Are You a Mystic Nerd?

All authors know they should imagine their Ideal Reader.

It sounds simple enough. You picture a certain age group, maybe a gender, a profession, a lifestyle. If you write cozy mysteries about a quilting sleuth, maybe your Ideal Reader is a Crazy Quilt genius. If you write romance, tradition points you to middle-aged women. It can all be very neat and tidy.

Or not.

The Three Guinea Pigs

My fantasy series 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles has wonderful readers, but they don’t tick off neat demographic boxes. One of my loyal readers doesn’t read fantasy. At all. Ever. He’s a transplanted Southern musician in his seventies.  Another fan is a D&D devotee — a college-aged, non-binary artist. Then there’s the middle-aged Californian woman who writes in the margins of Dostoevsky and underlines Chomsky. They’re not the same age. Not the same gender, background, or profession.

And yet they all love this series.

I struggled to find the thread that united them. What kind of reader was I writing for? Then, I let the question go — and let creativity take over.

Birth of the Mystic Nerd

This is a reincarnation epic with layered storytelling, multiple Worlds, tangled identities and shifting stylistic points of view. It’s anchored by Sahara Fleming, the present-day incarnation of Sharzad — yes, the historical model for Scheherazade. Like many in her soul group (called the qaraq), Sahara doesn’t actually believe in reincarnation. Until the memories start to flood in. Chapter by chapter. Lifetime by lifetime.

There’s complexity: eleven hidden structures in every chapter. There’s absurdity: titles like “The Tale of the Love Spat Between Two Atomic Particles” or “The Tale of Saaaarm and Argmhm, the First Cavedogs.” And there’s recurring mystery: a silver, oval-shaped object that morphs from ancient dagger to elephant talisman to subversive copy of The Thousand and One Nights — each object unlocking some deeper layer of memory.

You’ve got to be a little bit of a Nerd — capital N — to hang in with the repetition, the jumps between realities, the sheer scope. And since there are 1001 past life stories, you probably have a touch of the Mystic, too.

Thus was born my Ideal Reader: the Mystic Nerd.

Back to the Guniea Pigs

Back to my three devoted qaraqi guinea pigs. Are they spiritual? Not especially. They don’t do Tarot spreads or keep crystals in their nightstands. Like I do. But they love an oddball enigma, a beautiful mind-bender, a story that doesn’t play by the usual rules. That’s Mystic enough for me.

They’re also, every one of them, hardcore Nerds. They treasure obscure facts and love sharing them. They chase meaning through the tangles of ambiguity. They overthink until the cows come home. They love puzzles and obscure indie artists and rabbit holes of forgotten knowledge. They light up at the idea that The Reincarnation Chronicles jumps from World to World — one moment in a laundromat in a parallel universe, the next in an alien school of performing arts. And if I handed them a secret manual decoding all eleven hidden structures per chapter, they’d read it for fun. And annotate.

So, What Is a Mystic Nerd?

Someone who finds joy in arcane, curious, or wildly specific information — whether or not it leads to cosmic truth. Someone who dogears pages in The Qaraq so they can keep up with a time jump back to a World visited twelve chapters ago. Someone who underlines phrases in The Qaraq and the Maya Factor, tracking how Sahara and her soul group lose touch with their past lives — because the present becomes too cluttered with the ordinary, the car repairs, the spilled lattes. That’s the Maya Factor: banal reality becoming so loud that it drowns out the echoes of reincarnation.

Some readers are most drawn to these present-day dramas of Sahara and the other qaraqis. Others prefer the wildly imaginative past lives and lose themselves (happily) in the cosmic climax of The Tale of the Nine Thoughts During the Endless Orgasm. Some readers live for the rules and hidden architectures that reveal themselves only after hundreds of pages.

The Mystic Nerd embraces them all.

Sound Familiar? Welcome to the Qaraq.

If that sounds like you — if you’ve ever been accused of thinking too much or caring too deeply (about a footnote) — you might just be a Mystic Nerd.

And if so, I think we’re going to get along just fine.

Ready to begin your journey?

Start with The Qaraq, the first volume of The Reincarnation Chronicles.  Or if you’re already a Mystic Nerd, go for The Qaraq and the Maya Factor, Book Two, launching 10/01/25.

Past lives, hidden structures, cosmic puzzles — and the daily mess that makes us forget it all.

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