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The final word on my authorship and personal views

2025 was an exhausting year for me. That’s time I’m never getting back.

The personal life side of this is none of your business. Just know that in several respects, the public side of it was just as needlessly bad. I always manage, though. I’m on my own and I’ve always been tough like that.

I started developing the core trilogy of the series in mid 2022, when I realized my persistent dreams about ghosthood and the pining for my late mother should converge into a point I could convey universally to an audience, in a cogent, entertaining manner. I was 42 and I never fully committed to a long form story, because I dreaded becoming mired in a derivative, victim-of-inspiration, nothingburger of a narrative. It seemed like a waste of time. But there it was. It was melancholic, beautiful, hopeful, exhilarating and it handily defeated Death. Just as I always felt was the highest moral position to hold, existentially: To not be afraid; to understand it; make peace with it. Because it wasn’t the transition in itself that held a grip on me, but the uncertainty which assailed me with grief since the 4th of July, 2021. What if it was scary for her? Would she be alright? When it’s my turn, will I be able to find her somehow? I couldn’t sleep with these thoughts. This story saved me and gave me serenity. It was so much fun to write.

The process had its growing pains, due to my inexperience with such a huge tentative outline to draft, but I found my way, bit by bit. Being persistent, self-critical, indulging in mid-draft revisions, every time I was done with these massive 8k word chapters. The mental imagery kept chasing me and it insisted on Japanese anime aesthetics. It had to be. The first anime to homage stuff like the Ivan Reitman and Tim Burton movies on these spooky themes, it felt like a true love letter to a pop-culture that is largely dead now, revitalized by the heart-warming and powerful vibes of Japanese media. All the more reason to press on. But I wasn’t prepared to fall in love with my characters. That definitively changed everything from that point. Now I’m responsible for these people.

Not only were they larger than life figures, they were the BEST of us. In how they grew, what they had to deal with and how aptly they kept their sanity in such a terrifying and grim setting.

“Defiantly happy, these are the strongest of this realm. No question about it:

They are the Heroes of this Tale.” ~ Book III: Calamity Breach

Their teleological job for this narrative is very direct: To prove to you that courage is not optional; honesty improves planning and outcomes; family breeds strength against Evil. All things this world has largely forfeit, while rationalizing the anti-thesis to all of us, using propaganda and mass-scale social engineering, as if that holds any merit whatsoever. Our contemporaneity is so shamefully weak. Good God…

But I figured that was just the system. People think and feel, surely they can be reasonable to not become the system-

They have become the system. Sorry. That’s just the reality. The demoralization worked, you’re all defeated and you cope in your defeat. You have NOTHING to teach me on this subject. Only that you’re lying to yourselves. Pitiful. Eyesore.

Which leads me to the months after wrapping up the draft and revisions, taking this to social media to see what people thought of it. It was early 2024. Nobody cared. Hey, perhaps it was half-baked, perhaps my marketing strategy wasn’t working (not that I really had one, but whatever), but I did notice how people would attack my work, not because they read it, but because they didn’t like the cut of my jib. And any mutuals I managed to accrue back then, really didn’t stand by me. I’m just some Portuguese anon, who gives a fuck about him or his massive 300K+ word book, right? So I took it down, worked even more revisions on the manuscript, despite having zero real feedback on the fucking thing. Then I took it to query agencies for about 7 months therein.

All form letter rejections. No matter how much I followed the guidelines, checking the genre wish lists, nobody even touched the samples. Some of these lazy assholes even responded within minutes of the query. The end result? 200+ rejections for Spectral Braver. I should stop, get a chair and a rope and not bother these people with my white straight ass set for eradication again, right? Everyone’s on board with the agenda to completely push my demographic off a cliff, after all.

NO. FUCK YOU.

I’ll go full Indie, then. Self-publish the thing, reformat the book into 3 entries so this isn’t so massive and expensive to print, then start working on all these notes I have for prequels and a final sequel. This stuff is huge. I don’t care if my society has gone feral fuck mad. I’m going to tell my fucking story, by hook or by crow.

But I absolutely need readership. This project already took so much work, even if I was happy doing it the whole time, it had to start paying off somehow. Nobody believes this stuff is a job. Family doesn’t support or cheerlead (if they really didn’t lend much of a shoulder when my mom died, expectations were not exactly soaring). So I really need to create an image for this IP, to pitch this to a potential audience. My author account was thus reactivated in November 2024.

Shit, no money. Right. But there seems to be a bunch of generative image engines popping up everywhere. Since I only have to worry about covers for a digital version for the time being, let’s try to generate some setting from the story, like the great entrance hall of Craig Manor. That actually looks gorgeous.

Done. Now let’s breathe life into these descriptions. Sure, the LLMs are dumb as rocks and have such glaring gaps in their lexicon, it’s hard to get them to do anything as I imagined it. Most anime outputs are just Studio Ghibli shit, so I’ll have to go with some CG-looking crap for now. They nearly looked the part, the characters. I could even see how they would fare as live-action versions. But that wasn’t the vision I had for it. I should hold off on working too much on this stuff, just enough to tease what Spectral Braver is.

As I climbed in followers, graciously taking in all people who showed any interest in this, I saw there were actually a lot of Indie writers who were doing their own thing. A community would surely strengthen my reach but also give me some hope - that there were other people on my boat, trying to usher in their own brand of antidote to this nihilistic, stupid mainstream culture that made everything so goddamn boring since 9/11. It felt like a rising tide. They called it an ‘Iron Age’, even. It sounded so cool. But I noticed how many of them were taking jabs at my work, without reading it. If it wasn’t about the AI covers (which never went to print, as that goes against my own personal criteria about making physical commercial goods with AI art); it was about how I’m prima-facie not a good writer. Why would these people attack my work if I didn’t attack theirs? Isn’t writing a craft? An artform? Subjective? Stylistic? The fuck is the matter with these absolute sociopaths on X?

