Introducing Miles "Archwinger" Brooks, some kind of author or something

The Kindle version of my first book is available for pre-order now. Or wait for the paperback and hardcover, releasing 7/24/2026.

Backstory!

My parents didn’t name me “Archwinger.” My real name is way more boring. But if I died tomorrow, hundreds of people would (eventually) realize Archwinger has disappeared from the internet. Maybe even thousands depending on how many of you aren’t bots. Something like a dozen people would miss me in the real world. If that.

So maybe Archwinger is the real person and I’m his alter-ego.

Archwinger is actually the name of the third boss in this old Nintendo game “Legacy of the Wizard.” (I think in Japan, it was Dragon Slayer IV or something like that). A clunky, old-school Metroid-Vania style game before that was even a term, because all of the older Castlevania games back then were just platformers. The first two bosses in that game were jokes. You’d just face-tank them and keep tapping the B-button and they’d die first. I was just a kid in elementary school and even I thought they were jokes. But Archwinger was a difficulty spike. His bullets were like missiles, seeking you from all the way across the room before you could even see him. If you didn’t have the obnoxiously-hard-to-find shield item, you had to shoot his bullets out of the air with your magic shots all the way until you reached him. Then you slugged it out - your bullets knocking his away, his knocking yours away, his hits doing massive damage, yours doing crappy damage but you’re a smart human who can react to what you’re seeing and learn patterns. It felt like a dogfight to childhood-me. I had just a sliver of health and no items left when I beat that guy.

As you can no doubt tell, I had a lot of girlfriends growing up.

Anyway, that’s farther back than I meant to go. Let’s rewind to some more recent history. But still a long time ago.

In the year 201X, I became very slightly internet famous, mostly because my marriage sucked. I was sitting on the toilet after a particularly bad fight and input something into Google like why is my wife so mean all the time and never has sex with me. A few screen-taps later, I discovered the dreaded internet manosphere.

Somehow, being around angry internet men turned me into a writer. I already sort of was. I’ve always been good with words. And my day job is being a patent attorney, which involves a metric ton of carefully-chosen, precise language. But writing on the internet was like high school English class all over again, but on steroids, because the topics were actually interesting and fun. I could decide what to write about, within the broad scope of internet manosphere topics - whatever random thing I was interested in today. Then I could just let the words flow. Being as edgy, obnoxious, offensive, witty, hilarious, intellectual, or geeky and autistic as I felt like on any given day.

I’m a little dorky and awkward in person, but once you get to know me, I’m kind of smart and funny. When I’m writing, we don’t have to socialize. So we get to skip right to the smart and funny part.

Internet men started finding my writing witty, incisive, maybe a little hilarious. Even today, over a decade later, some of the big names in the ‘sphere still quote things I wrote. “Assume she’s promiscuous but don’t obsess”, “Women are as shitty as you let them be”, “Every unhappy wife is a rape victim”, and more. Lots more. I have something like 100 old essays at old.reddit.com/u/archwinger/submitted. Even more here on Substack.

Back then, there was this grift. Every manosphere guy who became a little famous for his essays was supposed to start a blog, a YouTube channel, and write books (that were really just collections of the essays he already wrote, maybe reworked a little bit).

I never did that. There wasn’t enough money in that grift to not work a real job, and my real job took up almost all my time, along with the broken-but-improving marriage and parenting our kid.

The thing is, I always wanted to write a book. Not to sell my essays in paper form to manosphere men. Not even necessarily a manosphere book. I have lots of ideas bouncing around in my crowded head besides internet gender-slop. Putting the things in my head on paper frees up space for other ideas.

There’s also something weirdly satisfying about writing that I discovered while writing edgy essays for internet men. It’s not the validation. Not really. It feels like just putting something on paper that someone else thinks about changes the world, just a tiny bit. We’re all colored and changed by the things we perceive, consume, are exposed to. Just a little. Those filters through which we experience life are constantly changing as things happen in our lives.

I feel like I’m adding to the collective world of humanity, by a small amount, every time I write. Like I’m a part of something.

I never did write a book back then. Real life was always too busy. My first marriage eventually ended, I’m remarried with two more kids, and have even less time and less money.

So naturally, I decided this was the perfect time to write a book for real.

My First Book

Over the course of my life, I started writing many books, never getting past the first couple of chapters. The first book I finally finished was actually one of the ones I started over a decade ago. Though the end product is unrecognizable compared to what I was thinking back then.

