Why I Rebuilt The Author's Desk and Where It's Headed Now
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Time to read 4 min
Candle Face Chronicles outgrew its place on the Branching Plot Books website and earned its own home at candleface.com. That move freed up The Author's Desk to focus on my full catalog, my writing process, and the two fields behind all of it: intelligence analysis and investigations. Those threads run through every book I publish, from The Crawl Space to Isabel to The Lost Souls.
The Author’s Desk is back with a clean slate. I’ve deleted the old posts and started over. Two things drove that decision: where Candle Face Chronicles needed to live, and where I wanted this blog to go next.
Candle Face Chronicles had outgrown its place on the Branching Plot Books website. For years, most of what I wrote here was tied to Candle Face in one way or another. The investigation expanded. The reader base grew. The material earned its own home, so I built one. Everything related to Candle Face now lives at www.candleface.com. That includes the books, the investigation, reader contributions, updates, and The Journal. This site can now focus on my other titles.
What The Author's Desk Covers Now
I’ve got other books and projects that deserve attention. This blog needs to cover them too. Going forward, The Author’s Desk will cover my full catalog, my writing process, and two fields that have shaped how I write: intelligence analysis and investigations. I spent more than thirty years in those fields. They’re baked into how I think about story, structure, and the reader’s role in a book. Candle Face still belongs in that conversation. The day-to-day investigation now lives at www.candleface.com, but the books themselves are part of how I write, and they’ll come up here when the topic calls for it.
Here’s where that shows up. Branching Plot Books is built on reader interpretation and engagement. Readers piece things together, weigh what’s credible, and arrive at conclusions the book won’t hand over. Analysis runs the same way. An intelligence analyst doesn’t just accept what lands on the desk. You study the source, test the information against what you already know, look for patterns, and flag the gaps. Investigators take a similar approach. The source counts as much as the information itself, and sometimes more. A piece of information from a shaky source can mislead an entire case. A reliable source with limited information can still move things forward. I vet sources. Always have. And I write with that same instinct.
You see it in every book I’ve published. The Crawl Space is where I first built interactive storytelling into the structure of a novel. Three boys get trapped in a dark corridor with three doors. Readers decide which door they take. That choice sends the story down a different path, with a different outcome. The book holds several possible endings, each one shaped by the choices a reader makes along the way.
Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona took that idea further than anything I had tried before. The book is built from real cryptic notes left behind by a Candle Face follower, and each note has eight variants. Pick a different variant, get a different version of the story. Isabel produces more reading combinations than there are stars in the observable universe. The number isn’t a gimmick. Every variant shifts something about Isabel’s life, her family, her motives, and how she became what she became. Each combination is part of an investigation the reader runs. Think of Isabel as a Choose Your Own Adventure book on steroids. The biggest of them had 44 alternate endings. Isabel holds a number so large it has 80 digits and no common name. I’ve recently submitted Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona to Guinness World Records for the most reading combinations in a book.
Candle Face Chronicles: The Lost Souls goes the furthest. The book asks readers to help me solve real paranormal cold cases. The testimonies come from spirits who were killed by Candle Face or her followers. The clues are in the details: a road, a name, a job, a final conversation. I’ve done what I can with what I have, but one person can only cover so much ground. Readers who catch something I missed can bring it to www.candleface.com and help move a case forward. That’s a real investigation, and it only functions because readers are willing to do the analysis.
Every title I write follows the same principle. I want the reader thinking, analyzing, and participating. That’s how I was trained to process information. The stories that stick are the ones that ask the same of their readers. A reader who finishes a book of mine and walks away unchanged missed the point. A reader who finishes one and starts asking questions, poking at contradictions, or looking up a name I mentioned is doing exactly what the book was built for.
Where The Author's Desk is Headed
Expect posts about the other books, the writing process, research notes, and the places where intelligence, investigations, and fiction overlap. Some posts will tie directly to a book. Others will cover broader ground. The tone will stay what it’s always been: direct, grounded, and written for readers who want to think along with me.
If you came here for Candle Face Chronicles, head over to www.candleface.com. Everything is there, and there’s plenty more on the way.
If you came here for the rest, you’re in the right place.
Arthur Mills
For over two decades, Arthur Mills served as an Army Intelligence Warrant Officer, specializing in piecing together what others missed: patterns, threats, enemy intent, and clandestine activity. He also trained intelligence professionals, built threat models, and briefed commanders and world leaders on global threats and battlefield strategy. After retiring from the military, he transitioned into private investigation, focusing on missing persons, human trafficking, opposition research, and fraud cases. He also holds a degree in Counterterrorism, adding academic grounding to the skills he developed in the field.
He is an award-winning author who has been writing books since 2006. While he publishes under his own name, much of his best and most widely read work has appeared under pseudonyms. Readers may already know those titles, although they would not know they are his. That separation is intentional because just as his books invite readers to participate and interpret what is hidden between the lines, his career as a writer reflects the same principle.
