The Myth of the Isolated Past

Navigating the connection recession, autistic history, and why I finally spoke out about my "why" behind writing on 10th century globalization, "cultural containers," and viking age anthropology.

It is incredibly easy to be brave in a vacuum. It’s easy to analyze human behavior, study systemic trauma, and write 150,000 words of epic historical fiction when you are sitting alone writing it at 5:00 AM.

What is absolutely terrifying is looking into a camera and trying to explain why you wrote it.

I recently wrote about the phenomenon of parasocial mentors—the people we watch from afar who give us permission to be vulnerable simply by being brave first. Last week, I decided it was time to take my own advice. I sat down with the Pages of Pandora podcast for my first-ever video interview about the Firebound saga.

When you spend your days working as the “logical” professional in tech strategy, exposing the rawest, messiest parts of your creative brain to the internet feels like a massive systemic failure. But the analytical brain and the creative brain aren’t at war.

You can watch the full interview here, where I try very hard not to look like a deer caught in the headlights while talking about medieval trauma:

We ended up having an incredibly deep, thoughtful conversation—not just about the Firebound saga, but about the very real anthropological and psychological realities that modern society is currently failing at.

Here are a few of the things we unpacked:

“Cultural Containers” and the Myth of Modern Autism

There is this bizarre, unspoken assumption in fantasy that being neurodivergent is a modern phenomenon—like autism was invented alongside the iPhone. But we have always existed. Our ancestors just didn’t use the clinical vocabulary of the DSM-5. They had different “cultural containers” for us.

I wrote Linde because I wanted to explore what an “Own Voices” autistic woman looked like before the medical model existed. For her, sensory depth and hyper-focus aren’t a diagnosis; they are the clinical tools she uses to survive a highly superstitious, frequently violent world.

The Intimacy Recession

We are currently living through a strange, depressing paradox: our media has never been more hyper-sexualized, yet people have never been lonelier. I am deeply inspired by Esther Perel’s clinical work on the tension between safety and desire, and I wanted to take those concepts and strip them down to their 10th-century roots.

In Linde and Gustav’s world, there is no digital barrier. Intimacy is gritty, awkward, and profoundly grounding. We talked about why true connection isn’t about perfectly choreographed romance tropes—it’s about two traumatized people learning to communicate through the raw, undeniable reality of the human body.

We Forgot How to Grieve Together

Today, grief is highly individualized. You go to a therapist, you pay a copay, and you process it alone in a beige room. But ancient societies understood that human beings shatter under isolated trauma.

We dove into historical, female-driven rites (like Kupola and Ladane) that acted as communal infrastructure. These weren’t just polite talking circles. They were visceral, somatic rituals that utilized dance, song, touch, and even eroticism to actively move emotion through the physical body. By losing these female-driven frameworks, we’ve lost the cultural safety nets that used to catch us when we fell.

Stop Giving Women Swords and Calling it Feminism

I am so tired of the modern “strong female lead” just being a traditional male action hero put into a woman’s body. We severely undervalue the quiet, clinical strength it takes to simply maintain your mind in a world that is actively trying to break you. Linde’s battlefield isn’t a melee; it’s the operating table. Her weapon is her intellect.

A Confession About Book 4

Toward the end of the interview, I admitted something I haven’t even told this newsletter yet: while all four books in the Firebound saga are fully written, I have drafted two entirely different arcs for the ending of Book 4.

Both are legitimate. Both change the trajectory of the universe.

As I keep releasing chapters here on Substack, I am hoping this community will eventually help me figure out which path is the right one.

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for making it slightly less terrifying to step in front of the lens. Let me know what you think of the conversation in the comments!