Saengard's Speakeasy

So, I can across a very interesting guy on Substack who's a sci-fi writer/author in his own right, but he also enjoys conducting interviews with other authors.  I raised my hand and well... you can listen to how hard I fumbled every question for yourself!! Have a good laugh at my expense!  https://youtu.be/0BI5kyXUcp4?si=NhN3HnHwBKNhGE4V

I recently reached out to a budding author and reviewer/critic of all things Sci-fi and fantasy.  He goes by Jimbo and has a way with words. You can read his Substack here.   Anyway, he graciously ready my book and left a glowing review.  I'll give you a taste of it here, but you should really go on to his Substack and read his REVIEW Here.   .... There's more awesomeness that you must read on his Substack if you want the rest of this beautiful review. I didn't ask for anything but an honest opinion and didn't provide anything in return. This wasn't a paid review.  Jimbo.... I'm honored. Thank you!

Writing is like taking a passenger on a drive.  The road is the plot.  The scenery on either side of the road tells you what kind of drive we're going to go on.  The car is the mechanics of writing, the voice, the pov, the setup of the story premise and the genre. (Among other things)  When you climb into the seat and see the landscape in front of you, you can kind of see the road winding a little in the distance. But when you look at the landscape, you see flat rolling hills and think to yourself, this is going to be a drive where you can mostly forget about the road and just be with your thoughts. You travel, but there are few landmarks. Things feel slow and serene.  Or you see around you, a stadium of cheering fans. You feel the roar of the vehicle you are in and you know you're going to have to watch that road with all your attention. Things whip past and you have to lean into the turns, barely anticipating it. Or you see trees and hills all around you. You ...

As you may have read in my earlier character study of Greycloud, there was a period of my life that was pretty rough, at least for me. I didn't go into too many details in that previous post, since the main topic was how the character Greycloud got his name. You can read about that in the link above.  But now that I've kind of opened that door, I thought I should share something a little more personal with you. I don't know if you'd even care to hear about it. I mean, we all have our own problems and something that was profound to me, may be inconsequential to you. It's far too easy to compare the size and depth of scars without simply acknowledging that they're both scars. Before you read further, please know this - there are two ways to handle those moments where injury occurred. You can wallow in the misery of it as an eternal victim of circumstance, (effectively trying to keep the wound open so it never heals), or you can come to terms with the fact that it ...

  It's difficult out there!     As soon as you put something of any modest value out into the world, there will be those sharks out there who smell blood in the water. Somehow, they think you have money that they can siphon off by offering fake services, fake clout, and fake advertising for.      Now, I'm certainly not writing with any real thought about "getting paid". Of course, it would be nice, but if there's one thing I've learned in life is - Never be Desperate. As soon as you put emotion into any trade or deal, you have lost perspective. And that is probably the most dangerous thing to lose.      So, I've released a book onto Amazon. I'd like for as many people as possible to see it and hopefully to read it. If my work resonates with people, then maybe money will come, but that isn't what I'm after. I have a story that's been burning in my mind for decades. I have to get it out into the world. And I want to make it the best, most enj...

  Saengard ~  I'm not sure if it will come as a surprise, but Saengard is indeed a pen name. I have elected to use a pen name to hopefully create a degree of anonymity for myself out in the public square. In this day and age, any kind of buffer between the strange world of the internet and the real world is a blessing. I fully recognize that I haven't separated my real information from this persona diligently enough and it is likely not too difficult to find me. That said, I wish to remain in the shadows as best I can. I did not select a pen name to hide from my family. They all know about the pseudonym. I have no reason to hide from them, and if I did, I certainly wouldn't admit to it. But even though I wish to have an arm's length of distance between you and I, I feel I still owe you something. People connect with people. We all want to know what oddity is hiding behind the curtain. The more someone protests, the more we want to push to find out. Often, what you find ...

