Wonder Where I’ve Been?
Heads down. Caffeine-fueled. Deep in the bunker.
I’ve been getting ready to launch my debut novel, Pejorative: Echoes of a Nation—a dystopian alt-history built from interviews, smuggled files, and shattered memory. This post is the behind-the-scenes look: where it started, what I uncovered, and why I had to write it.
If you’ve been wondering what I’ve been working on—this is it.
HOW A 'WHAT IF' BECAME A WARNING
Every story starts with a spark. For Pejorative: Echoes of a Nation, that spark was a question I asked on my blog, just a few “what if” scenarios about Alberta leaving Canada. At the time, it felt like speculative fiction. But the more I followed the rhetoric, the clearer it became that the lines between reality and fiction were blurring. What started as a thought experiment grew into something much deeper, a layered story about propaganda, memory, and the quiet erasure of national identity. In this piece, I look back on how Pejorative came to life, and how close it can come to the truth.
BEHIND THE PAGES OF PEJORATIVE
When I first sat down to write Pejorative, it wasn't born out of thin air. It started as a small spark, a single post on my website about Alberta's political rhetoric and the idea of a fractured Canada. I was mad, it went against everything I held sacred about Canada. And a lot of it seemed driven by mirroring U.S. authoritarian sentiment.
Originally, I was just exploring scenarios. I wanted to open peoples eyes. What if Alberta really did hold a referendum to leave? Would it be a straightforward political process, or something messier? Those questions led me down a rabbit hole, and I found myself drawn into the world of dystopian and alternate history storytelling, which I already loved. This topic though, I did not enjoy what I found.
From there, *Pejorative *evolved into something bigger. I didn’t want to just write about a physical incursion or a classic military conflict. Instead, I started to imagine a subtler kind of takeover, one rooted in information warfare and foreign influence. What if the real battleground was in the minds of people, with propaganda slowly eroding trust and nudging a region toward fragmentation?
Ultimately, that’s the heart of Pejorative: it’s less about tanks at the border and more about how fragile a nation’s unity can become under the slow drip of misinformation. And that’s how a single “what if” post turned into the novel you’ll be holding in your hands.
WHAT I FOUND WAS ALREADY UNDERWAY
The more I researched, the more I realized I wasn’t writing a distant dystopia, I was writing what was already unfolding. Pejorative didn’t just need a backstory; it needed a fuse, a timeline, and an accelerant to be come real.
I started digging. Military analyses of potential collapse scenarios. U.S. doctrine on insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. The unhinged blueprint of Project 2025. Open letters from U.S. senators laced with coercion. MAGA influencers painting propaganda as patriotism. I used my military training, even Canadian documents preparing for a Pentagon power shift, all pointing to one thing: a soft annexation hiding in plain sight.
Pattern recognition. Influence mapping. Every vector led toward the same conclusion: the worst-case scenario was no longer unthinkable, it was the most likely outcome. I hope I'm wrong and cooler heads prevail but I leaned into that and dug in.
In Pejorative, Alberta’s narrow vote to secede becomes the catalyst. But the real story is what follows, how misinformation, economic chaos, and political manipulation fracture a nation. It looks like it could be a forecast if we don't do something (yes, part warning there.)
NOT YOUR TRADITIONAL NOVEL — AND THAT’S THE POINT
*Pejorative *isn’t a typical debut novel. It’s fragmented. Chaotic. Built from lost archives, interviews, smuggled documents, and corrupted media files. There’s a loose timeline, but it doesn’t march forward cleanly, because war isn’t clean. Memory isn’t linear. And this isn’t fiction wrapped in a bow. It’s hopefully a warning and I stitched it together with whatever scraps survived (I've inserted some documents I found.)
That’s the risk I took. I know it might confuse some readers at first. But that confusion? That’s the point. This is what a hybrid war looks like, messy, disjointed, weaponized through narrative control and erasure. We’re already in it. And I wanted the structure of the book to reflect that lived chaos.
In the story, I’m not the hero. I’m the archivist. The guy piecing together the fragments before they vanish. The U.S. (or Unity, as it’s called in the book) has sealed the continent inside an information dome. Truth is filtered. History is rewritten. To the outside world, it’s snow globes and Hallmark cards. On the inside, it’s silence, memory crimes and genocide.
This book isn’t a clean story. It’s a recovered one. And I hope readers can sit with the discomfort long enough to see the warning hidden in the wreckage.
TAKE A RISK ON ME
This is my first full-length novel. And to be honest, I’m nervous. I’ve poured a lot of thought, research, and lived experience into Pejorative, but releasing something this personal, this unconventional, into the world? It’s terrifying.
Still, I believe in it.
I believe in the power of stories to warn us, to wake us up, to make us ask hard questions. If this book gets even one person to stop and rethink how they consume information, how easily truth can be bent, how memory can be stolen—then I’ve done my job.
And hey, beyond all that? It’s a damn good dystopian story. Alt-history with a future twist. If you like resistance tales, fractured narratives, and worldbuilding that feels just a little too close to now, *Pejorative *might be your kind of book.
So take a risk on me. Take a risk on this story. And if it resonates, pass it on.
I’m Jason, a science fiction writer obsessed with the places where technology, military life, and human nature collide - often in spectacularly messy ways. With a background in tech and the military, I love crafting stories full of sharp dialogue, immersive worlds, and unexpected humor. Follow along if you enjoy these kinds of stories or want to learn more about my writing and upcoming novels.