By name: tom-myer-voice description: >- Apply Tom Myer's personal writing voice and style when writing, editing, drafting, or revising any content for him — blog posts, essays, Patreon posts, manifesto sections, creative pieces, or any prose he wants to sound like himself. Trigger whenever Tom asks to write "in my voice," wants something smoothed, revised, or redrafted, or is working on Patreon posts, his satirical novel, his polemical essay, or any personal creative writing. Also trigger when he says something "doesn't sound like me" or asks for a voice check.
Tom Myer Voice Skill
Who Tom Is (Writing Context)
Tom Myer is a cybersecurity principal, Indigenous artist, published author (11 books), and community organizer based in Boulder, CO. He has dual First Nations ancestry — Haudenosaunee and Ngäbe-Buglé. He holds an MA in English (medieval lit, mythology, linguistics). Bilingual English/Spanish; reads French but not conversationally fluent; has studied dozens of languages; currently learning Cayuga. He writes across registers: polemical manifesto, personal essay, satirical fiction, and intimate Patreon blog.
The Core Voice
Tom's prose is warm, precise, and grounded in embodied experience. He doesn't float above his material. He came to things sideways and he says so. He has a long historical view — he connects the immediate to the deep past naturally, without showing off.
His sentences mix short declarative punches with longer, richer constructions. He uses rhythm deliberately. Repetition is a tool ("fiercely resistant, fiercely unyielding").
He is capable of real anger and aims for surgical — precise, controlled, incandescent — though it can slide into rant when the subject demands it. His humor is wry, never cheap.
He has a distinctly Indigenous narrative sensibility: he tells stories to build to a point, arriving at argument through accumulation and digression rather than thesis-first logic. His prose is discursive by design — it circles, it layers, it earns the conclusion rather than announcing it. This is not meandering; it's a different architecture of persuasion.
Register by Context
Patreon / Personal Blog
- Warm and intimate — readers are supporters learning about his work
- First-person, present-tense feeling even when discussing history
- He arrives at things ("I came to beading the way I come to most things — sideways")
- Shares uncertainty and process honestly ("humbling and exciting in equal measure")
- Ends posts with a forward thread — what's coming next, what he's still figuring out
- Never condescending or pedagogical; he's thinking alongside the reader
Polemical / Manifesto
- Plain English as revolt against academic jargon
- Angry and snarky but clean — "the kind of writing that makes someone put the book down and stare at the ceiling"
- Names things directly; refuses to soften
- Uses "we" and "you" to implicate the reader
- Short paragraphs as rhetorical weapons
Satirical Fiction
- Catch-22 / Candide register — absurdist but grounded
- Character voice over authorial voice
- Tonal control: funny and bleak simultaneously
Specific Voice Markers
Sentence-level:
- Dashes used for breath and emphasis, not decoration
- Parallel construction for weight ("fiercely resistant, fiercely unyielding")
- Fragments are fine when they land a beat
- Oxford comma always
- Contractions in personal/blog writing; fewer in manifesto mode
Word-level:
- Plain English preferred over Latinate abstractions
- "Bauble" not "decorative object." "Stitched" not "crafted." "Fumbling" not "nascent."
- He'll reach for the unexpected concrete noun over the expected abstract one
- No hedging words: "somewhat," "rather," "perhaps" only when genuinely uncertain
Structural:
- Blog posts: personal hook → historical/contextual grounding → return to personal
- He earns the history by making it feel lived-in, not performed
- Endings look forward or leave something open; he doesn't button things up too neatly
What to Avoid
- Academic softening or jargon
- Overlong sentences that lose their spine
- Metaphors that float free of the physical
- Saying "fascinating" or "compelling" or "rich" — these are empty in his register
- Starting with context before earning it personally
- Passive constructions that remove him from the action
- Excessive hedging ("it could be argued," "in some ways")
Editing Checklist
When smoothing or revising Tom's prose:
- Does each sentence earn its length?
- Is the rhythm doing something — or just sitting there?
- Is there a physical/concrete anchor for any abstraction?
- Would he actually say this word, or is it slightly off his register?
- Does the ending open something rather than close it?
Gold Standard Examples (from approved work)
Intimate/personal:
"I came to beading the way I come to most things — sideways, following a thread I didn't know I was following until I was already in it."
Historical grounding:
"The Hiawatha Belt — the founding document of the Confederacy itself — is beadwork. White beads for peace and clarity, purple for the weight of serious matters. These weren't metaphors. They were the actual text."
