Q. Is this your first novel? Where can I buy it?

A. Yes, The Long Guest was my first novel. It’s the first in The Scattering Trilogy.

The whole trilogy is now available on Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble online. You can also buy from me directly, or from Born Again Books in Idaho Falls, Idaho, if you happen to be there.

For some reason, Amazon is not listing The Great Snake as part of The Scattering Trilogy. To find it, go to Books and search “the great snake mugrage.” It turns out there are plenty of books with snakes in the title, and these will come up if you don’t include my name.

Q. What genre are your books?

A. Epic fantasy that is light on magic.

For further clarification, you might like my books if you like …

• Biblical fiction such as Havah (Eve’s story) by Tosca Lee or the feminist classic about Dinah, The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, or the novels of Brian Godawa: Noah Primeval, Enoch Primordial, etc. OR
• Fiction about about ancient North America like the novels of Kathleen and Michael O’Gear (People of the Earth, People of the Silence, etc.) OR
• Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear series (though my books have far fewer sex scenes, you will be grateful to hear) OR
• Multi-generational family sagas or the books of Anne Tyler OR
• Books about culture crossing like those written by Pearl Buck and like the science fiction of Ursula Le Guin

Q. I’m not a Christian. Can I still enjoy your books?

A. Absolutely. Come, and welcome! Though my books take the Old Testament Tower of Babel story as a starting point, you don’t have to buy into a Christian or young-earth perspective on ancient humanity to enjoy them. You can just read the worldbuilding as you would any other fantasy series.

My books are novels, not sermons. They aren’t intended to push a moral message (though every novelist writes from some kind of moral framework), but to tell a story. I don’t move my characters around like puppets to make them do what I want so that everything works out as it’s supposed to; rather, I put them in situations and let them respond to those from their internal motivations.

I would love to have you as a reader. Hope this helps!

Q. Why are your novels set in 10,000 BC? Are you a young earther or an old earther?

A. My position has changed on this. I used to “split the difference,” believing that the earth was tens of thousands but not billions of years old. Now, I am what you might call a “soft young earther.”

At the time I wrote The Scattering Trilogy, I didn’t believe the world was created just 7,000 years ago. As a linguist, I didn’t find the argument that the word “day” always means a literal day convincing. In fact, I find it really simplistic. Also, there is lots of evidence that genealogies in the Bible tend to skip generations, just hitting the highlights of an ancestral line. This makes it impossible to calculate Genesis timelines with precision by using the genealogies and ages given.

But already at that time, I did not accept without question the conventional wisdom of mainstream archaeology, paleontology and anthropology. It was clear to me (even) then that “modern” human civilization, complete with writing, mathematics, astronomy and engineering, is much older than we are usually told. This has become a hobby horse of mine, and if you search “ancient world” on my blog, you’ll find many posts with titles like “Ancient People Were Really Smart” and “Genetic Engineering in the Ancient World.”

How did I arrive at the date of 10,000 B.C. for my trilogy?

I took a few different lines of evidence, including evidence about the most recent North American ice ages, the last time the earth’s magnetic field reversed according to conventional science, and some of Graham Hancock’s wild historical theories. (For more detail see the Graham Hancock post here.) Putting all these together, I decided that for the purposes of my books, around 14,000 BC the earth (already populated at that point by advanced and evil human civilizations) entered an era of cataclysms that included lots of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, as parts of the earth’s crust slipped much more quickly than we usually expect. This culminated in the Flood, which in the world of my trilogy happened about 10,400 BC. I have people beginning work on the Tower of Babel at about 10,250 BC, which leaves The Long Guest opening at 10,200 BC and The Strange Land taking place at about 10,175 BC, twenty-five years later.

Obviously, not only are my dates guesses, but the “evidence” they are based on is little more than other people’s guesses. Turns out, it’s very difficult to tell what happened tens of thousands of years ago, which is part of the reason that literally every theory is controversial.

Luckily, this state of affairs left me free to do my own worldbuilding. For example, the ice-free corridor across Canada was supposedly not open until about 9,500 B.C. (as of the writing of this page). In The Strange Land, I have it open almost 700 years earlier. This is not a huge problem because in this field of study, dates keep getting revised as new evidence or new methods of analysis come up. Unlike with more recent history, +/- 700 years is not that huge a margin of error.

Since writing The Scattering Trilogy, I have moved more in the direction of an even younger earth. To be clear, this is not a position I’ve decided to take for ideological reasons. It’s just that I have seen more and more evidence that the earth could be closer to 7,000 years old.

I already didn’t trust conventional geology, paleontology, and archaeology very far when it comes to dates, but in the process of drafting The Scattering Trilogy, I did even more research in these fields, and what I found made me trust them even less. For example, there is some indication that around the end of the last Ice Age, a large asteroid struck somewhere near North America (possibly in Greenland). This thing would have had an impact comparable to a nuclear bomb. It left an ash layer and nanodiamonds as far away as South America (but not Europe – ???), and, crucially, this event would have thrown off recent carbon dates in the Americas by thousands of years. But it would have done this in patches, not uniformly over the whole continent. So, this possible asteroid strike has just invalidated every single theory about when people first came into North America that is based on carbon-dating of archaeological sites — which most of the theories are. Furthermore, there is not even agreement about whether this even happened, which also does not inspire confidence.

This isn’t the only example of research that totally discredits an old-earth picture of humanity. There are also numerous scandals, non-sequiturs and patronizing assumptions in the areas of human archaeology and genetic research, which are special (amateur) interests of mine.

