THE CURIOUS ORDER OF INK & FLAME

When Jack Prescott's father dies, he finds a steamer trunk in the attic and a great-grandfather nobody ever mentioned. J.B. Prescott was a cattleman's son, a pilot in the first war, a pulp writer, an explorer, a failed screenwriter, and the founder of a fellowship of writers that still meets on Saturday nights. He wrote a serial about a tree whose branches are worlds. In 1961 he walked into the woods in Tennessee and was never seen again.

The trunk holds his journals, his letters, and his stories, and Jack sets out to write the life. Then the dates stop adding up. A magazine that is seven years too early. A word nobody had coined. A typeface that had not been drawn. And a family that left him out of every conversation for sixty years, for reasons Jack's own father wrote on an index card.

A novel told in fifteen found documents, about what stories do to the world and to the people waiting at home.

Author & Protagonist is the companion: J.B.'s own 1952 course in fifteen lessons, reproduced page for page, with Jack's index cards translating each lesson for a world of phones, feeds, and AI. In the margins, in a later and shakier pencil, are a few notes J.B. should not have been able to write.

And the Order's whole archive lives on in a wiki: its characters, spirits, poetry and history, preserved as if it were real.

The author name on the books is Jack Prescott, the great-grandson in the story.