Showing results by author "JOSEPH SANTIAGO" in All Categories

When numbers and neighborhood stories meet, something powerful wakes up. Parish Stories: Data-to-Story Labs is a field guide for cultural creatives who want to work with data without losing their voice, their humor, or their community in the process. This book was built in and for places like New Orleans—and for every parish, county, borough, and neighborhood that knows it is more than a statistic. It treats “cultural creative” broadly: not just artists and writers, but anyone who carries culture into their work and connects it back to the people they serve—teaching artists and ...

What do you do with the strange, sharp, beautiful burden of being alive? In I Didn’t Want To Create a New Sadness, Joseph Santiago offers a compelling collection of short stories that move through sorrow, memory, longing, identity, humor, and the strange emotional weather of modern life. These stories do not simply entertain—they linger, question, unsettle, and illuminate. Across intimate reflections, uncanny encounters, and deeply human moments, Santiago explores what it means to carry grief, wrestle with change, laugh in the middle of pain, and keep searching for meaning in a world ...

Are you passionate about building thriving and inclusive communities? Do you want to make a positive impact on the lives of people around you? Look no further than "Community Development Frameworks: Building Thriving and Inclusive Communities." This comprehensive guide is specifically crafted for individuals actively involved in community development and planning, regardless of their level of experience. Whether you are a beginner or an expert in leading groups, this book offers practical insights and frameworks that can be readily applied to your own community development projects. The ...

MASTER THE FRAME Every situation is a game. See it. Read it. Win it. This pocket book is a survival kit for real rooms—HR traps, budget ambushes, grant boards, ER intake, hire–fire meetings, and “we just want to talk” surprises. When the door closes, this is the playbook you wish was in your pocket. What you get inside—fast, no fluff: Live drops: You’re thrown into the scene with only what a real person gets—voices, posture, timing, and pressure. Power Map: Who’s performing “nice,” who holds the lever, and who writes the record that sticks. Motive Read: What each player ...

POCKET UNIVERSE ADVENTURES: THE GALLEY In 1802, Tommy Bracken cooks below deck on the Persephone, where heat, salt, and routine are the only things keeping men human. Then the crew stops asking for seconds. A wreck drifts alongside. And Tommy realizes something out there isn’t just hungry. It’s watching. He survives the voyage, but the world doesn’t go back to normal. On shore, Tommy and Wallace build a place with a simple promise: a room where people eat like they matter. The Galley becomes a refuge, then a rumor, then a magnet—drawing in the bruised and brilliant, the cautious and...

Toad’s Terrible, No-Good, Very Excellent Adventure (How Not to Quest Properly) What happens when an imp with the self-preservation instincts of a sock in a tornado, a wizard who can’t stop turning things into chickens, a ghost rabbit with a talent for bad decisions, and a knight-turned-frog who just wants some peace get tangled in a fate-woven disaster? Well… this. Toad, an imp with a talent for absolutely the wrong kind of mischief, has been "banished" (read: promoted) to the Mortal Realm. Osric, a wizard desperately trying to master magic without creating more poultry, has somehow ...

What if fate came with a settings menu… and you’ve never checked what’s turned on by default? Subscribe to Fate drops you into the Great Game—a universe where gods argue over neural nets, lunar engineers discover their survival is a televised challenge, economies run on reputation, and a tiny gray “smudge” can derail a perfectly calibrated season of conflict. Inside this pocket-sized book you’ll find: An All-Father who wakes up to discover mortals have patched the code of creation. Moon colonists fighting for water, oxygen, and the right to be more than someone else’s ...

You didn’t buy this book. You picked up a Node. Inside are pocket universes, quick tales that open like doors. Each one drops you into a different room with different lighting, different stakes, different rules. A wet New Orleans street where paperwork has teeth. A corridor where “help” wears a smile and still asks for your surrender. A conversation that turns into a test without anyone admitting it is a test. Worlds that feel separate until you realize they are all running the same engine. These stories are meant to be stepped into. You will recognize the moments because you have ...

You picked up a Node—an ordinary-looking object with an unfair advantage: it turns everyday life into a readable map. A Pocket Universe is a room you can enter without leaving your life. The world outside stays the same—work, family, love, money, hunger, pride—but the noise stops pretending it’s neutral. You start noticing what was always there: who gets rewarded, who gets punished, who benefits when you stay confused, and what it costs to accept the role you’re being offered. That pattern is the Great Game: the invisible trade of attention, status, fear, desire, and control. It ...

You’re not just reading—you’re stepping through. On the train with a lukewarm coffee. In a hallway outside a meeting that’s already running late. At the sink while the group chat invents a new crisis. Players and Powers: Pocket Worlds in Play is the kind of book you crack open mid-day and the room tilts—just enough for the next move to appear. Think of each page as a small doorway: you touch the line, and a pocket world opens. In one, the conversation starts differently and people relax. In another, the schedule slides twenty minutes and the whole evening lands softer. Somewhere ...

