Why i wrote celeritous...

*"Like a lot of boys growing up in the seventies, I was swept away by Star Wars. It wasn’t just a movie — it was an awakening, a promise that there was more to the universe than what we could see. Those dazzling worlds and battles between good and evil sparked something in me that never quite went away.

Then came Blade Runner, and everything changed. It showed me that science fiction didn’t just have to be about adventure — it could be about identity, memory, morality, and what it really means to be human. That film cracked something open in my imagination, and I began to see the genre in a whole new way: not just as escapism, but as a way to ask the hardest questions.

It wasn’t until 2001: A Space Odyssey that I truly grasped the enormity of the questions sci-fi could ask. It showed me that sci-fi could be about more than adventure — it could be about awe, about mystery, about our place in the cosmos. The quiet mystery of that film stayed with me, whispering questions I still don’t fully know how to answer. It reminded me that some stories don’t just entertain — they expand you. They change how you see everything before those movies.

I’d discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Princess of Mars series. Those books pulled me deep into the heart of sci-fi and fantasy, teaching me to appreciate not only the spectacle of strange new worlds but also the intimacy of a hero’s journey through them.

Writing was always there, somewhere in the background; stories and ideas scribbled down, half-finished, waiting for their moment. But it was my mother’s illness that finally gave me the reason to sit down and truly write. I wrote Celeritous to save my mother. Of course, I couldn’t really save her. But on the page, I could give her the fight, the strength, and the hope she deserved.

What started as an attempt to give her a different ending became a story about all of us — about humanity, about resilience in the face of impossible odds, about what makes us who we are. Along the way, I discovered I wasn’t just telling her story, or my story, but maybe yours too."*

On this wall are the stories that raised me, challenged me, and inspired me to tell my own.