About the Author

Where Blood & Fire Came From

I can't point to a single book or film that made me want to write Blood & Fire. It was more of a slow accumulation of frustration. So many stories I loved felt like they stopped just short of what they could have been. Shows cancelled before they reached their potential. Books that played it safe when they could have pushed further. Characters who were interesting for five minutes and then flattened into symbols. Over time, that frustration became a question: what would it look like if someone just didn't stop? If a story followed every thread as far as it could go, built every world as fully as it deserved, and trusted its readers to keep up?

That question eventually collided with something else I'd been turning over for years. I've always been drawn to history, and religion is inseparable from it. What fascinated me wasn't any single faith, but the patterns — the uncanny similarities between mythologies that developed independently, on opposite sides of the world. It felt like they were all pointing at something. So I asked myself: what if they all were? What if every religion was true, to some extent, and what would that actually look like? The "angels as aliens" concept grew from there. I love speculative biology and hard science fiction, and framing these beings scientifically unlocked something important. It meant I could give them real biology, real motivations, real flaws. No one in Blood & Fire is purely good or evil. Everyone — demon, angel, human — is doing what they believe is right, shaped by history, loss, and self-interest. The same way real people are.

I've been living with this world for around eleven years. It started during a difficult chapter of my life — I won't go into detail, because everyone has their own version of that story — but in the beginning, it wasn't really writing so much as daydreaming. Letting my mind wander into this world and just... live there for a while. In many ways, more of the story exists in that space than in anything I've ever written down or formally planned. It kept me going. There's so much of myself scattered across these characters — not any single one of them, but fragments: a love of science and mysticism here, a particular kind of exhaustion there, an understanding of loss, of trauma, of what it feels like to seek danger because part of you has learned to find comfort in it. I didn't set out to put myself into this story. It just happened, the way honest things do.

I've written 70,000 words and deleted them more than once as my craft developed. The story has always been there. I just had to grow into being able to tell it. I'm in a much better place now, and I've carried something with me through all of it: the idea that this too shall pass. The good moments and the hard ones alike. It's made me someone who lives looking forward, even while writing a story that spans 15,000 years of history. Blood & Fire is the result of all of it — the daydreaming, the darkness, the patience, and the refusal to stop.