Wicked Darkness started with questions I couldn’t leave alone. Nearly 400 pages later, apparently I had written a book.

📖 I DIDN’T WAKE UP ONE MORNING AND DECIDE I NEEDED AN END-TIMES BOOK.

At least I don’t remember it happening that way.

It was more like one question led to another.

Then another.  Then another.

Prophecy led to history. History led to religion. Religion led to politics. Politics led to power. Power led to money. Money led to technology. Technology led to control.

Eventually I looked around and realized I had wandered so far down the rabbit hole that somebody probably should have tied a rope around my waist before I went in.

😂

So I kept writing.

And somewhere along the way, all those questions turned into a book:

WICKED DARKNESS: JOHNNY’S SURVIVAL GUIDE TO THE END TIMES

Nearly 400 pages of me asking a very simple question:

What if a lot of things we treat as separate stories are actually connected?

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⭐ I WASN’T TRYING TO WRITE A POLITE LITTLE BOOK.

There are plenty of those.

• Books that tell you exactly what you already believe.
• Books that carefully avoid stepping on anybody’s toes.
• Books you can finish, place back on the shelf and never think about again.

That wasn’t what interested me.

I wanted to write the kind of book where somebody stops halfway through a chapter and thinks:

“Wait a minute. Is that actually true?”

Good. Go look.

Check me. Argue with me.  Follow the trail yourself.

Because Wicked Darkness was never supposed to work if the reader simply accepts everything I say.

The entire point is to make you think.

Question the narrative and look at this world from both a Biblical and sales perspective.

---

🔦 THE BOOK STARTED WITH A PROBLEM I COULDN’T SHAKE.

We live in a world buried under information.

• News.
• Social media.
• Politics.
• Religion.
• Advertising.
• Algorithms.
• Experts.
• Influencers.
• Governments.
• Corporations.
• Churches.
• Schools.
• Television.
• Podcasts.
• AI.

Everybody is telling you what happened, what it means and what you should believe about it.
And somehow, surrounded by more information than any generation in history ever had access to…

the vast majority are remarkably confused.

That interested me.

Because information and truth are not the same thing.
They’re not even close to the same thing.

Noise and knowledge aren’t the same thing either.

---

WHAT IF THE REAL BATTLE IS OVER HOW YOU SEE THE WORLD?

That idea runs underneath much of Wicked Darkness.

Not merely what happens.

How it gets interpreted.

• Words matter.
• Definitions matter.
• Translations matter.
• History matters.
• Who tells the story matters.
• Who controls the microphone matters.

And if you change the meaning of enough words, you can eventually change the way somebody understands the world without ever forcing them to change their mind.

They think they arrived there themselves.
That is a much more interesting form of power.

Once you look at the world from that perspective you start to notice the patterns, the playbook, the characters involved.
And maybe when someone claims, “All the world is a stage” you look at the claim a little differently when you follow the road signs taking you to that stage and the people performing on it.

---

📚 WHICH SENT ME BACK INTO OLD BOOKS.

One of the strange things about writing Wicked Darkness was constantly moving between worlds that looked completely unrelated.

• Ancient texts.
• Biblical prophecy.
• Empires.
• Kings.
• Church history.
• Modern governments.
• Pharmaceutical companies.
• Technology.
• Artificial intelligence.
• Media.
• Money.
• Human psychology.

At first glance, some of those subjects have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

Then you start asking what they have in common.

People.

• People wanting power.
• People afraid of losing power.
• People wanting safety.
• People offering safety.
• People believing authorities.
• People distrusting authorities.
• People trying to control other people.

And people desperately trying to figure out what is true.

Human technology changes.

Human nature?

No.  That’s the deception when the character flaw is clearly evident when you follow it through the sands of time.

And that’s where I started making one of the arguments that runs through Wicked Darkness: what if some of the power structures we think disappeared didn’t disappear at all? What if they evolved, moved and changed clothes?

Rome wore sandals.

Modern institutional power wears shiny wingtips.

😂

That’s an argument.

