The Caverns

The Caverns

The contents of the caverns are vast and sprawling, yet there is a filing method, an organization. As you peruse the pages, you go deeper inside the caverns, and the mental sounds become songs that turn to memories—your memories of my memories, of stories that haven’t happened or didn’t happen or won’t happen, telling us more, leading us deeper within, ever deeper into the caverns …

Adventures In Secrecy (AIS)

#1 2022-01-27 Throat-clearing, an Introduction, and All That Jam

#2 2022-01-29 Why All the Secrecy?

#3 2022-01-30 Of Living Cities, Destroying Worlds, and Writing About Living Cities and Destroying Worlds

#3.1 2002-01-30 🔏 Brief Origins of the Dream Thief

#4 2022-02-01 Looking Into Creative Entrepreneurship: A Messy Search for Meaning

#5 2022-02-04 1001 True Fans

#6 2022-02-10 A Gallimaufry of Topics [super issue]

#7 2022-02-15 A Newsletter About This Newsletter + sum rex

#8 2022-02-25 The Art of the Incomplete Novel as a Finished Work: A Study in New-ish Forms

#9 2022-03-04 On Greatness

#10 2022-03-11 On Needing to Write & What Is Owed

#11 2022-03-18 Fiction as Gray Literature

#12 2022-03-25 On Earning

#13 2022-04-01 April Effing Fools

#14 2022-04-08 Why Don’t Folks You Know Want to Pay You?

#15 2022-04-15 Casual Internet Pundits and How to Live With Them

#16 2022-04-22 Shiz I Forgot About

#17 2022-04-27 The Deep End

#18 2022-04-29 🔏 On Your Forty-fifth Birthday

#19 2022-05-06 🔏 Submission 🔓 2022-06-06

#20 2022-05-13 🔏 A Body of Work 🔓 2022-08-18

#21 2022-05-20 🔏 Inundated 🔓 2022-07-18

#22 2022-05-27 🔏 Who Aren’t You?🔓 2022-07-27

#23 2022-06-02 🔏 The Insistence of a Persistent Lie 🔓 2022-08-26

#24 2022-06-09 300 + some changes

#25 2022-06-16 🔏 What Then? 🔓 2022-09-02

#26 2022-06-23 Is Eight Million Views a Lot?

#27 2022-06-30 Forgetting What You Never Knew

#28 2022-07-04 The Hope of True Freedom?

#29 2022-07-07 Content

#30 2022-07-14 Direction of Flow

#31 2022-07-21 On How to be Prolific

#32 2022-07-28 No Time!

#33 2022-08-04 On Anticapitalism and You

#34 2022-08-10 🔏Wanting Isn’t Enough

#35 2022-08-17 On Doing Better Than You Are Presently So Inclined

#36 2022-08-25 Exhibition (contains some sexual content)

#37 2022-09-01 Recognition

#38 2022-09-15 Inside

#39 2022-09-22 Don’t Touch My Stuff!: A Case for Clutter

#40 2022-09-29 Is There Accounting for Taste?

#41 2022-10-06 Artistic Growth

#42 2022-10-18 On Engagement, Briefly

#43 2022-10-31 November Is National Novel Writing Month

#44 2022-11-07 NaNoWriMo 2k22: Weekly Update #1

#45 2022-11-14 NaNoWriMo 2k22: Weekly Update #2

#46 2022-11-21 NaNoWriMo 2k22: Weekly Update #3

#47 2022-11-30 NaNoWriMo 2k22: Weekly Update #4/Summary of the Experience

#48 2022-12-11 You Are Here

#49 2022-12-18 I Have Felt It, Too (canceled)

#49 2022-12-24 Happy Holidays!

#50 2023-01-01 Happy New Year!

#51 2023-01-08 The Whole Megillah

#52 2023-03-01 A Few Updates

#53 2023-03-13 It’s Been Two Months

#54 2023-03-20 Back How It Was

#55 2023-03-31 Visibility

#56 2023-04-04 The Waterpump Girl

#57 2023-05-15 A Short Little Newsletter to Say I’m Not Doing Very Well, But You Needn’t Worry

#58 2023-06-28 Quick Update, Late June 2023

#59 2023-08-18 Writing for No One

#60 2023-08-23 Your Opinion, Please

#61 2023-08-27 Toward a Useful Organization of Parts

#62 2023-09-01 On Starting a tumblr at 47

The next three issues form a bit of a short sequence on using ChatGPT to prompt analysis of fiction:

#63 2023-09-05 Do You Think About What You Read?

