NASTRAGULL THE SERIES

How it all started

My name is Erik Martin Willén, a first time author from Sweden who loves books and loves writing even more.

I recently published an original science fiction novel titled NASTRAGULL: Pirates, the first book in a projected series that combines the non-stop high-tech adventure of Star Wars with the awe-inspiring, complex cultural backdrop of Dune—with quite a bit of Quentin Tarantino thrown in for good measure. This action-packed novel includes elements of military SF, traditional space opera, dystopian SF, and the sociological explorations of writers such as Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. LeGuin. At heart, though, it's a love story—the tale of two literally star-crossed lovers, and their Herculean efforts to move Heaven and Earth (sometimes literally) to find each other again and again as circumstances rip them apart.

This is a story that I've kept coming back to since I was very young. Back then, a friend and I decided to create a cartoon. He was a great artist and could draw anything—and I was a bit crazy with my creative imagination. We decided I would come up with the story and he would handle the drawings. Boy, what a team we were! We produced a couple of pages, and then we got bored and went outside to play.

Through the years, I made notes on the topic...many notes. Several times I attempted to write a book based on those notes, but didn't have the patience to complete it; after a few pages, I simply stopped. Years went by, and from time to time, whenever I faced difficulties in my life, I made more notes. Eventually I wrote the outline for the saga and turned it into several screenplays: Dawn Sets In Hell, Twenty-First, Nastragull, etc.

The turning point in my life, the one that made me an author, was when my younger sister Sofia was diagnosed with Lupus SLE—and died shortly thereafter at the young age of 24 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Sofia's death came as an incredible shock. It hit my family and me very hard, and made me revaluate my life. During my grief I started to write, and I wrote and wrote, and I held back nothing. Finally I had found my author's voice, and the result is the saga called NASTRAGULL.