Begin your flight
Story
The central work: novel excerpts and essays from my prose retelling of Buile Suibhne.
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Ancestry
Historical and mythic context: texts, places, and the MacSweeney inheritance around the Sweeney tradition.
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Vision
Why this project exists: to bridge medieval imagination, Christian symbolism, and modern literary craft.
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Quest
Chronicle Quest and Chronicle Writer: software that extends the same bardic storytelling vision.
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Sweeney
Why this author: Merlin in the tree, the name in the bloodline of claim, and the 1995–1997 recognition that started the work.
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Take Flight
Subscribe for finished excerpts, new essays, and project updates as the novel takes shape.
Subscribe →Why this site exists
Three creative nonfiction essays — the archetype, the recognition, and the life that paralleled the curse. The personal hook behind the retelling.
I · 1980
Becoming Anchorman In progress
Eighth grade, 1980 — auditioning only for Anchorman in The Idiot Box, and recognizing the guardian archetype that would keep returning: the long white beard, the book against the machine, the keeper of the word.
Read →II · 1995–1997
The Quest for Merlin In progress
University, 1995 — Tolstoy's Quest for Merlin, the hunt for O'Keeffe, and the 1997 surname search that delivered Buile Suibhne inside a packet from Ireland. How Merlin's Irish double was waiting under my own name.
Read →III · After
The Curse of Sweeney In progress
After the name attached — PTSD and the frenzy, exile and isolation, addiction and liminal sight, and the desert fathers' mercy that paralleled Moling's reception of Suibhne. Why retelling his story is, metaphorically, retelling my own.
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