Every protagonist I have written carries both.

Craig Anderson in SEER. Alan Charms in Black Water. Significant gifts. Significant wounds. The two living together in the same person and the wounds making it difficult to access the gifts. That is not a formula I chose consciously. It is a pattern that keeps emerging because I believe it reflects something true about how people actually work.

The most gifted people I have known in real life are rarely the most confident. The talent is often there in abundance. The access to it is complicated by what happened. By the father who left. By the community that dismissed them. By the failures that accumulated before they understood what they were building toward. By the voices that said you are not enough long before there were voices saying you are exactly what is needed.

Trauma and talent are not opposites. They often travel together. And the story of a life — the interesting version of it, the version worth telling — is usually the story of someone finding their way through the trauma to the talent. Not around it. Through it.

That is what I am writing in every protagonist I create.

Alan Charms has access to things in the spiritual world that most people do not. He has abilities that are genuinely extraordinary. And he cannot fully use them because the weight of what he has been through sits on top of them like a stone. The journey of the series is the journey of that stone being lifted. Not all at once. Gradually. Through conflict and loss and discovery and the kind of painful growth that only happens when you cannot find another way around.

I write that journey because I have been in it myself. Because I know what it feels like to have something in you that you cannot fully access. Because I believe the thing that is in you is worth the fight to reach it.

Alan Charms is fighting that fight. Craig Anderson fought it before him. And if you are reading this and you recognize yourself in that description — you are not alone in it. And the thing buried under the weight is still there. Still waiting. Still yours.

Go get it.

Stephon Rudd