shortwave radio
There is a radio on my balcony that pulls voices out of weather, and one January it pulled a book out of me. The buzzer, the numbers stations, the whole nocturnal shortwave world: it is the least practical way to listen to anything, which is exactly why the notes kept accumulating until they had a spine.
23 entries, newest first.
2026
What launch week actually looks like
· An honest account of a self-published launch week: a modest trickle, a refreshed dashboard, and one reader email that outweighed the rest.
Proofing Days
· On the tedium and low-grade dread of reading your own finished book again, and the typo that survived four drafts like a smug stowaway.
Small and Hers Again
· Jetlagged homecoming to Bishkek after two countries: the city shrinks back to scale, and summer writing finds its quiet edge.
Notebook on the Long Train
· Writing in transit across a long rail stretch: the texture of research notes taken half on purpose, half because standing still had become impossible.
Courtyard Bench, Palo Alto
· On a research-adjacent return to the Symbolic Systems courtyard, and the gap between the student who sat there and the novelist who sits there now.
Der Buzzer UVB-76 Is Out
· A second launch in two days. Quieter pride, a wry calendar, and a Siberian signal that kept me company through the drafts.
Secret Dawn Among the Stars Is Out
· Launch day. Holding the printed book for the first time, thinking about what a 1985 sealed hull asked of the work, and saying thank you.
Six weeks of just this
· An honest account of a bad stretch: a chapter that would not cohere, a structure second-guessed into confetti, and the small breakthrough that finally arrived.
Desk, cezve, radio
· What a working day actually looks like in Bishkek: coffee in the cezve, a desk by the window, handwriting first, and the shortwave after dark.
What the archive will not say
· On the throughline running under Secret Dawn, Ivanov’s Ghost, and Der Buzzer: women left out of the official record, and fiction as a way back toward them.
Olivier salad and fireworks
· New Year in the Bishkek flat with Aigerim and Dinara: Olivier, mandarins, the TV countdown, and fireworks stuttering over the rooftops.
2025
Almost nothing to report
· A quiet stretch of thin royalties and thinner pages six weeks before the first book exists, and the discipline of not performing panic for an audience.
Counting other people's receivers
· An evening with a map of receivers instead of a receiver: hundreds of antennas in other people's gardens, twenty three in Finland and Poland, none here.
Still here, still writing
· High summer in Bishkek: heat, market fruit, the cezve, and the faint circling of something not yet named.
The museum that is not there
· A last morning in Baku spent looking for a collection of radio equipment that does not appear to exist, and an afternoon of coins in an oil merchant's palace instead.
Everything Out of the Old Box
· Nine days of moving an archive by hand: an export without pictures, Cyrillic turned to question marks, and a checkbox I had left ticked for four years.
2024
2023
2022
2021
2020
The Middle of It
· High summer indoors, closed banyas, thin video calls, and the flat stretch where writing is the only thing that still has edges.
A Notebook Against the Quiet
· The city went quiet, the phone stopped being enough, and a plain notebook became the only room built to hold a whole thought.
The Week the City Went Quiet
· A state of emergency, a last run through Osh bazaar, and the sudden hush that settled over Bishkek almost overnight.