Readers keep bumping into familiar faces as they move from one series to the next. The short answer to every question that follows: yes, it’s all one universe — and every thread runs, deliberately, toward the Selection.

Disgardium is finished. Every book is out, the saga lands its ending, and no cliffhangers are left dangling — so if you were waiting for the series to wrap before you started, this is the moment.

Cartographer Pavel Kopchenov drew the Island of the Dead, where the first books of Soul Harvest unfold. That scorched patch isn’t an accident — think of it as a fog of war, there to keep the plot from spoiling itself.

The story behind the first children’s book of my life, written for the legendary Detskaya Literatura publishing house — told by the series editor, Anna Trofimova, with a pile of photos from the work on the book.

How is Sidus tied to Disgardium and Level Up — and maybe the other series too? Let me answer everyone at once and connect the dots, mostly spoiler-light. (Heads up: this one brushes late-book events.)

A draft map of the world of Disgardium, drawn by cartographer Pavel Kopchenov. For now it marks only the places actually named in the books — top-clan castles and temples left off on purpose, to dodge spoilers and clutter.

Back in 2020 I sat down for an AMA on Reddit’s LitRPG community. Here’s my intro post, kept almost as it was — a little time capsule about my books, my ZX Spectrum childhood, and how I stumbled into writing.

Writing LitRPG is trivially easy — just add elves, some numbers, a divine quest, and you’re done. Or so they say. A sarcastic look at the genre everyone keeps burying, and why it refuses to stay dead.

A few readers accused Alex, the hero of Disgardium, of fat-shaming and betraying a childhood friend. A short memo on why my heroes start out flawed — and why that long, winding road to becoming truly human is the whole point.

I always preferred the worst start possible — hardest difficulty, weakest team, one life only. That same flaw is why I drop every hero I write into the grimmest opening I can invent. The lower the start, the more exciting the climb.

Every author writes with a particular reader in mind. When I write, I picture my first readers — my 86-year-old Gran, my father, my kids — which is why I’ll never write books about selfish bastards.

I’m often asked whether writing books is easy. I always say yes — you just sit down and write. The hard part is everything you have to hold in your head while you do it. (Also, please remember this number: 26753.)

Plenty of authors boast about game worlds so authentic they engage all five senses. But if immersion is total, so is pain — and I’ve done my share of tanking in raids. Who in their right mind would play a game like that?

In most superhero stories, the hero starts fighting crime the moment they get their powers. Me? I’d probably just keep living my life, trying to make things better for the people around me — which is exactly what Phil does in Level Up.

A string of unlikely coincidences is the only reason this book exists. Four abandoned chapters, five likes, a year of silence, then a contest that caught me — the messy true story of how Level Up became a novel.