Stories from a world broken by the collapse of everything digital — rebuilt with muscle, iron, and the stubborn refusal to stay down.
Peri Blackwood runs before dawn, measuring herself against a stopwatch that can't tell her what she needs to know. When a heist gone wrong pulls her family into something far larger than a score, she'll learn that the things worth keeping can't be timed — and the things worth fighting for don't come with a clean exit.
Get Notified Browse All BooksSix collections set in the world of Blood & Steel — prequels and companion stories to the forthcoming Ironforged novels. Each stands alone. Together, they build a world.
I've been building this world for thirty years. Not all at once — in pieces. Characters carried around like emotional luggage from one notebook to the next, one failed draft to the next, one life chapter to the next. Peri, Kitt, Kataero, Wynne — they've been with me longer than most people I know.
The Blood & Steel universe is set in a world that lost everything digital and had to rebuild with what was left: muscle, iron, and the stubborn refusal to accept that civilization was over. It's not post-apocalyptic in the wasteland sense. It's post-collapse in the human sense — communities finding new ways to function, power structures rising from the wreckage, and ordinary people caught between the machinery of systems that don't care about them.
The short story collections are the foundation — prequels and companion pieces that establish the world before the Ironforged novels begin. Wilted Crowns is the first full novel. Five books in the Ironforged series. Fifteen planned across the broader saga. One story, told across decades.
By day, I work in transportation and logistics. By night, I write about people who refuse to stay broken. The gap between those two things is smaller than you'd think.
“Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.”— 1 Corinthians 9:25
