ANGUS STUMP

Z Kooper doesn't know who, where or when he is, but that's never stopped him before. Chased by the fallout of decisions made more than a millennium ago, he's on a mission to reassemble history, armed with nothing but a wobbly memory and a long-handled spatula. It's a time-bending, reality-warping adventure in unintentional heroism, and the multiverse may be betting against him.

Enter Gurney Poe, Z's shit-talking one-eyed handler, whose extradimensional expertise makes him both indispensable and insufferable. He's been Z's temporal sherpa for centuries, ever since their ill-advised meddling in a Viking dice game mangled the timeline. Now, as the fabric of reality starts to frazzle, it falls to Z and Poe to almost stitch it all back together.

Past and future collide in an unruly scramble of temporal tomfoolery, myth, and badly-behaved magic to keep the multiverse intact. Throw in a bratty bit of cosmic tech with a keen sense of chaos, and watch the stakes climb higher as the past grows murkier.

Fixing time is messy business, and Z approaches it with the grace of a skateboarding giraffe. His accidental heroics and Gurney Poe's snarky guidance launch them fedora-first into history's hidden pivotal moments. At each turn, Z discovers pieces of his own forgotten past, including a mysterious memory-adjacent someone named Boo, who just might hold the key to his fractured memory, his lonesome heart, and the survival of everything, everywhere.

And everywhen.

Turn Left is a genre-fluid, cheerfully chaotic speculative fiction with a warm heart and a crooked smile. Part Douglas Adams, part Kurt Vonnegut, it celebrates the beauty of imperfection and the magic of a well-timed accident. Also hash browns. With a badly woozled timeline and a universe at the tipping point, Z Kooper's adventure is just getting started. Again.

Angus Stump is not a writer.

He's adamant about this, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Sure, he's always written, but that doesn't make him a writer. He's just a guy who won't stop putting words on paper. Or screens. Or the back of envelopes.

His photojournalist origin story taught him to craft words to frame the world he captured with his lens. As a marketer, he cranked out copy nonstop. As a web director, from microwriting to deep dives, he spewed content like a digital woodchipper. Maybe he was writing, but he wasn't a writer.

For a blissfully irresponsible stretch, he paid the bills by stringing together music journalism, quirky people stories, and restaurant reviews for regional print publications, back when those things existed. But that wasn't writing. That was just survival.

And there's his 25-year career as a performing songwriter, where he served up four-minute odysseys of dented hearts and imperfect truths. But that's not writing writing. Right?

Then "Turn Left" happened. The story ambushed him at the intersection of "what if" and "why not," and the rest of that story lies between its covers.

Stump resides in Kansas. It is almost exactly like the third dimension but everything takes a little longer. His front porch affords an excellent view of the crooked furrows of the human condition, so he mostly stays indoors.

And don't call him a writer. He's not quite ready for that.