Sight of Flame is Now Available!

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And another novel of mine launches! Sight of Flame, the first book in the Blade of Fate universe, is up on Amazon!

She can see every future. Every one of them ends with him dead.

One touch from a dying stranger, and Selene’s life is over. The sorceress who collapsed in her family’s courtyard passed something into her with her last breath: the ancient aspect of prophecy, the power to see the threads that bind every choice to its consequence. Within a day, her betrothal is torn up and her family has turned her out onto the road.

Half-drowned and out of places to run, Selene is pulled off a muddy forest track by Thorne, a scarred blacksmith and war veteran. He asks no questions. He offers her a horse, a fire, and a home in the quiet village of Briarford. There, among weavers, felting songs, and his sharp-tongued sister’s inn, Selene finds something she never had in her father’s house: people who want her for who she is.

But the visions don’t stop. And Selene knows something Thorne doesn’t. Long before they met, she saw his face, a man with steady brown eyes holding a sword that seemed to be listening.

In the east, the Flame Queen has risen again, a sorceress who burns armies where they stand and answers every offer of peace with fire. The king needs the one weapon he has never had: someone who can see where she will strike next. Word of a new Prophetess is already spreading through the hills, and the people hunting her are getting closer.

When the king’s rider arrives at Briarford, Selene must choose. She can run, or she can stand. Thorne must decide whether to swear the oldest oath there is: his life for her protection, his strength for her weakness.

Some oaths are only words. This one forged a blade.

Sight of Flame is an adult fantasy romance with:

  • A slow-burn, found-family romance between a sorceress who sees too much and the man who refuses to be afraid of her
  • A cozy village that rallies around its own, and a royal court at war
  • A grounded, battle-weary hero who has already lost one future and won’t lose another
  • A magic system built on thirteen ancient aspects and the legendary Blade of Fate
  • An earned, emotional happily-ever-after
  • Open-door love scenes, so this one is for adult readers

A complete, standalone story. Sight of Flame is Book One of the Blade of Fate series. The books share a world and can be read in any order, with no cliffhangers and no waiting years for an ending.

If you love fantasy romance with heart, hard choices, and a hero worth swearing to, start the journey here.

Blood of the Fae Now Available!

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Blood of the Fae Now Available!

So, I finally got Blood of the Fae done and published!


He came south for justice. He found his blood instead.

Assistant District Attorney Raúl Rodriguez left Queens with a broken heart, a sharp legal mind, and zero patience for small-town Southern hospitality. All he wants in Vicksburg, Mississippi, is a quiet drink and a case worth winning.

What he gets is Thea Collins.

Blunt, brilliant, and allergic to small talk, Thea is a local private investigator who does astrophysics in a bar, insults people in a dozen languages, and keeps a crossbow handy for anyone who annoys her. She and her cousin Jimmy are also persons of interest in the disappearance of a mysterious doctor, a case that just landed on Raúl’s desk.

One night of conversation changes everything. Raúl starts seeing things: strange lights, shifting faces, crowns that shouldn’t be there. When he tries to break his oath to the court, his own throat closes and nearly kills him. Then Thea drags him home to meet the family, and he learns the truth no one ever told him.

He is Fae.

Not glitter and wishes, but the old blood of Arcadia, inherited from a grandmother who gave up eternity for love. Now Raúl is sworn to an ancient Earl and bound by oaths that can choke him and debts that must be repaid within a year and a day. He has to learn glamour, combat, and the laws of a hidden world from the two people who drive him craziest. The training is brutal. The nightmares are worse. And in one of them, he sees his own grave, dated just six weeks away.

Then Thea is found beaten and poisoned with cold iron, the one thing that can destroy a Fae’s very soul. Raúl and Jimmy are arrested for the attack. With Thea trapped in a coma and sending him cryptic visions, Raúl has to clear his name, outmaneuver a deputy with a grudge, bargain with a Fae secret-keeper whose price is steep, and accept help from the last allies anyone expected: a motorcycle club of werewolves.

The clock is ticking toward the date on that headstone. And the person who wants Thea dead has Raúl in their sights next.

Full of Southern heat and sharp humor, with a slow-burn romance and a fresh take on the Fae, Blood of the Fae is the first book in the Cycle of the Eternals, a sweeping urban fantasy saga that begins on the banks of the Mississippi and reaches all the way to the stars.

History Matters and Why Most Historians Get It Wrong

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Originally posted at Virtute et Armis et Mente.

In my introduction, I mentioned that I’m a long-haul trucker. But I started my adult life with a very different dream: studying history. I even earned my undergraduate degree in it.

I still remember one graduate course that irritated the hell out of me — Historiography, the study of the different lenses through which historians view the past. I thought most of it was both stupid and wrong. I didn’t have a fully formed alternative at the time, so as a lowly grad student I kept my mouth shut and passed the class.

