1.- Could you introduce yourself to Jamreads’ readers?
Damn, I wish I had a dark secret or two! I could reveal them, one by one, on occasions like this … Alas. I write science fantasy noir (try saying it three times fast), I was nominated for a Nebula Award a few years ago, and I love being here at Jamreads!  

2.- How did you start writing?
I’ve been writing since I was four. Well, at that ripe age I couldn’t really write yet, so instead I tormented my grandmother, who had to type my stories on an old Soviet typewriter. All the books we borrowed from the local library were wrapped in some kind of cigarette paper, so I demanded that grandma's output be bound and wrapped in cigarette paper too.
Yeah …
A more interesting question, perhaps, is how I started writing in English. In the 2000s, I dabbled in game development, programming 3D engines as a hobby. The problem was, the aughts were the worst moment in history for home-brewed game engines: the ‘90s, the era of “hero programmers,” was over; you had zero chance of keeping up on your own.
My team’s shot at glory had been our pitch to Atari, which, needless to say, didn’t go well. It included, however, a companion short story, and while translating it from Russian into English, I noticed for the first time how freely and beautifully English prose flows. So when game development became history for me, I decided to try writing in English professionally.
I’ve been very blessed: my second short story sold, and in August 2015, eight months into my writing career, I made my first pro-sale to Nature. It took me more than a year to repeat the feat, but I sold another story to the late, great Mike Resnick, the five-time Hugo winner and then-editor of Galaxy’s Edge. Things kept going uphill from there, thankfully :)

3.- What inspired you to originally write Tower of Mud and Straw?
I saw the novella in a dream. I rarely get vivid dreams, but this one I remember: looking through the foliage at a Renaissance facade, knowing somehow I was in a province, that I’d been banished there. There was humiliation, but also a sense of wonder: somewhere behind that facade hid magic.
I must mention at this point that in addition to game development, I used to play guitar. Half a decade before writing the novella, I attended a Guitar Circle Course in Caorle, Italy; the week-long workshop was led by none other than Robert Fripp, a David Bowie collaborator and the irreplaceable leader of the prog-rock mastodon King Crimson. It was in Caorle that I learned about Gurdjieff and the “waking sleep,” a purported hypnotic state Gurdjieff believed we spend our lives in.
I believe in the “waking sleep,” too, but rather than seeing it as a disadvantage, I tap into the dream. It’s describing the waking world that causes me problems!

4.- Could you tell us more about the process of pitching and publicating the original Tower of Mud and Straw?
It’s a fun story. B. Morris Allen, the Editor-in-Chief of the now defunct, beautiful Metaphorosis Magazine, had the idea in 2019 to reinvigorate the genre of serialized novella. He recruited a few Metaphorosis authors for that project but never approached me. Didn't even think of me. I’d already sold a story to him at that point, but it was quite short and I had no experience of writing longer works.
So there I sit, looking at his announcement; I think back to my dream, and the novella crystallizes in my head. I swear to you, I just flipped open the laptop and wrote down a 2,000-word outline in about an hour. I then wrote to Morris—“Hey, I heard you were working on this novella project, and I have an idea …”—and he didn’t reply at first. So after a couple of days, I wrote to him again and got back, “I’ve been mulling it over. Okay, send me the outline.”
I did, and once he looked at it, there was no longer any question that we had to do it. The rest, as they say, is history.

5.- In which ways would you say your own vital experiences have influenced your literary pieces?
Many of my short stories contain fragments of myself. “Your Grief Is Important To Us,” the story I sold to Mike Resnick, emerged during the time my wife and I were going through the IVF. A year later, “Memory Is a Rumor” (the one Morris has bought) was a rumination on raising children. Both “The Blue Room, Said the Wishmaker” and Tower of Mud and Straw were prompted by my own futile attempts to build a successful career as a software engineer.
By the way, Tower might’ve also worked the other way round, as in having influenced reality :) Sadly, the novella has predicted the Russo-Ukrainian War down to a couple of months.
“Consider this: if the tower doesn’t get finished within the next two years, Duma will attempt an incursion”—in the Tower / Sleeping Worlds universe, Duma is a cross between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. The sentence was written in April 2020.
2020 + 2 years = 2022.