Thus prepared to be skeptical, I stumbled across the scientific work being done by Answers in Genesis, which is presented on the popular level on their YouTube channel Is Genesis History? That’s where I first heard about the “continental sprint” geophysical model of the Flood, presented here by Dr. Kurt Wise, which answers many of the conundrums raised by Graham Hancock before he went completely New Age. Additionally, there is astronomical evidence, glacier evidence, fossil evidence (and here), archeological evidence, and genetic evidence for a young earth and a young humanity.

I’m still not of the thinking that we can calculate the exact day and time that Creation happened, again because of the imprecision of the genealogies in the Bible. Nor do I totally understand what is going on in Creation Week in Genesis 1. But, the more I study it, the clearer it becomes that Genesis is a reliable history book.

Q. Wait a minute. If your novels are taking place in 10,000 BC, how come your characters have agriculture, trumpets, recurve bows, and in some cases even writing?

A. There is plenty of evidence that human beings had sophisticated science and technology long before conventional history teaches that they did. See all my blog posts with titles like “Ancient People Were Really Smart.” Especially see my series of posts about The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard M. Rudgley.

Just because a given innovation was known tens of thousands of years ago doesn’t mean it was used continuously, by all peoples in all places, in an unbroken line ever since. Some technologies were lost, and we are still not sure exactly what they were (examples: ancient surgery and building with megaliths). Other technologies, such as writing and agriculture, were useful only to people who lived in certain geographical environments and were lost or abandoned by people groups who struck out as explorers in a pastoral or hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Q. What’s with the dragons in your books?

A. They are not magical. They are dinosaurs.

The Long Guest features a duckbill dinosaur, a raptor type of dinosaur, a passing mention of stegosauruses (in Paradise Valley), and a slightly longer encounter with a feathered triceratops. In The Strange Land, we only occasionally see flying dragons from a distance.

In both books, we don’t interact with a dragons a great deal, because they are not characters in the plot. (Sorry.) They are part of the ancient milieu through which the human characters move.

There is historical evidence that “dragon” was the ancient world’s word for dinosaur or for certain types of dinosaurs. See the dinosaur post for more information.

Q. Are you an “own voices” writer?

A. Yes. I am a human being writing about human beings.

Q. I’ve heard writers say “I was going to do X, but then the character did Y.” I always think, Wait, aren’t you the one who makes up what the character does?

A. Well, it may sound strange, but when we are writing fiction, the characters do “come to life” and do things the author wasn’t completely planning. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if this does not happen, then the story is not working.

Of course, the author still has to “make up” what the character is doing in a sense, and write it down. But it seems to come from somewhere else at the same time. This is similar to what happens to actors and musicians when they talk about “being in the zone.” They still have to play the notes or say the words, and they need to be talented and to have practiced. But something more is also going on. This is the reason that ancient poets and storytellers used to invoke the Muse before embarking on their art.

I’m not sure this phenomenon is experienced by every single fiction writer. Perhaps there are some very meticulous plotters who don’t experience this and who still write perfectly good books. But this “characters coming to life” thing is definitely a part of my own process, and I’ve heard many other authors talk about it, so I know I’m not the only one.

Q. Will your next book be set in the same world?

A. Sort of. I am cooking up something that is set pre-Flood. It’s still earth, but the setting will be unrecognizable as historical fiction except to the hard-core Nephilim buffs. It will look more like fantasy.

Q. When is it coming out?

A. God help me, I don’t know. Writing is not my day job, and my life has shifted to include a lot of other responsibilities. Probably a few years yet.

Q. Do you miss Indonesia? Would you ever live there again?

A. Do I miss the country? Yes, sometimes. Negara yang indah. Do I miss that period of my life? Absolutely not, it was fraught with failure on my part and has left me mostly with regret. Do I miss learning another language and culture in an immersive situation? Yes, very much. It felt I was just getting started when our time there was cut short. However, now that I have kids, I am glad to be raising them in a place where they can belong, rather than being third-culture kids.

Would I ever live there again? Perhaps, if circumstances were right. But that is unlikely to happen. Malignant bureaucracy was a big part of the reason we left in the first place, and that hasn’t gotten any better.

Q. How many languages do you speak?

A. Ah yes, linguists always get this question. I will have to disappoint you.

To answer this question, I’ll be using the ILR Proficiency Scale (which you may know as the FSI Scale), linked here. Basically, 0 is no proficiency in the language, and 5 is the proficiency of an educated, articulate native speaker.

• French: took two years of it in middle school. Proficiency probably 0+ to 1.
• Spanish: I used to be a 2+ or 3. I neglected my Spanish for many years, so now I have some oral comprehension, but almost no speaking ability.
• German: Level 1. Took it for several years in college, but I have very little vocabulary.
• Ancient Greek: 0+. One year at college level. Can read the alphabet phonetically, and remember how to say “the.”
• Mandarin: 0+. Studied during an intensive 6-week course. Can hear the word boundaries, and know the pronouns and how to say this “What’s this?”
• Tagalog: 0+. I was exposed to it during a month in the Philippines.
• Indonesian: Used to be 3+, but my ability has decayed in the years since.
• Bahasa Siang (a minority language of Indonesia): 1+. I learned about 1,000 words in it.
• Other minority languages of Indonesia: Javanese, Sundanese, Banjar, and Ngaju: 0+. I know a few words, and what these languages typically sound like. Some of them, particularly Banjar, are somewhat decipherable if you know Indonesian.
• Bahasa (Malaysian): Probably 2. You can sort of figure it out if you know Indonesian.
• Latin: It’s an ancient language, so I’m not sure how I’d do conversationally, but I’ve been teaching basic Latin for several years now, so I’m gonna go with 2 (Limited Working Proficiency).

So, the answer is, eleven languages but actually only five, and as far as fluency, really only one.