Voxforge
NIGHT AND DAY · GENESIS

17 YEARS
IN THE MAKING

Night and Day began as a dream. Over seventeen years, it became a life’s work—and eventually, the foundation on which Voxforge was built.

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THE DREAM

It began beside a fire.

I began working on Night and Day when I was twenty years old.

It started with a scene that still exists almost unchanged today: two men sitting beside a fire, speaking about whether they deserved to be loved. That conversation eventually became Chapter 66, The Song of Teziah. Around it, an entire world began to form.

Before I had properly begun the novel, I spent almost a year building that world—its history, its gods, its timelines, the Kaleidoscope of Fate. I have always loved worldbuilding, but Night and Day became something different. It was the first time I began to understand what kind of writer I wanted to be.

The first draft of Book I became a playground. I was twenty, and every few chapters I seemed to discover some new storytelling tool and immediately wanted to play with it. I experimented wildly, failed often, kept what worked and abandoned what did not. Somewhere in that process, I took the first steps toward finding a voice of my own.

I am still finding it. I hope I always will be. A writer’s voice is not something you discover one day and then possess forever; it is something you keep refining as you change. But every journey needs a beginning, and mine required a leap of faith, a great deal of experimentation and plenty of failure.

ARTIFACT 01 Early writing program screenshot · placeholder
THE LIFE'S WORK
“There is little value in turning rejection into mythology. What mattered was what happened afterward.”

When I finished the first book, I immediately began the second. I also began trying to get the series published.

That part went badly.

There is little value in turning rejection into mythology. Every writer knows some version of that story. What mattered was what happened afterward. I stopped trying to publish Night and Day for several years, but I did not stop writing it. Three more books grew out of that period. The timeline expanded, characters changed, symbols acquired meanings I had not consciously intended, and I began to understand the deeper patterns in my own work: why certain ideas kept returning, why particular characters existed, and what I was actually trying to say.

Years later, I tried again. By then, the publishing world I was approaching had changed as well. It was the late 2010s, before the enormous expansion in reading and publishing that came with the pandemic, and the industry felt increasingly cautious. The appetite seemed to be for projects that were easy to position and easy to understand. Night and Day was neither.

The series itself became the objection. It was too large, too dark, too difficult to categorise, too structurally unusual. Much of what I considered its identity was treated as a commercial risk.

So I went back to writing. Another thousand pages followed. Eventually, however, even I ran out of momentum. For almost three years, I stopped working on Night and Day.

NIGHT AND DAY
EARLY MANUSCRIPT
ARTIFACT 02 Earlier manuscript version · placeholder
VOXFORGE
TURNING POINT · PLACEHOLDER
ARTIFACT 03 Publishing / Voxforge turning point · placeholder
MAKE IT THE TIME

The question changed.

Then, at thirty-five, someone asked me a very simple question: how long was I going to keep waiting for the right moment?

By then, the answer to that question had changed.

For much of the time I had been writing Night and Day, independently publishing something of this scale had barely seemed like a realistic option to me. And even when the tools became available, the idea was intimidating. Publishing the books myself meant taking responsibility not only for the writing, but for editing, design, production, distribution, marketing, and everything else that stood between a manuscript and a reader. I did not feel ready for that.

But the world around the books kept changing. Self-publishing had matured. Direct digital distribution had become normal. Reader communities had grown around platforms that allowed writers and audiences to meet long before a finished book reached the shelf.

Slowly, what had frightened me began to look different. Independence did not simply mean having to do everything myself. It meant having the freedom to decide how Night and Day should reach its readers in the first place.

And perhaps, after all those years, I did not need to wait for the right moment.

I could make it myself.

That was the beginning of Voxforge.

But Voxforge did not emerge simply as a vehicle for my own books. I had become increasingly interested in stories being told inside games, while much of contemporary fantasy publishing was moving away from the kind of fiction I personally wanted to read. At the same time, communities such as Royal Road showed how different storytelling could feel when readers were present during the journey rather than appearing only after publication.

The idea became larger: a publisher that could develop original fantasy alongside its audience, bridging the gap between immersive game worlds and extraordinary fiction.

I did not want to simply publish a finished book and move on, but allow readers to experience a story chapter by chapter, talk about it, react to it, and become part of the life surrounding it before the final edition ever reached a shelf.

FROM NIGHT AND DAY TO VOXFORGE

Night and Day began as a dream.

Over seventeen years, it became a life’s work.

And eventually, that life’s work became the foundation of Voxforge.

Read Night and Day Discover Voxforge