Happy New Year!
2025 was never meant to be a year of major change in my writing career, but life doesn’t ask what we’re planning. It just happens.
At the beginning of the year, A Sky Without Stars was on ice. It didn’t have a title yet. It didn’t have an ending. Somewhere in early spring, I opened the project and started reading. I couldn’t stop. I realised this was possibly the most coherent work I had ever created. It needed to be completed. It deserved to be published.
As I started writing, something like a dam broke. Creativity flowed, ideas rushed in. Many of them didn’t fit that project.
I saw algorithms, political unrest, digital manipulation. A world drifting toward something unsettling.
While finishing Sky, I started work on Recommended for You, a novella about loneliness in the age of algorithms, AI companions, and increasing social isolation. I imagined a perfectly average man, living roughly five years in the future.
Sky and the new novella were completed around the same time, but I needed to finish the old work first. The Frank and Celestina trilogy had been with me since 2017, and it deserved a proper conclusion. Only once that was done could I turn my attention fully to the modern stories.
That time has come.
Recommended for You will be released in a month. But it won’t be alone. Two more novellas are scheduled for this year. One is a near-future political thriller, involving elections, deepfakes, and assassination. Later in the year, a very dark story set in Iceland follows. Again near-future. Again unsettling.
I hope you’ll join me on this journey.
At some point last year, I said that 2026 would be nothing like 2025. Now you know why.
Once again, happy New Year. May the scary things stay in our fiction.
Peace and love.