Why I'm Building This
I've spent most of my life consuming stories across every medium – games, film, TV, manga, novels. And I kept noticing the same thing: the best storytelling techniques rarely stay in their lane. What makes a game's opening act devastating has everything to do with what makes a novel's first chapter unforgettable.
So I started reverse-engineering it. Dissecting the craft. Stealing what works. Transplanting it.
By day I'm a Social Studies teacher in Nevada – someone who's spent years figuring out how to make complex ideas land for an audience that doesn't always want to be there. Turns out that's pretty good training for writing spec-fic.
The Story Lab is where I do all of this in public. I'm not teaching from authority I haven't earned – I'm learning alongside you, sharing what I find, and testing it in real time in my projects.
"The craft educator who analyzes stories across all media – games, film, TV, novels – to help beginner-to-intermediate speculative fiction writers understand the transition from other storytelling formats to writing their own novels. Fellow learner. Not a guru."
The Work
Long-form YouTube masterclasses – 40+ minute deep dives that take a game, film, or TV show, extract a specific craft technique, and show you how to use it in your novel.
The Story Lab newsletter – weekly issues with one craft lesson, one honest Project Cyber update, and what I'm currently analyzing. Free, always.
Project Cyber – my near-future sci-fi novel set in 2126 Japan, built in public. Every technique I teach, I test here first.
Steel Soul – an original comic series. Behind-the-scenes process and updates live on Patreon.
The Audience
Beginner-to-intermediate speculative fiction writers who grew up on games, film, and TV and are trying to write the novel that lives in their head. You know story instinctively – you've absorbed thousands of hours of it. You just haven't cracked the transfer yet.
That's what we're figuring out together.