Vivid & Untamed Worlds: From Marketing to Middle Earth. Ish.
Meet Dominic de Souza: Born in New Zealand, studied in Fiji and France, raised in Australia, & rooted in the USA, he escaped a doomsday cult, and now writes fiction.
Ever feel like your inner 13-year-old is still somewhere out there, swinging a stick like a sword, dreaming up battles between Jedi and dinosaurs? What if that spark never died — even after you built a business, raised a family, and fought through real-life dragons like burnout, bills, and grief?
Dominic de Souza’s story is part Stranger Things, part Stargate Season 9, and croissants. From a yellow bike in New Zealand to the smoky cookfires of Fiji, to launching LegendFiction as a rebel act of joy, he’s chasing that same magic that lit up his childhood: the thrill of story. So what happens when you mix a love for Catholic mysticism with comic books, and a calling to write with a calling to heal? Can fiction be a vocation, a way back to wonder, a weapon against despair?
Grab a cuppa, or maybe a mead horn, and welcome to this journey. It ain’t over yet.
Follow Dominic de Souza on Substack
Hi, I’m Dominic. I graduated from the Writer’s Institute for Children’s Literature, wrote my first novel at 13, again at 16, and broke the 120,000 word mark last year on a YA novel. I work full time in marketing and graphic design, because all the worlds without end that I want to write about need me to pay the bills.
Oh, and I left a Catholic doomsday cult, and it’s my life mission to help others find their freedom, and build a future we believe in.
What’s your origin story?
I was born on the north Island in New Zealand, with a mountain at the end of the road and a clear memory of causing havoc with a yellow bike and dog named Barney.
My background comes from the ochre and sky-blue thrumming of Bahia, Brazil on my dad’s side, and my mom’s ancestors comes from the hearthsmoke and whiskey of Ireland, the heavy bread and lullabine wolves of Germany. Wherever we lived round the world, the concrete spiritwalk of North America call to me, past the sprawl of strip malls and snowdrifts, the flare of frontier faith and new foundings in a welcome wilderness.
I blinked, and was 9 years old in a country school in Fiji, thick with fascinating, faithful Indians and thin, active Fijian children. Everything was beaches and late night dinners, mango trees and mosquitos, and massive frogs that edged the smoky pit-fire cooking.
Till that point, I’d been homeschooled, so this was a deep-end dive into squealing busses and grim bus drivers and the crush of curry-scented sweat as we kids rattled shoulders on rough dirt roads.
And then Australia, where our large family added the 8th kid. I was the eldest, a total ’80s family from ‘Stranger Things’. We didn’t have much money, so we kids grew up semi-feral, scrambling around on the roof, making our own treehouses with split wood and bashed thumbs.
We told stories, hiked and biked the local woods, explored every pipe and fallen tree, and ate like wild hogs. Every stick a sword, every karate class a proving ground, every school day a clock-watching waiting game till the explosion of break time and more games.
During all this, I discovered a love of books, and a love of writing. I read the local library dry, ordered in huge lists of things, started drawing my own comics, and writing my own novels. The satisfaction of building and sharing my own worlds was incredible, and I couldn’t stop. What if a crashed pilot had to fend off T-Rexes with a lightsaber? What if Star Wars and Jurassic Park mashed up? What if two children got sucked into fantasy world on the brink of war? What if… What if…
And after three months, I found that I’d written my first novel, and those magical words, ‘The End’, were a prophecy. I was going to do it again, someday. Sure, it was only 50-pages typed up. To a tousled, 13-year old kid with big teeth and aviator glasses, it was a magic that smelled like fresh copybook paper, blue Bic ink, and any dark weird corner where a cramping hand could craft letters and lines into worlds and weirdness.
Let’s fast forward, with a whole host of very-bad, no-good, awesome-stories: a year lived in a French boarding school, and a final move to the USA. I dropped out of college and high school to work for the family business, and discovered that all my love for creativity was really, really helpful for marketing. I became the back-of-house problem solver. The IT guy, the database and emails guy, and customer support contact. That’s when I discovered graphic design, and copywriting.
25 years later, I’ve been hard at work trying to skill up. I have a small, young family of my own, and fight every day to create peace and space for them to thrive. And at the same time, to dig down through the layers of silt and guilt from being born in a Catholic doomsday cult that covered up the wild, feral energy of that young kid I once was.
Early in Covid, I launched LegendFiction, an online community for fiction writers, partly because I wanted friends. Mostly because I wanted to have a lot more fun.
Today, this community has grown, and my inner creator started to surface again. I burned through writing my first YA novel, which feels like pure fire in the belly. Seeing it grow and take shape, breach the 100,000 word limit, and see the lights go on in people’s eyes when I start to talk about it… it’s sheer magic.
Just the other day, a friend described my worlds as vivid and untamed, and I’ve never heard anything so perfect. That urge for adventure, for self-discovering, for cracking the mysteries and diving deep into the wonder and danger of this thing we call life, to get back to an enchanted world thriving with meaning and purpose, and to capture a glint of this weird wildness in a story… maybe that’s why I’m here. I plan to keep finding out.
What are the biggest challenges so far?
From early on, the myths of Robin Hood, the Arthuriad, the Olympiad and Maharabahata and the Dreaming, have been my friends. And they always come back to two themes; real heroes are merry and brave. So I want to be like that too. And I fail twice a day.
In my case, where I work and where I have to be in life, I’m remote from all the friends and family I’ve ever known. My wife has been struggling with a debilitating medical condition for a decade. It’s a perfect recipe for shutting down your creativity and taking a hard left into left-brain survival thinking, because bills and breakfast must happen every day.