#64 2023-09-10 Do You Even Analyze, Bro?

#65 2023-09-17 Do You See Where the Words Point?

And then we’re back to our usual hijinks …

#66 2023-09-20 The Whole Shebang … which is kind of an updated take on #51, The Whole Megillah cos Ello died and broke my links and other things.

#67 2023-09-24 The Painful, Long-Foretold, and Now Actual Death of Ello

#68 2023-09-28 Coming Soon: Under the Influence

#69 2023-10-01 Coming Soon: Ten Years Gone

#70 2023-10-11 NaNoWriMo 2023: NaNoWriMo Harder

#71 2023-10-26 About Ten Years Ago …

#72 2023-11-07 NaNoWriMo 2023: Weekly Update #1

#73 2023-11-14 NaNoWriMo 2023: Weekly Update #2

#74 2023-11-21 NaNoWriMo 2023: Weekly Update #3

#75 2023-11-30 NaNoWriMo 2023: Weekly Update #4/Summary of the Experience

#76 2023-12-07 Orange December

#77 2023-12-30 The Adventures in Secrecy with T Van Santana Year in Review—2023 Edish

#78 2024-01-01 Happy New Year!

#79 2024-01-08 Writing Plans for 2024

Special Editions

#1 2023-01-29 What’s the Secret of Secrets?

#2 2024-01-02 Two for a Tuesday

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” collaboration

2023-12-29 “Moments for Esperance”


Teresa’s Backbone

A Secretsverse Epinovel

Since this is a sprawling novel with many parts that each link to other novels and other media, I’m just going to drop the readers’ guide/table of contents for it here. That can take you wherever you might want to go within it.

2022-11-01 “Hey bae” Day 1 introduction

2022-11-08 “The Backbone” Readers’ guide

2023-01-23 Reading the Backbone: A New Introduction by the Author for the 2023 Crowd


No One Ever Knows Why

A Secretsverse Book

California Exodus


Beautiful Wasteland

A Secretsverse Experience

Enter the Beautiful Wasteland


Azza-Jono (AJ)

The Conscious City. Divided like the brain, both by the fissure of the River and the monolithic Wall. But no barrier is truly impenetrable. High-tech assassins stalk its streets, magicians commune with its strange powers, despots and revolutionaries undo themselves in their quests to tame its influence over its own inhabitants. The lines between Art and Science and Religion blur like the states between Wakefulness and Dream until, before you know it, you yourself have become one of its hypnagogic citizenry.

#1 2022-01-31 Enter Nikki

#2 2022-02-02 All Hail da Paize!

#3 2022-02-07 Visit Scenic Azza-Jono!

#4 2022-02-12 Meet the Roommates

#5 2022-02-13 Unknown Narrator No. 1

#5.1 2022-02-14 🔏 Unknown Narrator No. 1—Revealed!

#6 2022-02-16 On City Life: Caliban Orestes

#7 2022-02-20 Memory’s Tricky

#8 & 8.1 2022-02-27 The Disappearance of Chairman Paisley 🔏 Like Mother, Like Son

#9 2022-03-06 Kraft & Schnell Collectibles

#10 2022-04-18 A Collection of Other Voices in the Living City—Part 1

#11 2022-04-24 A Collection of Other Voices in the Living City—Part 2

#12 2022-05-22 The 9th Narrator

#13 2022-05-29 Nothing Else Matters

#14 2022-06-01 Here Comes the Man Called Clade

#15 2022-06-08 On City Life: Arkhídamostheneia Jones-Wagner

#16 2022-06-15 Blayne Foster, Mystickal Detective in The Case of the Tides of Ego

#17 2022-08-24 Friends & Neighbors—Part 1 (st. Teresa Alfaro)

#18 2022-08-31 Friends & Neighbors—Part 2 (st. Teresa Alfaro)

#19 2022-09-07 Friends & Neighbors—Part 3 (st. Teresa Alfaro)

#20 2022-09-14 Friends & Neighbors—Part 4 (st. Teresa Alfaro)

