Hugin & Munin Publishing

I attended my very first Worldcon in Glasgow in 2005, which was an interesting as well as enjoyable experience, although fairly expensive on a student budget. I had been aware of Worldcons for quite some time, but it was only with the return to Europe that attendance felt feasible. I would dearly have liked to follow up with a visit to the Worldcon in Japan in 2007, combining two of my largest interests, Japan and books. But instead my return to a Worldcon would end up taking 14 years. I had my sights set on Loncon 3 in London in 2014, but this followed too closely upon the birth of my first son to be feasible, and the birth of my second son quickly killed any of hope of attending the 75th Worldcon in Helsinki in 2017. Baby number three almost prevented attendance in Dublin 2019 as well. It was initially planned as a family vacation, but in the end my wife, halfway through the pregnancy, felt it was a bit too much with all the other travel we had already planned, so in the end I went...

I have always found it interesting to see what other people read and hear their thoughts on books, especially if I have read them myself, or as a source of book tips. Even if I don't really need more books to read. The to be read pile isn't exactly shrinking. I have a bad habit of reading multiple books at once, so this will be a mix of reviews, early impressions and random musings about books in my to be read pile. I started reading The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski after watching a couple of episodes of The Witcher on Netflix. The show didn't immediately capture my interest, even though a lot of people were praising it. Maybe it was partially due to not really being what I had expected, having assumed it would be more in line with the computer games inspired by the books, rather than the books themselves. I had nei...

I think most people have at least a couple of books that are extra important to them, inspired them or in other ways shaped them. Most likely from childhood or youth, as that is the time we are most impressionable. My mother used to read to me and my brother when we were young, something I really loved, but sometimes it was frustratingly slow. I always wanted to know what would happen next. I obviously don't have a perfect recollection of that time, but I believe that this to some degree is what spurred me to learn to read, so that I could devour books on my own. I don't know when exactly I progressed from reading children's books to more adult books, but I have a clear memory of reading The Hobbit in 2nd or 3rd grade on my own, and then my mother had already read to me and my brother. So this is probably one of the first book taking me out of the children's fiction into the wider world. My mother also read The Lord of the Rings to me and my brother sometime aft...

Better late than never, or "For better than never is late; never to succeed would be too long a period." as Chauser put it. In this case I am talking about the launch of HM Publishing, which is something I have been talking about for close to 25 years, but which has never really felt realistic, as to paraphrase SF author Charles Stross, the best way to make a small fortune in publishing is to start with a large one. That and the fact that running any sort of business is a huge time investment. The digitalization of the publishing industry over the last 10 years has decreased both the cost and time investment required for publishing books, but somehow it was still never the right time. There have however been more concrete thoughts and actions over the last few years, even if nothing took me over the finishing line. In the end I finally realized that there will never be a perfect moment, I will never get more time, and at some point it will be too late, so here we ...