riding Hood” retelling for an outside anthology; it wasn’t selected. But she loved it, her beta readers loved it, and a bigger world began forming around it.

Now she wants “bite sized” releases: “dark fairy tale retellings of the original fairy tales,” she says, eerie rather than outright horror. She’s calling it, for now, the “Barbarian Angel series.”

The core lesson: what short stories are — and what they aren’t

Finally, the episode arrives at the topic the host promised up front: short stories, especially anthology-ready ones.

The host frames the submission problem: writers don’t understand what short stories are “trying to do as opposed to chapter in a book,” and many drafts are actually “a novel … compressed down into like only 6,000 words.”

He offers a simple standard: the story must deliver on “the promise of the premise.” If the opening implies a rescue, you rescue. If the premise is a heist, you steal the gems. If the real story is moral transformation, then you make that the explicit promise early — and treat the heist as subplot, not the point.

Gab defines a short story as “self-contained,” and insists it still needs the core ingredients: “a character with motivation and stakes,” “a goal,” “a character arc.” But the structure cannot be novel-shaped.

“If you want to fit something into 3000 words, you can’t have that much going on,” she says.

Her fix is surgical: cut scenes, not just wordiness. “The way to make a short story is not to have a bunch of scenes and to make them all shorter,” she says. “It’s to have fewer scenes.”

Then she gives the number that matters for writers in this community: “one to two scenes is really, really the sweet spot.” Three if you’re lucky. Four if you’re “just a little godling of writing.”

To help writers fit an “entire arc” into tight space, she offers what she calls a “cheat code”: implication. “You can imply things rather than stating them,” she says. You don’t need the full “normal world” sequence; often “the inciting incident probably has already happened.” Start close to the action, then seed context in a few sentences later.

And she warns against scale confusion: “You cannot have … a heist, mystery, political uprising in an epic fantasy world in a short story,” she says. “You can’t have Mistborn … in a short story.” But you can isolate “one scene” that stands on its own and make it hit.

The host adds his own guidelines, emphasizing speed of clarity. “Within the first three to five paragraphs, you should have stated who the character is, what do they want, where is this story going,” he says. “If I’m reading by the end of page two, and I don’t know where this is going or why I should care, there’s going to be something wrong with the rest of the story.”

He also recommends a concrete dialogue trick: introduce a character with a line that reveals them — the sentence that summarizes their role, their worldview, or what they prioritize. He points to movies that do this early, then urges writers to do the same in short fiction because it saves space and clarifies stakes.

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Explore the Comic Fundraiser

John McNichol starts with the basics. “The new book is called Where the Red Sands Fly. It’s the third novel in the Young Chesterton Chronicles trilogy.” It took a long time to land the finish line, what with family upheavals, life, teaching. Oh, and a PhD program.

But the book dropped last November. “I’m very happy and proud with it,” he says.

He teaches in the Dallas area now. Between the high school load and work toward his doctorate in English literature, he still gets stopped in the hallway, and someone asks “Are you that John McNichol?”

They know The Tripods Attack. They don’t know there’s a sequel. Now he gets to tell them there’s a third.

I tell him I grew up glued to War of the Worlds long before I knew why. Later came Chesterton in college. So when his cover smashed both worlds together, it set off all the sparks. “This is hilarious,” I have to say. So why even write Young Chesterton?

Stories for boys

John says the idea came from years in middle-school classrooms. Back around the early 2000s, he was teaching at the same school his wife attended as a kid in Portland. “I saw what my students were giving me for book reports,” he says. Theology was twisted strangely, religious characters were often villains.

“I found the reverse to be true in real life,” he says. In Portland, often billed the most atheistic city in the country, he saw more actual kindness and patience from Catholics, and he saw coldness from people who decided he wasn’t in their tribe.

He had seven kids coming up, his oldest just hitting the middle-school years. “I didn’t have books I felt comfortable for a young man to read,” he says. There were strong Catholic novels for girls. Very few for boys.

He started reading what his students read. He saw the trend, and wanted to point them toward a writer like Chesterton, someone who shaped many lives. “I thought, why not try young Chesterton? My first publisher pitched it as Catholic Young Indiana Jones.”

The Tripods Invade

Once he started researching Chesterton, the puzzle pieces landed fast. “One of his best friends was H. G. Wells, who wrote War of the Worlds,” he says. They sparred constantly. They teased George Bernard Shaw in their essays. They argued without breaking their friendship.

John says his own best friend in high school was the same kind of foil—opposite end on politics, religion, everything. “But we were great friends because we were always arguing,” he says. That dynamic went straight into the books.

Then came the red-haired girl. Chestertonians knew her as a recurring presence in his early work. No one knew who she was. Years later scholars found his first novel in an attic. Turns out she was the cousin of someone on Chesterton’s debating team. John used that mystery as his own recurring character, flitting into and out of the story, unsettling readers, sometimes helpful, sometimes not.

At the same time, he fell into steampunk. “I found myself fascinated by the idea that the computer revolution came a century early,” he says. Punch cards instead of wires. Pneumatic tubes for communication. Steam everywhere. The perfect stage for adventure. “What if I put young Chesterton in that?”

Writing a trilogy

One snowed-in Christmas in 2000, he grabbed a laptop and started typing. Five years later, he held The Tripods Attack.

The tripods weren’t picked at random. They let him bring in Wells. And they let him push on a question he heard from atheists all the time: God doesn’t exist, all there can be is the law of the jungle. No one has a soul, we’re only sacks of chemicals. “If that were true, many of the folks saying it wouldn’t survive the jungle,” he says.

He asked what would happen if humanity found itself struggling with something stronger. “Herb Wells has to confront the consequences of his philosophy,” John says. The story pushes his worldview against Catholicism’s self-sacrificial core.

There’s no time to cover book two, but John gives a snapshot. “The Emperor of North America is steampunk cowboys in America.” Book three, Where the Red Sands Fly, sends Gilbert to the British Martian colonies to meet siblings he didn’t know he had.

As he talks about it, he mentions his own life slipping into the pages. At age 28, he learned his biological father died and left him in his will. That pulled him into a room full of strangers who looked exactly like him. “You will never have a more surreal experience,” he says.

Self publishing a comic?

He hasn’t self-published his novels, but he’s testing those waters with comics. Hillside Education publishes the trilogy, and Amazon carries them. The comic, though—Extraordinary Heroes—is running on FundMyComic. “It’s not a Kickstarter, but similar,” he says.

The idea for the comic came from a simple inversion: all the superhero origin stories we’ve seen, but told from the view of a regular guy who gets dropped into their world. “He finds out he has life skills they don’t,” John says. The question isn’t just powers. What makes a hero?

FundMyComic lets people pitch in at any level. If he hits the goal, he pays his artist, Grayson Bowling, and production moves forward. “Grayson did the cover for Where the Red Sands Fly,” he says. “He nails what I envision.”

Once the comic is complete, Kablam handles the printing and shipping.

The story in issue 1

What’s the actual story? Owen, a teacher and single dad, is doing gig-work and delivers food to a mansion. Inside he sees the headquarters of his world’s version of the Avengers. The Super Six.

Most modern deconstructions paint superheroes as broken or violent. John want sto do something different. These heroes grew up learning to fight giant robots, not raise families or run budgets. “People who know how to stop robots don’t necessarily know how to hold a relationship together,” he says. Owen has what they lack, and they have what he lacks.

Again, it’s a story that comes from his personal experience. John remembers a meeting with a school parent who ran two international corporations. “I thought I was going to learn the secrets of the universe,” he says. But the man only knew how to talk business. Nothing else. John uses that tension in the comic. What a person excels at can narrow the rest of their life. What if superheroes were the same?

Owen comes back in later issues. The scripts are done. John just needs the funds to get the first one out the door.

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A young princess is dying, a dragon is hunting her cure, and her watchman is running out of time. In this week’s live show, let’s meet author and LegendFiction mentor Mary Rose Kreger about ‘The Green Blade’, her sequel to Avalon Lost. We dig into colors, the illness at the heart of the story, why Avalon feels like home for her, the struggle of writing with health issues and three kids, and what it means to keep creating when life hits hard.

What You’ll Learn
✅ How Mary used color theory from her design background to shape the story
✅ Why Philia struggles in book two—and how Mary keeps her interesting
✅ How writing through illness gave the novel its emotional core
✅ What makes portal fantasy and Avalon stories so meaningful
✅ How critique groups like Stories Live help authors level up
✅ Why longer short stories (6k words) are easier—and better—for world-builders

joins our LegendFiction livestream for a cosy chat about her upcoming book, and all the grit, growth, and grousing that got her to this point.