#21 2022-09-21 You Can Never Go Back, But Neither Can You Leave—Part 1

#22 2022-09-28 You Can Never Go Back, But Neither Can You Leave—Part 2

#23 2022-10-05 You Can Never Go Back, But Neither Can You Leave—Part 3

#24 2022-10-12 You Can Never Go Back, But Neither Can You Leave—Part 4

#25 2022-10-19 You Can Never Go Back, But Neither Can You Leave—Part 5

#26 2022-10-26 You Can Never Go Back, But Neither Can You Leave—Part 6

#27 2022-12-04 You Can Never Go Back, But Neither Can You Leave—Part 7

#28 2022-12-11 You Can Never Go Back, But Neither Can You Leave—Part 8

#29 2022-12-18 You Can Never Go Back, But Neither Can You Leave—Part 9

Beings of Azza-Jono

#1 2022-08-16


The Other Worlds of TVS (OW)

sf serials set in worlds other than Azza-Jono or the 32C

#1 2022-03-13 Gaucho & Hogwash!

#2 2022-03-20 An Axe +2 Grind, Incorporeal, and Monterey

#3 2022-03-27 Gaucho, Episode 2: “The hundreds”

#4 2022-04-03 Gaucho, Episode 3: “Littered pages”

#5 2022-06-22 Hogwash!, Episode 2

#6 2022-06-25 Incorporeal, Chapters 6-9

#7 2022-06-29 Monterey, Episode 2: “The Knock”

#8 2022-07-08 Incorporeal, Chapters 10-13

#9 2022-07-13 Hogwash!, Episode 3

#10 2022-07-20 An Axe +2 Grind, Encounter: “The Blank Space”

#11 2022-07-24 Incorporeal, Chapters 14-17 | End of Part 1

#12 2022-07-26 Oublier 1.0

#13 2022-08-09 🔏Hogwash!, Episode 4 [locked for your safety]


Gaucho (spin-off from OW)

When William wakes up, he finds himself in the Station, alone but for Pem, a talking cat. Together they set out in search of William's past, following his ring finger that points on its own. They encounter friends and foes, dangers in a world of stories spread wild over a kingdom growing dark.

#4 2022-04-10 Are what you eat

#5 2022-04-20 City in the tree branches

#6 2022-05-02 Pem’s concern

#7 2022-05-10 A cave

#8 2022-05-20 About a girl

#9 2022-05-31 Darkness comes

#10 2022-06-14 Things that can’t live in the light

#11 2022-06-24 Destronizar

#12 2022-07-05 Take only what you need

#13 2022-07-15 I’m one too

#14 2022-07-25 A little rescue

#15 2022-08-05 Water of life

#16 2022-08-15 The beach

#17 2022-08-26 Threes

#18 2022-09-18 It’s gonna burn

#19 2022-09-30 What’s inside | End of Stage 1


Gaucho, Stage 2: Van Buren

#20 2023-12-08 Herein now we dwell

#21 2023-12-13 From the dunes comes a stranger

#22 2023-12-27 Pem’s departure

#23 2024-01-03 Exposure

#24 2024-01-10 Something mystic


T-Rex (TR)

all the recommendations, reviews, and related opinionating, published monthly intermittently

#1 2022-03-14 March 2022

#2 2022-04-20 April 2022

#3 2022-05-23 May 2022 🔏extras in the underneath

#4 DELAYED June 2022 canceled!

Special Editions

#1 2022-06-10 Book Review: Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You

#2 2022-06-19 Book (P)Review: Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun


🔏 Saucy Secrets (SauSe)

stories with a bit more spice to them, including ‘graphic’ sex (whatever that means), locked up tight to protect your delicate sensibilities

#1 2022-05-01 Downgrrl

#2 2022-05-08 Passage


Secret Texts (ST)

short stories, novellas, excerpts, and other fragmentary bits of the Secretsverse of the Thirty-Second Century, da 32C

#1 2022-07-27 A Story for Roxy


Sound Off! (SO)—Canceled!

I pose[d] questions and you get got a chance to give the Internet your sage wisdom, rivulets of insecurity, or a piece of your mind; [was] posted biweekly [twice].

#1 2022-03-22 What Should I Write?

#2 2022-04-06 What Should I Focus On?