Russell Hasan's Blog

Hello Readers, I've finally finished my YA magical realism fantasy novel. It ended up being unexpectedly long at 120,000 words. I considered submitting it to literary agents to try to get it tradpubed, but I did my research, and it is very much not what's considered "hot" in YA fantasy right now (i.e., YA fantasy romance), and it is basically so unique and original that it has no good "comps," so it has no real shot at getting tradpubed. And in all the literary agents guides to query letters, they all say "don't tell me your novel is so original it has no comps," and the question is, well, what if it is? And the answer is, if that's true, then they really don't want it, because the tradpub Big Five will only buy novels based on the comps. The amazing thing about tradpubworld is that, because it's all based on comps, it rewards conformity and punishes originality, which may explain why I am better suited to be an indie author than to...

 Hello, readers! New author selfie! I ditched the beard and look years younger as a result, because my beard is naturally white but my mustache is naturally black (as of right now). I'm writing a new novel while I wait to hear back from literary agents on my epic fantasy series starter novel I blogged about before. I'm working on a YA magical realism literary-leaning fantasy novel-in-stories. For a long time I've wanted to write a novel using the fantasy tropes from genre fantasy which I love and read a lot of but with the intellectual rigor and literary quality of literary fiction (and a lot of literary fiction in reality lacks such quality and is horrible, but they aspire to it in theory in a way genre authors do not), so I am going for it in this new YA magical realism novel I'm writing. You wouldn't necessarily expect magical realism to be YA, but the plot idea I had which I really like has a kid protagonist and an obviously YA type of plot, so it has ended up b...

 These were so cute, I just need to share them here. These were the 2025 Dunkin Christmas cups.

So, I did another round of editing on my epic high fantasy novel and, strangely, it went from 115,000 words to 108,000 words despite me adding a lot of new things into it that weren't there before. Go figure. My next writing projects are going to be the sequels in the series, plus a book I'm planning to write that will be a collection of three related fantasy and science fiction novellas in one book. I'm still not writing any new nonfiction, but, I mean, I've written like 20 nonfiction books, that's enough to last for a while. Had to put The Gratitude Turkey as a screenplay on the shelf, it's more suited to be stageplay.

I realized it got removed from my bio, so I will reshare it here: I accept emails from readers at author.russell.hasan@outlook.com. I check it monthly and will respond if appropriate. Email is the best way to reach me. Sometimes I respond to comments on my Youtube channel but I rarely check my other social media. -Russell

 Hello, Readers, I've finished my epic high fantasy novel. It combines epic high fantasy with elements of horror, thriller, YA, and disability fiction. It clocked in at almost exactly 115,000 words. Next step: get it published. My next writing project is to turn my novel The Gratitude Turkey into a screenplay! As promised, here is my new author selfie, with my new beard and mustache: