If you spend enough time around government systems — military, policy, institutional machinery — you learn something most people don’t want to admit:

Secrets aren’t hidden because they’re extraordinary.
They’re hidden because they’re inconvenient.

People assume writers create solitude to work — but I didn’t start writing because I enjoy being alone. I started writing because I spent most of my life feeling alone already.

How atmosphere, loneliness, and the Southwest shaped the world of Max West

For most of my life I never really felt like I “came from” or “belonged” anywhere. I grew up in Burnsville, Minnesota, where the winters are long and the closest thing to a supernatural mystery is whether your car will start in negative twenty degrees. People sometimes assume I must have grown up in Las Vegas because my book feels so rooted here — the atmosphere, the energy, the weirdness, the beauty.

I’m going to start with a confession:
I don’t really read thrillers. At least not the kind that dominate BookTok with bright covers, twisty blurbs, and breathless young readers declaring, “I gasped on every page.”

If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been sitting on something big. After months of waiting, rewriting, hoping, doubting, praying, and refreshing my inbox like it owed me money, I finally get to say the words I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to write

There’s something sacred about the moment before everything changes.
Writers live for it…the quiet hum of possibility before the ink dries, before the story steps out into the world and becomes something bigger than us.