We start with the weather, because it looks like November on both our ends. She mentions they had snow the week before. I ask what colors she sees when she thinks of Avalon.

“For this book, the themes that we picked for colors are definitely like that deep dark green color,” she says, “and then like a kind of golden color like wheat.”

Colors matter, she explains, because one of the hardest moves in her new novel, The Green Blade, is that her main character loses them. “Part of what happens to the main character is that she loses her colors. So that just makes them more important.”

Before she was a fantasy novelist, she studied graphic design.

“Since I was a graphic design major in college, we studied a lot about colors,” she says. “It really helps with working with cover designers and stuff as a writer. We learned all about colors and the Pantone color of the year. I still like to follow that and see what’s the new colors they recommend every year. I love to be really specific with colors. Instead of saying something’s red, I’ll be like, it’s vermilion. Because that’s a much cooler color than just red.”

The Green Blade

She holds up the proof copy of The Green Blade. On the front is Princess Philia Pendragon and her watchman, Will Owain. Philia is the returning heir of Avalon. Will is the loyal guard who loves her more than he knows what to do with.

“They also have a little bit of romance,” Mary says. “Or I should say… it’s a pretty big subplot in the story.”

She reads the back:

“Princess Philia Pendragon has returned to the enchanted Isle of Avalon, but her journey comes with a terrible price: a curse worse than death. The curse spreads like dragon fire through her body, poisoning her cheery temperament and bending all her thoughts towards death… Will Owain, the princess’s loyal watchman, refuses to accept Philia’s cruel fate. He’d give up everything to save her, but he fears even his own life would not be enough.”

There are dragons, war, a power-hungry lord, and the slow, choking advance of a magical illness. On the surface, it’s solid portal fantasy in the vein of Zelda and Ranger’s Apprentice—two of her chosen comp titles.

“Legend of Zelda has got Princess Zelda, and she’s got a very important role in the story,” Mary says. “Philia’s also a princess. Will is definitely a Link-type hero, maybe kind of an underdog hero. And then just the whole fantasy vibes and the sword fighting and nobility and magic. Avalon’s full of magic. It’s based off the Isle of Avalon in the King Arthur stories, where they say that magic grows out of the very earth.”

Ranger’s Apprentice adds another flavor.

“It’s really about the skills of the Rangers,” she says. “How they learn to do their trade. There’s a very important emphasis on the master and apprentice relationship. The characters don’t just magically resolve their problems by slashing their swords a few times. It takes a bit more than that.”

Living in exile, and writing from it

In Avalon Lost, the first book, Philia splits her life between modern Wales and Scotland and the medieval, enchanted Avalon she longs to return to. That longing, Mary admits, comes from a very personal place.

Years ago, she explored religious life and entered a convent. She later discerned out and married. Her life moved forward—husband, three kids, the usual chaos—but something in her never completely left the cloister.

“I felt like I was still a sister,” she says. “I felt like I was still kind of in the convent. I think that feeling has persisted. Part of me is still in a convent or a cloister of some type, and God didn’t take that away. I don’t think he wants me to take that away. I think he wants me to keep that with me.”

When she revised Avalon Lost after leaving, she poured that sense of exile into Philia.

“For me, in the convent, that was where I belonged,” she says. “For Philia, she really belongs in Avalon. That’s where her identity is. That’s where her future is. That’s where her people are. There are experiences in places where you go in life that permanently change you. It can be hard going back into your other world.”

She mentions the Pevensie children in Narnia, dragged back to platforms and school uniforms after crowns and talking beasts. “The good thing is,” she adds, “you can bring back those riches that you had and share it with other people who never have that experience.”

In The Green Blade, Philia continues her adventures in Avalon. And then Mary takes nearly everything away from her.

How do you keep a dying character interesting?

For most of the book, Philia is either in pain or bound by it. The curse eats at her body and mind. Her world shrinks to rooms, beds, and short windows of borrowed strength. She loses agency. On paper, it’s the kind of setup that can sink a character into passivity.

I put the problem to Mary: “How did you go about keeping Philia an interesting character when she’s constantly declining and losing her ability to do anything? What were some of the challenges you had to overcome to make her more than ‘the sick one in the bed’?”

Mary stares at the ceiling, and her grin goes grim. “I think it was a lot of planning,” she says. “Trying to think: where is Philia right now in her journey? The curse is like a slow acting magical death sentence. At first she still has a lot of capabilities, and she’s able to do some things. But she keeps getting worse.”

What makes Philia compelling, Mary says, is not what happens to her body, but what she keeps choosing.

“With each new phase she has to learn to accept it,” she says. “She’s always trying to find ways to fight back, to just keep going a little bit farther. She’s come back to Avalon because she wants to inherit her father’s kingdom. She wants to protect her people and be there for her people. It just increasingly gets harder for her to do any of her roles as a princess. By about two thirds of the way through the book, she can hardly even get out of bed.”

Mary doesn’t talk about this as theory. This year, while finishing The Green Blade, she had struggles of her own. “I’ve had a lot of health issues this year,” she says. “I kind of had an idea of maybe what her mindset was and what kind of choices she would be making in her head. Like, if I take this medicine that isn’t actually going to make me better, but it can make me better for one hour, I can be with my father at his war council to help protect the kingdom. So should I do it, or should I just stay in bed?

“I think seeing people having to make tough choices can make them pretty interesting,” she says. “She’s a very sweet character. She starts off very innocent. It’s neat to see her journey and how she’s developing and growing in virtue through the story. I really grew to like and appreciate Philia a lot more after writing this book.”

Writing when you can’t make dinner

Behind the scenes of the book there’s another story: a woman who could not always stand long enough to cook but still chose to open the laptop.

“I was really struggling with a lot of physical and mental health issues early this year,” Mary says. “But when I would make the choice to sit down and write when I first woke up in the morning, it helped me so much the rest of the day. I was a better wife and mother. I was able to do the other things better because I felt like there was one part of me that was an essential identity that I had long before I ever became a mother or a wife. And that’s being a writer and a storyteller.”

There were days when dinner didn’t happen.

“Sometimes I couldn’t, I was not able to even make dinner for my family,” she says. “It was just too overwhelming. But I still wrote something that day.”

She calls the book “a cry in the darkness,” then corrects herself.

“It’s like finding hope,” she says. “My way of keeping going and saying, it’s worth it to keep moving forward, even though I’m facing a lot of challenges in my own life.”

One of her beta readers told her she was deep in depression this year and that the story helped her see things in a new way.

“That was really good for me to hear,” Mary says. “That’s what I’m hoping, that maybe this story can help people like that who are trying to find ways to keep going when they’re dealing with illness like Philia, or like Will, who’s dealing constantly with different injuries. It doesn’t mean you can’t be heroic.

“It doesn’t mean you can’t do great things, even if you can’t get out of bed. You can still do great things.”

Community, critique, and the long work

Mary doesn’t do this in a vacuum. She also runs Stories: Live!, a small critique group inside LegendFiction. Every two weeks, a handful of experienced authors bring a thousand words, swap pages, and read each other’s work aloud over Google Meet.

“Everyone who comes in is an experienced author,” she says. “Some of them already have books published or they have a pretty good amount of stuff written. It keeps you motivated, because every two weeks people are allowed to bring in a thousand words. During the meeting we’re all together and we take turns reading each other’s work out loud.”

Sometimes people do voices. Sometimes they trip over a line and the line gets fixed.

“If you hear someone stumbling over a line, you probably need to fix some of the words in it,” she says. “It helps you to be aware of your audience when you’re writing. Plus accountability. You think, I’ve got to work, because they’re depending on me to bring in a thousand more words.”

At the end of the rapid fire questions segment (which always full of laughs and fun), I ask her what she likes most about herself.

She doesn’t mention discipline or grit or worldbuilding.

“I like when I’m with the kids, and I don’t have any concrete plan for what we’re going to do,” she says. “I can just take them in the car and take them out for an adventure. We went to a park with a forest and I took the kids wandering around the forest. We built a shelter out of logs in the woods and we found these old glass bottles from like a hundred years ago. It was so fun, but we didn’t have a plan. So I guess I like my sense of adventure.”

In real life, it looks like three kids in a Michigan forest, their mother tired but still moving, following a path through the trees that wasn’t on the map. On the page, that looks like Avalon, a green blade slowly pushing through the earth toward the sun.

