Adriana Kantcheva

Author of speculative fiction.

Hello, ,

It's been a quiet month since my last newsletter, mostly keeping my head down and focusing on writing. The weather is warming up, and that's a delight.

What I’ve been up to

• I polished a short story just in time to send it off to a specific submission call. It's the first time I've ever written anything for a theme. Usually, I don't enjoy writing after prompts, but this time I felt inspired.

• I'm making good progress on a mini-revision pass for my current novel. Next steps will be some polishing and then seeking comments from beta-readers.

• On the back burner: Working on another short story draft that I recently received comments on, but I really want to prioritize the novel.

Not the latest blog post...

I've lately been thinking a lot about what I want from life and what happiness and fulfillment mean to me. I come from a family where external validation is rated very highly. But over and over again, I find that doing my thing to the best of my abilities is all I can and ultimately want to do.

The blog post below is not new, but I haven't changed my mind about what I say there. In fact, I have more to say about the subject, so apparently, a new blog post is brewing in my head...

Does anyone ever get “there?”

(A photograph of a mountain dirt road. People, their backs to the camera, are walking on it.)

Let me take a little of your time to talk about the concept of “getting there”. The lives of many seem to revolve around this elusive destination. Lately, mine as well. I’m a writer. I’m as passionate about this as the next writer out there. I’ve spent countless hours obsessing about the next steps in my writing “career.” The goals. The milestones. The obstacles.

I was first focused on getting a story—any story—published. Then I was focused on getting more stories published, then on joining a number of communities, and now I’m gearing up to obsess about finding an agent.

And as my obsessions peaked, the pure, innocent joy that the act of writing is for me dissolved. Click here to read more.

With a bang!

I wrote what follows as an exercise, but I quite like how it turned out, so I'm sharing it here.

No light, no matter, no sound, nothing. Inertness. A void.

Then, incandescence.

Existence ignites into being, a spectrum of energies hotter than anything to come oscillating rapidly in a mad dance of creation. Motes so small they’re half non-existent but carrying enough charge to fuel galaxies blaze and cook.

In the kaleidoscopic soup of all there is, a fusion, a mating begins, and the touchable is slowly begotten: first quarks, neutrinos, electrons, and protons; and then atoms that kiss to gas. The gas swirls and combusts. Galaxies light up. The deaths of stars are the births of planets. One day, we arrive to flutter across the colossal eye of existence like snowflakes about to melt.

So, stop. Give some love. We are all part of the inferno.

A recent video

I recently went to a medieval festival in Switzerland (Lenzburg has a lovely castle) and witnessed a reenactment of 15th-century fighting techniques described in a manual from that time, compiled by a German nobleman. What I enjoyed most were the explanations, which stripped the whole affair of any romantic notions: it was brutal, dangerous, and not always chivalrous (that being said, the woman knight in my current novel project is most definitely chivalrous).

Here's a link (Dropbox) to a video with one of the demonstrations:

Something learned

Sometimes, the best things in life come unwanted and uncoveted, like when Siri doesn’t hear me well while I’m driving and plays the wrong song, which turns out to be exactly the right song (see below).

Reading and music

• Reading: I read The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson a while ago, so I'm not sure why I never mentioned it this newsletter. It's absolutely excellent from premise to execution. Traveling to a parallel universe is only possible if the traveler's counter-self is already dead there. The protagonist is dead in most parallel universes, so what does that say about her life and chances? High-stakes emotions in a brilliantly envisioned sci-fi world.

• Music: This is the artist Siri helped me discover: Nabihah Iqbal. Current favorite song: Closer Lover (link to YouTube) from her latest album "Dreamer". (But why not listen to the whole album? It's sooooo good!)

Until next time!

Adriana

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© 2026 Adriana Kantcheva | catchingwords.com