How a chance encounter with a 19th-century photograph sparked a decade-long journey into the far future.
Every novel begins with a question. For me, it began with a photograph.
I was browsing an antique shop in Santa Fe when I came across a faded daguerreotype of a lawman — badge pinned to a weathered duster, eyes that seemed to look straight through you and into something far beyond the frame. The caption on the back read simply: Regulator C. Barrett, 1867.
I stood there for a long time, wondering what that man would make of our world. And then I thought: what if he could see it?
That question became Cullen 'Boone' Barrett. That question became The Dust of Ages.
Boone arrived fully formed in my mind — a man of iron convictions dropped into a world that has no use for iron convictions. But he needed a counterpart. Someone who understood the 25th century the way he understood the frontier.
That's where Samantha 'Deuce' Cordell came from. A combat operative shaped entirely by the future, she is everything Boone is not: technically brilliant, politically savvy, deeply cynical about the institutions she serves. Together, they are a collision of centuries — and the friction between them is where the story lives.
Writing a novel that spans seven centuries requires a peculiar kind of research — you have to be a historian and a futurist simultaneously. I spent two years studying the New Mexico Territory in the 1860s: the language, the law, the landscape, the violence. And I spent another year reading everything I could find about theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, and speculative future societies.
The goal was never to write a technically accurate science fiction novel. The goal was to write an emotionally accurate one — to make the future feel as real and dangerous and alive as the past.
I'm already deep into the second book. Boone and Deuce's story is far from over, and the universe of The Dust of Ages has more secrets than one novel can hold.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for the messages, the reviews, the letters. You are why I write.