Hello Steemit! My name is Mike. On the surface, I'm a normal guy. I live in a house on a quiet street, I have a wife and pets, and every morning I get in my Subaru and drive an hour-plus to work, where I'm a lead software developer for a company you've shopped at many times before. You may have even passed me on the street today and not noticed anything remarkable.

But I have a secret identity. I create whole worlds using some of the deepest, most powerful magic humankind has ever known: the written word. Airy thoughts given power, fantasy transformed to reality. Those poor souls stuck in the mundane world, where everything is robbed of its wonder, have applied the decidedly unimpressive name of Author to this High Sorcery.

My wife has a secret identity, too. She does the same thing, using both words and pictures. She gets the slightly more impressive, but still entirely insufficient, designation of Author/Illustrator.

We're a team -- a team of superheroes, if you will -- and everyday we battle to save reality.

A World of Resurgent Myth

You see, while I crunch code everyday, that's not where my mind or my heart really is. I want to be creating worlds of adventure and breathing lives into the characters that I love. I want to forge more novels and short stories out of the aether called imagination.

We already have six books out, which you can buy on Amazon or read more about here. These stories span many genres, from Young Adult to Mystery and Suspense, from Science Fiction, to Action and Horror. But they're all tales of heroic adventure, where bold, daring, and (more or less) virtuous people battle against gigantic odds to do what is right.

And each of our books are set in the same shared universe, which we call the Ascension Epoch. It's a world close enough to our own to be recognizable, but different enough to be wondrous and exciting. History took a different path in the Ascension Epoch, a path where the events of some of the greatest works of fiction ever written actually happened. The most important of those changes are:

• The re-emergence of paranormal abilities (superpowers, if you will) in the mid 19th century. Both the extraordinary abilities and the extraordinary people who wield them are called Talents in our universe.
• The invasion of Earth by the Martians, a la H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, which wrecked the world's empires, redrew the political map, and, in some cases, transformed the geography.

Our alternate history is chock full of details taken from the public domain works of creators as varied as Jules Verne, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Will Eisner. And it's populated both with heroes and villains you're already familiar with and hundreds of originals that I hope you'll grow to love.

Heroes of the Commons

I really do want you to love these characters and live their adventures in the fullest way possible, and that means the freedom to share and remix them in whatever way you like. Accordingly, all our stories, artwork, and designs are open source, released under CC-BY-SA, now and forever.

Besides, it would be silly if we incorporated so much public domain material and insisted on copyright, wouldn't it?

I intend to post some of our shorter stories on here, and eventually I will also share some of our novels in episodic installments. But to do that, we have to publish a few of the six or seven books that we currently have in flight.

One day I'll be able to quit my day job and turn fantasy into reality full time. One day...

Back to Mundanity

While I get ready for bed (I have to be up early for that hour-long drive to work, remember?), maybe you can help turn my fantasy into reality by buying some of our books, or, If you've already done that, by leaving a review or spreading the word about our grand project. Sorcerers of the written word thrive on encouragement, you know. Perhaps you'd like to join in the project with your own creations, or share your own adventures in worldbuilding or Open Source fiction.

In any case, I look forward to hearing from you, and I look forward to sharing more of what I love with you.