Soon after a few of these exchanges, my published work got the first review on Amazon, on the first book.

As you can plainly see, Amazon never took this down, despite reporting it. And 6 other pieces of shit piled on. This is the ACTUAL reality of Indie. Total brand vulnerability with bad actors. Nobody cares, nobody makes noise about this, because I would have to be a very important person in order to have some some sort of Devon Eriksson month long anti-cancel culture campaign on X. Nothing on the guy, it was unfair what that group did to him. But you were on his retweets like white on rice - not because you believe in the principle, but because you’re all stinky clout demons. I get it, if you’re on your own, you’re just on your own. People who were supposedly sympathetic to me on X didn’t move a finger. A year later their fingers will not move and this shit’s only gotten worse and I’ve gotten considerably bitter in proportion.

Don’t think I don’t see your cowardice, guys.

Rest assured you’ll be on your own too.

Anyway, I kept working, otherwise this would just feel like those 200 fucking rejections from trad pub, so I had to keep moving, defeat the cortisol rise with this BS.

But people just wouldn’t read the fucking thing. Even got a few sales, but no readers. By the way, this is why your “write to market” strategy is absolute bunk if you don’t have people talking about your story in public. You go by metrics, you obsess over sales, but unless you created a dream for an audience to rave about, none of this stuff matters. It’s momentary. It pays for a few more cups of coffee. You probably should worry about your story instead and how original and powerful it is. Long term thinking.

The process to get the first book from that 1 star to 3.56 with a few more jabs to tear me down, took months. Reputation? Guttered.

This stuff made me wary about promoting my work. The more I did, the more vitriol I attracted. Several author accounts, some of these supposed Indie darlings of the community, started jumping into this. I am absolutely sure, they were spreading falsehoods about me and my work in these circles.

Spectral Braver took tears and sleepless nights trying to transform my grief into something beautiful and fun. It isn’t generative. It’s ME, you fucking asshole.

One of these unfortunate situations was with the Fellowship of the Indie Author, whose star author & promiscuously lead moderator of that community, decided to snipe the one post in months I did just TALKING about an aspect of my book. I wasn’t advertising links to make a sale. Their reaction was absolute silence, including from the author who started this community. Apparently, that was an acceptable thing to do. So I left that community.

You’re all still there. On your tippy toes, trying to get clout.

I see you. Cowardly, as ever. Don’t come tell me about principles, you have none. You let all this stuff transpire in the hopes they won’t do it to you.

I hope they do it to you. So you learn.

The next little bit of high school drama was a relatively minor account who, to my knowledge, only posted some lame poetry every now and then. Not exactly someone particularly accomplished in publishing (which is a commonality with the most vile of examples in this disgraceful community), who was watching my mentions for interactions with a prominent Indie reviewer who took a shine to me, somehow.

It seems that according to some people, men like me aren’t deserving of love or something. It’s all so mean-spirited and awful, I have to chalk this woman and her cadre of witch cunt crypto-feminists in the Indie space, as caricatures of the Mean Girls in that one movie, except aesthetically downgraded to a rather unfortunate degree. Hags, yes. Ugly fucking hags, the lot of them. And they can die mad about it. Because these people had access to my DMs they wanted to supposedly “warn me” about this reviewer being a catfish. I pushed back, because frankly that’s just not something you accuse someone of, with no evidence. Which they obviously didn’t have. Rejecting this gossip attack then resulted in the most low IQ devolution of their narrative. Now, this account isn’t a catfish - it’s me. And every other account who has associated with me since is also POTENTIALLY me.

Guys, you’re saying this stuff in your timeline sowing circles in front of everyone and sundry to this DAY - with X having regional info clearly showing all of us posting from DRASTICALLY separate, continentally distant fucking countries. You are literally Joseph Goebbels, employing the “repeat the same lie” playbook. That’s how I know you’re fucking evil. And nobody puts you in your place but me.

That’s ok. You’ll be put in your place as many times as you need, man hater.

That reviewer shows me this stuff because, well she’s a woman and I know she loves the gossip. But this destroyed our relationship. Even if she claims she loved reading my books, she paid WAY more attention to stuff like this, which was disheartening to me. Spectral Braver is my heart. It’s all there. And here’s another one who is just trying to get a nice review out and not really seeing my heart in those pages or truly living in that world. She had more books to read. Many, many more. So that wasn’t it either. This whole thing is just cumulative frustration that just makes me not want to deal with people anymore.

And so I won’t. It’s been over a year of dealing with you assholes. The lot of you.

I don’t care if you don’t read the books. But you owe me the same level of honesty at the very least. Because this isn’t about just me anymore. All this time, it’s been about them:

These are the folks who saved your useless fucking world and you don’t even know it.

It legitimately breaks my heart.

But you know what? I figured it out. This isn’t for you. You’re all cooked, your world is finished and the Devourers actually won here.

Your memories are shot to Hell and you barely understand your own History;

You’re all either overt or closet sociopaths, you’ve completely destroyed your bonds in society;

You believe in nothing and you’ve even gaslit yourselves into thinking we’re living in some kind of simulation-

YOU’RE MORONS!

You’re Godless, lost and doomed fucking morons.

So I’ll keep working on Spectral Braver and I’ll absorb all the falseness, the injustice and the antagonism, fart it out into the void and keep on working some more, doing everything you don’t like and don’t respect, such as using generative images to create my concept work, tell you to fuck off when come to preach to me on how to tell a story, how to brand myself and to “play nice” with you fucking degenerates. That will be the day, indeed. You might want to sit your ass down.

That will never happen.

Spectral Braver forever.