The Dominion

There’s something about cleaning cabins deep in the woods that slows your mind down.

No traffic. No television. No noise except wind in the trees and the hum of a vacuum against wooden floors. The work is simple and repetitive, and that kind of quiet has a way of letting ideas surface that normally get drowned out by everyday life.

That’s where the idea for The Dominion began.

At first it wasn’t a story. It was a metaphor that wouldn’t leave me alone. A question, really: what if the things we treat as harmless entertainment are not as harmless as we think? What if stories, images, and ideas are more like seeds than distractions?

Human processing speed is slow. We don’t change overnight. We absorb. We normalize. We adapt in small, almost invisible steps. What feels shocking today becomes ordinary tomorrow, and eventually it becomes expected.

The thought crept in while I was wiping down countertops and making beds: entertainment isn’t just something we consume. It’s something that quietly shapes the rooms inside our minds.

Ideas need a place to live.
Stories give them shelter.

The Dominion began as an exploration of that idea — not as a lecture, but as a story. Fiction has always been a safe way to examine dangerous questions. It lets us explore uncomfortable possibilities from a distance, the way you might watch a storm from the safety of a porch.

What happens when the line between harmless fiction and shaping belief begins to blur?
What happens when stories stop reflecting culture and start quietly steering it?

I don’t have all the answers. That’s not the point.

This book started as a question I couldn’t shake while cleaning a quiet cabin in the woods, and it’s still a question I’m trying to understand.
As I kept writing The Dominion, the idea stopped being abstract.

It became a family.

I started imagining a home slowly pulled apart — not by violence, not by tragedy, but by distraction. Screens glowing in separate rooms. Conversations getting shorter. Laughter becoming rarer. Even when everyone was together, they weren’t really together.

That thought unsettled me more than anything else.

We often think of entertainment as harmless because it feels passive. Relaxing. A reward after a long day. And in many ways, it can be. Stories can inspire, comfort, and bring people closer.

But like anything powerful, it has a shadow.

While writing, a question kept surfacing: what if the real danger isn’t what entertainment shows us, but what it slowly replaces? Quiet conversations. Shared meals. Bored moments that turn into meaningful ones. The simple act of being present with the people we love.

A family doesn’t break all at once.
It drifts apart a few minutes at a time.

That realization hit closer to home than I expected. It made the story feel less like fiction and more like a warning whispered in the background of everyday life.

The Dominion stopped being just a metaphor about ideas.
It became a story about attention… and what happens when we give too much of it away.