The fiction section is still relatively small, but it already has a fairly clear personality.
Most of the books here share some combination of absurdism, dark humour, genre collision and literary mashup.
Even when the settings are completely different, I tend to be interested in stories where familiar systems stop behaving in familiar ways.
Bureaucracy becomes surreal.
Philosophy enters a zombie apocalypse.
Classic literary universes collide.
A perfectly ordinary working day becomes something much stranger.
That is probably the thread connecting most of the fiction I publish.
No Further Claims
No Further Claims, a Bracken Ford novel, is a darkly comic story set in small-town America.
It is interested in bureaucracy, local politics, institutional logic and the strange way communities can collectively accept something completely absurd as long as it has been written into a report, approved by a committee or repeated enough times.
The world of Bracken Ford is recognisable.
That is part of the joke.
Nothing in it needs to become completely fantastical because real administrative systems, local legends, civic projects and small-town conflicts already produce enough absurdity on their own.
The humour comes from people behaving very seriously inside structures that make less and less sense the closer you look at them.
God Was Busy with the Plumbing
Another book in this section is much more personal.
God Was Busy with the Plumbing was originally written in Ukrainian and later translated into English.
It follows a former artist who has become a plumber and, shortly before Christmas, is sent to a hospital to deal with a sewage problem.
That description is technically accurate.
It also does not explain very much.
The book is partly absurdist, partly comic and, in places, loosely autobiographical in spirit.
I studied art and have always been interested in the strange distance between the identity a person imagines for himself and the life he actually ends up living.
An artist becoming a plumber is already an interesting starting point.
Sending him into a hospital before Christmas to repair a sewage system gives the universe an opportunity to comment.
Or perhaps the universe is busy elsewhere.
The book is about work, dignity, failure, adaptation and the ridiculous situations through which people somehow continue trying to make sense of themselves.
There is humour in it.
There is also a fair amount of black humour.
The Ukrainian and English editions now allow the same story to exist in both of the languages in which I most often publish.
Marcus Aurelius during the zombie apocalypse
Some fiction begins with a more explicit mashup.
One example is an adaptation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations for a zombie apocalypse.
The basic idea is simple:
Stoicism is very convincing when the problem is an irritating colleague, bad weather or somebody insulting you.
What happens when the external world is genuinely catastrophic?
Can you distinguish between what is under your control and what is not when the dead are trying to eat you?
Can you maintain equanimity while civilisation collapses?
The absurdity works because the original philosophy is taken seriously.
The zombie apocalypse is not there only as a joke. It becomes a stress test for ideas about mortality, fear, responsibility, self-control and acceptance.
That combination of something intellectually serious with something deliberately ridiculous is a form I keep returning to.
Don Quixote in Neverland
The clearest literary mashup in the catalogue is Don Quixote in Neverland.
The idea came from noticing an interesting structural similarity between two characters who initially seem unrelated.
Don Quixote is an adult who refuses the ordinary adult world and chooses to inhabit a reality constructed from stories.
Peter Pan is a child who refuses adulthood altogether.
One wants to escape ordinary maturity by turning himself into a knight.
The other builds an entire mythology around never becoming an adult.
Putting those universes together creates a strange symmetry.
Don Quixote is physically an adult but psychologically insists on another world.
Peter Pan is physically a child but can often behave with the cold certainty and authority of an adult.
Neverland, meanwhile, is exactly the sort of place where Don Quixote's inability to distinguish story from reality may stop looking like a defect.
The mashup is not simply about placing two famous characters in the same adventure.
It is about asking what happens when two incompatible ways of refusing reality discover that they may actually belong to the same universe.
Why mashups interest me
I like mashups because they expose assumptions.
A familiar story usually comes with rules we stop noticing.
Don Quixote belongs to one literary system.
Peter Pan belongs to another.
Stoic philosophy belongs somewhere very far from zombie fiction.
Once the boundaries are removed, both sides become visible again.
What does this character actually believe?
Which part of the story is essential?
What happens if a philosophy designed for one world is forced to operate inside another?
Absurdism works in a similar way.
You take a normal institution, profession or social rule and move it only slightly.
Often you discover that reality was already more absurd than the fictional version.
Fiction in more than one language
Most of my publishing catalogue is English-first, but fiction does not necessarily follow that rule.
Some work begins in Ukrainian.
Some begins in English.
Some may eventually exist in several languages.
I do not see translation here as secondary to the "real" version. If a story works in another language and I can produce an edition I am comfortable with, it becomes another legitimate version of the book.
This is particularly important to me because my own life now moves between Ukraine, France and an increasingly international working environment.
The language in which an idea begins is not necessarily the only language in which it should remain.
And then there is LitRPG
A larger fiction project is also emerging through Good Dog, my LitRPG work.
It is already being published, with a substantial part of the project complete.
I am not placing it inside this standalone Fiction block because it is developing into a publishing line of its own.
That distinction is useful.
The books collected here are mostly independent experiments.
If a fictional world grows large enough, develops sequels or becomes a repeatable format, it deserves its own space rather than being forced into a miscellaneous category.
A small but intentionally strange shelf
For now, the Fiction section remains compact.
I do not publish fiction simply to fill a genre catalogue.
The projects usually begin because there is some collision I want to explore.
An artist and a sewage system.
Marcus Aurelius and zombies.
Don Quixote and Peter Pan.
A small American town and the full machinery of institutional absurdity.
The subjects may have very little in common.
The instinct behind them does.
Take something familiar.
Move it slightly out of alignment.
Then see what becomes visible.
That is probably the best description of the fiction I like to write and publish.