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On a November afternoon in late fall, joins me with the sort of breathless, secretive smile every author with a book launch can’t hold back. Her novel, Heart (a YA dystopian story with zombies) has a gorgeous cover with flowers bursting off a veined heart, all pinks and golds.

“It drops on Valentines day 2026,” she tells me. “That feels right, because the book actually starts in February.”

It didn’t begin as a love story. It began—in a way—with Dracula.

Zombies… with Heart?

I ask for her comp titles, and she thinks for a moment and says, “Maze Runner. Maybe Divergent. Some readers have compared it to Hunger Games because it’s the big dystopian. But I’d say mostly Maze Runner. And if anyone has seen the zombie movie Warm Bodies, it’s like Warm Bodies and Maze Runner.”

That combination sets the stage for what she calls a “not gritty” zombie world. More YA than horror. More questions than gore.

“The story starts when this girl’s best friend gets the early stages of infection,” she says. “She wants to find a cure. There are these safe compounds. In the compounds, people are doing experiments on certain people to try to see if they can get a cure. She breaks one of these guys out, and this team of misfits goes across the wilderness to find a new compound.”

They encounter zombies and people. And both raise the same question: what does it mean to be human, and what does it mean to be a monster?

I have to pause her there. “Why does an English teacher write a story about zombies and human identity? Why this theme? Why did it matter enough to make you stop your life for a thousand hours?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “It started when I picked up Dracula for fun in college,” she says. “There’s this monster who’s very similar to us, and you can become that kind of monster. It blurs the line. You have to fight in a different way to find your humanity.”

She received a grant to study Victorian Gothic literature. “I was paid to study the question: what does it mean to be human? And how does our understanding of monsters impact how we understand identity?”

A fun, dark summer

She read old zombie texts, Byron’s vampiric tales, Dracula, Frankenstein, and then compared them with Twilight and modern monster stories.

“In the old texts, monsters were very scary and people were very human. There was a clearer divide.” Then something changed. We get sympathetic monsters.

I had to ask: “You say our understanding of monsters got fuzzier. What do you mean by that?”

“We’re not sure how monstrous they are anymore,” she says. “In Dracula, he needs to be stopped. In Dracula Untold or modern books, they might do the same terrible things, but we’re not sure if they’re pure monster. There’s more ambiguity. I think it links up with ambiguity in our own identity.”

She thinks again. “A monster causes harm and has lost some sense of their past humanity. By humanity I mean the goodness and dignity in that title.”

When I ask about cultural differences, especially with her interest in Korea, she smiles.

“The Goblin in the K-drama Goblin is very sympathetic,” she says. “Same with the Grim Reaper. I don’t know how older Korean works treat them. But modern ones feel similar to our modern vampires.

“I looked at Dracula, Frankenstein, older vampire works, and then Twilight,” she says. “My takeaway was the fluidity of identity matched the fluidity of monsters. They’re not irreversibly monstrous anymore.”

She adds, almost as a confession, “I wondered if we lost something. Maybe it would help to bring back a fully monstrous monster. I felt like there was a fear of taking a clear cut in modern literature. Drawing a line might help us form a stronger human identity.”

Monsters in Heart

I ask how this work shaped her novel.

“There are zombies,” she says, “but it’s sad to call them monsters. They’re victims of an illness. It makes them something they weren’t.”

But there are also human monsters.

“People who have lost their humanity because they gave in to fear or want to protect themselves at all costs. They lost their love of other people.”

I ask about Eve, the main character.

“She grew up inside the compound. She doesn’t remember life outside,” Lucca says. “She’s pushed to keep adapting. Self-defense, fighting, shooting a gun. Her whole life feels like one response to fear.” The compound runs experiments. They enhance bodies. “She can run faster. She has better sight. It’s almost superhero-esque. She’s strong, but she’s vulnerable.”

Zach, the boy Eve breaks out, is the inverse. “He was outside the compound and then brought in. For him, safety is outside the walls. So he and Eve see the same place in opposite ways.”

The movies that shaped her

I ask for her top zombie films. “Train to Busan,” she says. “And Warm Bodies. Warm Bodies is Romeo and Juliet but with zombies. It’s sweet.”

Her least favorite? “That Resident Evil that came out while I was in Korea,” she says. “There was a famous Korean actor. I saw it for him. He was in it for about ten seconds and then died in a helicopter explosion. I was mad.”

The self-publishing journey

She once wanted traditional publishing.“I wanted the quality, the support, the prestige,” she says. But she talked to authors. One traditionally published writer told her her royalty percentage.

“I thought, that’s a scam,” Lucca says. Meanwhile she saw self-published authors creating top-tier books. “Everything I wanted—beautiful covers, beautiful writing—I was seeing in self-published books.”

Agents liked Heart. They requested the full manuscript. They praised it. But they asked for edits to make it more marketable.

“I did the edits,” she says. “But something happened. The heart of the book got taken out.” Beta readers confirmed it. “They said, ‘It used to be exciting. I’m not sure what changed.’”

So she went back to the old draft.

“This book sits between genres,” she says. “It doesn’t fit the neat categories. I realized it might need to be self-published.”

The book launch

“God willing, the book comes out February 14th,” she says. “Everything is on schedule.” She’s opening a Kickstarter with special editions, stickers, hoodies.

For launch day: “My dream is a local bookstore. A huge stack of books. Freebies. A party for everyone who supported me.”

People can find her on JacquelineLucca.com

Her next project: “I want to write a book on how to write a book,” she says. “I’ve taught writing for over ten years. I want this book to be something where you sit down, and at the end, you have 50,000 words of a draft.”

She’s also still writing her long-running fantasy Sands of Nall. “I’ve been working on it for sixteen years,” she says. “I’m loving it.”

What happens when a military vet, journal-keeper, and indie creator decides to push his craft as far as it’ll go? I’m talking with author Keith Hayden — sci-fi horror writer, podcaster, world-builder, and shameless explorer of every tool he can get his hands on.

This conversation rolls from Okinawan folklore to Metal Gear inspirations, AI-powered journaling, daily writing discipline, and what Keith learned about himself at Author Nation.

A Story Rooted in Okinawa and Family

Dominic (me) opened by hyping up Keith’s work, especially Prompted Hearts. Keith’s current project is a prequel: Sirius and Limnic: Escape from Okinawa, Type B, a sci-fi horror story about three brothers trying to escape an occupied Okinawa.

It looks like military sci-fi from a distance, but Keith talked about it like a memoir with monsters. He’s lived in Okinawa. He has three brothers. He’s wandered the islands with his wife for years. Every corner of that place carries folklore, ghosts, rumors, and sudden spots of silence.

Four years of “that would make a great story” finally turned into a book. He’s halfway through, shooting for 2025–26.

Learning What Horror Isn’t

Keith’s last novel, Gates of Okinawa, was supposed to be horror. His wife read it and said, “This isn’t horror.” He grudgingly admitted it was adventure with demons, seven gates, a teacher and her students.

If he rewrote it, he said he’d tear out the scaffolding: remove the neat progression that killed the dread. He would bring more of that sensation you get walking alone through the quiet parts of Okinawa—the “something’s watching you” atmosphere. Less “Captain Planet,” more “I don’t know where this path goes or who followed me here.”

The new book fixes all of that. It’s epistolary—told through documents an archivist is studying fifty years after the events. Instead of a straight line, it’s a stack of disordered reports and letters. The opening chapter is the character opening a grimy folder and muttering, “Oh no.” Horror by disorientation. A story you piece together instead of follow.

Journaling as Accidental Training

Then we jump back in the timeline. Keith started writing because of The Butterfly Effect. He journaled from 2004–2017 almost weekly. At first it was “here’s my day.” Later it was “what if I rewrite this in third person” or “what if I turn this conversation into dialogue.” Over time it stopped being a diary and became reps, years of practicing perspective, voice, and detachment.

Journaling pulled him out of his head. There was no “wrong way” to write when the only audience was himself. That freedom (get the idea down, don’t overthink) became the backbone of his fiction process.

These days he journals out loud. While his wife is deployed, he dictates into ChatGPT’s voice mode every day. It takes his rambling and condenses it into “stubs”: summaries, cross-references, tidy little idea bundles he stores in Google Docs.

During Author Nation he walked to his car between sessions and recorded live debriefs, which now form a five-day play-by-play archive.

NotebookLM became his “theme detector”: an editor that reads everything at once and spots patterns.

For fiction, he feeds chapters into AI and asks: “What would sci-fi horror readers latch onto?” When the model accidentally notices something cool, that’s a sign Keith should turn that dial up.