I'm putting this out there for the new author and for the reader who's curious on what it takes for an author to 'get seen'. I'm also writing this for myself, so I can remember what I did, what I think worked, and what didn't. If no one else reads this, I know it will at least be helpful for me. (I may be updating this particular post regularly!) I didn't know much when I completed my first book in November last year (by completed, I mean  written, edited and had an advanced reader or two, created a cover, etc). To be honest, I still don't know much, but this is what I'm doing and I'm happy with the results so far. (results at the end) In November 2025, I created an Amazon account... googling the heck out of everything about the process. I think it took me most of November to feel confident about everything so that I could launch on November 29th. The only reason I chose that day was because Thanksgiving was over, the house was clean and I felt l...

One of those famous folks once said, (paraphrased of course) that if you can't boil down a complex idea into it's simplest analogy, then you don't have a good grasp of the idea. What's left unsaid is the high degree of earned insight or intelligence to confront the complex idea in its true unfiltered form and go on a path of discovery to distill it into common parlance. It takes a uniquely talented mind to be able to climb to the top limb of the tree and pluck the highest fruit of insight they can reach and then bring it back down and hand that hard work to a passerby so they can taste the fruit without the effort of reaching it. In some ways, it is our nature and perhaps our duty to do this. For the many who find the fruit disagreeable, there are some who enjoy it. For those who enjoy it, there are fewer still who want to know where the fruit came from and fewer still who want to go get it themselves... In search of a taller tree, a higher limb to climb, to see what un...

I was on X (I still call it Twitter irl), and came across yet another post of Elon's where he tauts UBI with no discussion of how that could ever actually become a real, beneficial, benevolent utopian system by which we all get paid to eat and breathe and enjoy a societal retirement without any negative effects.  In short, ridiculously optimistic. Never had such a thing existed and I find no reason for the trend of human society to ever change in that regard. If there's anything that stories teach us, is that we crave conflict. Without it, we actually go insane. We have to create conflict, even if it's in our own heads.  With that in mind, I tried to ask Grok some profound questions, but it's currently gatekept behind a paywall.  So I asked Chatgpt instead. And yes, it's probably an older model, and yes there may be better answers from other AI's, and yes, the irony is not lost on me that I'm 'asking AI' a hypothetical question that is basically ...

Today's post is about world building!      I don't know about you, but when I come across a writer or artist that wants to talk about 'world building', I kind of roll my eyes and feel just a little ... I don't know... bored? Put out? Artists and writers live inside their own heads for a large portion of their lives. They sit with the different bits and pieces of an imaginary world, refining it little by little, until one day, they produce a piece of work that you get to see or read. Only after they've refined their vision well enough, do you get to see a complete world that is presented in the service of the story they want to tell (either visually or written). People who truly love the vision that is presented in that story, think they want to see more about that world. In truth, it takes a very rare... almost fanatical zealot... who actually, truly, deeply loves to learn more about the rules and designs of the universe they enjoyed in your story. The only grou...

 The World Ender is the first book in a series titled 'Punk City'. Urban dictionary calls it - an insult describing the place in a jail that's under police protective custody or simply a prisoner under their protection. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=punk%20City If we analyze this term a little, we begin to see an alternate definition for a 'Punk'. Here, we could interpret one use of the word is to describe the police. This 'City' is under the control of 'Punks'. Perhaps, Punk is intended to describe the prisoner who ran to the protection of the police, as in the phrase Punk-ass-bitch. In either case, whether it's describing police or prisoner, this term doesn't connote the anti-government, anti-establishment rebel that we associate with the term 'Punk', as in Punk-Rocker. In the rest of this science fiction series, I want to explore the interpretations of this phrase. I think I've already set the tone with the fi...

  Elon Musk seems to believe UBI, universal basic income, is something that can exist inside the framework of our current (mostly) free market economy.  I haven't tried to really get his total insight on how his vision of a system would work, but I have paid attention to what it appears he believes could make UBI reality. He seems to believe that those people who buy his robot servants will have at their disposal a completely autonomous 'clone' of their own working capability output.  Effectively he sees that if you want to earn a living, you would first have to purchase one of his robots so that it works instead of you. This belief comes from faith in AI as a benevolent and ubiquitous surrogate, far more capable than a lowly human. It doesn't get tired or need breaks. It just works... Until it breaks.  The problem with this faith is that it completely ignores market forces that would drive the greedy advancement of corporations far above people. The machines that co...

