What the Hell are The Lost Tales About?

The Lost Tales of Emerson Kaye is heavily layered in metafiction. It asks the reader to understand that the author is playing a character inside his own invented world.

Think Yuunral Naretar from The Last Queen of the Underverse—just less jokey and far more personal.

In this short story, I blur the line between creator and creation by writing a version of myself into the story: a lonely, divorced man who is suddenly confronted by his own fictional protagonist, Emerson, at a neighborhood Applebee’s. This surreal framing device becomes a way to process reality. In the author’s note, I explain that Emerson is essentially a bolder version of myself—the one who says the things I wish I had said.

Emerson becomes that person who, in hindsight, delivers all the right lines at exactly the right time.

The journal fragments accompany the story in the book. They are “real” in the sense that I genuinely spent years writing them as a creative exercise in Emerson’s voice and had been published online in various forms. Within the fictional universe, however, those same notes are repurposed as a mysterious historical record of conversations between the “author” and his 321-year-old friend.

Ultimately, the entire book—including its imagined histories, the magical Underverse, and the character of Emerson—is a creative vehicle for exploring emotional truth. Specifically, it grapples with isolation and trauma in the years following my divorce. Some of those echoes still linger, as Rebecca says in Book 2 after the loss of S’Rah: You adjust.

It’s a fictional story about the emotional weight of storytelling itself. A companion piece to the broader fantasy series, it contains the deeply personal reflections that refused to stay quiet.

Is it any good?

I have no idea.

Read it and let me know.

This collection of fictional journals and narrative excerpts chronicles the life of Emerson Kaye, a man who claims to be over three hundred years old. A meta-fictional memoir, blending personal recollections of barroom encounters with an epic fantasy backstory involving a dimension called the Underverse. Through a series of philosophical dialogues, Emerson shares unconventional wisdom on parenting, religion, and human nature with the narrator, Dono. Central to the plot is Emerson’s tragic romance with a magical marble warrior named Three and his enduring quest to return to her world. Ultimately, the work explores themes of longevity, grief, and the power of storytelling as a means to preserve history.

Digital Copy Available Here!