Yes, that is correct – I finally self-published my fiction book called “CineMagic”. In fact, the book contains two stories: “CineMagic” as the main course and “Mechanism” as a dessert.
If you are sitting there surprised with this twist, below is the story of its creation ⬇️
I enjoyed writing stories for a very long time. It was never anything concrete, just short episodes and isolated scenes. For example, I wrote, printed and hand-crafted a mini-book for my wife, describing our future happy life from the perspective of an older self – it was very romantic. Then, I had a bigger project – a story for kids that I hoped to finish before having my own kids so I could read it to them as a bedtime story. However, I have never taken this seriously enough to piece together the whole story, ending up with about 50 pages of draft material (I still store it on my drive so there is a slim chance I may finish it one day… maybe for my grandkids? 😅 ). Besides that, I had a few funny stories that were very niche as they were filled with niche “internal” humor for my friends.
Many years later, I started to write articles about gamedev and management. First, for my LinkedIn and later for my own website (yes, this one). I started it for several reasons that I stated many times in various articles (here, for example). One of them was to practice my written English, as I am not a native speaker.
In 2021, I moved to Copenhagen, and my surroundings were 90% English-speaking. I felt a need for an opposite exercise to practice my written Russian. I’ve been told many times that I can speak and write in a captivating manner – I was proud of that and didn’t want to lose my storytelling skills. So I started to piece together some of my older ideas and write a few pages every couple of weeks.
After a while, I realized that I like the outcome. I decided to take it seriously this time, as the project seemed shorter and easier than that book for children. Apparently, writing books is hard (yes, even in the AI era, especially if you really care about the result). Keeping the writing style and the narrative consistent, when you don’t write it in one take but spread across months (or even years), was the most challenging part for me.
Last year I decided that 2025 would be the year when I would finally publish my story (well, two stories as going with just one was too short of a book and I wanted 100 pages at least). To publish “CineMagic”, I combined it with another short story I wrote. Actually, the only story that fitted because others were either horrors or comedies (and “CineMagic” is neither). “Mechanism” was the obvious choice with its sci-fi elements, and I think it leaves the correct aftertaste to think about the whole book.
Apparently, the hardest part was editing, then translating and preparing the layout. AI helped with the cover and with the English translation, though the latter required heavy editing.
I’m happy with the whole experience – polishing the story, the phrases, the characters. Getting into the flow and observing how the stream of events takes you through blank pages and twists to some conclusion is an exciting feeling that now makes me perceive reading slightly differently.
I think the Russian version turned out better (well, that was the whole point of this project when it started!) but I’m proud of both stories and both “localizations”.
If you decide to actually go and check it, I really hope you will enjoy it, and any feedback will be very much appreciated. But if not, I’m still glad I did this and learned something new while working on it.
Retrieving Thoughts 