Writing in Bursts, Full Time

Keith writes like a sprinter, not a marathoner. He trained himself to write novels on his phone during 2020. Thumbs only. Ten minutes here, twenty-five minutes there. 300 words or 50 words—doesn’t matter. What matters is daily motion. The metric isn’t how many words he gets, but whether an idea reaches its endpoint.

Morning sessions, pomodoros, new words first.

He didn’t magic his way into writing full time. His wife’s military career anchors their finances, plus years of shared austerity. He still substitute teaches when needed.

Before this he studied to be a Spanish court interpreter, saw machine translation rising, and pivoted to teaching math. He navigates life the same way he writes novels: start at level one, improve the skill, keep going.

It’s how he’s picked up audio, podcasting, sound design, music composition, drawing, and AI animation—all in the last five years.

The Author Nation Reality Check

Author Nation surprised him. The indie world is moving at warp speed. AI tools everywhere. Publishers experimenting. Talks on Kickstarter, video, audio, discoverability. The overwhelming part was the velocity—too many paths, too many promises, too many shortcuts.

The encouraging part is that Keith had already explored most of those paths. Audio. Social. AI. Video.

While the “book-a-day AI churn” crowd exists, the pros at the top already work like mini-studios: they have outlines, collaborators, co-writers. AI is just that system made available to people who never had access before.

The Core of the Thing: Who You Become

We ended on the real point: You are the point.

The books matter, but they’re byproducts of the process that shapes you. If you write fifty books and remain unchanged, something’s missing. This work of being an author demands a version of you most people never meet in themselves.

Where Keith Lives Online

Keith wrapped by pointing listeners to:

• Podcast: Cereus and Limnic on Spotify

• Website: keithhayden.net

• YouTube: Digital Novelist (active, experiments, readings)

Ben and Gareth, the lifelong friends and co-hosts of Pizza Planet: A Pixar Podcast, join Dominic (me) to talk all things Pixar. The pair are known for breaking down every Pixar release with the rigor of film analysts and the enthusiasm of devoted fans.

“We strung together a bunch of random Pixar phrases that we love,” Gareth joked of their show’s quirky sign-off. “All of our podcasts end with Keep it in O for Onward. Then Ben says, adventure is out there, and of course, to infinity and beyond.”

Why Pixar?

“My love for Pixar is deep-rooted,” Gareth said. “My dream was to get into animation and start my way towards working there. Their stories are just enduring.”

Ben agreed. “Pixar is the cream of the crop for storytelling,” he said. “When you look at the AFI list of the top hundred movies—live action included—several Pixar films make the cut. That’s incredible.”

Both traced their fascination to the studio’s unprecedented run from the mid-1990s through 2010. Gareth listed the canon from memory: “Monsters Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Ratatouille (2007), WALL-E (2008), Up (2009), and the crescendo, Toy Story 3 (2010). For fifteen years, every release was a classic.”

Behind that success, Gareth credited the early “creative brain trust”—John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, and others. “Steve Jobs was fostering a culture where those people could really work out stories collaboratively,” he said. “They were inventing the standards as they went.”

Ben added, “Joe Ranft was another key figure. He had a profound impact on the story department while he was alive. When Pixar grew, they began giving new directors chances to helm films. That’s healthy—but maybe, in sharing the load, something got lost.”

What the Bar Looks Like

Asked what defines a “Pixar-level” film, Ben identified three criteria: emotion, depth, and clarity. “First, emotion—was it truly moving?” he said. “Then depth—did they push the theme to its absolute limit? Pixar puts its characters through the dark night of the soul. And finally, clarity—was anything cluttered or unnecessary?”

Gareth added that perspective matters. “After any new release, you have to fight recency bias,” he said. “With Elio, we recorded our podcast in the parking lot right after seeing it. You can hear us realizing in real time: ‘This movie is great.’”

Together they look for “a clear message, a clear theme, and characters whose journeys support the thesis of the film.” Sometimes, Gareth admitted, the analysis becomes reconstruction: “After The Good Dinosaur, we spent the entire credits re-structuring the movie to make it better.”

Best and Worst

Both men named Finding Nemo as Pixar’s pinnacle. “It’s structured so well,” Ben said. “The theme of not over-parenting and giving your children freedom is in every scene. Everything was purposeful. Nothing was wasted.”

Gareth’s connection deepened after becoming a father. “Every dad should see that movie,” he said. “I even have a Finding Nemo tattoo—Crush and Squirt with my son’s birthday.”

At the opposite end, Gareth didn’t mince words: “Probably Cars 2. I don’t hate it, but it’s an objectively horrible movie. Coming right after Toy Story 3, it was a dive.”

Ben cited Toy Story 4 and Soul as disappointments. “Toy Story 4 twists the heart of the series,” he said. “And Soul—it’s trying to answer the meaning of life, but it doesn’t take a specific stance. It’s too abstract. Finding Nemo knows exactly what it’s about; Soul doesn’t.”

When Pixar Surprises You

Gareth named Onward as the film that most surprised him. “I went in for the fantasy adventure, but the substance is what stayed with me,” he said. “The relationship between the brothers, the ending—it’s beautiful. Then you learn the director based it on his own life and his father’s death. The whole film is a love letter to his brother.”

For Ben, Up became personal. “When my wife and I went through miscarriages, I realized I was reacting like Carl,” he said. “Grief had closed me off. Seeing Carl open himself to new life helped me do the same. That movie, and even our podcast conversations, deepened my friendship with Gareth.”

Films That Changed the World

Gareth credited Toy Story with transforming not just Pixar but animation itself. “It was the first feature-length 3-D animated movie,” he said. “It changed everything—killed 2-D for a while. WALL-E showed that animation could be art, and Cars reshaped the toy industry.”

Ben pointed to Pixar’s emotional impact. “They didn’t just set a story bar—they made emotion essential,” he said. “Almost every Pixar movie makes you cry because it’s honest. Inside Out changed how we talk about emotions. I’ve even seen corporate workshops using it to teach emotional intelligence. Imagine—an animated film helping adults become better people.”

Dominic summed it up: “It gives us a common language across generations. A story adults and kids can both connect to and understand reality more deeply through.”

The Pixar Philosophy: Authenticity and the Armature

“What’s Pixar’s philosophy about how we should live in the world?” Dominic asked.

Gareth answered first. “Authenticity. Pixar hands the story to people who have the authority to tell it,” he said. “Look at Turning Red or Luca—both autobiographical. During Soul, Pete Docter realized, ‘I can’t tell this story.’ He brought in Kemp Powers, who had the right perspective. That humility keeps the stories honest.”

He contrasted Pixar’s approach with other studios: “Nearly all early animated films were adaptations. Pixar broke that mold with original ideas. They weren’t saying, ‘What’s popular?’ They were saying, ‘What’s our story?’”

Ben connected the philosophy to a craft principle he learned from story coach Brian McDonald. “Every story needs what Brian calls an armature—the invisible truth the whole film hangs on,” Ben explained. “Without that, it crumbles. Pixar keeps rewriting until every beat serves that armature.”

He added, “The best stories come from something worth saying—something so personal you’d fight for it. Pixar’s strongest films have that kind of conviction.”

The Fun of Theories

De Souza then raised the fan-favorite “Pixar Theory,” which imagines all the films existing in one universe.

Ben laughed. “Yeah, John Negroni started that, and the Super Carlin Brothers ran with it. It’s all in fun—obviously not intentional—but they’re brilliant at finding threads.”

Gareth’s favorite example comes from Onward. “Someone noticed the mountain range in the background is shaped like the Axiom ship from WALL-E,” he said. “So in that theory, Onward happens in the distant future after humans left Earth. There’s no merit to it—but it’s fun that we can imagine that.”

Beyond Pixar

Asked about other recent films they admire, Gareth named The Wild Robot and Dune Parts 1 and 2. Ben added Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Peanut Butter Falcon.

A Friendship Built on Story

The Pizza Planet podcast grew out of years of casual debate. “We were roommates for years,” Ben recalled. “We’d stand in the bathroom brushing our teeth and talk for hours about the latest Pixar film. One day we said, ‘Dude, why don’t we have a podcast?’”

Their tradition of attending opening-night premieres continues, even with family life. “We’re dads now,” Ben said, “but we still try to catch the early screenings. It’s a special tradition.”

They recently wrapped season three. “We take short breaks between seasons,” Ben said. “Season four’s coming soon. You can find us everywhere under Pizza Planet: A Pixar Podcast or on Instagram at @pizzaplanetpodcast.”

