Welcome to My Website (I Don't Know What I'm Doing!)

You know that feeling when you walk into a roomful of strangers and trip over the carpet so everyone's looking at the klutz who just joined the group before you've even said a word?

Well, I'm really trying to avoid that here.

There are quite a few cliches which I'm sure we've all heard about first impressions, aaaand I'm not going to bore you by listing a bunch of them off. When you begin anything new, a good first rule to keep in mind is to go in with an awareness that you're going to make mistakes and probably put a bad foot forward on occasion. It's why acknowledging that this is your maiden voyage on any endeavor can feel like a permission structure to yourself and a request for grace from everyone else.

Other, more confident people believe in putting on a show as if you've done this a thousand times, when in fact you're as wet behind the ears as a basset hound after his first encounter with any body of water (including water bowls). The faction known as fake-it-till-you-make-it or "I'm not new at this, you are!"

My plan is to lead with brutal honesty and a cute illustration.

How Did I Get A Website?

Short answer: I wrote a book.

Can I Get a Long Answer, Please?

Oh, sure, sorry.

I'm a great storyteller and a very good writer, but I'm super ignorant about all of the work that goes into getting a book published. I just figured that once I'd done the really hard thing--writing a freaking novel--that everything else would just be...housekeeping.

I knew I'd need a cover, obviously, but I didn't think about what's on a book cover besides a great piece of art. I knew that I'd be selling this thing on my own because it's really hard to get into traditional publishing unless you're famous, infamous, or related/married to an already-successful author.

And I'm none of those things. After tossing out ideas of going on a crime spree or marrying some of my idols (did you know some big-time authors have bodyguards to keep the fanboys back?), I realized that I was going to have to do this thing solo. I would become a self-published author, prove my commodity (so to speak), and then the publishing houses would come a courting!

Then my heartmate began doing research and found out that you can write volumes about the stuff I didn't know regarding what you need to do to get self-published. And many, many people have written such works. There are two things they talk a lot about in these books. And articles. And videos. And blogs. And...well, you get it, right?

Get a website.

Create a brand.

Not THAT Kind of Brand!

Having worked for many corporations in my long and storied career, I have a knee-jerk reaction to a lot of the buzzwords and jargon that get thrown around. How problems are challenges and moving the needle is as simple as touching base to make sure everyone has the bandwidth to leverage a win-win for everyone concerned.

Nevertheless, when practically every source mentioned that you have to protect-your-brand this and establish-your-brand that, I decided to just embrace the paradigm shift. I've got an adorable, photogenic dog and a friend who can draw all day for me. I hit the ground running, grabbed that low-hanging fruit, and got some fast buy-in from my team.

Yeah, that left a bad taste in my mouth, too.

But What Should This Website Feel Like?

I understand the KISS principle, and many of the resources out there advocate it. A simple, yet sleek design with a consistent theme that won't tax people's attention spans. "Sophisticated with a twist" is what a lot of sites like to offer people, but I found the sophistication a little too safe and the twist practically non-existent. I also discovered it to be a little insulting.

My thoughts on this are that designers try to subtly one-up each other while keeping inside very conservative lines. Offending the least amount of people while not challenging their expectations seems to be the order of the day. And if I'm reading between the lines? I think they're afraid to trust their audience.

If you've read Prelude to the Storm, you'll see the little bread crumbs that I've left throughout the novel that hint at the fact that the Storm Cycle isn't going to be a coloring-within-the-lines kind of epic fantasy. I'm not looking to emulate the current trends in speculative fiction, science fiction, or fantasy. I want to tell a good story and challenge the way you see the world.

To that end, I'm going in with the idea that my readers and visitors to my website can hold more than one idea in their heads at a time.

There's the serious stuff, which is the novel. I take my work very seriously--even the humor in the books. I want the characters to feel like real people who are alive. When they speak, I want you to hear their voices to the point that you don't need any tags such as "Kitoor said". Because you knew it was Kitoor speaking by the way he spoke. On the website we'll have fun, but I'm going to treat aspects of the novel with a certain degree of gravitas worthy of the sacrifices they'll be making to make their world a better place in the face of the greatest crisis it's ever seen.

At the same time, there's going to be the playful stuff, which is just me interacting with you as equals. What I mean by that is there's always going to be someone out there in the world who's taller than you, or smarter than you, or prettier than you, or more successful than you. Some of these irritating people can even be many of those things at the same time!

But that doesn't mean they're better than us. The person who's smarter than you might not be able to juggle like you can. The person who's taller than you might not be able to carry a tune in a bucket while you have the voice of an angel.

Treating people as peers is how I've gone through life ever since graduating high school and getting hit with the big, bad world. And I've found if you treat everyone as an equal--at least until they show you that they'd rather be an unremitting jerk--you can make a surprising amount of friends (Pro Tip: Many bosses don't like you to treat them like equals). My website's gonna be super respectful, and thoughtful, and silly, and have a large vocabulary interspersed with words that are pretty lowbrow, and as long as you're courteous to everyone here we're gonna have a great time.

And I'll try to get to know you, too! Tell us what you're interested in seeing or hearing and we'll try to make this something you'll want to check in on every month. There's going to be new blogs, new content from Auren, and something fun added, as well, so you'll get something fresh three weeks out of every calendar month.

Sound like a good time? Well then...

Hey, everyone! I'm Leonard, that's Feinen. Welcome to the Website.

I really don't know what I'm doing!

All artwork by Forge. Copyright Leonard J. Chastain 2026