Then I spend the book showing you why I think it’s worth considering.

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🏛️ BABYLON DIDN’T HAVE AN IPHONE.

Rome didn’t have artificial intelligence.

Nebuchadnezzar didn’t have cable news.

The apostles weren’t arguing on X.

Nobody in the Book of Revelation was complaining because their streaming service raised the price again.

😂

The machinery changes.

But some of the underlying human behaviors are remarkably familiar.

• Fear.
• Greed.
• Loyalty.
• Tribalism.
• Power.
• Faith.
• Control.
• Rebellion.
• Hope.

That is why ancient writing can still feel uncomfortably modern.

Not because the ancient writer secretly knew what an iPhone looked like.

Because the people holding the iPhone are still people.

They still struggle with their flesh, their minds, their wills, their emotions and that leads to crazy ambitions, beliefs and terrible decisions.

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✝️ AND YES, THIS IS A CHRISTIAN BOOK.

I’m not hiding that.

The framework is biblical. The questions are spiritual. The book takes Biblical prophecy seriously.

But I didn’t want to write something that only works if the reader nods along with every sentence because we already belong to the same club.  On the contrary.  This book is extremely confrontational.  It’s written from the perspective of a Christian salesman, which is a comical combination.  It’s like the Apostle Paul trying to sell you a tent he made, while sharing with you the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I self-published it because I’m pretty sure most Christian publishers wouldn’t touch what I wrote in this book.

I wanted to ask harder questions.

Is history being rewritten by AI? One source tells me Rome had 69 emperors. Another gives me 90. Why? What exactly is each source counting? Who qualifies as an emperor? Are co-emperors, rival claimants and usurpers included?

And why does that matter?

Because definitions matter.

Type “How many Bible translations are there?” into Google. You’ll get a list longer than a CVS receipt — 900+ and counting. Let’s call it what it is: Not 900 translations — 900 interpretations. Because if the enemy can’t kill the truth, he’ll drown it in noise.

It’s the same old trick: Confuse the sheep. Flood the signal. Twist the words. Then step back and let doubt do the rest. Interpretation without understanding leads to confusion. Confusion leads to compromise. And compromise leads straight back to control. – Chapter 1, Page 25

Here’s the funny part about that quote.  Nobody asked Jesus when He quoted the scriptures: “Which version, Lord?”
That wasn’t a thing like today.  No wonder there is such confusion today.

There are questions that people today are not taking the time to step back and ask because so many have simply trusted the narrative they’ve been fed.

• What happened when religion became institutional power?
• What happens when fear becomes useful?
• What happens when obedience gets confused with faith?
• What happens when people stop asking questions because somebody with authority tells them the questioning itself is dangerous?

Those are religious questions.

They are also very human questions.

---

THE MONSTER ISN’T ALWAYS WEARING HORNS.

That may be one of the ideas that bothered me most while writing.

Everybody expects evil to announce itself.

Dark cloak.

Scary music.

Maybe smoke coming out of the floor.

😂

Real life is rarely that convenient. Danger can arrive wearing a suit. Holding a clipboard. Carrying a degree. Offering safety. Promising convenience. Explaining that everything is being done for your own good.

That doesn’t mean every authority is evil. It doesn’t mean every institution is corrupt.

It means appearance is a lousy substitute for discernment.

And that idea shows up again and again in the book.

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🧠 FEAR IS INCREDIBLY POWERFUL.

You can get people to do extraordinary things when they’re afraid.

In sales we understand a very simple manipulation technique that most people are not trained to spot.

“The fear of loss is more powerful than the possibility of gain.”

In sales we understand a simple psychological principle: the fear of loss can become more powerful than the possibility of gain.

Look at Powerball. When the jackpot climbs into the hundreds of millions—or into the billions—people who normally don’t play suddenly start buying tickets.

The funny part is that your individual ticket’s odds of hitting the jackpot don’t improve at all. They’re still roughly one in 292 million.