And yes—their signature farewell works: “Keep it in O for Onward, adventure’s out there… and to infinity and beyond.”

Get the Book

When Callie Sioux was ten years old, she bought a sword.

Excalibur, a film replica she picked up at Tennessee Knife Works on a family trip. She couldn’t afford the Lord of the Rings collectibles, so she settled for the blade of kings instead.

Decades later, it’s followed her through short films, photoshoots, and a life that’s swung between ups and downs.

That sword, still gleaming after years of use, feels like a perfect emblem for her life—equal parts myth and grit.

From Road Life to Radio Dramas

A year ago, Callie was still finishing 1232: An Audio Epic, an ambitious radio drama that wove together her love of storytelling, music, and production. It earned her a nomination for Best Audio Drama 2025 from the Realm Maker Awards—an honor that put her work alongside legends who’d collaborated with Focus on the Family and other giants in Christian audio.

She describes the months after that nomination as a time of “waiting on the Lord’s timing.” The temptation to leap into the next thing was strong, but life, as she says, had other ideas.

Creating art full-time wasn’t financially sustainable. “You can usually get a project done,” she admits, “but your art has a hard time perpetuating itself.”

So she made a hard choice: to stop relying solely on her creative work to pay the bills and instead build something that could nurture art in a different way.

The Woodshop: A Stage & Sanctuary

That “something” turned out to be The Woodshop, a historic neighborhood music venue and bar tucked into Chattanooga’s St. Elmo district. Once a grocery store from the 1800s, the building still has the charm of a small-town stage. Calli and her husband, Jet, took over the space and turned it into a haven for live music, theater, and community events.

They host touring artists from Japan, the Netherlands, and across the United States, as well as local talent they’ve known for years. The Woodshop feels like a spiritual successor to the road life they once lived: intimate, unpredictable, and brimming with stories.

Jhett also co-hosts a weekly live blues radio show recorded right there on Tuesday nights. “We do it with a live audience,” Callie grins. “Sometimes it gets a little dramatic, but it’s still radio.”

Faith & the Fight to Keep Creating

When asked how she’s kept herself together through the endless uncertainty of the creative life, Calli doesn’t hesitate. “Grit,” she says simply. “And Christ.”

She talks about growing up in New Mexico, hauling water in the desert, breaking ice for livestock, falling out of trees, and watching animals die.

“My parents didn’t raise me to think life was supposed to be easy,” she says. “You get bucked off, you get back on. That’s just what you do.”

That toughness has saved her more than once, especially when depression came calling. “I’ve struggled with that darkness my whole life,” she says, “but once you survive it, once you get through the suicidal thoughts, you realize you have to fight every day for your peace. It’s a real battle, spiritual, physical, emotional…

“And I like fighting.”

Faith, for Callie, isn’t a gentle comfort. It’s armor. “Christ softens the grit with love,” she says, “but the grit’s still there. You need both.”

She Had Glass Eyes: A Gothic Fable

Out of that same mix of grit and imagination came her latest creation: a Victorian Gothic thriller called She Had Glass Eyes. The novella began as a simple writing prompt: set a story in 1846 England with one supernatural element. It turned into something far more haunting.

The seed of inspiration came from an obscure historical invention: the Euphonia, a real simulated speech machine designed in 1846 by a German inventor named Joseph Faber.

“It could mimic human speech,” Callie explains, “and people were horrified. Some said it was the end of humanity, that we wouldn’t need people anymore.”

The story follows a female undertaker obsessed with acquiring the talking machine for herself, spiraling into madness in the process. “It’s a cautionary tale about obsession,” she says. “About what happens when we chase the wrong thing.”

The book releases October 20 through Twenty Hills Publishing, and early reviews have been glowing. Critics have praised its balance between historical texture and modern readability—dark, poetic, and surprisingly accessible. “It’s not a Christian book,” Calli clarifies, “but it’s not godless either.”

The Long Shadow of Authenticity

That honesty has become the hallmark of her art—and her theology. In the final stretch of our conversation, Calli turns philosophical. “Growing up in church, I could always tell when someone was being genuine,” she says. “So much Christian fiction didn’t feel real. It felt like propaganda. It talked down to people.”

She remembers attending a church full of bikers, cowboys, hippies, and businessmen. “That was reality. Faith was messy, complicated, man. That’s what I want to see in stories.”

She’s not against Christian art. Far from it. “There’s a place for it,” she insists, “but the measure of good art isn’t how many times you say the name of Jesus. In Christian music they call it the ‘JPM’—Jesus Per Minute. That’s not how we should measure stories.”

What matters, she argues, is intention. “Your intention will always be seen,” she says, quoting an old mentor. “If it’s genuine, if it’s excellent, if it’s written with love and truth, people will feel it—believers or not.”

Calli believes the next great wave of storytelling will come from authors willing to drop their armor and write what’s real. “People don’t want sermons,” she says. “They want genuine conversations. They want to feel something true.”

That’s why she’s drawn to communities like LegendHaven—spaces where Christian and non-Christian creators can talk about light and dark, beauty and pain, without judgment. “It’s the only way to grow,” she says. “We need to stop building fences around art and start asking, Is it good? Is it professional? Is it genuine? That’s the bar.”

Callie is hosting a live readaloud and book launch event at LegendHaven!

Get my LegendHaven $10 ticket

Callie’s story is far from over.

She’s still booking shows, still producing radio, still finding time to write late into the night after the bar closes. When she’s not wrangling artists or soundboards, she’s probably tending to the venue’s garden or hosting themed nights—like the recent Bilbo’s Birthday Bash, a two-day festival complete with hobbit menus, costumes, and Tolkien music.

“I just wanted to put on a show,” she grins. “Turns out there are a lot of nerds in Chattanooga.”

What keeps her coming back to the page? Maybe it’s that stubborn drive to write what actually excites her, or maybe it’s the dream that one of her stories might hit a reader the way The Magician’s Nephew hit her at five.

How would you describe your writing style, and what influences formed it?

I describe my writing style as blunt and concise—with descriptions that count and realistic dialogue.

The influences that shaped my writing style are the same ones that inspired me to begin writing in the first place. My writing journey began with a creative writing class at my homeschool co-op. I was thirteen and my teacher expected us to write a book, with us submitting a chapter each week for her to review and grade, and I was concerned that I didn’t have what it took. I was nervous because for the grade of a short story I had submitted previously, I had one point deducted.

So, in 13-year-old perfectionistic desperation, I took J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter: The Sorcerer’s Stone from my shelf and read it in a new way—for sentence structure, voice, tone, and overall flow. My teacher had taught us the basics of all those things, but when I studied a published author, I took my learning into my own hands.

I remember pride surging through me when, after looking over my first chapter, my teacher had me read the opening line to our class. Not only did I feel a sense of accomplishment for doing well, but I also loved what I had written. My chapters for that class grew longer and longer as the weeks progressed. By the time it ended, I had a big, fat stack of chapters and a completed story that I was proud to call my own, and my writing journey took off after that.

With the shared interests of my fellow homeschooled friends, my writing and techniques matured over the course of the next few years through the countless original stories and fanfiction we wrote together. My friends and I had so much fun writing together, and the sheer volume of writing we did helped me hone my craft. I owe my friends my sincere thanks for their role in my writing journey!

As I continued to write, my interests in genre also became more niche. I liked fantasy, but my heart reveled in dystopia and science fiction. I avidly read books such as The Hunger Games, The Lunar Chronicles, and The Arc of a Scythe, among others. Luckily, what my friends and I wrote together was typically in these genres as well.

Overall, my writing style has been influenced by the people and stories that have shaped me: my excellent writing teacher, my enthusiastic friends, and the books I’ve read and studied.

Now, because of all that I have learned, my writing has one purpose: to transport readers into a world not their own and convey a story that will impact them.

What are your writing habits like, and how do you get (and stay) in the writing zone?

I try to write a little each day, and I make sure I don’t beat myself up about the word count. That means being okay with writing either 10 words or 1,000 words and closing my computer when my energy is spent. I have a day job that I balance with my writing, so being humble about my limits is what keeps me going. A little each day adds up to a lot over the course of a year.

The key is not to let yourself be bogged down by what you think you should be doing and focus on what is reasonable and right for you.

In terms of staying in the zone, I write what excites me as much as I can to keep my interest high. Those less-interesting parts I know need to be written, I write in bullet points first or get the dialogue down to write around later. Again, it’s all about finding what works for you.

