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Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams

October 3, 2025

Writing

art, book, creativity, fiction, literature, writing

Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams is a short novel I recently wrote. It took me exactly 10 days to go from “blank page” to “edited, ready for publishing”. Of course this is unusual even by my standards (writing short, abstract, poetic fiction).

What made this possible – and at the same time very easy and pleasurable – was a concordance between methodology and subject matter.

Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams is probably the most free-styling, artistic kind of work I’ve written that still counts as prose. I certainly can detect an evolution in my literary production, with novels like The Storytelling Cat being far more abstract, artistic, poetic than my earlier works.

So where does Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams sit in all that? Let me explain…

Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams. Book cover art.
Cover art by yours truly. The color palette is not accidental, by the way…
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The Immigrant Trilogy

July 31, 2025

Writing

book, Greece, literature, writing

The Immigrant Trilogy comprises three previously published works: To Cross an Ocean: Apognosis, The Other Side of Dreams, and The Storytelling Cat. These three works can be read independently – indeed, the order doesn’t matter – but only by reading all three of them can a reader appreciate the full scope of the themes involved. In that sense, I view The Immigrant Trilogy not as a collection of three novels but a three-volume novel.

The title gives an indication of the major connective element: immigration. However, although the plots and characters of this work do focus on actual immigration – being a stranger in a strange land – the concept must be examined from a more general, more metaphorical perspective.

We are all immigrants in some aspects of our lives. Some of us might be non-binary, others might be disabled. Perhaps we are single parents, or we try to cope with some mental health challenge. The bottom line is, one way or another we are “misfits”; we (feel that we) don’t belong.

The Immigrant Trilogy, book cover
If you happen to be familiar with my favorite art themes, you’ll recognize the cover of The Immigrant Trilogy as something I’ve painted myself
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Nested Temporality in Writing: The Future Pasts

July 26, 2025

Fiction Writing Tips, Philosophy, Writing

literature, philosophy, time, writing

“The future ain’t what it used to be” is an oft-quoted sentence. It’s supposed to be funny, but few realize it contains a concept that is important to writing and philosophy alike. This sentence contains what I refer to as a nested temporality.

People usually think of the past, the present, and the future as easily defined, separate entities. They also don’t see much ambiguity and in-betweenness in them: there’s one kind of past, one kind of present, one kind of future.

However, this is not true. There are pasts contained in the past (indeed an infinite number of them), and pasts contained in the future. Perhaps it’s more self-evident that there is an infinite number of futures, too, if we went about defining the future as probabilities.

Oh, and if you’re interested in defining the present, good luck with that!

In this post I’m examining the concept of nested temporality – and I will begin with defining it more precisely – in the context of writing fiction. What does a nested temporality bring to a narrative, and how can we use nested temporalities for creative purposes?

Nested Time. Image of clock.
For purely practical reasons, humans tend to think of time as both linear and well-defined. Nothing could be further from the truth…
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