What changes is the size of the prize, the number of people chasing it and the feeling that you might be the one idiot who didn’t buy a ticket when everybody else did.

The mathematics didn’t suddenly become attractive. The fear of missing the opportunity did.

That’s sales psychology. 😂

And the reality is that…

• Sometimes that fear is justified.
• Sometimes it isn’t.
• Sometimes the danger is real and the response is reasonable.
• Sometimes the danger is real and somebody discovers that the fear surrounding it can be useful.
• Sometimes the fear itself becomes the product.

That interested me enough that it became one of the recurring threads running through Wicked Darkness.

Because fear can make people surrender things voluntarily that would be very difficult to take from them by force.

• Privacy.
• Freedom.
• Money.
• Judgment.
• Responsibility.

Even the willingness to ask simple questions or question what they are being sold.

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🤖 AND THEN TECHNOLOGY STARTED MOVING FASTER THAN THE BOOK.

This has been one of the stranger parts.

I wrote about technology, control and the direction things were heading.

Then artificial intelligence exploded into everyday life.

I’m talking from 2025 when I wrote the book to 2026 and the difference is staggering.

Now I use AI myself almost every day.

😂

That doesn’t make me anti-AI. Quite the opposite.

AI is helping me build Writers Freak. It helped me write my book Wicked Darkness by verifying some of my research and work as a great Editor for my spelling and punctuation, as well as telling me, “Yeah, I get you’re a salesman, but you might not want to say it like that or you’re going to alienate your audience.”  Probably a good idea when you’re naturally sarcastic and you’re not writing a book on How To Win Friends and Influence People.

AI is a great tool.  It helps me research.

• Edit.
• Create images.
• Produce narration.
• Build videos.
• Explore ideas.

I think it is one of the most powerful tools ordinary people have ever been handed.

Which is exactly why I also think we should understand what we’re handing IT.

You know, kind of like that Stephen King novel. 😂

Because AI is still an IT. It’s artificial intelligence. It’s not a living human being. CHAT can’t come to my house, take me to Starbucks and buy me a Matcha Latte. Pull the plug on the computers running it and there’s no little AI guy standing outside wondering where everybody went.

You’re not taking AI to the local graveyard someday and buying it a plot of land.

That’s what I mean when I say it isn’t “real” in the same sense that you and I are real.

And then yesterday President Donald Trump stood before the United Nations and said U.S. government documents would start referring to AI as SI—Super Intelligence instead. If you’ve read Wicked Darkness, you’ll understand why that got my attention immediately.

It fits the pattern and strategy I argue about throughout the book. I’m not going to drag you all the way down that rabbit hole here. That’s what the book is for.

AI isn’t going away, and I don’t see it slowing down anytime soon. The genie is out of the bottle, and we’re not putting it back in the cave.

And this is where my Bible-prophecy brain kicks in.  Because when I look at what is happening to knowledge and technology, I can’t help thinking about what Daniel was told concerning “the time of the end”:

“But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” – Daniel 12:4

Knowledge has increased at an exponential rate, along with people running to and fro like never before.  I guess you could easily say that Daniel got that right a couple of thousand years ago.  We’re not talking about a reinvention of the wheel.  We’re talking about an artificial intelligence that makes the printing press look like a kid playing with Legos.

• Information.
• Habits.
• Questions.
• Documents.
• Preferences.
• Photographs.
• Voices.
• Work.
• Ideas.

Eventually perhaps entire pieces of our decision-making.

You can be excited by technology and still ask questions about it.

Those positions are not opposites.

---

CURIOSITY IS NOT A SIN.

That probably summarizes the book better than any complicated theological description I could write.

• Ask.
• Read.
• Compare.
• Look at the original source.
• Look at who translated it.
• Look at who benefits from a particular interpretation.
• Look at history.
• Look at what changed.
• Look at what didn’t.

And then make up your own mind.

I don’t need somebody to finish Wicked Darkness agreeing with every conclusion I reached.

That would actually be a little weird.

😂

I’d rather have them finish it thinking:

“I never looked at it that way before.”

