So, I’m going to board the hype train. But not as a passenger. As the driver! Think about it. Who better to write a book on AI than a diehard curmudgeonly tech-savvy skeptic who treats this whole thing as one big conditioning experiment? Exactly. No one. Now, the topic. Ethics, of course. What else is there.
Well, well, that was quick. Three months, done. Now, let me throw some lovely statistics at ya. Book length? About 80,000 words, give or take a few, thirty-five images, thirty-three tables, a combat simulation (written in octave). Study material? I read about 150 books, and about thrice as many reports, journals, monographs, and webpages in six languages. I marked about 800 annotations, and ended up with slightly under 700 citations and references. And the genre?
A couple of months back, I finished writing my brand new-old fantasy book. A fresh, third attempt at an old idea. Why, you may ask. Well, the old one just wasn’t good enough. Despite its verbosity, almost three quarters of a million words, it was clunky, ponderous, perhaps even boring. And reading, I was quite surprised, and delighted, by how much my writing style has changed over the years, and decades. This got me wondering. How many words does it take for one to find their “true” voice?
I don’t like repeating myself. Let me say that one more time. I don’t … no, wait. Aha! So, as it happens, I’m not really fond of writing “more of the same”, so to speak. Once I’ve done a certain theme, I don’t find great enjoyment in rehashing it. Some authors love their worlds, and keep spinning endless sequels in them. But that’s too familiar, too easy for me. I always need to push beyond my would-be comfort zone, and I always want to try new things, writing wise. Hence, the two new topics I’m going to do in 2025: military history and romance novel, what.
I did it. The brand new (yet old) 63-chapter, 160,000-word fantasy book featuring magic, dragons, wizards, gritty heroes, and lots and lots of lore is done. I finished the project within roughly six months of leisurely writing (for the most part), give or take a few weeks. On its own, this wouldn’t be a major feat, except … I have tried to “rewrite” this idea three times already, unsuccessfully. But now, I finally succeeded.
It’s happening. I’m very close to finishing the new old fantasy book! After twenty years and two failed rewrite attempts, this third endeavor is finally bearing fruit. I found the right formula. Rather than trying to fix the old, clunky, ponderous manuscript, I’m writing a brand new book, with brand new words. Only the original idea (mostly) remains the same. In fact, even though this book will “only” stretch some 150,000 words, less than a quarter of the original version of mine, it’s still more fun, has more detail, more character development, better pacing, better everything.
When it rains, it pours, or something. If you recall, less than a month back, I told you about my new fantasy work. Well, new old, so to speak. I’m writing from scratch a book that I’ve already written, more than 20 years back. Now, the idea is jolly solid, only the original volume is a ponderous 630,000-word colossus that simply isn’t fun enough. Fixing it turned out to be an impossible task. So I set about writing a brand new book, reusing the core story concepts. This has been going brilliantly. I’m already 35% done, some 60K works so far.
Between 1997 and 2001, throughout my military service, I wrote my first proper fantasy book. It was a hefty effort, 630,000 words in total. The book had everything: magic, monsters, lore, epicness, colorful protagonists. Only I never published it. Simply put, I tried sending it to various agents and publication houses, and they all turned it down. Rightfully so, because it wasn’t very good. In fact, it was pretty bad.
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.
Hello there, readers. It’s been a while since I posted an update here. But the lack of visible blog news activity doth not indicate a lack of invisible writing activity (not using the invisible ink, that is). I thought you might want to hear what sort of prose I have for you in the store. After publishing 20 books in 10 years, a nice round number and an awesome milestone altogether, I have no intention of slowing down, and so, let me tell you what you should expect from me in the coming months.