But my systems-thinking brain wouldn’t let it go.

History is one of the most useful subjects we can study, yet it’s often taught terribly. Much of that comes from the straight-jackets of modern historiographical schools: Marxists see everything as class struggle, Great Man historians obsess over individuals, Annales scholars focus on bottom-up social forces, and cultural historians frequently reduce everything to oppression narratives.
They’re all limited. Some are actively misleading. It took me years to articulate why.

The core mistake is treating history like literature instead of the study of a living, breathing super-organism: human civilization. The same patterns that govern biology and medicine often have powerful carry-over into how societies live, sicken, and sometimes die.

We can’t put Rome under a microscope and see cell walls, but we can treat civilizations like bodies and draw useful analogies.

Trade becomes the lifeblood that moves resources and ideas. Foreign influences can be symbiotic (like mitochondria powering our cells) or invasive, triggering immune responses — from cultural rejection to outright conflict. Bureaucracy grows like a tumor. Overly restrictive policies act like poor circulation.

Understanding these patterns doesn’t just help us explain the past. It gives us tools to make better decisions now and avoid repeating old disasters.

That’s the lens I want to explore here. I’ll be drawing from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and beyond, testing whether this biological/systems model holds up. I’m also planning to dig deeper into people like Peter Turchin and yes, the old Asimov influence.

Some of you are probably still wondering about the odd Latin name of this Substack and what any of this has to do with “saving the West.”

Good questions. The name — Virtute et Armis et Mente (By Virtue, Arms, and Mind) — is partly inspired by Mississippi’s motto, but it also reflects the three essential pillars Western civilization must understand and wield if it’s going to survive the forces trying to dismantle it.

We’ll unpack that more next time.

Until then,

– G.K. Masterson

Zero Plus Zero Equals Zero

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Originally posted at Virtute et Armis et Mente.

In a previous post I talked about the Law of Reciprocity.

Today I want to talk about another fundamental truth that gets ignored at our peril.

It’s this: 0 + 0 = 0.

That’s not just arithmetic. It’s one of the deepest axioms of reality itself. There is no free lunch — TANSTAAFL is literally written into the universe via the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Every system requires input to produce output. Energy, effort, resources — something has to go in.

Photosynthesis? The sun pours in massive energy. Digestion? Your body burns calories just to process food. Even faith traditions require something from the believer.
This is why Marxism fails every single time it’s tried.
Marxism isn’t just trying to rewrite human nature. It’s attempting to engineer its way around a basic law of physics: you cannot get something for nothing. No matter how elegant the theory looks on paper, it is built on a foundation that reality itself rejects.

Marxists read Marx.

Anti-Marxists understand him.

Capitalism isn’t perfect by any stretch — it has plenty of flaws and failures. But at least it doesn’t declare war on the basic operating system of the universe. That makes it fixable. Marxism, in this reality, is not.

The sooner we stop pretending otherwise and start building systems that actually respect reality, the better off we’ll all be.

– G.K. Masterson

Reciprocity isn’t optional

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Originally posted at Virtute et Armis et Mente.

On one of my long hauls, a thought hit me that I ended up chewing on with Grok for hours: the Law of Reciprocity.

It’s so fundamental to human nature that we rarely even articulate it anymore. Yet failure to respect it explains a huge amount of our current dysfunction.

Reciprocity isn’t optional social etiquette. It’s hard-wired. Vampire bats, primates, dolphins, orcas, and humans all display it. You don’t get to legislate or wish it away.

Our trade systems, justice systems, alliances, and even religions are built on this foundation. When one side defects from the old norms while demanding the other side continue to obey them, the eventual result is predictable: the other side stops playing by those rules too.

We’re watching that dynamic play out in real time in the United States.

For years, significant parts of the left have abandoned basic norms of civil discourse — harassing political opponents in public, weaponizing institutions, and using lawfare — while insisting the right must remain “principled” and restrained. The right, by and large, has still tried to hold the line.

However…

Humans are wired to reciprocate, especially defection. And once trust breaks, it takes far longer to rebuild than it did to destroy. The right also tends to attract more systems thinkers who understand force multipliers and strategic patience.

If this imbalance continues, we should expect to see quieter, more structural shifts rather than dramatic viral moments. Industries dominated by right-leaning workers may begin adjusting prices, service priorities, or policies in ways that reflect the new reality. Rural and red areas may become less welcoming to urban refugees who bring the same attitudes that wrecked their previous homes.

Trust-based networks (farmers markets, local businesses, homeschooling) will tighten. Migration patterns and policy choices will reflect the growing sense that the old social contract has been unilaterally voided.

This isn’t a call for chaos. It’s a description of what living systems do when one part starts acting like a parasite on the whole.