My advice is to kick perfection to the curb. It doesn’t exist. The sooner you can establish a mindset of ‘this is what I can do’ instead of ‘this is what I can’t seem to do,’ writing will become easier. It did for me.

What do you think makes a good story?

Simply put, a good story is one that stays with you for years and years after reading. It’s one that you can look back on; one that you can take a lesson from.

A good story example for me is The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis. I didn’t personally read this story, but my father read it aloud to me when I was five years old. Yet, it was this story that sparked my love of literature. After he read that book to me, I read the next book in the Chronicles of Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, all on my own. I haven’t stopped reading since.

This is what I aspire to, hope for, and dream to accomplish. I pray that one day, the stories I write will be able to impact others, just like how that one story impacted me.

How do you know what to write?

I have a personal rule: whatever I’m working on must spark something in me, even if it’s small, and my projects need to be relevant to my lived or learned experience.

Imagine a picky toddler. You try to feed them broccoli, and they swipe it off the plate. But if you give them ice cream, they snatch that up as quickly as they can. That’s how my brain works when it comes to writing. I’ve tried to write what doesn’t excite me (the broccoli), and it’s never worked out very well. I can tell when my writing is uninspired, which is why I focus on writing what does excite me (the ice cream).

I want my writing to inspire and matter—not just to me, but to anyone who reads it. If I’m not pouring a part of myself onto the page, what stake do I have in my work?

What is your favorite genre to write and why?

My favorite genres are dystopia and science fiction. I like to play with the concept of technology affecting humanity—for better or (more often) worse. I also enjoy exploring what characters decide to do with a newfound power they gain and, in a similar way, the destruction of that power. Similarly, I like writing about what people choose to do when they are placed in dire circumstances, which is shaped by their personality, age, mentality, state in life, etc.

Because choice-driven plots fascinate me the most, I’ve found my stories run on the same themes—it’s what makes my work gritty, messy, and human. Some things happen to my characters that they have no control over, so for me, it’s more about what my characters do next that matters: what do they do after being captured, after the fire, after the bomb goes off, etc. Watching my characters wrestle with good and evil both in the world and within themselves stirs something in me, and that feeling is what keeps me writing every day.

If you were featured in a recent LegendFiction anthology, what is the name of your story, and the anthology?

Read my story, Mission: London, in LegendFiction’s upcoming anthhology, Thrill Runners.

Declan Finn didn’t plan to become the guy with forty-five novels under his belt. It just happened because, as he put it, he couldn’t turn his brain off.

The stories wouldn’t stop showing up. They’d move in, start shooting, and refuse to leave until he wrote them down. His solution was simple: “If they live in my head, they pay rent.”

When Dominic De Souza finally sat down with him for the first time—after hearing his name for a decade—it turned into a half-hour sprint through Declan’s wild origin story, his faith-fueled thrillers, and his unapologetic approach to surviving in the indie publishing world.

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From Fanfic to Forty-Five Novels

Declan’s first book, White Ops, started as Babylon 5 fanfiction in 1998. He was sixteen, armed with coffee, teenage energy, and zero awareness that “fanfiction” was even a thing. Fifteen months later, he’d written six books—nearly a million words.

He laughed about it now, remembering how he cornered Jim Baen at a convention to ask how long a novel should be. “He said about 400 pages. I thought that meant 400 single-spaced pages.” The result? 800-page behemoths.

What began as imitation turned into compulsion. “I just couldn’t turn the brain off,” Declan said. “So if the characters were going to live in my head, they might as well pay rent.”

Writing Faster Than Coffee Works

Declan’s average novel runs 60–90,000 words. His record? 60k in three weeks. “When I was 16, I had energy. I could do 36-hour stretches in summer,” he said. “Lived off a lot of coffee then.”

Today, he’s part indie, part small-press. His Saint Tommy NYPD and White Ops series are published through Tuscany Bay Books, while Baen still distributes some of his titles.

Does he write full-time?

“Pretty much. And it’s not work. It’s an addiction.”

Saints, Superheroes, and the Smell of Evil

One college course changed everything. “It was Christian spirituality and mysticism,” he said. “We were learning about saints who levitated, bilocated, or could smell evil. I thought, slap a cape on one of these guys and congratulations, you’ve got a superhero comic.”

That throwaway thought became Saint Tommy NYPD—a 12-book urban fantasy about a cop who’s also a living saint. “He fights possessed serial killers, smells evil, bilocates, and dies a few times,” Declan said casually. “One version walks away. The other one doesn’t.”

The concept took off. His Catholic thrillers and vampire novels found an audience in readers who wanted grit, faith, and explosions—all in the same story.

Lessons from 45 Books

Asked what he’s learned after writing more books than most people read in a year, Declan didn’t hesitate. “Step one: know something about guns,” he said. Growing up in New York, his knowledge was… minimal.

“I knew if you pulled the trigger and it went bang, it was semi-auto. Hold it down and more bullets come out? Fully auto. That was it.”

Over time, research and reader corrections shaped his realism. “Gun people are picky,” he admitted. “I once copied from a user manual and got told it was wrong. It’s on the website! They said, yeah, manufacturers lie. Shocking.”

The Troll Problem and Rage Marketing

After two decades in the trenches, Declan’s learned what he loves—writing—and what he hates—marketing. “If I wanted to interact with people, I wouldn’t have picked a profession where I lock myself in a room for seven hours a day,” he joked.

He’s seen the rise of “rage marketing,” where authors pick fights online to sell books. “It works for some people. Not for me,” he said. “I’ve got one character who used to share my temper. I don’t want to live like that online.”

His version of marketing is pure volume: more books, more consistency, not the constant Twitter post screaming “BOOK! BOOK! BOOK!”

He’s run Kickstarters, signed books at DragonCon (“They stuck me in a back room behind the bestsellers”), and dealt with bookstores that won’t return calls.

None of it slows him down.

The State of Publishing

Talk of Barnes & Noble makes him sigh. “Half the store’s manga. The other half’s toys. The books are shrinking, the Starbucks are growing.”

He still finds hope in small presses and indie communities, where the hustle matters more than the label. “At least online, people actually find new authors. You don’t have to be blessed by New York.”

What’s Next

He’s already juggling four new ideas, including another entry in Blaine Pardo’s Land and Sea series and a possible action-comedy about an Antifa riot at the SHOT Show gun convention in Vegas. “Once I figure out how to make that hilarious, we’re good,” he grinned.

As for burnout? Not possible. “It’s not work. It’s addiction. The only time I stop is when I’m reading other people’s books—usually so I can review them on - Upstream Reviews.”

Declan even has a dream exit strategy: “Robert Parker died at his keyboard. That’s how I want to go.”

Hope for Other Writers

His advice to aspiring authors: “First, get a real skill—something that pays the bills. Electrician, plumber, whatever. If you’re wired to write, you’ll write anyway.”

And second? “Keep a schedule. Half an hour a day, one page. That’s 365 pages a year. Congratulations, you’ve got a novel.”

“Just be consistent. And if you’re going to be a professional, act like one.”

Declan Finn might joke about rage marketing and caffeine addictions, but behind it is a truth I admire: he’s built a career on sheer compulsion and curiosity. He doesn’t chase trends—he seems to outwrite them. In business, half the time winners win because they outlast the competition.

Forty-five novels in, he’s not slowing down. The words keep coming, and the man at the keyboard keeps saying yes.

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Declan’s coming to LegendHaven for a Sunday morning panel! Are you coming?

Allison Spooner’s been telling stories since before she could spell her name. Literally. Her mom used to write them down for her.

That early instinct to build worlds never left, but like a lot of lifelong writers, she hit the wall hard. Somewhere between the pressure to write the “big novel” and comparing herself to other authors with hundred-thousand-word trilogies, writing stopped being fun.

The thing that pulled her out was flash fiction: tiny, thousand-word stories that get the job done. The short format gave her permission to finish something. She could explore an idea, capture a moment, and move on.

That freedom slowly turned the lights back on.

From Flash Fiction to Neverland

Out of those small ideas became something much bigger. That idea became The Lost Girl: A Neverland Story—a continuation of the Hook universe where Peter Pan’s great-granddaughter is dying, and her mother sends her to Neverland, hoping that a place where you never grow up might also mean never dying.

Spooner grew up on Peter Pan, the Mary Martin stage version taped off TV onto an old VHS, and then Hook, the family classic.

“As I got older,” she says, “I started writing about the darker side of things. I always thought it was fascinating, what it would really mean to never grow up.”

That fascination grew into a novel about childhood, mortality, and what happens when innocence refuses to die.

