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Kentash is a book that generates emotional as well as intellectual interest,
because while it shows parallel universes
and the lives of unimaginable beings,
it also shows the everyday life of a troubled teenager,
a girl of a similar age
and how they carry on through school and life in general,
the boy's dog,
orphaned children and the relationships with their parents,
so in that sense the book demonstrates reality as much as fantasy.
And it ingrains them very well, to the point that you feel identified;
me, a woman of 44 years, felt identified with the girl of 13 years.
In other words, it was me at 13 years of age,
thus the book achieves a profiling of characters that is very interesting.
The dialogues are well constructed and the manner in which the chapters are structured
make it very interesting to read, and above all
the epigraphs that accompany various chapters which are written by a delirious poet
in a different altiverse,
evoke reflection on many different themes,
because the human heart is the same
in whatever time, place or universe.
Well, the story began as a way to entertain my children
during dinner time because according to them,
the food I cooked was very bad; inedible at times.
So the only manner that they would be able to swallow it
would be for me to tell them a story while they ate.
And so was born the story "Kentash", that of course, was not called that in those times.
And that was finally written as a short story of 10,000 words
that Sven then takes and writes into a novel of 100,000 words.
After this, follows a process of editing that is very long and very complicated
with many emails and revisions, in which my eldest son was also involved,
until finally, after all that work we have a finished text in English
ready to be published, and then the work begins again
with translation of the text to Spanish,
editing the text and then once again publishing the work with Puerto de Escape.
My dad was always a person that while he didn't always have patience,
with me he did.
With me and this book, he had a lot of patience.
It took a long time to make the book,
that's what really stays in my mind.
It's almost, what...12 years?
12 years.
12 years that we have been writing the book,
so if anyone believes it was something done quickly,
it's not.
It took us 4-5 years to write it,
then another 2-3 to mutilate it
and then to polish it,
to have something that somebody could read.
But I think it ended up well polished.
For me, the ultimate test that the book is complete
is that the text flows.
The text doesn't stop.
When it stops, it means that something needs to be changed.
That is my standard when editing the book.
And when I can read chapter after chapter
with nothing stopping me
and the text flows smoothly,
then the book is ready to be published and read by the masses.
One of the things we wanted to do
was impart values.
We wanted to entertain, because of course
a science fiction book is to entertain;
for a person who perhaps comes home tired from work
they take the book and start reading
for an hour or two
to escape and enter into the world of "Kentash".
But apart from that we wished to impart values,
so that the characters were well-defined
and the difference between right and wrong was clearly demarcated.
And we wished to...
Sven with several of his characters
wished to portray certain values that
we believe are lacking in our culture.
For example, as he mentioned before, compassion.
It's a value that is a little lost.
Compassion, kindness... the desire to not avenge oneself
when wronged,
and the main character is a bullied child
that at one point has the opportunity to seek revenge
and the power to do so,
but he doesn't do it; he decides not to do it.
And that's a value that I think we all should have;
that despite the fact that someone may do us wrong,
we should not seek retribution
because that is one of the things that causes
so many of the problems that we have in the world today.
So we thought it would be good
that young people would be entertained by it but
at the same time that it would provide a set of values
that they could use or be influenced by them.
I now feel like I am capable of writing a novel;
I know what I have to do
and how to do it.
When we first began writing, we
had no experience as writers obviously,
we were novice writers
and so we had to do a great deal of work
to supplement our inexperience in the literary field.
Sometimes it was shocking when a friend
read our book that had taken us four years
to write and said that it was boring.
So then you say to yourself "Four years of work and it's boring".
But in the end it was a good piece of criticism,
because if he had said that it was good and in reality it was not,
it would have been of no use to us.
For me, I think the book changed me
in some way.
When we began to write the book
I thought to myself, "one or two years and then we're done".
Perhaps another year to edit it.
And the book showed me that to make something that
is really good, you have to reach the point
where you think that you've done all you can
and can do no more,
and then go further.
And when you reach that point again, you must go further, again.
It is something very difficult to do, personally speaking,
but I understand that to create anything that has value,
this is what you must do.
In the second book, the story will have
the same characters plus a few additional characters
that will be very different from what
we have seen up to this point.
And the story itself will be very different
although it will obviously connect with the storyline
of the previous book.
When we were writing the book,
it was always just going to be a book in English
that we would publish...
and I'm not a very social person so
I never saw myself being in front of people talking about the book
and answering questions,
but it has been very interesting.
I always wanted to return to Chile.
I wanted to see my grandfather
and the city where I was born
and I believe it has been something very special.