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A Less Disturbing Form of Reality: Short Story Collection

October 28, 2024

book, fiction, genre, literature, writing

A Less Disturbing Form of Reality is a short story collection themed around the uncanny and the unexplained. However, there’s something you need to know: It’s not new.

In fact, it’s anything but new. The stories were written between 2008 and 2014, though a handful of them are adaptations of even older stuff I’ve written.

In other words, these are really, really raw. They’re also very unlike my usual literary-fiction style, and even different from my recent short fiction, such as A Summer Evening in Another World and Tell Me, Mariner.

So, why now?

A Less Disturbing Form of Reality: book cover

The cover art of A Less Disturbing Form of Reality is something that won’t win any awards. It’s made with Canva and an AI-slapped image…

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Literary Translation: Secrets, Revelations, Reflection

October 14, 2024

Fiction, Literature, Writing

book, creativity, fiction, literature, writing

I’ve talked before about literary translation, in a sense: In my post about translating poetry. But today there’s something more unique to talk about, having to do with what translating a novel can teach you about yourself and your writing craft.

You might remember that some time ago I wrote a novel called The Storytelling Cat. Indeed, I started writing it about a month after saying “I won’t write another novel”. Never trust a writer, huh? What you might have noticed is that there’s also a Greek version available for download on Home for Fiction.

The vast majority of my readers don’t speak Greek. Still, I decided to translate The Storytelling Cat into Greek – on a whim, almost – for two reasons: i) it completes the third part of my quasi-Greek-trilogyIf you suspect I might translate the other two novels too at some point, you might be right! (supplemented by Apognosis and The Other Side of Dreams); ii) it’s set on the island of Lemnos, and I wanted to experiment with the local idiom in literary form.

What I didn’t expect was that this literary translation – written in less than two weeks – would reveal a ton of things about my creativity, my writing, and who I am as a writer.

literary translation. Greek version book cover — This is the Greek version of the cover. The art is self-evidently the same…

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Old Memories Murmured in Dreams: Young Love Poetry

May 20, 2024

Fiction

book, fiction, literature, love, poetry, writing

An old joke claims that thirty years of marriage is when she wonders what happened to the guy she married, while he wonders what happened to the girl he didn’t marry. There’s something special about young love, and poetry themed around this concept has certain unique features as well.

The most important element is of course relevant to rosy retrospection. Young love – our first romantic interactions in teenagehood and early adulthood – might be beautiful, meaningful, and exhilarating, but it’s also confusing, painful, scary, and sometimes dark and destructive.

No sane person would ever want to go through that more than once!

But that’s the beauty of art: It allows us to safely experience and reflect on feelings, thoughts, and states of mind that we wouldn’t want to experience in “reality”.

So I decided – on a whim, basically – to put together Old Memories Murmured in Dreams, a poetry collection focusing on young love. Quite frankly, I’m not even sure we can call it poetry – I tend to see it more like my Medēn art project; something between poetry and prose.

In any case, if we want to call it poetry for simplicity’s sake, it’s poetry from a naïve, young-adult perspective, but with intriguing darkness. Hey, it’s me; what did you expect!

young love poetry; cover art for Old Memories Murmured in Dreams — Cover art, made by yours truly

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