The Pocket Universe Playbook Gate of Aesir · Pocket Universe Saga Stories you can walk into. This book is a set of doors—into places, people, and ideas that might not exist yet. Step through, look around, take notes, and—if you like—choose what happens next. Each story stands on its own and hands you something you can carry back to your day: a turn of phrase that opens a room, a small shift that changes the mood, a new way to see the block you live on. Inside you’ll roam pop-up neighborhoods, corner shops that bend time, meetings that flip from drift to decision, and nights where ...

YOU DIDN’T BUY THIS BOOK. YOU PICKED UP A NODE. In New Orleans, a “normal” lunch turns into an intake line—forms, name tags, and rules that start acting like they’ve always been true. When the room tries to file people into permanent categories, Mara does the only thing that works: she makes reality messy again. Today. Right now. This weather. This shift. No forever-words. But the storm doesn’t stop at the door. A service entrance peels open into the City of Echoing Pages—a metropolis built from book spines, ink-lamps, and sentences that rearrange themselves when you blink. ...

Step into a realm where the whisper of morning revelations unveils the path to inner wisdom, and the vibrant life of New Orleans sets the stage for a journey of self-discovery and communal understanding. "67 Days of NOLA Poetic Exploration Between Here And There" is not just a book of poetry; it's a soulful expedition across the landscapes of time, culture, and the mysteries of the human spirit. Week 7 - "The Experimental Certainty of Exploration Through Social Distance" - challenges readers to traverse the intellectual and emotional terrains of isolation, where the act of distancing ...

You didn’t pick up a book. You picked up a Node—a pocket doorway into a set of worlds where stories don’t describe reality. They shape it. In Sector Folio-7, a catastrophic cascade has begun. Worlds are bleeding into each other, rules are breaking, and a city built from living pages is starting to collapse from the inside. Streets repeat out of order. People forget who they are mid-sentence. And “plot holes”—literal voids—open in the ground and swallow entire blocks. Mara Keene is a Scriptor tasked with keeping this place intact. She enters the City of Echoing Pages to recover...

Some games are played for money. This one is played for reality. Shanghai, 1926. Meilin wants music. Jue wants the rush of the next perfect hand. What they get is taken. When a high-stakes Mahjong game draws the attention of Xenon—an ancient predator shaped by Greek philosophy and immortal hunger—the twins become collateral in a silent war that stretches from the International Settlement to Prohibition-era New York. Across the ocean waits Livia: Roman, ruthless, and building a modern empire out of jazz clubs, blood routes, and broken loyalties. But vampires are only the surface. Above ...

Before you find yourself—you’ll have to wander through the stories that shaped you. In the fourth volume of The Creative Works of Mr. Joe, Joseph Santiago invites you into a space where memory, myth, and imagination blur—where genre bends, and the self reveals itself in unexpected ways. Told through a kaleidoscope of flash fiction, short stories, and lyrical essays, these works explore the invisible threads that shape our lives: the fears we silence, the joy we nearly miss, and the rituals we invent to stay human. With a voice both vulnerable and sharp, Santiago weaves sci-fi ...

One slice changes everything. Welcome to the Great Game. This isn’t just a book. It’s an invitation to a universe that edits itself as you read. A place where memory is clay in the right hands, truth is a negotiation, and belief is both the lock and the key. To join the Great Game is to accept that certainty is brittle and doubt is a kind of magic. It’s to follow muses who deal in “maybe,” to bargain with gods updating their brands for modern worshippers, to find prophecies scrawled on pizza boxes and secret histories buried in the mundane. These pages hold stories of anti-heroes ...

WELCOME TO THE GREAT GAME. You didn’t just pick up a book. You triggered a side quest. Inside these pages are pocket universes stitched together with chaos, caffeine, and the kind of questions you usually ask at 3 a.m. when your Wi-Fi’s out and you’re staring at the ceiling. You’ll meet cursed wanderers who turn paperwork into holy rituals, gods who treat the multiverse like their personal TikTok, and algorithms trying to understand why humans cry over dog videos. This isn’t just a story collection—it’s a playground for anyone who’s ever wanted to poke the universe and see ...

✶ Somehow I Got Lost Along the Way ✶ A Side Quest from the Pocket Universe of the Great Game This isn’t the main storyline. This is the secret passage. The detour you weren’t supposed to find. The cosmic margin notes that refused to stay quiet. Somehow I Got Lost Along the Way is a collection of reflections, dialogues, confessions, and tangled myth-fragments from the Pocket Universe of the Great Game—the same vast, layered world explored in the Gate of Aesir series. Here, the rules of the Game twist. Gods trade bets on mortal choices. Emotion itself becomes currency. And ...

Our enigmatic protagonist, Joseph Crown, is a renowned Hypno Dom and kink lifestyle expert with a reputation for privacy and secrecy. But when he meets John Wager, his carefully guarded identity is thrown into chaos. John offers him a solution to his problem - licensing his identity and business along with a wager to create a successful new life. But as Crown delves deeper into this new world, he discovers a dark side - THE ARCHITECT OF BEHAVIORS. Now, his life and anyone he comes into contact with are becoming part of the Great Game, and he must play to win.