About Dominic de Souza

I'm an accidental world traveler, married to a stunning, freedom-fighter woman named Maria, with a small darling gangster daughter named Peanut (sorry, Leta), and a corgi with attitude for days - Kiffles. I'm the eldest of 8 kids, born in New Zealand, raised in Australia, schooled in Fiji and France, and now living in the USA. I graduated from the Writer's Institute from Children's Literature, self published my first novel that I wrote at 13, and have been in marketing and branding for 25 years.

I don’t claim to know exactly where this Substack goes. I am working through my thoughts, and they’re not always comfortable. But they are always compelling to me.

Welcome along my journey. It’s going to be a wyrd one.

Some of my story

About a decade ago, I left the tribe and family of my childhood over some serious disagreements. With nothing but a couple of bucks in the bank, a new wife, a baby on the way, and no idea what to do, I stopped writing and started levelling up my career.

I had nothing, and needed to teach myself some serious skills. In ten years, I proved to myself that I could learn whatever I wanted, and create a ton of value for clients and companies.

My deeper, narrative theme is all about finding a wardrobe to Narnia, and through a surprising door in a wall, we step into full, enchanted reality, the home where we truly belong.

And each novel is not about some Christian, fictional escapism. It's more like an escape out of the fake, disinterested, disenchanted world we've woven around ourselves, this inhuman matrix that slowly chokes and drowns our creativity and our lives with flashy lights and dopamine hits.

I think we're all alive for simple reasons. To dig a well, plant a tree, raise a child. That means to make the world better by 1% for someone else, to pass on what I love and know, and to think beyond myself and my cravings to build a world where we're all just a little bit more free.

Only free people can stand up for themselves, and create more freedom.

But I'm not kidding anyone. We're standing deep in moral marshlands, and there's no way we're getting through this alive, or with lily-clean hands.

The best we can do is find the second star on the right, and follow it straight on till morning.

That means, get past your first, compulsive answer to a problem, and orient your life according to the highest possible ideas. Cue Jordan Petersen here. And then follow that star through the darkness until morning breaks - when things get better.

And if it’s not better yet, it’s not over.

In the end, all will be well. For that reason, I am a universalist, probably very syncretist, and a Catholic who practices radical hospitality alongside radical boundaries.

The world needs our resilience and heroism, our ability to know ourselves and hew to our boundaries, to get used to making fast and firm choices for good reasons, to be ready to bind ourselves to our responsibilities, and to fight for the right and good until we fall at our post.

My favorite movie as a kid is First Knight, with Sean Connery.

Writing Fiction

Together, we're going to follow the path of the Wandery, a House from LegendFiction. Wanderies are the Magician cluster of the Archetypes. Magicians are the Explorers, Innocents, and Sages, meaning we thrive on discovery, exploration, education, mastery, and doing new things.

This is my starting point on the wheel, which means I personally, and my characters, are usually focusing on journeys into the other quadrants: learning how to be a warrior, how to love more openly, and how to be better leaders.

Most importantly, I stay up late at night, and wake up really early, to dream. Dream of gods and dragons and heroes pulled into fantastical adventures.

Themes I love

• Do you like epic fantasy and scifi novels, filled with gorgeous and eerie and fantastical beings, big civilizations and heroic characters? Like Avatar, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Brahmastra, War of the Worlds, Dune…

• Do you love fast paced, action-focused storytelling with blockbuster ideas? Like Dark Knight Rises, The Musketeers, Hunger Games, Locke & Key…

• Do you thrive on secret societies, time travelling, and mysteries of ancient ruins? Like 12 Monkeys (Series), Debris, Travellers, Old Guard, Stranger Things…

• Do you get inspired by characters struggling with deep ideas that actually get you thinking about being human, and our place in an incredibly complex world? Like Inception, Witcher, YOU…

• Do you love the chills you get from paranormal fiction where what we think we know about things is wrong, and we have to relearn everything fast, or we die? Like Evil, The Sandman, Lockwood & Co…

Yep, those are mostly movies, because I love a lot of movies. And a ton more that I just can't add to this list.

When it comes to novels, I'm a big fan of Brandon Sanderson, Rick Riordan, Arthur C Clarke, HG Wells, Michael Crichton, CS Lewis, Tolkien, and and a handful of others.

This is the world I love and live in, and am writing tales about. I seem to be following a recurring pattern: the main character are forced into a new world, or robbed of their old one. Now, they must go on adventures of discovery, and self-discovery, because everything they knew was wrong.

Deep down, I’ve discovered a theme that I return to over and over. Its a snatch of a lullaby that turns my ear and warms my heart: “And then they turned the corner, or opened the door, and were surprised to find Heaven."

How I see the world

I'm on a feverish inner journey to understand how everything works. I'm not satisfied with a lot of the pat answers from scientific or religious apologists. I believe deeply that we're called to unearth and celebrate truth, wherever we find it.

This leads me into a lot of faithful deconstruction, of what I know about faith, religion, science, and everything. In my stories, I'm doing something deeply real (and deeply fun) for me. My life is dedicated to the relentless hunt for Holy Wisdom, this glorious truth surging beneath the thin layer of ice we all skate on, the thin layer of reality we call life.

That's why my stories focus on fairy tales, angels, gods, dragons, and demons. I'm here to go on the coolest, most dangerous and dramatic adventures I can, because something is calling me. Calling me out of a dark forest, and I can't sit and do nothing.

Maybe you'll join me. Maybe not. That's ok. I'm building my home on the fringe of civilization, planting my gardens with fruits and plants excavated from the deep forest, and other countries. That scares some people.

Not me. I think that the only way we, as humans, grow stronger, is when we eat things from all over. We filter out the poison, and bind our bodies to the good and the true and the wholesome. We're always entering into communion with the world around us, drawing it into our bodies, and making ourselves out of it.

And if we're patient and lucky, we might begin to see the outlines of angels, and the whispers of the fae. And we can feel the hum of Eywa, discern the records of the gods, and the deep smile of the GodMan from before time.

It's a world made up of dragons.

Let's ride.