This page shall detail my writing journey, from the start to present day!

14 Minutes Till The Start: Cosmonaut

I wrote this originally to discuss the situation with Audra Winter, and how it made me look back at my debut novel, Cosmonaut. But then it spurred on a more lengthy story of mine, to talk about my entire writing journey. Cosmonaut was not the first story I ever wrote, nor the first story really made available to the public, but it was the first to be published. It was the first in the Cosmonaut series itself, originally written in 2018, published in 2019, and republished in 2020. In 2025 it got an update alongside the second in the series, Cosmonaut: The Lunar Wars, when I moved the ebooks to Itch.io and redid the formatting myself with Atticus.
Cosmonaut was spurred on by the idea back in 2017 when I discovered old soviet cosmonaut music, the sounds of exploring space, of a future of humanity in the stars. I decided to take that and base it around an alternative history where the Soviet Union had won the Space Race, and by extension the cold war. Taking place decades after this, in keeping the ideas of the music and songs that inspired the series, it would have a space program with far more influence, power and scale than we have now. They didn't stop going to space, to the moon and beyond just because it was too expensive. They continued, set up shop on the Moon and pushed further to Mars. It went from a national effort to a unified global (Mostly anyways) effort between the new soviet-allied countries. Space Exploration in the Cosmonaut universe is a foundation of its modern geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics, especially when considering lunar resource extraction.
But to bring it back to the original book—It didn't fully realize or capture this. The scale of Cosmonaut, of Book 1, was extremely limited. It barely even passes as a Novel, more so a Novella. It was to serve as a quick story to hop into, nothing too ambitious. But looking back, I see that I had too little ambition behind the project. The scale of Cosmonaut was far too restrictive, far too narrow. It has flaws, flaws I've come to accept as being simply apart of my journey as a writer.
To really sum up, Cosmonaut's flaws would be as follow:

• Too little worldbuilding, and worldbuilding that was not fully fleshed out.This definitely has changed a lot since I wrote Cosmonaut back in 2017-2018, with the Mars Incident really taking on the task of doing real proper worldbuilding, setting the stage of this timeline and world.
• Characters were not at all fleshed out as nearly as much as they should have been. This is something I've come to realize about even The Lunar Wars, at least in terms of who they were, what they were to the main character, and how they would grow. They didn't really seem to do that in either story.
• It was just too short. The story could have simply used more, namely the aforementioned worldbuilding, characterization and character growth, but also just more into it, more stuff happening. I could have definitely done far more with it, and I think that will be my greatest regret.
• As a final note, I do feel like my dialogue did not age well at times. I was 18 going on 19 when I finished Cosmonaut, and I can definitely see how my dialogue and prose had aged well.

Part of me has always thought about rewriting Cosmonaut. But I do feel like that would just make things worse. I think it should stand as a testament to how I started, and how I got better with each new piece I wrote. Cosmonaut was the start of a love letter to space exploration, to my love of space, of the science behind it, and the determination of the people who journey into it. It would be one of four books that would encapusale the Cosmonaut Series. The next book in the series would have its own flaws, but also be something that appeared in the light through my darkest of times.

A Blood Red Moon: Cosmonaut: The Lunar Wars

It wasn't really that long after I thought of the sequel, Cosmonaut:The Lunar Wars. It was a quick