Fantasy was never the problem.

Almost thirty years ago, on the floor of my best friend’s room, a Fisher-Price castle was at war with a Fisher-Price pirate ship. They were sold as separate worlds and we played them that way: cannon against cannon, each behind its own walls. Then I took the ship’s hook, latched it onto a castle window, and sent the pirates up the line, and the war became men fighting men on the ramparts. No box art proposed it. My friend stared at the boarding party. “Panos, you have so much fantasy,” he said. In Greek, fantasy and imagination are one word: φαντασία. I have been trying to live up to that sentence since.

School kept a different score. I was not a good student, and the essay was where I failed most reliably. I could see a story whole and could not make sentences hold it; the games I played kept running in my head long after the screen went dark, and none of that ever reached the page. Nobody offered me a word for the gap. I assumed, the way children do, that the seeing did not count.

In my last year of high school the Greek curriculum put algorithm development in front of me: commands written out on paper, for a computer that existed nowhere in the room. I was hooked. A machine that executes whatever I can see, asking only that I say it precisely? I had met that machine before. It used to be a pirate ship.

The paper computer became a career in software engineering, and the career has been good to me. Then the machines learned to write code themselves, and my profession was invited to wonder whether it was still needed. For now that worry is overstated; the machines still need engineers who can tell right from wrong in what they produce. But I noticed something more interesting than the threat. People who had never written software were suddenly building it: rough and sometimes broken, but unmistakably theirs. Code had been the wall between their imagination and the made thing. The wall had a door now, and the ones walking through it were the disciplined, not the fluent.

Prose is the same kind of wall. There are people who can see a story completely and cannot make sentences carry it, and I know them well, because in an essay exam I was one. The Atelier Method is what I wish someone had handed that student: keep the seeing, delegate the sentences, and hold every page to a standard written down in your own hand.

I will keep making books this way, in the open, and The Archivist is the first of them. I hope the next one I read is yours. Fantasy is the asset; it always was. The wall between it and a finished thing has a door now, and what stands in the door is judgment. Judgment can be learned. My friend was right about me before I could type. Whoever was right about you, the tools have caught up.