Farstrider Publishing established
As of 2023 Farstrider is officially a company. Our purpose is to enable our founder, Jesse Kaukonen (that is, me. I feel weird writing about myself in 3rd person) to publish novels and hopefully one day make a living with them. This website includes up-to-date information about the novels we are currently producing as well as any appendum material relating to them.
The name Farstrider comes from the last name "Kaukonen" which has a few possible etymologies:
- It might relate to a person called Kauko, an old Finnish first name. The "-nen" ending is often used to convert a noun into an adjective. For example, the noun for "hole" is "reikä". To say something has the property of having lots of holes, one writes "reikäinen". For the last name, the -nen- ending would mean "people resembling Kauko", or possibly, "the family of that one bloke called Kauko". This etymology, while likely true, is boring.
- The second etymology could relate to the word "Kaukainen" (or any of the other 15 grammatical cases in Finnish), which means "something that is far away" or "distant". This name might have formed when a family lived far away from a larger population center and the villagers just started calling that family "those who live far away". To me, this is a much more interesting etymology, and it's not a far reach to add a twist of fantasy and say "that family which travels far away", or, "Farstrider". It also helps that Wheel of Time has a character called Jain Farstrider, a daring adventurer whose books the main characters read in their remote village before venturing to adventure themselves.
And that is who we are! We tell stories of magical faraway places where no has stridden before.
Welcome!