Alex Lucio Interview Published on: 30, Jul 2026

Of all the disciplines I carry into storytelling, the biggest carryover is product development and launch. Planting a breadcrumb in chapter one that only illuminates in chapter twenty is a discipline of a kind — the same discipline engineering teaches when you're structuring a product down to its smallest function and feature. Nothing exists by accident. Every part earns its place, or it comes out.

Running a company sharpens a different muscle. You spend years learning how to move an entire organization toward a vision that, at the start, only lives in your head. A novelist is doing a quieter version of the same thing with a reader — building the picture piece by piece until they're standing inside it with you. The tools are different. The problem is the same.

I grew up in a family where a lot was never said out loud. Around the dinner table there was a weight you could feel — the tension of a marriage, the economic strain of raising three kids in poverty, all the things adults carry and don't discuss. You learn young to sense what nobody names.

Years later, I was on the floor with my three-year-old granddaughter on my lap and my English bulldog at my feet, half-working, not really with them. I closed the laptop. That hour changed something. I realized I'd spent a life staying busy — probably to avoid sitting with the same kind of weight I grew up around.

Weight of a Dog came out of that. It's a grief novel, honestly. It's about the things love leaves behind and what, if anything, actually stays. But science is my passion — I couldn't help myself. So I wrote a grief novel on a science-fiction spine. The resonance physics, the quantum-consciousness ideas, the time structure — that's not decoration. That's how my mind reaches for the questions grief asks. Underneath it all, though, it's a book about presence, and about the weight we all carry whether we talk about it or not.

I build complex systems for a living — medical devices, fully automated pharmaceutical lines. That kind of work is high-detail precision. Nothing gets built until every interaction is planned down to the smallest interface. That habit doesn't shut off when I write.

Honestly, I'm incapable of writing a story like Spider-Man. My mind would flood with questions about the chemistry of the adhesive, why the nozzles don't gunk up, whether he needs a solvent to soak them when he gets home from crime-fighting. I'd never make it out of chapter one.

So in Weight of a Dog, I had to make the science work first. The pyramids, sound and frequency, quantum consciousness — I touch on all of it, and none of it is hand-waved. For my mind, doing that work creates a credible ledge. Once I trust the ledge is there, I can jump off it and write the fiction. The science isn't the story. It's the ground the story stands on.

I can't write something that offends my own sense of what makes sense. The rigor has to hold up for me first, or the story doesn't stand.

Weight of a Dog centers on a frequency war — a global cataclysm with the Great Pyramid of Giza as its trigger. To write into that honestly, I had to work backwards through the physics before I wrote the scene. What is Earth's natural resonance? Which frequencies actually propagate a signal at that scale? How does a signal get modulated inside a carrier wave? I built that architecture until it satisfied the engineer in me. Only then could I sit down and write the moment.

The balance, for me, isn't between science and story — it's about doing the science quietly enough that the reader never has to notice it. The reader shouldn't need a physics degree to feel the scene. But the physics has to be right underneath, or the emotion sitting on top of it will feel weightless. The rigor is what earns the feeling.

Three themes carry the book: grief and loss, guilt, and evil. To me those are the contours of the unspoken weight in a family — the things everyone can sit at a dinner table and carry without saying, because they're too heavy to lay down between the plates. Kids have a sharpened sense of that. They can't name it yet, but they feel every ounce of it. I did. Most of the readers I hear from did, too. That's the frequency the book is trying to meet.

Grief and loss were the obvious way in. But guilt is the one that lingers underneath — the private ledger everyone keeps and rarely shows anyone. And evil in this book isn't the villain with horns or the sociopath with a knife. In modern life I don't really encounter that version. What I encounter is certitude. It's the evil that knocks on your door with a smile, absolutely sure it knows what's best for you, and is willing to hurt you in the name of your own good. It's the evil that goes to bed with a clean conscience because it counts the day's harm as virtue. There's a character in the novel who can kill with a smile on her face because she believes she's doing it in humanity's interest. That's the evil that scares me. That's the one worth writing about.