The Ghosts We Make

Her next book, The Things We Cannot Change, is about addiction, loss, and the ghosts we carry. The main character, Callie, comes face to face with the spirit of her father—a man she’s been trying not to think about since his death. It’s a fictionalized version of Spooner’s own story growing up with an alcoholic dad.

She says she always knew she’d write it one day. “If you’re a writer and you go through something like that,” she says, “you kind of always know in the back of your mind you’re going to end up writing about it.”

But writing about pain honestly is hard. The key, she says, is distance. “If you don’t know how you feel about it, write it as fiction. Give it to another character. Change the names. Write it in third person.”

That approach helped her face what she couldn’t yet process directly. And her honesty reached readers. One woman wrote to say the book inspired her to reconnect with her alcoholic mother after years of silence. Another said it helped her see the other side of addiction for the first time.

Stories like that remind Spooner why she writes. It’s about empathy, and seeing people you’ve stopped understanding.

The Secret Trilogy

Spooner started writing longer works, stretching the muscles flash fiction had strengthened. Today, she’s secretly writing a trilogy under a pen name. The genre is completely different from anything she’s done before, different enough that she wants to build an audience from scratch, experiment anonymously, and see how it grows.

She laughs when she calls it top secret. “Because the internet is so intrusive,” she says, “it also gives you a strange kind of freedom. I just wanted to try something new.”

Enter PenPal

Then she built her own AI tool for writers.

It’s called PenPal—“the writing assistant I always wanted.” Spooner’s partner is a web developer who’s been deep in AI for years, long before the big boom. Together, they mixed his tech skills with her creative hesitancy to build a tool designed for writers, not for replacing them.

“People think AI will write the book for you,” she says, “but that’s not what I wanted. I wanted something that keeps me in control, something that helps me work with my characters.”

And that’s exactly what PenPal does. Writers upload their own notes, outlines, and world-building, and PenPal builds an interactive “character bot.” You can literally open a chat and ask your protagonist a question.

She laughs about how strange it’s been to talk to her own creations. “A lot of my characters are very guarded,” she says. “They don’t want to talk. I actually had to convince them it was safe to open up.” But the process sparked unexpected discoveries because of what she found herself asking. “It made me realize the questions I was asking should be scenes. Other characters should be asking them.”

The Dream Tool

Beyond the character chats, PenPal acts like a creative dashboard. It can check your grammar, flag tone inconsistencies, fact-check historical details, even tell you what color eyes your character had three chapters ago. Spooner describes it as “a one-stop shop for all the little things that usually break your writing flow.”

But she’s careful not to oversell it. “It’s not a replacement for editors or beta readers,” she says. “It’s just another tool, like Grammarly, but built for storytellers.”

One user told her it had “transformed her writing journey,” helping her re-edit a published series by organizing notes and tracking continuity.

For Spooner herself, PenPal became a quiet source of confidence. After analyzing her novel The Lost Girl, it told her what she was best at: intimate dialogue, emotional body language, and small scenes.

“It reminded me of what I do well,” she says. “That gave me the courage to try a new genre.”

Self-Publishing and Self-Trust

Spooner’s been self-publishing from the start, partly out of necessity—no traditional publisher wants a flash fiction collection from an unknown author—but mostly out of conviction. She likes owning her creative freedom.

“I wanted to write stories my way,” she says. No forced love interests or trend chasing. She wants the stories that matter most to her.

That independence comes with its own learning curve: marketing, social media, audience-building. But she’s found joy in doing it her way, even if it takes longer.

As of now, she’s finishing that secret trilogy, developing PenPal, and hosting workshops at writing conferences—including LegendHaven, where she’ll be demoing her AI tool live.

It started with a livestream. A camera, a controller, and a gamer who didn’t want to play alone anymore. David Sanchez didn’t set out to build a ministry; he just wanted to hang out with people who loved both gaming and God.

What came out of that impulse is now a thriving international community of Catholic gamers spread across Discord servers and Twitch streams, a place where fellowship and fun meet faith.

David’s Story starts with LifeTeen

David’s story begins in Southern California, inside the kind of youth group that quietly changes lives. His parish ran Life Teen, a Catholic ministry that mixes retreats, worship, and practical formation for teens. David drifted through high school with a loose grip on his faith until one of the youth leaders invited him to a Steubenville conference.

That weekend cracked something open. In adoration, surrounded by hundreds of other teens, he felt the first tug back toward belief. It didn’t happen through preaching. It happened through people his own age showing him what it looked like to live faith joyfully.

That spark turned into a call to serve. He joined the ministry’s core team, mentoring teens, and then became a Life Teen missionary, spending summers at camp watching others go through the same transformation he did. “I didn’t want to just give a summer to Jesus,” he said. “I figured, if this is where I’m called, I’m all in.”

Gaming and charity events

Gaming had always been part of his world. Pokémon Ruby. Halo. Long nights with friends across the street. But it wasn’t until 2021 that faith and gaming started to merge.

A friend invited him to join Extra Life, a charity event where gamers raise money for children’s hospitals. Streaming for a cause flipped a switch. Suddenly games weren’t just downtime—they were a bridge. That’s when the idea of a network, more than a channel, started forming.

He launched a Discord. Dozens of Catholic gamers joined, then hundreds, from across the U.S., and soon, the world. By the time the count hit 300 members, people were joining from as far as the Philippines. What drew them in was relief in finding a community where people could laugh, talk about faith, and game without the noise or cynicism of secular culture.

David sees gaming as a moral sandbox. The stories, the choices, the moments of temptation—they all mirror real life.

In Knights of the Old Republic, he says, he always tries to do a “dark side” run. He never can. “Every time I reach those choices, I just can’t do it,” he admits. “Something inside me pushes back.”

A game can become a place to test your conscience. You see what kind of person you are when nobody’s watching—not in church, not at work, just you and the screen.

The changing landscape of gaming

The conversation drifts into the changing landscape of the industry. David’s excited about what’s happening with indie studios—small teams using tools like Unreal Engine 5 to make games that rival AAA productions in quality and imagination.

He’s frustrated with the big studios that push half-finished titles, chasing deadlines instead of care. “Indies are hungry,” he says. “They have to be excellent right out of the gate.”

When he dreams out loud, it’s not about beating a boss or breaking into the business. It’s about storytelling. He talks about an idea for a game inspired by The Order: 1886—a moody, Victorian world of monster hunters who jump through time to stop demonic incursions. It’s David’s style: half gamer, half theologian, turning gameplay into a meditation on eternity.

But the heart of his work isn’t fantasy. It’s people. As an associate director of youth and young adult ministry in Texas, he sees firsthand how disconnected young adults can feel. Many grew up online; their friendships are digital first, sometimes digital only.

For them, the Catholic Gaming Network is more than a hangout. “It’s a place to belong,” David says, “and to be built up.”

He wants gamers to see that play can be holy, the same way storytelling, art, and sport can reflect the Creator. When the right people gather around the right purpose, even a headset becomes a mission tool. “Gaming can help you get to heaven,” he says,

The point isn’t escaping reality. It’s finding meaning inside it. “Don’t be afraid to step out of the boat and try new things,” David says before signing off.

A few years later, that idea became seven books, a streaming platform, and a movement that’s helping families name their temptations, laugh together, and remember what goodness looks like when it’s epic.

The Seven Deadly Dragons

John first appeared on The Legend Fiction Show during last year’s LegendHaven 2024 Con. Back then, his team had just launched the final book in their seven-part series: one dragon for each of the deadly sins—pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.

“The goal,” John explained, “was to teach kids virtue through storytelling. If you want them to know the truth, tell them the truth. But if you want them to remember it, love it, live it—tell them great stories.”

Each book centers on a young hero training in an academy for dragon slayers. Across seven years, from second grade to eighth—he learns that humility slays pride, generosity slays greed, and every virtue becomes a weapon of light.

The stories are written for ages seven through twelve, but parents are some of their biggest fans. Families read them aloud. Siblings quote the lines. Moms and dads laugh at the hidden jokes. It’s fantasy built for family conversion.

Turning ‘Sin’ Into Story

The language of “dragon slaying” is now part of family life for readers. When a kid starts whining for more toys, a parent doesn’t have to lecture. They just say, “The green dragon’s getting you.”

The kid immediately straightens up: “No! Generosity slays greed!”

“I’ve always been a left-brain guy,” John says. “I’m a scientist. I look at the world through data.” But storytelling reaches the heart in a way nothing else can.