Now we have something interesting.

---

📖 THE TITLE ISN’T VERY SUBTLE.

Wicked Darkness: Johnny’s Survival Guide To The End Times.

I wasn’t exactly aiming for Chicken Soup for the Soul.

😂

The title comes from the idea that darkness isn’t merely the absence of information.

Sometimes darkness is manufactured confusion.

• Enough noise that truth becomes difficult to see.
• Enough fear that questioning becomes uncomfortable.
• Enough competing voices that people eventually surrender and let somebody else tell them what to believe.

That is a different kind of darkness.

And I ask the hard questions.

Was Jesus Christ really the Jewish Messiah?
Did He really rise from the dead?
Is the Bible true or a collection of fables?
If it is true, and it claims there are angels, demons and a sinister fallen angel who’s the ultimate invisible salesman, how would that change the way we look at the world and how the strings are being pulled?
Is Bible prophecy legitimate?
Did the Book of Daniel really predict the empires of the world from his time forward?
If he did has his prophecy stopped working?  If it did what was the end point?
Has Jesus actually returned as many Christian cults claim and if He did, why can’t I get on His calendar?

So, I didn’t spend months writing nearly 400 pages just for sarcastic fun.
I wrote it with intent and purpose.

And I think it is much more dangerous than simply not knowing something.

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🕯️ SO WHY CALL IT A “SURVIVAL GUIDE”?

Because I’m not particularly interested in predicting a date when the world ends.

Human beings have been embarrassingly bad at that.

😂

The survival part is more basic.

Can you still think?

• Can you recognize manipulation?
• Can you question authority without automatically rejecting all authority?
• Can you use technology without letting technology use you?
• Can you maintain faith without outsourcing every spiritual decision to an institution?
• Can you recognize fear without letting fear make every decision?
• Can you distinguish between what somebody actually said and what somebody told you they said?
• Can you remain human when almost everything around you is trying to turn you into a data point?

And when the “Man of Sin”, “the beast” finally arrives as the Bible claims he’s coming are you going to be able to spot him or fall for the greatest deception that will be sold to the world in the history of mankind?

Does the Bible tell us who this guy actually is and why is he called, “the beast”?

“The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.” – Revelation 17:8

That’s a data point worth figuring out before becoming one – lol.

And all of this sounds like survival to me as this world races towards a close encounter of the wrong kind.

---

AND THEN I DID SOMETHING EVEN STRANGER.

I finished the book.

Built WickedDarkness.com.

Put the book out there.

And eventually realized:

Writing a book and getting people to discover a book are completely different jobs.

Which should sound familiar if you read my other Writers Freak Parking Spot about judging a book by its cover.

😂

The book can exist.

The website can exist.

The Kindle edition can exist.

The PDF can exist.

All of that can be sitting there perfectly functional.

And still…

Somebody has to discover it.

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🎬 SO NOW I’M TURNING THE BOOK INTO SOMETHING ELSE.

This is the part I’m working on right now.

Instead of leaving nearly 400 pages sitting quietly on a digital shelf, I’m turning Wicked Darkness into a visual reading series for YouTube and Rumble.

The book has 34 chapters.

As I write this Parking Spot, I’m working on Chapter 7.

So no, I’m not finished. 😂

I’m moving through the book chapter by chapter, turning each one into its own video using a repeatable 12-slide structure:

• Slide 1 opens the chapter.
• Slides 2–11 carry the actual book reading.
• Slide 12 closes it.

The narration follows the book. The illustrations create a visual world around it. And The Writers Freak—my strange three-armed green character who somehow wandered into the whole production—helps tie the visual world together.

Apparently writing the book wasn’t enough.

Now I’m building the movie theater in my computer too. 😂

And I’m putting the chapter series on YouTube and Rumble for people to watch for free. If enough people eventually watch all 34 chapters, maybe those platforms will throw the salesman a few bucks for becoming what the Internet now calls a “content creator.”

I call it a virtual “salesperson”.

Same job.