Those three sit inside every family I've ever known, mine included. Naming them is the whole point of the book.

Honestly, I didn't. I didn't try to build a society. I wrote within the framework of a family — specifically an ethnically Italian family — because that's the register I know in my bones. My parents were Cuban and Italian, and that particular texture is what resonates with me. The rhythms at the table, the way affection and argument occupy the same sentence, the things that get said with a look instead of a word. I trusted that if the family felt true, the world around it would feel true by extension.

That's an engineering instinct too, in a way. When you design a complex system, you don't start by drawing the whole plant. You start with the smallest unit that has to work correctly and you get it right, and everything else gets built out from there. The family was my smallest working unit. I built outward from the dinner table.

The first challenge was Baloo. How do you build a novel around an English bulldog without letting it slide into sentiment? A pet in fiction is a trap. It's easy to write cute; it's hard to write true. I had to keep asking myself whether a moment was earning its weight or just tugging at a heartstring, and cut anything that was only doing the second thing. The dog had to be a dog. The reader had to feel him at his level, not at mine.

The harder challenge was voice. Early on, every character sounded the same. So I built myself a small device: I attached each character to the name of a real family member or close friend, and I wrote in that person's voice — their pacing, their word choices, the way they enter a room. Once the voices were fully differentiated on the page, I went back and changed the names. The voices held. That trick unlocked the book for me. It's obvious in hindsight, but I don't think I could have gotten there any other way.

The audiobook was a request, honestly. I'm sixty-three. I insist on a physical book in my hands — the turn of a page, the weight of it, the cover as an object. That's intimacy to me. But I recognize other generations read on devices, and others still don't read at all. So the audiobook is currently being produced as a full-cast, sound-designed piece — an almost cinematic adaptation of the novel to audio. It's a different way in for a different kind of reader.

The prestige series is a different animal. The book as a book and the book as a screen concept are two separate things, and I approached the screen adaptation deliberately for that reason. This novel has a very strong interior register — grief, presence, the unspoken weight. That doesn't translate to film. But the science-fiction spine is kinetic, and film is where kinesis lives. Because I wrote a grief drama on a sci-fi spine, the work is genuinely both. The novel is where I could develop the interior — the concepts of weight and presence. The screen is where I can finally develop the sci-fi scaffolding at full scale. I'm in love with both halves. Each medium honors the half it was built for.

The novel was architected. That's the honest word for it. The time-loop structure in Weight of a Dog is a systems-design decision more than a literary one — every loop had to close cleanly, every element had to carry forward, and nothing could contradict itself downstream. That's engineering work, not just storytelling.

Inside that structure, I seeded breadcrumbs in chapter one that don't bear fruit until the end. The story traces three generations of a family, and a detail that seems like atmosphere on page ten is doing structural work on page four hundred. To me that's no different from designing in a feature early because you know the system will need it three subsystems later. You don't retrofit it in. You lay the pin in the wall on day one and build the frame around it.

Characters and conflicts follow the same discipline. Every arc has an initial state and a terminal state, and the middle is the pressure that forces the transition. Once I know those endpoints, the rest is a matter of putting the right load on the right beam at the right time.

I built the world of Weight of a Dog the way I've built every medical device I've ever launched — and I documented it the same way, too. The novel ships with a Reader's Guide and a fully fleshed-out Codex, essentially a Series Bible. It's structured no differently than the documentation package that accompanies a device launch: a technical manual, a user manual, and a controlled record of every design decision behind them.

Once a system is written down, it enforces itself. Every physical constant, every rule of the frequency architecture, every family relationship across three generations sits in the Codex. When I sat down to write a new scene, I wasn't relying on memory or vibe — I was checking the spec. If the scene contradicted the spec, one of them was wrong, and usually it was the scene. That discipline is the entire reason the world holds together.

It's also why the IP extends cleanly into a picture book, an animated companion film, an audio drama, and a screen adaptation. The Codex was built to carry weight beyond a single format. When the world is documented well enough, other builders can enter it and stay honest to it.