6.- Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory is an expansion over Tower of Mud and Straw; why did you decide to prepare this new edition?
My dear Nebula-nominated and Kirkus-starred Tower was always supposed to be part one of a larger work. I know a lot of people love saying such things in retrospect (probably crossing their fingers behind their backs), but here’s an excerpt from the original outline I sent to B. Morris Allen: “Should a sequel be written, the hero would flee to [spoilers redacted] to escape prosecution for [spoilers redacted].”
Sadly, we never got to that sequel! So instead, in November, I’m releasing Sleeping Worlds, which contains the entire story from beginning to end.
A lot of people have asked me if they should re-read Tower before delving into the novel, and the answer is no, you absolutely must NOT do that. Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory consists of two parts, an expanded version of Tower being the first one. 30% longer than the original novella, it’s a proper Director’s Cut! The second half continues and concludes the story.
To quote one of the early reviewers, “If you thought that the novella was too open-ended and didn’t answer your many questions about this very unique world, here you’re finally getting all your answers.”

7.- During the read of Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, I’ve noticed your prose is quite poetic. Was it challenging to write in this style?
First of all, thank you so much for your kind words, Jamedi! And it’s not so much challenging as it’s time-consuming. I rely on metaphors heavily, so each time I’m describing something, I have to sit back and think, “Okay, what does this object remind me of? Is it like a black furnace? Or a stretch of evening sky? Does it jump around like a sun bunny?” After a while, you get fits of anxiety about repeating yourself—but I absolutely refuse to write even a single filler sentence. No fluff for poor Yare!

8.- How it was the process of working on Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory for publication?
It was horrifying. I finished the first draft of the novel in November 2021, when the potential Russian invasion was still “just” a looming possibility. My agent, Ed Wilson, sent me his notes in December (he’s an amazing editor, too, by the way—he did the lion’s share of the editing on Sleeping Worlds), and I kept working through Christmas, January, February … And then I couldn’t work anymore, because the sheer horror of war burst into all our lives.
I thought that was it, that the world was going to end there and then. I seriously considered taking my family to Argentina. A writer friend of mine who lives in Buenos Aires told me, “Yare, this is a good idea, a good time to emigrate—expropriations of private homes have stopped for now.” Sounds like black humor, right? So I stayed in the Old World. I pulled myself together and finished the second draft in May 2022, almost three months after the invasion of Ukraine had begun.
When it became clear—thank God—that the world as a whole would hold out a little longer, another, more personal fear arose: will I ever get published again, being an ethnic Russian? I realize it was selfish to think about these things, but still …
I’ve spent the second half of my life in Vienna, Austria—and I’ve been in active opposition to the current regime in the Kremlin since 2012. But hey, my mother tongue is Russian, my name is unmistakably Russian, so I must be responsible, right? At least, that was the vibe in the months following the start of the invasion.
We only went on submission in September, and we remained in limbo for more than a year after that; things have ground almost to a halt in the post-Covid publishing world … What used to take a month now takes six. We finally received an offer we liked in December 2023, from Caezik SF & Fantasy (an imprint of Arc Manor). These guys are great, so I’m relatively happy now.

9.- What can we expect from Yaroslav Barsukov in the future?
I’ve got a sequel to Sleeping Worlds completely outlined. After that ending, I’ll have to switch main characters—the continuation, should we ever get to it, will be from Brielle’s POV.
For now, I’m halfway through another novel; a different universe but the same undefinable mixture of genres—science fantasy / noir / just the right touch of Lovecraftian horror. The tentative title is “The Mandolin Teacher”; it's about a mammoth railway bridge leading to a different world (no, I don't suffer from gigantomania; why do you ask?), an injured musician who's forced to work as a music teacher, his quest to get his dexterity back, and his unexpected role in the larger, sinister events leading back to the death of the previous Emperor.
To the people who’d love to read it: please consider buying Sleeping Worlds! It’s not about me getting rich, it’s about having some ammunition when pitching to potential publishers. The best argument in negotiations, as in any other industry, is still the same: sales, sales, and sales …
Oh, and if you can, do support your local bookstore! Even if they do not stock Sleeping Worlds for some reason, most independent bookstores can get things really quickly, in a couple of days. My publisher has traditional distribution, so there shouldn’t be any problems with that.