Building the DragonSlayers Universe

The success of the books led to more ideas. First came a podcast, Saturdays with Sir Roland, on Catholic Sprouts. Then came the vision for DragonSlayers.tv, a full streaming platform where kids can watch, listen, and laugh their way through the virtues.

The site features “Dragons Around the House,” a comic mini-series where kids face everyday temptations: lying, selfishness, laziness, and learn to make the heroic choice. Each short story is packed with humor, quick choices (A, B, or C), and the satisfaction of choosing “legendary dragon slaying.”

And then there’s the music. John and his team wrote two songs for every book, each one themed around the dragons and virtues. There are “battle cries,” upbeat tracks, even a parody of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” that covers the entire story of salvation history in three minutes.

“Parents tell me their kids listen to the songs on loop,” John said. “They make up dances, memorize the lyrics. It sticks.”

From Eye Doctor to Storyteller

None of this was supposed to happen. John’s full-time job is eye care, not epic fantasy. But faith has a way of calling people out of comfort zones.

Years ago, he wrote a nonfiction book, Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Mission, which Dynamic Catholic distributed to over a quarter million people. It opened doors for him to speak nationwide. But he realized he wasn’t reaching the people he cared about most: young parents and their kids.

So in 2018, he created a family retreat focused on the sacraments of First Reconciliation and First Communion. He wanted something fun, immersive, and unforgettable. The result was Dragon Slayers, a retreat that used the metaphor of dragons and knights to teach confession and grace.

When parents and kids begged for more, he turned his talk into a nonfiction book. But his test readers told him the truth: kids want stories.

“So I turned it into fiction,” John said. “And one book turned into seven.”

The entire family joined in. His daughters handled art and editing, his wife shaped the text, his son drew the dragons. They worked like a mini studio, releasing one book a month starting on Easter Sunday 2024. “I wouldn’t do that again,” he joked, “but it kept us accountable.”

When Faith inspires Fantasy

Beneath the humor and dragons, Dragon Slayers is deeply Catholic. His father’s death in 2008 was the moment that pushed him to write and speak publicly about faith. “I promised him I’d try to become the saint God made me to be, and inspire others to do the same,” John said. “That promise keeps me going.”

Through the process of writing the series, he says he’s learned more about himself than he expected. “When you spend that long writing about the seven deadly sins, you see your own. You have to face them.

“I used to try to do everything myself,” he admitted. “But this project only worked because my whole family was involved. I’ve learned that God does better work when I stay out of the way.”

What’s Next for Dragon Slayers?

2025 may be the biggest leap yet. John revealed that several screenwriters and producers have reached out about turning Dragon Slayers into an animated series. “I can’t say much yet,” he said, “but it’s exciting.”

He’s also developing a father-son experience called Knights of Light: a yearlong academy-style program built around archery, prayer, and virtue. Each year focuses on one dragon and its opposite virtue, ending in a rite where fathers “knight” their sons into manhood.

This past summer, they trialed it with 14 boys and 11 dads. “It was incredible,” John said. “It’s like living out the story together.”

The Dragons Are Real

Toward the end of the interview, John shared two of his favorite stories from families.

One was from his godson, who ate too much pizza one night and staggered inside holding his stomach. “Dad,” he groaned, “I think the indigo one got me.” The indigo dragon (gluttony) had claimed another victim.

The other was a letter from a mother whose son, with special needs, had never connected with reading or religion. After discovering the Dragon Slayers podcast, everything changed. He started talking about the dragons, using the virtues, even handling disappointment differently.

“She told me,” John said. “ ‘You’re doing what God called you to do.’”

Where to Find the Dragons

All of John’s work is available at ExtraordinaryMission.com, and the entire streaming platform is free at DragonSlayers.tv.

“Sign up for free,” John said, “and you’ll have access to all the stories, music, and adventures. It’s a world where every temptation has a dragon, and every kid has a sword.”

Miriam’s last convo on the Legend Fiction Show talked about if stories were escapist. This time, she wants to chat about what happens when we heal the storyteller, and through that, heal the imagination.

Miriam’s life as a creative had always been tied to that search. She remembered how she began writing poetry as an eight-year-old, how her early short stories were full of enchanted rings and talking animals.

At the time, she didn’t realize that those little stories were already doing interior work—helping her process hurts, joys, and teenage chaos. Around the same time, she started songwriting. Music became another way to tell stories, except shorter, more concentrated.

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Her first song came out of a global tragedy.

At fourteen years old, she was watching the war in Bosnia unfold on the news in real time. The pain of seeing a far-off world burning had to go somewhere, so it landed in a song—a tragic love story in the middle of war.

Looking back, she chuckled at her early demos, remembering a producer telling her, “Miriam, I think you have potential, but your lyrics are all over the place.” In one song she’d be cramming together a crush, personal drama, and a plea for world peace.

In her third year of college, she had a profound conversion experience in January 2002, one that fused art, faith, and imagination. She remembered the exact moment: reading Mere Christianity while listening to Howard Shore’s soundtrack for The Fellowship of the Ring. At track seventeen, three minutes and fifty-four seconds in, something broke open. She knew God was real. She knew she was loved.

That memory has become an anchor for the rest of her creative life.

Healing and imagination

From that point on, her songwriting gained focus. Instead of being scattered, the lyrics sharpened. The stories turned into mini-conversion moments, often drawn from scripture.

Miriam said she loved inserting herself into the gospel stories—what if she were Mary Magdalene, or the tax collector? What would it feel like to encounter Christ in the middle of the narrative? Those reflections turned into songs.

But the larger theme she kept circling back to was healing. Healing wasn’t just personal, it was cultural. “We’re supposed to have a well-formed conscience,” she explained, “but we also need a well-formed imagination.”

Just like a conscience is shaped through prayer, scripture, and community, the imagination needed that kind of formation too. What we watch, what we read, the friendships we keep—all of it builds or deforms our imagination.

Creativity is healing

And when that imagination is repressed, creativity suffers. Dominic jumped in here, reflecting on what happens when someone ignores their creative calling. Creativity, he said, doesn’t go away if you bury it. It sours. It turns into frustration, even anger. You can feel like a battery leaking acid into every corner of your life.

But the moment you return, even for a few minutes, to something creative—drawing, writing, singing—it heals you back up.

Miriam pointed out that many of us process chaos through art. “We’re meaning makers,” she said. When life feels chaotic or meaningless, we write or paint or compose so that something comes out the other side. That act of making meaning can itself be healing.

The meaning crisis

This led to the bigger cultural picture: the meaning crisis. Dominic brought up The Last Samurai, when Tom Cruise’s character is asked about fate. “I believe a man does his best until his fate is revealed to him,” he replies.

In a world stripped of meaning, creativity can be a kind of applied contemplation, even a form of prayer. It’s how we thaw through bitterness and resistance until meaning reveals itself. And we often have to practice creativity until our purpose is revealed to us.

Miriam connected that to Tolkien directly. For Tolkien, creation was the stage where God’s plan is revealed. We’re not passive spectators—we’re co-creators, invited to participate in ongoing creation.

And because creation itself is fundamentally good, reaching for it in times of chaos is natural. Art and story reconnect us to that goodness.

But the heart of her recent journey was silence. She had gone on her first eight-day silent retreat, leaving behind devices, music, and even background noise. At first, the silence felt heavy. Old memories, relationships, even buried wounds came bubbling up. But staying with it proved healing. “Let some of the stories be written out of silence,” she said.

An 8-day retreat into silence

By silence, she didn’t mean a vacuum. She meant a stepping away from the endless input of media and sound. In that quiet, forgotten ideas resurfaced—dreams she had set aside because someone once dismissed them, or because she thought no one would care. Silence gave them space to return in a new season of life.

She admitted she was still learning. Daily practices were simple: putting her phone aside more often, trimming back podcasts, doing chores in quiet instead of with constant noise. “I just want to form my imagination well,” she said. Even small spaces of quiet were enough to let thoughts sort themselves and settle.

Dominic resonated with that, especially with ADHD constantly buzzing in his head. For him, the practice was intentionality—even in simple things like washing dishes. Do it on purpose, not by accident. That pause of attention became a form of relief, a reset.

By the end of their conversation, Miriam returned once more to Tolkien. She talked about Lothlórien, that glimpse of untouched goodness. For her, healing was tied to what she called “the memory of good.” Holding onto memories of when God had acted, when goodness had broken through, gave her strength to move forward.

She compared it to C.S. Lewis’s Aslan—never doing the same thing twice, but always surprising with new forms of goodness.