Update #2
Newsletter
Dear readers,
Since my last update, I’ve published two new books: the novel The Great Derealization, which I mentioned previously, and the short-story collection Ataraxia Sanatorium and Other Unearthly Tales. If you’re already familiar with my work, most of the stories in the collection won’t be new to you—they’re drawn from my earlier posts on r/nosleep. That said, they haven’t simply been repackaged. Each story has been revised and edited, not to absolute perfection perhaps, but as close as I could reasonably get.
At the moment, I’m editing another short-story collection—still untitled—which gathers the remaining r/nosleep stories that didn’t fit into the first volume. Alongside that, I’ve begun work on the novelization of my short story Julia Was a Special Girl. It’s a counterfactual coming-of-age story about a teenage girl who forms a white-hat hacker organization in middle school. What begins as a small, idealistic group gradually turns into a cult of personality, ultimately challenging the fragile world order of the post–Cold War 1990s and triggering the decision to send a message back in time.
Once I’ve finished editing the second short-story collection, I plan to move on to two rough novel drafts that have been waiting in the wings for some time. The first is The Lost City of Utgård, based on one of my most popular short stories, about a city inexplicably transported to a parallel universe. The second is The Red Bathhouse, a liminal horror novel written as a diary, following a teenage girl who finds herself trapped inside an endless bathhouse of blood-red tiles and swimming pools filled with black, oily water.
As for my other projects, there have been a few changes. I’ve decided to stop working on the ecosystem simulator after realizing that it simply wasn’t fun enough to play, and that the game engine I was using, Clickteam Fusion, couldn’t handle the scale required to make it enjoyable. Still, the project taught me a great deal, and I don’t consider the time I spent on it a failure.
Going forward, I plan to shift my focus to a smaller game—something better aligned with my current skill level and the limitations of my current tools—while gradually learning new ones, such as Unity or Unreal Engine. I haven’t produced much new art recently, but I did manage to finish a few pieces, which are showcased below:
That’s it for this update. I hope to return with another one soon. Until then, feel free to explore the books and projects mentioned above—and thank you for reading.