Fancier title. 😂

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🤖 AI CHANGED WHAT ONE WRITER CAN DO.

This may be the part I find most fascinating.

Not very long ago, turning a book into this kind of visual production could have required writers, illustrators, narrators, designers, editors, studio equipment and a meaningful production budget.

Today?

One person can do an astonishing amount.

I already have the writing.

AI helps create visual concepts.

AI can produce narration.

Keynote gives me the production structure.

YouTube and Rumble give me distribution.

Writers Freak gives me somewhere to park the story around it.

None of those tools magically makes the result good.

Somebody still has to make decisions.

Trust me.

I have deleted enough AI-generated mistakes to know.

😂

But the barrier between “I have an idea” and “I can build something around this idea” has collapsed.

That is remarkable.

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✍️ AND THAT’S WHY WICKED DARKNESS BELONGS ON WRITERS FREAK.

This Parking Spot is obviously promoting my book.

I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

😂

But it is also demonstrating exactly what Writers Freak can do.

A book doesn’t have to be one product sitting on one shelf.

It can become:

• A story
• A conversation
• A website
• A Parking Spot
• A video series
• An audiobook
• Artwork
• Commentary
• Short videos
• Interviews
• Research
• Updates
• Something I haven’t even thought of yet

The words are the starting point.

Everything around them is the Island.

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📚 MAYBE YOU HAVE A BOOK TOO.

Maybe it’s published.

Maybe it isn’t.

Maybe you’ve got a manuscript sitting on your computer that you’ve been “almost finished with” for seven years.

😂

Maybe you write fiction.

• History.
• Religion.
• Business.
• Romance.
• Poetry.
• Science fiction.
• Cookbooks.
• Children’s books.
• Memoirs.

Something so strange you aren’t entirely sure which shelf it’s supposed to sit on.

Fine.

The subject isn’t the interesting part.

You created something with words.

Now what can you build around it?

That’s the question Writers Freak is interested in.

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🅿️ THAT’S WHAT A PARKING SPOT CAN DO.

A Writers Freak Parking Spot gives one subject its own page.

You can tell the story behind your book.

• Show the cover.
• Add photographs.
• Quote it.
• Embed video.
• Link to your website.
• Link to where somebody can buy it.
• Add an interview.
• Add a reading.
• Explain why you wrote it.

Update the page later when something changes.

And because this is Writers Freak, you don’t even need a finished book.

You just need something genuinely connected to the world of words worth writing about.

A standard Parking Spot is $7 one time.

• No monthly fee.
• No scheduled renewal.
• No scheduled expiration.

You build it.
You control it.
You decide what belongs there.

It just has to be within the world of words and have value for the people visiting here.

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THIS ONE HAPPENS TO BE ABOUT MY BOOK.

Wicked Darkness: Johnny’s Survival Guide To The End Times.

I wrote it because questions kept bothering me.

I published it because eventually you have to stop editing and let somebody else read the thing.

😂

And now I’m building everything around it because the technology finally lets one independent writer do things that would have been unrealistic not very long ago.

• Maybe you agree with the book.
• Maybe you don’t.
• Maybe you think I’m onto something.
• Maybe halfway through Chapter 12 you decide I disappeared completely down the rabbit hole.

I have had a few people tell me they loved it.
I have other people tell me they wanted to throw it at the wall and couldn’t finish it.

That’s okay. That’s why I wrote it.

Read it and decide for yourself.

That was the point from the beginning.

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🔦 WELCOME TO WICKED DARKNESS.

Nearly 400 pages.

34 chapters.

One very large rabbit hole.

And a simple idea underneath all of it:

DON’T WAIT FOR SOMEBODY ELSE TO TELL YOU WHAT’S TRUE.

LOOK AROUND.

If that sounds interesting, come find out where the rabbit hole goes.

And if you wrote something of your own?

Park it.

Maybe somebody is looking for exactly the thing you wrote.

EXPLORE WICKED DARKNESS

GRAB A $7 WRITERS FREAK PARKING SPOT