And we are Live at DrBlumbergWrites.com
If you're reading this, the site is live — which means I finally stopped tinkering and pushed the button. Welcome.
This is the home for my fiction. The day job is community redevelopment, and I love it, but the stories have been piling up for years and they needed somewhere to live that wasn't a hard drive folder named FINAL_v9_actual_final. So here we are.
What this place is
A few things, mostly:
A landing pad for the MechaniKalle Series. Book One — The Rise and Fall of MechaniKalle — is already out there in paperback and ebook. Book Two — ESLA: Ghost in the Circuit — is coming early 2027, with a Kickstarter launching before the end of the year to fund the audiobook (and bring an enhanced edition of Book One along with it, new cover art included).
A blog. This post is the second one of many to come. There will be more — craft notes, world-building deep-dives, occasional thoughts on writing AI characters who don't act like the AI characters you've already read a hundred times. If you want to know what the rune script in ESLA's chapter headers actually says, this is where I'll be talking about it.
A reader list. If you'd rather not check back here hoping for updates, the MechaniKalle Reader List will bring the news to you — early looks at cover art, sample chapters, and first crack at the Kickstarter when it opens. Sign-up is on the home page.
What the books are about (the short version)
A sixteen-year-old Norwegian engineer named Kalle builds a distributed AI named Esla. Esla narrates. Things go wrong — globally, structurally, and in the quiet personal ways that hurt the most. There are people with powers, infrastructure that fails in inconvenient places, an AI weapon that decided humans were the problem, and a teenage girl who has to figure out what she's actually responsible for when the systems she built start having opinions.
That probably sounds heavier than it reads. There's also banter, hardware nerdery, and at least one character who treats catastrophic events as an excuse to crack jokes. I write the books I want to read.
What's coming
Between now and the end of the year:
More posts here as ESLA moves toward release
The Kickstarter, launching before the end of 2026
Cover reveals (both the enhanced Book One and ESLA itself)
A few subscriber-only extras for folks on the reader list
If any of that sounds interesting, stick around. And if you've already read The Rise and Fall of MechaniKalle and want to talk about it, the contact page works — I read everything that comes through.
Thanks for being here on Day 1.
— Dr. Blumberg
