Nick D'Amato

I write long, slow, cosmic books for people who don't mind being unsettled. Two projects right now. SIGNAL LOST is a literary cosmic-horror epic about a software engineer who finds a pattern hiding in the math of an AI model and figures out, slowly, that the pattern has been waiting for someone like her for three hundred years. FRACTURED EPOCH is a twelve-book multiverse saga about a cosmic guardian who broke creation out of grief, and the seven broken champions tasked with reminding him who he was before he fell. There's a novella between books six and seven. There are anthology stories. There's a lot of work in progress.

The books are written the way I'd want one read to me. Patient sentences. Specific images. Bleak wonder. No cape quips. No narrator stepping out from behind the curtain to spell out the lesson, because the prose carries the lesson if it's working. The themes themselves are the whole point. Grief. Love. What we owe each other. What a person is when she's been prepared from infancy to do something she didn't ask for. What it costs a god to remember who he was before he fell. The horror is cognitive, not jumpy. The grief is real. The voice doesn't budge between Aerros and Antivale, between Maya's first Showing and the inside of the door, even when the genre on the cover changes.

I write in Wisconsin. Day job in software. The writing happens in the quiet hours, mostly between 9pm and 1am, sometimes longer if a chapter is pulling. I don't outline first and then fill in. I outline and re-outline as the prose teaches me what the chapter is actually about. Most of what I think I know about a book gets corrected by the book itself by the second draft.

The plan is to publish SIGNAL LOST first, traditional or independent, whichever lands better. FRACTURED EPOCH is built like a franchise from the ground up. Twelve novels, a novella, anthology subseries, a TV adaptation map for Saga I, a tabletop sourcebook outline, an open-world RPG concept set in the Shard-Lands. That's the long version. The short version is I'm trying to make something that lasts.