The only real off-ramp is for the original defectors to restore the norms — publicly, consistently, and even while the other side is still adjusting. Trust is fragile. Once broken, reciprocity cuts both ways.

We ignore this ancient law at our peril.

– G.K. Masterson

Starting a Substack: Virtute et Armis et Mente

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So yeah, I’ve finally done it — I started a Substack.

Articles will live here for about a week before I move them over to this site for free. If you don’t want to subscribe, no hard feelings. Just wait a week.

Subscribers get early access plus the ability to actually talk with me in the comments. I won’t be enabling comments on the blog cross-posts.

So what the hell am I writing about, and why should you care?

I’m going to be dissecting the mess we’re in — the problems facing the United States, Western Civilization, and the modern world — from a systems thinker’s perspective. We’ll talk consciousness, reciprocity, barbarians at (and inside) the gates, broken institutions, copyright law, and whatever else needs a no-bullshit look. I’ll also toss in stories from the road, updates on my fantasy series, and whatever else strikes me as useful or interesting.

I’m building up a backlog so I can keep posting at least once a week even while I’m out rolling down the interstate.

This short note is just the opening salvo. Next post I’ll start unpacking why I’m calling this thing Virtute et Armis et Mente — By Virtue, Arms, and Mind.

Hint: It’s not just because I’m a Mississippi girl who knows a thing or two about all three.

– G.K. Masterson

Guess Who’s A Trucker Now?

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Yeah, I am. 🙂

I got into a trucking school back in May where I learned everything I needed to learn to get my CDL-A. After that, I went out on the road with a trainer where I learned how to really handle a truck. I started driving on my own back in August and just came home for the first time. On Saturday, I’ll get another load and shoot out for another month or so before I come home again.

My first month out has shown me just how far I have to go. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly. But I am very, very, VERY thankful for all the more experienced truckers out there who have been super patient with me and helped me get backed up to doors or into parking spots when the set-up is not something taught at the academy. Without these absolute angels among men, I’d have done some serious damage. I mean, I can straight-line like anyone else but setting up for a 45° back when I don’t have the space I’m used to? Or backing up off-set up a hill? Or handling a super-tight backing? Not easy.

What I generally do is straight-up tell the shipper or receiver that I’m still new and could use a spotter and that it will go faster if they put me on an easy door. I do the same thing at truck stops if there isn’t a whole lot of open parking. I’ll find a trucker and wave him over and ask for help. I know that as I get more experience under my belt, I’ll need this less and less, but I’m very thankful for all the guys who have taken time out of their day to help me.

This help, this sense of “brotherhood,” is something that you don’t find in a lot of other fields. I know that I was pretty much thrown to the wolves as a teacher. But I’ve found that being honest about what I can do and what my experience is while driving tends to make the others do what they can to help me and to explain things so that I can get better.

The money is good, too. I drive for a great company and they pay well and treat me well. No micro-management. No mandatory daily meetings to get screamed at over things outside my control. No cult-like or abusive-relationship-like BS. I’m told where to go to pick up a load (and what time to be there), told where to deliver it (and when), and then left to determine when and where I’ll take my mandatory breaks. I’m treated like I have good sense and like I’m a person worthy of respect. And I’m paid well. Very well. My education for this industry cost me nothing up front — just an agreement to work for this company for a year in order to pay it back. No money out of my paycheck — just do the work for a year and then I could go somewhere else if I wanted.

So, if any of you out there are struggling in a field where you get treated like garbage, have crap pay, and are looking for a way out, I have some hope for you. Get into trucking. We need more drivers. There are schools where you can learn all you need to know. If you drive for my company, you’ll get additional training after you get your CDL to help you learn the things they don’t have time to teach you at the driving school. You’ll be treated with respect by other drivers and by the public who know that, without us, they don’t get food. Don’t stay in a dead-end job with a boss who gets off on screaming in your face, throwing things at you, and treating you like garbage. No, you won’t go home every day (or even every week) but the money is good, the freedom is awesome, and you’ll wake up each day knowing that the load you’re hauling is going to keep people fed and clothed. Other truckers WILL help you if you need it and are humble enough to ask for it (and having boobs helps because chivalry is still A Thing in trucking).

Anyhow, that’s part of why my updates are sporadic. When I’m on my 10 hour break to sleep, that’s pretty much what I do — get a shower at the truck stop and then sleep. 🙂 Hopefully, as I get more experience driving and backing, I’ll find more time to post little updates and even travel logs (though I’ll have to keep some details out).

Oh, one last thing — don’t be jerks to truckers. If we signal that we want to move over, let us. Don’t pass on the right. And don’t get in front of us and stop unless you want to meet Jesus. It takes us a lot of time and space to stop those rigs. If you don’t like that, go argue it with God and Sir Isaac Newton.