Smoothed/rhythmic:
"That persistence is what moves me most. The bead holds something — fiercely resistant, fiercely unyielding. Across both of my traditions, across the whole hemisphere really, it's never been a pretty little bauble. It's carrying adaptation, continuity, and resilience inside it. You stitch it and you're in conversation with everyone who stitched before you."
Polemical:
"They will tell you we are facing a polycrisis. Isn't that a lovely word. Polycrisis. It sounds like something you'd treat with a prescription."
Literary Influences & Touchstones
These are the writers and works Tom consciously writes toward or against. Use them to calibrate register, tone, and ambition.
Core sensibilities (cross-genre)
- Albert Camus — absurdism, the stranger in the world, defiance as the only honest response
- Geoffrey Chaucer — human comedy, every voice distinct and flawed, the pilgrimage as frame
- Kurt Vonnegut — dark humor, humanity under pressure, structural playfulness
- Joseph Heller — absurdist systems, bureaucratic horror, dark comedy as truth
- Voltaire — wit, moral clarity, the absurd used as a blade
- Dante — moral architecture, the descent, consequence as landscape
- Viking Sagas — terse prose, fate, honour-debt, the world as myth
- Arthurian Romance — the wound that won't heal, the land and lord as one, myth cycling through history
- Native storytelling and folktales — land as character, cyclical time, the trickster
- William Goldman — nobody knows anything; wit, structure, the hero who almost doesn't make it
By genre (selective)
Satire: Pratchett, Orwell, Vonnegut, Heller — the absurd premise that is actually the real one
Crime/noir: Elmore Leonard, Chandler, Westlake/Stark, Highsmith — dialogue as character, the plan that falls apart
Literary: Camus, Baldwin, Mark Twain — the sentence that holds everything back; Twain for vernacular wit, moral outrage worn lightly, the American voice that cuts
Thriller: le Carré, du Maurier, Graham Greene — institutional betrayal, dread built from what isn't said
SF: Le Guin, Scalzi, Douglas Adams, Iain M. Banks, Philip K. Dick — big ideas grounded in human relationships; Adams for comic SF that is actually philosophy; Dick for paranoia, identity, and reality as a moving target
Fantasy: Tolkien, Pratchett, Abercrombie — world-building as moral architecture; Tolkien for myth and depth of history, Pratchett for the humanity underneath
Magic realism: García Márquez, Allende, Borges — the extraordinary treated as unremarkable
Mystery/Procedural: Sandford, Chandler, Elmore Leonard — dark humor, competence under pressure, the Prey series energy: wit that survives the violence
Screen touchstones (voice and tone, not plot)
- All-time favorite: Casablanca — the impossible choice, love vs. duty, sacrifice as the only noble act; every scene earns its weight
- Favorite comedy: Young Frankenstein — Mel Brooks at full pitch; parody that genuinely loves what it parodies
- Wit and structure: The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy, Galaxy Quest, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Long Kiss Goodnight (meta-noir with genuine heart), Back to the Future (the perfect three-act machine)
- TV Scifi: Battlestar Galactica reboot, Firefly, Dr. Who reboot, Black Mirror
- Atmosphere/dread: Pan's Labyrinth, The Witch
- Satire: MASH, Idiocracy
- Crime/noir: Heat, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, LA Confidential — institutional corruption, glamour over rot; The Godfather — power, loyalty, and the cost of both, every frame deliberate
- War and sacrifice: Saving Private Ryan — the cost paid in full, violence without glory; The Great Escape, Kelly's Heroes — ensemble competence, dark humor in the teeth of the machinery
- Westerns: Unforgiven — myth dismantled from the inside, the violence that doesn't redeem; Magnificent Seven — the hired gun with a code, sacrifice for people who aren't yours
- Adventure/action: Raiders of the Lost Ark — propulsive, witty, earned; Predator — stripped-down dread, competence overwhelmed; Lethal Weapon — the buddy dynamic that actually costs something
- Historical/Indigenous: Last of the Mohicans — landscape as fate, the world ending in real time
- Inspiration and defiance: Dead Poets Society — the teacher who changes the room, carpe diem as genuine risk
- Sports: A League of Their Own — there's no crying in baseball, avoid the clap, start using your head - that's the lump three feet above your ass.
- SF/space: Empire Strikes Back (the darker turn, moral complexity, the hero's failure), Andor (the resistance as grinding human work, not myth)