My original book was going to be an episodic series of essays, told in the first person, about girls from various stages of the main character’s life (with “Red Pill” lessons sprinkled throughout). But the “real story” would be told in the cracks. The charming, silly stories about girls were just the front-facing plot, while a reader who pays attention learns about a damaging childhood, aloof parents, a misaligned educational system, and is indirectly told the actual story through his inferences. Kind of like Forrest Gump. The main character is like Forrest on the bus bench while the reader is like the old lady listening to his stories. (Forrest’s front-facing “stupid is as stupid does” story is silly and charming, but the real story the movie told was about various events from America’s history, Southern culture, and the time period, perceived through the eyes of a retarded man.)

My original approach to this book wasn’t awful. But it wasn’t a gripping read. A series of silly and charming essays about girls, bound together in a book, would just be me banking on “I’m Archwinger, that mildly famous internet manosphere guy, and I have something to say! Buy my book because I’m Archwinger!” Leveraging Archwinger’s internet renown is fine for a 10-minute Substack essay that doesn't cost you anything, but it’s a lot to ask for a 50,000 word book and $9.99 of your hard earned dollars. I respect your time and money too much for that.

I never finished writing that book. But recently, I found some inspiration. One of the bigger names in our dark corner of the internet, Rian Stone, broke the mold and wrote a fiction book. (He’s since written two more, actually, and is working on another.) Not another “how to get women, be a better man, and how hard the world is for us men” manosphere gender-slop book. A real book you might buy at a bookstore and read for fun.

If that snarky fellow can write a work of literary fiction, why the heck not me?

Being a decade older and wiser than when I started the first couple chapters of this book, the words came a lot more easily. Writing about people is a lot easier when you know more about how the world is and what people are like. There were still many iterations of the book and lots and lots of editing decisions, but my first novel Wait. What Was the Question? was completed this year.

Introducing Miles Brooks

Wait. What Was the Question? is available for pre-order (in the Kindle format) right now, and is releasing (in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover formats) on July 24, 2026. Link below:

Wait. What Was the Question? on Amazon

I’ve written the book under the pen name “Miles Brooks.” (Link to Amazon author page.) The wife picked it out - thought it sounded modern and trendy. While the book is not technically a “manosphere” book, I’m a manosphere man and most of the people interested in buying and reading something I wrote are going to be manosphere men. We’re not a very popular group of people. We’re more like the kind of people your employer fires you for associating with. And the kind of people other internet people who don’t like you (or like you too much) might get curious about if they know your real identity.

So I can’t tie this product to my real name. But since it’s not a manosphere book, just a fun fiction novel, I also don’t want to sell it as “Archwinger, legendary evil internet misogynist.” Archwinger isn’t a very good author name anyway. It’s a better name for a pixelated green dragon-like creature that spits bullets across the screen.

Wait. What Was the Question?

Wait. What Was the Question? is the story of a divorced dad named Archer Wood. He finds himself in court-ordered therapy due to some substance abuse issues his ex-wife blew out of proportion (or maybe not…) The reader gets to see Archer navigate therapy, lots of dating, co-parenting his daughter, and his co-dependent relationship with his best friend, who’s in a terrible marriage of his own.

Archer’s primary strategy for dealing with all of these uncomfortable and potentially vulnerable encounters comes straight from his Gen-X latchkey kid upbringing, rife with narcissistic disconnected boomer parents who thought parenting ended with with food and a roof over his head: avoidance and talking about himself. (And maybe a little too much self-medicating.) He tells stories about his past thinking he’s connecting with others, when he’s actually doing the opposite.

That works fine with girls you’ve just started dating, but sucks a bit for long-term relationship success. It sucks even more when that’s your approach to parenting a kid who’s not so much of a kid any more, or when your best friend is sick of your shit because he’s drowning in his own.

But by the end of the book, if you’ve been paying attention, you know why he’s the way he is, and even see him get a little bit better after confronting a few of his skeletons.

It’s good. Or at least I think so. I have to be in the right mood to sit and re-read it. Some nights, the words just fly off the page at me and flow through my brain, and I find myself thinking “I can’t believe I wrote this amazing thing.” Other nights, I’m not in the right headspace and it’s harder for my brain to parse what I’m reading, and I think “Nobody is going to like this.” I’m told feeling this way is normal when a book is nearing its release date.

Conclusion

If any of the above sounds interesting to you, pre-order the book (or wait and buy it in paperback), and tell everyone you know. The average indie/self-published book sells a dozen copies. I’m not getting rich this way or quitting my day job. I just want people to read and be entertained.

Stealing a sound byte from our own Rian Stone, it’s good (or at least I think so). Maybe it’s your cup of tea, maybe it’s not. But I’m not wasting your time.

Wait. What Was the Question? on Amazon