Dear readers, it’s been a while since I posted an article here. The astute among thee may wonder why so, and also remember my book plan for 2022, which, so far, does not seem to be progressing according to plan [sic]. Well, my big intention was to bundle The Golden Horde weekly serial into a proper paperback volume and (re)-release it on Amazon. But then 2022 happened. War. And what do you do when your book theme is WWIII and it involves a bunch of countries across Europe and Asia? Well, you don’t … publish it, for starters.

I wrote The Golden Horde in 2018, way before the current events took place. In fact, the action in the book occurs in a somewhat distant 2050 (albeit with the war raging for more than a decade). World War Three has erupted, there’s a global economic breakdown, and central Asia is the hotspot of fighting. West vs. East. An interesting theme, for sure, but one that may feel somewhat uncomfortable at the moment. In fact, to me, it felt wrong going forward with the publication that could, in some weird, indirect way, profit from the current geopolitic situation.

I decided to wait some. After all, people who want to read the free weekly serial can already do that at their leisure. Instead, I dedicated my time to polishing up a nice 120K-word sci-fi book. Next year, I will try to pitch it to a bunch of professional publishers, because why not. Ultimately, I finished 2022 without a new book on the shelves, a first one for me since 2011.

But no biggie. This is just a small inconvenience after all. Longer term, what I’m most interested is finding new topics and themes to write about it. I hate repeating myself, I hate rehashing the same old stories and tropes. I absolutely don’t like it when authors straddle a single world, a single set of characters and keep writing about them ad nauseum. Gets boring awfully quick, and I’m trying my best to avoid that.

This is why, over the years, I wrote high and low fantasy, mythology, sci-fi, military thriller, dystopian, all of it, dabbled in first- and third-person, single- and multi-POV, and did my best to be original every single time. But I am running out of fresh ideas, which makes my quest harder. At the moment, I cannot think of a genre or topic that would be engaging to write, and that isn’t already a repetition of something you’ve already seen from me. A difficult task, but one that makes 2023 a welcome challenge. Well then, I bid you a good new year, and see you soon.