Amid the Vastness of All Else

Publication Day: June 24, 2025

Amid the Vastness of All Else

By C.S. Humble

Around seven years ago I came across a poem written by an obscure writer who had died long before I was born. His name was M.H. Cobb. The work was entitled The Mountain in the West. It was random chance, I suppose, or the residue of design if your belief system so leans. I had been working on building a fictional mountain range as the setting for a macroverse idea I had, and when Cobb’s work came into my life it changed me. It did what all the great works of poetry and fiction and love hope to do, making itself a mirror I could see myself in. Not the me that exists, but the me that I wanted, and in many ways still, strive to become.

From that moment forward I felt a responsibility within myself to equally, as Cobb had done for me, put forth something beautiful in the world. Something that both came from within and yet, somehow beyond me. That the source of myself might be contained within the work and, for the reader, present a headlong vision of hope and joy, sorrow and the means to endure all the challenges that come with those human emotions.

Thousands of hours, over a quarter of a million words later, through the vasty sea of different publishers and trials and struggles, I am happy to say that Amid the Vastness of All Else was produced and is now available to the world. Complete and in its (current) entirety, the saga sets itself across the wild landscape of a panicked, post Slaver’s Revolt United States of America, where I have taken great liberties with the realism of its supernatural elements, while also striving hard to paint a portrait which remains true enough to the historicity of the brutality of the time. I believe the work to be honest, transparent, fantastical and representative of the timeless tradition of Texas writers telling a tale far too grand to be real. And while the saga may not be real, it is a very true story. A story spanning those twilight years of what we know to be the Frontier period and the dark mythology which we call the Wild West.

Among these pages you will find many things. Landscapes that populate both the memories of my youth, especially those set in Texas, but also places far from my fatherland which hold within themselves their own kind of grandeur. Arizona and New Mexico, with their sunbaked plateaus yellow as sheet cake. New Orleans is there, too, quite prominently, teeming with life and music and the naked spirit of carnal happiness I have never known elsewhere. Chicago, Kansas, Charleston, all real places, but also fictional places like the Deep Creek Trading Post, Black Wells. Yellow Hill, where the story begins, is an amalgam of all the many oil field towns I grew up in as a boy. That West Texas realm where all the sun’s positions make a glory of the morning and the evening, boil the day, and at night shade the world so dark it hides all of the landscape and none of the stars. But the landscapes are nothing but empty cleverness without the people living within them. As much as the land refines the people, the people living within it are the place. And so, you will find various characters, all of whom I have grown to love and admire, sometimes despise, and here at the end of the saga I find myself missing them all the time. I am sometimes deeply grateful that I can imagine them whenever I want, bring them to life should I miss them too much, but for now, with the publication of the saga this year, I think they are glad to be rid of me for a while. I’ve done a great deal to them, but like all grand friends and lovers, they have shown up every time, always reminding me who they are.

And of course the work is filled with gunfights and horse chases, peril at every single sharp turn in the narrative road. Supernatural Horror, heart-stopping Adventure, Coming-of-Age, Unrequited Love, the thrill of life to its top. The saga is an attempt to build a kind of narrative pavilion where we might hide from our many cares and woes and share an incommunicable experience of life piled on life.

In short, and transparently, my goal was to write the best goddamn story that had ever been told. To be the kind of writer for you that M.H. Cobb was for me.

Did I accomplish that goal? Probably not for most. But the journey itself has meant everything to this writer. It allowed me to say goodbye to West Texas, helped me find disenfranchised voices that, in my youthful ignorance, never would have known. And more than that, it helped me to say goodbye to three grandparents, my father, and brought so many new and wonderful people into my life. It is the fulfilment of a promise to the people who have mentored me over decades, if but only to say, “Thank you for believing in me.”

This saga may not be well remembered over the course of additions to the stockade of marvelous fiction produced by human hands over the span of our species, but it has been special to me; and that, as they say, must be enough.

I think, as I get older, it can be that. But I will keep writing, hot-hearted and forever feeling incomplete until the last story is done. Hopefully that is not for many, many more novels.

I hope you will read Amid the Vastness of All Else, and while you do, I will keep my end of the deal. I’ll keep writing, striving to get better all the time. Because that’s what the craft demands and what the author must demand of themselves, I think. The work, the beauty we put into the world smooths the little section of the world we are living in, while we live in it. This saga is seven years in the making, and for now I am happy to not say goodbye, but rather:

Only for a piece, only for a time,

-C.S. Humble (Seth)

June 24, 2025

Amid the Vastness of All Else is available via Shortwave, or Amazon.com