On Hearing Color, Seeing Sound, Feeling the Void
What Writing The Ouroboros Cycle Demanded of Me
I was that feral, bucktoothed, freckle-faced, pot-bellied kid you picked on or pitied in grade school.
To compensate, I sported a big mouth, no filter and an unshakeable lack of self-awareness. The result of this unfortunate plight was a recurrent assortment of fat lips and black eyes well into the 2nd grade.
Reading altered everything.
Once I understood how language carried meaning, my hunger for it reshaped the structure of my world.
I was pretty much exiled from polite society in those days. Sprawling on my bedroom floor for hours at a time, a Hires Root Beer and a Hostess Snowball close to hand, I could wander through the Encyclopedia Britannica or far afield through the sagas of Norse mythology, Birds of the Northwest or the Hardy Boys and return unbruised.
I read everything I could. Encyclopedias. Books. Sand Dune Pony. Something Wicked This Way Comes. Shampoo bottles. Recipes. Fine print. Indexes. Footnotes. I read until syntax became breath, narrative became gravity and writing became reflex.
I outgrew the mouthiness, but the attitude Threaded forward, underpinning my entire Cycle. I can see it right now, peering back at me from the corner as I write this sentence.
I digress. Back to writing and reading.
World building authors and their worlds always fascinated me. I wanted to join their club when I grew up.
I despaired that all the good worlds had already been spoken for. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dune, Foundation Trilogy, Ender’s Game, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Left Hand of Darkness; would I ever be able to build a world that could stand with these detailed and nuanced masterpieces?
I finally found my cosmological muse. Or maybe it found me.
I hope my baby is as pretty as those that have come before.
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The Cosmos Refused to Behave Like Scenery
Writing my world required something unexpected.
The rules bent first. Then the rhythm. Then the shape of story itself. What started as creating and writing morphed into a process of listening and recording.
Scribe became the only word that fit.
The story was already present inside a cosmology that knew it was being written. It shaped its own rhythm and invited me to follow. This was a Cycle in motion.
Every artifact carried weight. The Loom. The Forge. The Weave. The Pattern itself. Each carried intention. Each watched from within.
The cosmos responded to action with recursion. Memory threaded through structure.
Consequences folded inward, until time forgot how to proceed.
Characters moved inside awareness. Glimlock mocked the fabric of memory because he understood it. Nephrys breathed stillness because the Pattern required it. Hargrum dragged iron across emergence and called it order.
Cosmology conversed with itself. I followed and recorded what coherence allowed.
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Imagine the Thunderstorm
Try this:
- Imagine a thunderstorm.
- Now imagine it is sentient.
- Now remove your sight. Remove your hearing.
Now describe the sentient thunderstorm to an audience. How does it move? How does it taste? How does it press against your skin?
What does it want?
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This is what writing The Ouroboros Cycle felt like.
Transcribing something with no interest in being seen, only in being known. I received signals from a structure far older than narrative. The messages arrived at once, in full.
Unfamiliar.
The act of writing became an act of translation without a common tongue.
The cosmology revealed everything. It withheld nothing. Its scale flooded me. Its scope dissolved my sense of mastery. The difficult passages remain as evidence. They hold the weight of transmission.
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Cycles Within Cycles
As I listened, the Ouroboros Cycle revealed itself in all of its complexity. It curved through memory and called it momentum. Each return arrived wearing the shape of progress. The Pattern allowed it, because each return carried more than it left with.
We are all aware of common terran Cycles. Bacteria bloom and collapse. Retail empires rise, crest, and hollow. Belief systems wrap around old bones and call themselves new. Conquerors conquer. Conquerors are conquered. And so it goes.
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Consider this Cycle within a Cycle:
A viral outbreak appeared without warning, creating a rend in the Weave, a scar in the Pattern .
It reshaped travel, politics, ritual, education and personal identity.
It bent every Cycle it touched. That was a big deal. Its echoes still thrum in the Pattern.
Now imagine a Cycle not born of biology, but of consequence itself.
Now imagine this Cycle sits at the headwaters of the cascade
That is the Pattern I was asked to follow.
In the cosmos I was shown, Cycles form the structure through which reality Threads itself forward.
Each Cycle returns through forgetting. Each one evolves through echo.
Every turn folds into Pattern, until consequence forms a shape the Cycle cannot contain.
LOOM and the entire Ouroboros Cycle exists inside such a break.
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Writing with What Couldn’t Be Held
The further I reached, the less the traditional forms answered. Paragraphs resisted containment.
Dialogue spiraled into argument with itself. Action scenes disassembled cause and effect, only to rebuild themselves sideways.
I began to understand.
The cosmology had no interest in being documented and examined.
It desired to be felt and experienced.
Some moments in the book are quiet. Some are dissonant. Some feel like clarity, others like recursion.
This was not a style choice. It was transcription fidelity.
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Closing: Why LOOM feels as it feels.
You may feel moments inside the book that bend your breath. You may find paragraphs that echo differently each time you read them. That’s OK. Your time and engagement will be honored.
That was always part of the invitation.
This story refused to behave like scenery.
It moved without pause. It carried memory before character, consequence before chronology.
I discarded custom and tradition. I followed the logic.
So if you feel something impossible forming beneath the language, you are not confused.
You have entered a Cycle.
And it has already begun remembering you.
