From the Desk: Breaking the Symmetry (Why I Rewrote Everything)

There is a moment in every project where the story stops being polite and starts telling you the truth. Usually, the truth is inconvenient. Sometimes, it’s destructive.

Almost two years ago I finished building a world called Out of Time. It was a comfortable world, populated by academics and ancient libraries. It was a story about “binding the world together” through empathy. It was safe. It was structured. And it was wrong.

I realized recently that I wasn’t writing the story; I was writing around it. The feedback from my early readers confirmed what I had been trying to ignore: the stakes were too abstract. A system without tension is a system at rest. And a story at rest is a dead story.

So, I did the only thing a writer can do when the foundation is flawed. I broke it.

Enter The Broken Symmetry.

The project formerly known as Out of Time has undergone a phase shift. The core DNA remains—Lewis Lambert is still our guide—but the nature of the darkness has changed.

We are no longer fighting for abstract “empathy.” We are fighting against Entropy.

In the new draft, the antagonist, Sorath, represents “The Zero”—the desire of the universe to resolve its complex equations back to nothingness. The threat isn’t that the world will become cruel; it’s that the world will simply stop. The “Great Silence” is coming, unzipping reality one variable at a time.

This shift from “Soft Fantasy” to “Quantum Mythology” required a complete tear-down:

• The Magic is now Physics: Artifacts aren’t just magic items; they are “metamaterials” with negative refractive indices. They are stabilization nodes for a reality that is trying to decohere.
• The Team is Active: We are done with passive heroes. The new team doesn’t wait for permission or divine handouts; they break into museums, hack servers, and pry the truth out of the cold hands of history.

The Broken Symmetry is darker, sharper, and louder than its predecessor. It wanders deeper into those “dark-academia corridors” I love so much, but this time, something is hunting us in the hallways.

The equation is unbalanced. The signal is broadcasting. It’s time to wake up.