About Jesse Kaukonen

I’m the man behind these books, hi! I was born in 1988 in a remote backwater in eastern Finland, and after spending my teenage years playing P&P RPGs and bouncing in various jobs, I landed a career as a software developer. I’ve worked with computer vision, hardware programming, motion capture, graphics programming, and other weird things. As of this day, I write code for credit/debit card payment terminals and wrestle with words on weekends.

I also…

Pretend to be a historian without a degree of any kind, in anything.
Do traditional horse archery without a horse, using a would-be Scythian. bow. Scythians best nomads.
Play guitar, especially nylon string fingerstyle ballads and Touhou music.
Play violin, badly.
Paint.
May occasionally play a tiny bit of video games.
Run a few kilometers every two days.

Taste in novels

When it comes to the kind of novels I enjoy reading, I’ve found four core points to be critical when I decide if I choose to read beyond the first volume:

The plot must promise me that the author has a plan for the whole series and it all comes together in the end. This doesn’t include a poor cliffhanger at the end of the first novel - I need to see plot threads opening and going somewhere, to be later resolved.
The worldbuilding must be intriguing and make me ask what’s waiting behind the next hill. This includes the magic system, which can be soft or hard, as long as it’s interesting. A bit too many fantasy books are set in a carbon copy of medieval Europe.
The characters must be enjoyable. While I did quite enjoy the Broken Empire by Mark Lawrence, reading a character like Jorg isn’t the most uplifting experience. So many books feature grimdark universes where the characters are depressed and internally broken. While these can make for good character arcs, it doesn’t make me want to stay in that character’s head for several hundred thousand words.
The line level writing needs to be good. This is one of those things that’s difficult to get past once you write enough.

About Jesse Kaukonen

I also…

Pretend to be a historian without a degree of any kind, in anything.
Do traditional horse archery without a horse, using a would-be Scythian. bow. Scythians best nomads.
Play guitar, especially nylon string fingerstyle ballads and Touhou music.
Play violin, badly.
Paint.
May occasionally play a tiny bit of video games.
Run a few kilometers every two days.

Taste in novels

When it comes to the kind of novels I enjoy reading, I’ve found four core points to be critical when I decide if I choose to read beyond the first volume:

The plot must promise me that the author has a plan for the whole series and it all comes together in the end. This doesn’t include a poor cliffhanger at the end of the first novel - I need to see plot threads opening and going somewhere, to be later resolved.
The worldbuilding must be intriguing and make me ask what’s waiting behind the next hill. This includes the magic system, which can be soft or hard, as long as it’s interesting. A bit too many fantasy books are set in a carbon copy of medieval Europe.
The characters must be enjoyable. While I did quite enjoy the Broken Empire by Mark Lawrence, reading a character like Jorg isn’t the most uplifting experience. So many books feature grimdark universes where the characters are depressed and internally broken. While these can make for good character arcs, it doesn’t make me want to stay in that character’s head for several hundred thousand words.
The line level writing needs to be good. This is one of those things that’s difficult to get past once you write enough.