— G.K.

Bill Whittle Talks Screen Writing

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So, yesterday, Bill Whittle came on my livestream and we talked about screen writing! Watch below!

These are the books Bill was talking about:

Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting
Making a Good Script Great

Thoughts on Writing — Why Preaching Fails

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So, it’s no real secret that I deeply dislike preach-fic or message-fic. I find it trite, dull, uni-dimensional, and lazy. I do this even when I agree with the message being preached because it’s just not good story-telling.

However, the question comes up as to why it’s bad story-telling. And, while I’m struggling with the whole “Augustine might be smart but he’s still an idiot” thing, my brain has been coming up with the answer to this other question.

The reason preaching is bad story-telling is because it forces everything to follow a set-piece theme and anything that deviates from this must be removed or mocked. It causes the author to turn just about every scene, every conversation, every interaction, every internal monologue to become yet another chance to deliver The Message. Every character is cast in terms of how they deal with The Message. Every plot point becomes about how The Message is Good. There’s no chance for the characters to develop quirks, personalities, relationships, or any characteristic that is not going to re-enforce The Message.

Historically, the worst examples of this have been in Christian fiction. For instance, I read the entire Left Behind series and found it enjoyable as a nice fluff read. However, I rarely find myself interested in going back and re-reading this series because the characters are so dull and one dimensional. They’re either “saved” (which is a word I hate because of that Augustinian transactionalism) and thus always doing Good or repenting for doing Bad and praying for those who aren’t “saved” yet. If they’re not “saved” then they are either Pure Evil with no hope of redemption or they’re selfish, self-centered, self-focused, hedonistic people who will either become “saved” or will become Pure Evil.

But real people aren’t like that and that is part of the tragedy. I know plenty of wonderful people who aren’t Christian. Yes, I fear that they will go to the Bad Place in the hereafter and yes, I pray for them. But they’re not inevitably selfish or self-centered. They are human. They’re kind, generous, willing to sacrifice to help others — either because of their own faith or because they believe in something like karma. I know plenty of Christians who are real jerks. And they are “real” Christians but they are just deeply unpleasant people to be around.

Now, the current trend in preach-fic goes two ways: either it’s Woke or it’s anti-Woke. Regardless of which side it’s on, it’s got characters who are flat. The protagonists are always the enlightened ones who see The Truth and are trying to get everyone else to bend to The Truth. The antagonists are always hateful, self-centered, narcissists who hate The Truth and instead want to enslave everyone to Their Power. Anyone who isn’t a protagonist is just another Sheep who needs to be Herded to The Truth.

Literally the only difference is which Truth is The Truth.

This is story-telling on the level of fairy tales we tell to very young children who are not developed well enough to understand just how complex reality and real life can be. It’s on the level of something like Cinderella with the Evil Stepmother and Evil Stepsisters who are trying to keep Cinderella from finding happiness. Sure, that’s a good foundation for a story and there are plenty of stories that are Cinderella stories that are quite fun to read and re-read. But the good stories move beyond the Cinderella = Pure Good and Evil Stepfamily = Pure Meanness. Adult readers get very tired of stories that are constructed with no more complexity than the fairy tales we tell toddlers because we know that reality is not like that.

Another reason that preach-fic is boring is for the same reason that having someone nag you gets old fast: if you’re an adult, you know what’s going on in your world. Being constantly reminded of a situation you know does nothing to help and it makes you just tune out the person talking because you’re sitting here thinking “and you think I haven’t considered this? Do you think I’m an idiot?”

It’s the same phenomenon that causes teenagers to roll their eyes and shut their ears when they’re getting harped on for the umpteenth time about Drugs Are Bad, Mmkay? They got the message the first dozen times. The more you harangue them, the more likely they are to say “well, if I’m going to get lectured about it, I might as well try it so there’s a reason for the lectures in the first place.”

That same thing happens on a cultural level, as well. The louder The Message gets preached, the more people tune out. That is causing the preachers to just get louder and more insistent with The Message which makes more and more people tune out. The only hope is for one side or the other to figure this out and start telling interesting stories where The Message is just part of the backdrop and theme and no longer the driving force of the story itself.

— G.K.

Augustinian Transactionalism Is A Headache

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No, I haven’t forgotten about this place. However — and I cannot overemphasize this enough — trying to explain Augustine, Anselm, and why they are both kind of idiots is incredibly difficult. That’s been my stumbling block for months and that’s why there haven’t been any updates.

Add in that I am currently looking for work and I just haven’t been able to find the time or energy to study history while I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to pay my bills and you’ve got a pretty good picture of how things are.

That said, hopefully I will find something soon and will be back to explain why Augustine, even though he is a Church Father, is also a ginormous idiot.

— G.K.