from the Author's Desk:

Unit sales writing long-form fiction is the least I’ve been paid for my creativity in any career I’ve held so far.

My secret power in previous careers was my creativity, remembering some career gigs where I was paid by the minute and giggled watching the receipts stack up.

In writing a novel, the storyteller has control of almost everything. The final product of weeks, months, or years can feel deliciously satisfying. More so as the original intellectual property builds into a shelf of books.

What the Author can’t control is how a special Reader will react. That’s been true since the invention of the movable type press in Mainz around 1440 CE, starting the age of pirating intellectual property. The writing and publishing of longer works of fiction began in the early 1600s in the Romance languages — and even earlier in China.

Tech in the early 2000s incited rapid proliferation of long-form fiction. By 2020, the business behind Big Tech had thrown up paywalls as a net to capture profits from both Author and Reader. Now entertainment writers have to pay for ads before a noteworthy Reader will see a book is available to buy.

By 2024, Big Tech businesses were consuming trillions of books, songs, and artworks to train their newest money-making tools, without compensating the originators.

Here we are 600 years later, and there is now a digital version of the movable-type press. The business owners of the new AI movable type press engines are taking the same liberties the mechanical press owners took hundreds of years ago: using other people's work to make money, and keeping all the money for themselves.

Let's recap the biggest book resellers, search engines, and social media platforms. They:

• Now require storytellers to pay for advertising before the original works are made available for Readers to buy or subscribe to
• Are still taking a cut from the book sale or page reads
• Are training their AI tools from the books

Meanwhile, I'd like you to listen to and read my stories.

I created my own online store.

I'd like your help making Maurllan's Cast Theater a fun place to visit by listening to and reading my stories and by writing reviews to feature on Maurllan.com.

Hit reply to my Moonletters.

And I still can't control how you react to my storytelling.

But your reactions are part of the art of storytelling which humans evolved with — long before machinery and digital movable-type presses! Storytelling is the essential survival technique of keeping each other alert around a fire at night while predators make frightening noises in the dark shadows beyond the flickering firelight.

It's the thing we do together.

Maurllan's Cast Theater is the storytelling site.

You found your way here to read about me

The other thing I can’t control as an Author is whether you will pay the favor forward: let another exceptional Reader know you have found a fun Author, and where to find me:

https://maurllan.com

I type with ten fingers

The storytelling flows from my creativity — sometimes in all-consuming waves. I use a tall stack of editing tools to polish my work — any industry leader uses the best tools.

The rest of the glitches you’ll find are eccentricities and foibles of my emotional history and the detritus of deep reading. If we are what we eat, we write from what we read — how the insights land on my pages is part of the magick.

Voice is the hardest element of writing to develop and the most valuable when achieved.

Most contemporary narrative voices in the book market fall into recognizable categories:

• commercially accessible (prioritizes clarity over complexity)

• genre-conventional (sounds like other Romance, Fantasy, SciFi, etc.)

• literary (prioritizes language over story)

• experimental (prioritizes innovation over coherence)

Maurllan's Literary Populist storytelling voice:

• accessible to genre fans

• coherent enough to immerse

• sophisticated enough for serious readers

• innovative enough to surprise

• narrative voice inside and outside the story simultaneously

• silkily, seamlessly shifts between literary sophistication and playful irreverence

• rhythmic urbanity

• archetypal accessibility

• cultural bridge-building (academic, pop culture, folklore, slang)

• temporal omniscience (fluid across contemporary sensibility, historical authenticity, mythic timelessness, and metafictional awareness)

• consistently grounds wonder in visceral, sensate experiences — bridging cognitive centers for multi-modal engagement

• adapts personality to match Cast Lead perspective — a suave technique many writers never master

You're now part of the Inner Team. Who are we? The Cast Leads of Maurllan.

Let’s talk about you

You’re here at Maurllan's Cast Theater. You’ve lingered long enough to dig deeper — who is this guy?

Your legs may have crossed at the ankles while eavesdropping, wrinkled your nose, run fingertips along the titles to see the goldish glow come and go.

Your eyes may have lit up, laughed at some quip of mine or even had a racing of goosebumps up your arms to the nape.

Your throat may have swallowed repeatedly while a palm rubbed the back of your neck, thinking about the worst-case scenario of reading more of my spells — knowing as you do the etymology of Old English ‘tale’ or spell is from the Germanic spellan, ‘to tell’.

I write using spells. I use spell checkers.

You’ll feel the practical magick as a palpable sense of wonder which creeps along the skin, introducing spontaneity in your stride, an unusual open-mindedness, a craving for spicy storytelling, and a sense of marvel in your deep breathing.

Be special

Your unique reading pedigree is my delight. I can only imagine the books you have read and who your favorite Authors have been, investing in yourself. Slip your mind into any of my Cast Lead’s thoughts and enjoy yourself.

Buy something while you’re here

My products are only available at Maurllan's Cast Theater. You'll be using my choice of a secure website vendor and your pick between two secure payment processors — we couldn’t get any closer to each other unless you touched my left elbow to introduce yourself at a favorite coffee shop of mine.

You can get a sniff of the steeped alfalfa flowers and field grasses aroma of my Iron Goddess of Mercy Oolong tea.

What amazing thing will you share with me?

For the special love of your day,

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Maurllan

(Pronounced Mar•Law•on)

read Maurllan

get Voice: https://maurllan.com/collection/get-voice

get Royal: https://maurllan.com/collection/trade-paperbacks

get Digital: https://maurllan.com/collection/ebooks

get Resources (behind the storytelling): https://maurllan.com/blog/resources