These Three Careers Are Secretly The Same Job.

WRITING CHILDREN'S BOOKS, SPECULATIVE FICTION, AND RUNNING AN ART GALLERY ARE THE SAME JOB. HERE'S WHY.

At first glance, these three worlds seem far apart.

Consider a children’s book that can travel to meet some of Earth’s strangest and most vulnerable creatures — the Northern Bald Ibis of Morocco, the giant wetapunga of New Zealand, the solenodon of Cuba. The questions a child asks could explore conservation, evolution, extinction, and the fragile wonder of life.

Speculative fiction, for me, asks a different set of questions: What if time could bend? What if consciousness survived inside a machine? What if humanity were only a brief transition between two forms of intelligence?

And an art gallery asks another: How do artists get seen, heard, valued, and remembered?

My job happens to be at the crossroads of all of the above.

I link them by the common thread of the act of wonder.

When I write for children, I try to protect curiosity before the world teaches them to hide it. I stretch that same curiosity in my speculative fiction to science, philosophy, fear, and possibility. And when I run TERAVARNA Art Gallery, I am surrounded by artists who do exactly that — through color, form, texture, memory, imagination.

All three look at the ordinary while also refusing to accept their ordinariness. To me, each one is a doorway to wonderment.

I honestly never felt the need to carve out separate roles for these. And it’s because they all point toward the same human hunger: the desire to understand, to imagine, to leave behind something meaningful.

In the end, whether I’m writing for a child, building a fictional universe, or supporting an artist’s journey, I’m doing just one act.

I am only trying to keep that wonder alive.