Books, Manuals & Other Escaped Objects
This is the publication shelf.
It is not a clean shelf. It does not prove that there was a plan.
There is In Itself, a book of philosophical essays by my mentor, Lajos Mura, which I helped bring into print because some debts cannot be paid with money. There is Finnish Sign Language Material, because sometimes the real problem on-site is not the machine, but the fact that two people in the same room do not share a working communication system. There is Ventilation Info Kit, a pocket handbook for ventilation professionals, because useful information has a bad habit of hiding in expensive books, scattered standards, old PDFs, and the head of the one person who is currently on holiday.
And then there is After the Chaos, a tabletop role-playing game that began as a side pipe from a much larger fantasy world and is now, somewhat rudely, becoming more finished than the novels it came from.
So no, the category is not elegant.
It is philosophy, accessibility, ventilation, practical field knowledge, fantasy, rules, systems, unfinished novels, finished side projects, and the general human tendency to solve one problem by accidentally creating four more.
Which is probably my brand, whether I ordered it or not.
In Itself
Lajos Mura, 2013, 68 pages
This book was not written as a book.
It was assembled from the letters, emails, notes, and scattered writings of Lajos Mura, my mentor, and in many ways a father to me. He died in 2007.
Lajos took me in when I was homeless in Hungary. He fed me, stayed up with me, and learned with me when I was preparing for school. He did not teach in the usual sense. He had a way of creating the conditions in which you had to become yourself.
When I was preparing for my final exams, he claimed he was bored driving around the country and asked me to read my textbooks aloud onto recordings, so he would have something to listen to on the road. I do not know whether he ever needed those recordings. I do not even know whether he listened to them. But I made them, and I got the best grades.
That was often how he helped. He did not drag people forward. He created a reason for them to walk.
The book gathers his reflections on life, struggle, work, family, freedom, self-creation, mortality, and the strange business of being human while pretending we have a manual somewhere. It is philosophical, personal, sharp, funny, sometimes harsh, and very Hungarian in the best possible way: one moment it is looking at death, the next it is talking about money, children, goats, freedom, and why people are the way they are.
The cover is built from a photograph of the two of us eating on the terrace when I was about twenty. The final image is the same place after I removed us from the table and turned the sunny day dark.
Getting his words into print was a small act of gratitude.
Not enough, probably.
But something.
Work-related publications
In Finnish
These publications grew out of practical work: situations where the problem was not that information did not exist, but that it was scattered, too abstract, or not available at the moment when someone actually needed it.
The collection includes Finnish Sign Language Material for HVAC and building-services situations, the Ventilation Info Kit for practical ventilation knowledge, and the Ventilation System Cleaning and Inspection Guide, which brings together visual inspection, cleanliness assessment, cleaning methods, safety, documentation, and inspection checklists for ventilation systems. The attached guide is a 35-page Finnish IVAeris publication, intended as support material for workers and educational use, and it focuses especially on assessing duct cleanliness visually and carrying out cleaning and inspection work safely and systematically.
Not academic in the decorative sense.
More like tools.
Which is usually what you want when the ceiling is open, the customer is waiting, and the answer needs to be useful before the coffee gets cold.
A Blow for the Wretched
A Blow for the Wretched is the first novel in my fantasy series set in the World of Elshore.
The story begins after the Chaos, in Udhafa City: a broken northern metropolis of canal blocks, dead imperial towers, religious debt, medical scarcity, old machines, and people who keep surviving mostly because stopping would require paperwork.
At the centre of the book is Thelian, a blue-eyed canal-block boy marked as wrong before he has had any real chance to become himself. He is poor, grieving, practical, frightened, stubborn, and already carrying too much. When his little sister dies of heart-fever, Thelian makes the kind of promise children make when the world has failed them completely: he will find the Blood Ïsuulë flower of Baramma, the legendary plant from the stories of Prince Randen, and bring back something that can answer death.
The book also follows Bigtooth, an Annil guardian who has spent far longer than ten days protecting two ancient sleepers in a hidden chamber, and Harri, a debtor whose private failures are slowly converted into public machinery by the Order of Randen. Around them, the old world has not disappeared so much as rusted, mutated, and been repurposed by people with uniforms, ledgers, prayers, and very strong opinions about who counts as human.
It is a fantasy novel, but not the polished-castle kind.
More ducts, fever rooms, ruined office blocks, hibernation vaults, capsule stations, stolen medicine, religious bureaucracy, and old imperial systems still humming in the walls because nobody has yet found the correct switch.
The first book is finished, but the series is built as four interconnected novels. That makes publishing only the first one feel slightly dangerous, like opening one wall of a building and discovering the ventilation, electricity, family trauma, and ancient metaphysics are all using the same duct.
So the manuscript exists.
The forest exists.
The road through it is still being cut.
After the Chaos: Core Rulebook
The World of Elshore, complete draft in editing
After the Chaos is a tabletop role-playing game rulebook set in the same world as my fantasy novels.
The main project is not actually the game. The main project is four interconnected novels: A Blow for the Wretched, A Prince for the Abandoned, and the rest of the series waiting in the machinery. The first book is finished, but I cannot really publish it alone, because the books are tied together in ways that make publishing one piece feel like installing only the left side of a ventilation system and hoping the air will understand the intention.
Meanwhile, for fun and to play in the world with my son I turned the setting into a tabletop role-playing game.
This was supposed to be the side project.
Naturally, the side project is now the one that looks like it may actually get finished.
The rulebook includes the world and concept, core rules, characters, the living world, and material for the game master. It is a way to open the door into the setting before the novels are ready, and maybe also a way to keep the world alive while the books continue their long campaign against completion.
The draft is finished and currently going through editing.
So the novels are still in the forest somewhere.
But the game has found a road.