AI is the obvious answer, so let me be specific about how I actually use it. When I started Weight of a Dog in 2025, AI wasn't nearly as common as it is now. As it matured, it became a godsend — but almost entirely as a research assistant. Consider a historical claim you want to check. Before AI, that was a trip to a library or a week of hunting citations. Now it's effortless. Fact-checking is where these tools genuinely earn their keep for me.

I'd caution against using AI as an editor, though. It has a smoothing instinct. It will file the sharp corners off a sentence that needs its corners. The prose that carries weight is often the prose an editor-model wants to fix.

The interesting thing is that the more I write, the less I use AI in the writing itself. I use it almost exclusively for research now. Part of me hungers for the old-fashioned pace — sitting with a paragraph longer than is efficient, working a sentence in my head on a walk, letting the slow way do its work. Speed isn't the point of writing. Truth is. Technology is extraordinary for the parts of the process that reward speed. It's less useful for the parts that reward staying with something.

That's the adaptation I'd offer other creators. Use the tools generously where speed genuinely helps. Guard the parts of the craft that don't.

My gosh, yes — the honest list would fill the page. If I have to name the ones who actually live in me, it's Lewis, Tesla, Tolkien, Tolstoy, and Hugo.

Lewis for how belief can be argued without being preached. Tolkien for showing that a mythos, done seriously, becomes its own kind of truth. Tolstoy and Hugo for the size of their moral canvas — for the willingness to spend hundreds of pages on the interior life of a single soul because that soul mattered. And Tesla because he understood before almost anyone else that the universe runs on frequency and resonance, and that intuition sits under a great deal of the physics in Weight of a Dog. Between them, they gave me permission to write a book that takes belief, morality, and physics seriously in the same breath.

Two responses have stayed with me. The first is from readers who tell me they set the book down and immediately wanted to call a member of their family they'd fallen out of touch with. That one always lands, because if the book does anything, that's the thing I hoped it would do. The whole novel is about the weight of what goes unspoken between people who love each other. If a reader closes the last page and picks up the phone, the book worked.

The second was from a reader on Amazon who wrote that she just wanted to go hug her dog. That one made me smile in a way I didn't expect. It's the simplest possible response, and in a way it's the most complete. She got exactly what the book was doing, without needing any of the vocabulary around it. Presence. Staying. The animal at your feet who has been telling you the truth this whole time.

Those two responses tell me the book is doing what I built it to do — on both floors of the house.

The single most important rule I'd give is this: in fiction, the scaffolding cannot get in the way of the story. It doesn't matter how good the engineering is if the reader has to climb through it to reach the characters.

I learned this the hard way. When I first wrote Weight of a Dog, I built the scaffolding first — I engineered the premise, worked out the science and the archaeology in real detail, and then laid the story on top. The manuscript came in at 175,000 words because the underlying architecture was that dense. It was accurate, it was internally consistent, and it was too much. I cut nearly 70,000 words on the way to the final novel. Almost all of what I cut was the scaffolding showing through the walls. The interesting thing is that some of that removed material may eventually become the prequel — the engineering wasn't wrong, it was just in the wrong book.

So the advice is: do the science, do it rigorously, document it in a codex, but then be ruthless about how little of it the reader actually sees. If you built the ledge correctly, the reader doesn't need to see it. They just need to feel that the ground is solid when the story stands on it.

Quite a bit is in motion. I'm currently working on casting for the prestige series adaptation, and once that's set, we begin pitching the project to studios. In parallel, the cinematic audiobook production — a full-cast, sound-designed piece — is roughly three to four weeks from release. And I've already started writing the prequel. Some of the 70,000 words I cut from the original manuscript were too good to leave in a drawer, and they lived in a different book anyway. That's the one I'm building next.

As for AllAuthor — the honest answer is that platforms like AllAuthor matter more than newer authors realize. Writing the book is only the first half of the work. Finding the readers who need it is the second half, and it's the half most writers are least prepared for. Anywhere that helps close the distance between a novel and the reader it was written for is doing real service. That's what a conversation like this one does. My thanks for the space to have it.