I have a very clear memory of being a freshman in high school, sitting in a chair that felt engineered for discomfort, while an English teacher—well-meaning, patient, and entirely unaware of the chaos she was about to unleash—gave the instruction:

“Sit still. Think of something. Then write about it.”

That was it. No scaffolding. No guardrails. Just me, a blank page, and a brain that—being the brain of a fifteen-year-old boy—immediately supplied ideas that would not have survived five seconds under fluorescent classroom lighting.

So I sat there.

Thinking.

Editing myself before the pen even touched the page.

And, as you might expect, writing absolutely nothing worth keeping.

That experience stuck with me a long time. Not because it was particularly traumatic, but because it was so common. The assumption was simple: creativity appears on command. That if you give someone a blank page, they’ll know what to do with it.

Some people can. Most people don’t.

I certainly didn’t.

So, years later—after enough writing, enough false starts, enough projects that went somewhere and plenty that didn’t—I started thinking about that version of myself again. The kid staring at the page, knowing he wanted to write, but having no real way in (at least not one that was appropriate for THAT setting).

That’s where Realms Unwritten started. Not as a grand plan. Not as a product line. Just as a solution to a very old, very familiar problem: Where do I begin?

The first book was always going to be fantasy. No surprise there.

Fantasy was the genre that first convinced me stories could be larger than life without losing their grip on something human. It gave me permission, early on, to imagine without apology. So building a collection of prompts rooted in that space felt less like a decision and more like returning to a place I already knew.

From there, things expanded.

Science fiction came next—though less in the polished, clinical sense and more in that classic, speculative vein. The kind of ideas that ask what if and don’t immediately try to tidy up the answer. Space, time, strange technologies, stranger consequences. The playground gets bigger, but the questions stay just as personal.

Then came robots. Not because I had a lifelong plan to write a book about robots specifically, but because subgenres started to interest me in a different way. Strip things down. Focus the lens. See what happens when you take a single idea—artificial intelligence, autonomy, identity—and turn it over from every possible angle. It’s a narrower door, but it opens into some interesting rooms.

At that point, I did what any reasonable person does. I pivoted entirely.

The pirate book exists, in large part, because my wife and I grew up loving Treasure Island and the particular brand of chaos that comes with it—especially the version involving felt, music, and questionable nautical accuracy (MUPPETS). The Age of Sail has its own rhythm, its own vocabulary, its own moral gray areas. It felt like a space worth exploring, even if it meant swapping out starships for ships that leak in more traditional ways.

And then, finally, I circled back to something that had been sitting in the background for a while: spies, detectives, and the whole shadowed world of intrigue. The kind of stories shaped by dim lighting, sharp dialogue, and people who rarely say exactly what they mean. There’s a certain appeal to that tension—the push and pull between the detective and the femme fatale, truth and deception, control and collapse. Gunsmoke & Glamour ended up being less of a detour and more of a natural endpoint for this first set.

Taken together, the first box set of Realms Unwritten is exactly what I wish I’d had back then:

Not instructions. Not rules. Just doors. Open one, step through, and see what happens next.

A practical note, since it’s come up more than once: all of these prompt books can be ordered in a left-handed format. No awkward binding fights, no ink-smudged compromises. If that’s something you need, just reach out to me or Megan directly. We’ll make sure it’s printed that way and shipped out by hand.

As for what’s next—there will be more prompt books eventually. The well hasn’t run dry.

But for now, I’m stepping away from prompts for a bit to focus on a different project: a collection of science fiction stories set in an original universe that’s been quietly taking shape in the background. Different pace. Different demands. Same underlying question: What happens next?

We’ll find out.

*The links below will take you to Ingram Spark where you can buy the book at a discounted price and, for your reference, authors typically get more money from Ingram Spark than KDP so when given the option, I highly recommend buying from Ingram.

Realms Unwritten: Gunsmoke and Glamour: Buy Now

Realms Unwritten: Boundless Buccaneers: Buy Now

Realms Unwritten: Consciousness in Code: Buy Now

Realms Unwritten: Echoes of Tomorrow: Buy Now

Realms Unwritten: A Visual Writing Prompt Book: Buy Now