New Novels are Live!!!

I put the finishing touches on the two novels I blogged about recently, and I'm not a patient person and saw no reason to wait, so I pushed them. The links are:

The Magical Glasses: A Vision Quest

The Darkness

Please take a look at them! The first one is my magical realism novel (it turned out not to fit the criteria Amazon has set for "YA", so I published it as just magical realism, not as YA magical realism), and the second one is dark fantasy/fantasy horror/epic fantasy with neurodiverse protagonists (like me!). They both came together with the editing process ending just this past weekend, so I pushed them both today.

Author Update August 2026

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 be a tradpub author. I've decided to just do what I know how to do and indiepub it. I'm currently editing it and putting the finishing touches on it, but I plan to have this one hot off the presses before end of year of THIS year (2026)!!! Also, my epic fantasy series-starter novel was rejected by all the literary agents (sigh), so I plan to self-pub that one later this year too, since that was already complete. So, after a long wait, y'all have not one, but two fantasy novels from me to look forward to later this year! Probably both coming out this fall, probably early fall, possibly late fall/early winter.

--Russell

Author Update May 2026

 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 being real, authentic YA magical realism. I've written 30,000 words of a word count target of 100,000 and hope to finish it by end of summer 2026. It's going to be a one-off standalone novel. I'm not sure what the market is for YA magical realism, but we'll see.

Cute Pics

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

Author Update 2026

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.

Email Me! @ author.russell.hasan@outlook.com

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