First watch this on X... https://x.com/i/status/2025298735291404630 The context I have to assume is in response to the advancement of AI. There are so many levels of unsettling change going on these days that makes navigating the already uncertain future a harrowing experience for those just starting out.  I truly believe one of two things will occur - widespread functional distrust of AI in any arena of decision making will relegate it to the level of a simple tool. We may be seeing the peak of AI acceptance already, even as it becomes "smarter" and more capable.  OR Something dramatic happens to prove the complete superiority of this tool and we are regulated to one of two conditions, perhaps simultaneously: Purpose driven humans are allowed to go through the motions of learning and going to work, though the real 'need' no longer exists. Seeing a human behind the counter will be a quaint novelty, like going to a 50's themed diner with a soda jerk wearing the cla...

Charles Freeman has been a part of this story nearly as long as Greycloud has. The Greycloud we come to know by the end of "The World Ender" is driven by anger. He needed a counterpart, someone who can keep showing him the good side of humanity, reminding him that there is a point where we all lose ourselves if we pursue the darkness too far. He is Greycloud's anchor. Charles' character is sympathetic to the trials that Greycloud endures, because he too has failed to stay on the right path in his own life. We get tidbits of his story inside the book, but they are more like hints to a difficult life.  In "The World Ender", we learn that he served in the military for a short time before becoming a security guard with a Top Secret clearance.  During that time, he married, had a son, and eventually divorced. In the book, it isn't clearly stated why the divorce occurred, but we know that his own son wants nothing to do with him. It's safe to say that he w...

The origins of the character George Greycloud Guess, in my book The World Ender , began sometime in the early 2000’s. To be honest, my memory of exactly when he became part of the story is hazy, but I can tell you that the influences behind his name and the design of his character came from a personal connection to the Cherokee tribe. Long before the days of genetic testing, when all we had were stories passed down from our grandparents, I was told that same tale that apparently so many others had also been told. A blood relative married a woman from a Cherokee tribe. We had such confidence in that story, that my father believed he was at least 1/16th Cherokee. That would make me at least 1/32nd. Far too minimal a relation to the tribe to be anything other than an interesting connection somewhere in the history of my lineage. But then a close relative submitted DNA to one of those services and we were all shocked to learn that there was no significant connection that we had been told....

   🧵 World Ender series Part 2 It all began when I was born in 1977.... JUST KIDDING. I wouldn't do that to you. But seriously, this story had its origins in 1999, when I had moved in with two old high school friends to begin a guerilla style free-press comic book to tell the stories we developed while being the quiet nerdy outcasts that comic book readers were in the 90's. We spent 9 months in 1999 creating multiple issues of an anthology series of college-age humor, satire, parody and hi-jinx called Hub City. Those were the Salad Days!  During that time I created a one-page strip called "Zero Mass". (In a future book, you'll learn more about that title and the story associated with it.)  The foundations of the novel you now have read... or at least will be able to read... were born in that strip. It really began the entire Punk City saga, becoming one of several stories in the series.  By early 2000, that wonderful collaboration had come to an end. I moved ba...

 🧵 World Ender series Part 1 If you've found this blog, chances are that you have purchased this book in one of the many formats its available in. Let me begin by saying Thank You. Having others enjoy this book is the only thing that matters to me. On November 29, 2025, I finally put this book out into the world - a single drop in a sea of books that come out every day. The first version was an ebook on Kindle, focusing on the Amazon's Kindle Select program that enables Kindle subscribers to "purchase" this book at no cost. For everyone else, I launched the ebook at $0.99 cents.  My goal is to simply make this story available to as many readers who would be willing to give it a try.  I have no illusions about trying to make money from this, and I am fortunate enough to not depend on the success of this book for income.  (I haven't quit my day job!) So let me take you through some of the history behind this published story. I'll break the story into different ...