My problem is that my wild, feral, inner creative rebel will not take no for an answer.
So whether it means losing sleep, sanity, or cycling through routines of Netflix, philosophy, creative insanity, and then burnout, it must happen. Now obviously, I know that’s not a healthy routine. And it’s taken me several years to get it together. Now I know I can quit any time.
Kidding. I quit already… Ish. It’s been 2 days.
Looking back at the last few years, I tell myself that my limits were self-imposed… but they were actually the rules of the game I had at the time. No budget, no time, and no credibility.
So how do you change the world, or make a dent in it, when you’re a nobody, and no one knows you? I don’t have all the answers. But I do have a rebel edge to throw spaghetti at a wall longer, faster, and with more grit than anyone I know. And if it doesn’t stick, then I’m gonna start throwing the brownies.
But after building LegendFiction for years now, it’s becoming an incredible thing.
Why does LegendFiction matter so much?
In the last century, Christian contributions to fiction have steered into a literary and evangelistic mode, and I’m not satisfied with that.
Most of us are secret nerds, and have our hardcore fandoms. And I think there’s a massive truth in there, and a massive need for more of it.
We don’t need more Christian fiction, but more fiction created by Christians. Less of the preachy soapboxes, and more of the blockbusters, the cosy adventures, the introspection and myth and antiheroes and epic worldbuilding.
Today, we’re on a quest to have fun, share that fun, and inspire more fun, with our faith and our fiction. All this, because we believe that the deep, human truths and the mythology that saturates our lives is healthy and helpful for human thriving.
Most importantly, it is born from a love of life, an excitement to engage with the world and its peoples, and a call to lock arms with friends and build a better world right here, right now.
Some of my favorite novels, movies, and sources include Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, Game of Thrones, The Witcher, Star Wars, Marvel Cinematic Universe, and a ton more. The length of my Netflix watchlist and my Kindle TBR terrifies me.
How do you mentor LegendFiction?
I’m usually present in the community every day, responding to messages and sharing feedback on ideas and stories. I’m not as intensely involved as I was in the early days, because we have a team of mentors now who care for everyone.
I host several shows on the YouTube channel, to talk with authors and readers.
Here’s some feedback from when I edited novels:
“Working with Dominic opened up whole new dimensions to my story that I had never even considered before.” Eric Harrah, ‘The Sartonian Knight’
“Dominic de Souza has a great gift of editing that pours out into his skills, helping me go deeper into my thoughts and prose so that the words on pages spring to life.” Dr Jean Lee, ‘A Modern Day Mary Magdalene’
How does faith inspire your life?
David Bentley Hart recently said: “I am a thoroughly secular man who happens to believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead.” That’s me too. Being a disciple of Christ means everything to me. It also means that his commitment to becoming thoroughly human (so that we might learn how to become thoroughly divine), puts him in communion with every human person. Therefore I am too.
In terms of labels, I am in the Catholic communion, but practically, I like Hart’s approach of being fully secular. My read on this is not that ‘secular’ means an empty box, but that everything in creation is sacred. It’s just more helpful to see myself as perfectly normal human at home in a broken, blessed, and beautiful world, instead of advance troops colonizing the world for the Kingdom.
Many moments impacted my faith, but here’s three.
I spent three days over Easter in Lourdes with friends, rapt by the rushing grey waters and bulging, white-grey shoulders of stone around the small, white statue of Mary, people from across the earth gathering at this grotto to ask for miracles. I remember a moment when prayer came as easy as breathing, in a dark purple night studded with lines of twinkling rosy candles and long, swaying processions of people singing Ave, Ave Maria.
In the same year, I marching for three days through mud churned by rain and ten thousand boots, in the Paris-Chartres pilgrimage. Three days of blisters, grit, and grace, trekking at high-noon down unending roads and dusty, golden wheat fields. We all looked forward the great Mass bristling with banners and breathless blessings. The second night, I lay on my back on a hillside for hours, staring at the stars, surrounded by the forever hum of humans being alive, and a quarter mile away, a tent sparkled with lights and thurifers as pilgrims huddled near Perpetual Adoration, Christ walked with us in the monstrance.
I’m now a dad, and that changed everything. My wife has struggled with chronic illness from the day we married, and we have one child here, one who passed on in a miscarriage. But raising this curly-haired freedom fighter, and holding down a job, and keeping my family safe and cared for, has taught me more about everything than all the book-learnin’. I believe marriage is a mystery school, and the daily discipline helped me glimpse how unconditionally loving God is to all persons.
Final thoughts for fiction authors?
I think writing fiction can be a vocation. That means its more than fun, more than a job. It’s something you do so that you are changed by the process, changed into something better. A vocation is part of your spiritual ascent into God.
So every story is probably me clambering into a little coracle, setting out through deep unlit seas of my inner psyche to find a backdoor into Aslan’s country. We all have one, that little door there, at the end of all things, when we think ourselves most alone. Every author is a key that unlocks something in this world. That’s why we’re here.
Every generation needs more than yesterday’s teachers. We must renew our minds constantly, translate timeless truths into the lived witness and presence of daily live. That means being sort-of fluent with the tropes, themes, and trending tales of each generation.
This is not always an easy or happy road. But “there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for.”
More than some good. An incarnated god is here. And “there are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” That’s C.S. Lewis.
Round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I have passed them by
A day will come
I will take the hidden paths that run west of the moon and east of the sun
I'm glad that you were here with me
Here at the end of all things
Night too shall be beautiful and blessed and it's fear will pass
I must leave
Must cross the sea
The love you gave is all I take with me
Use well the days…
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What’s next?
I think you’ll like my mini-course: check it out!