Sky Curse: The Chosen Five is a sci-fi and fantasy novel that follows five young adults, who are chosen to fulfill a Mayan prophecy and must locate crystals that will hopefully save the Earth. What was the inspiration for the setup to your story?

Sky Curse series aims to bring hope for Earth’s future, while analyzing causes that might bring its demise, like environmental chaos. It was important for me to bring up the mighty Mayan civilization that disappeared abruptly and the recent research that suggests that human-made environmental disasters had caused their demise.

The protagonist Cecilia is just like any one of us. She’s quite ordinary with a lot of problems of her own. At the beginning of the book, she has nothing to do with climate change activism. Until she gets hold of a mysterious crystal that gives her some magical powers. With her newfound abilities, she tries to save the world from an impeding apocalypse.

Readers say Sky Curse is a page-turner that…

1. reads like “news from the future,”
2. which helps understand the present,
3. while learning from the ancient past (the Maya, Roman Empire, etc.)

As for the inspiration for the setup – many people, especially teens and young adults, suffer from climate anxiety, but unfortunately feel helpless to do anything about it. They give up. They call the subject “depressing” and steer away from it. They get depressed about their future and the future of the next generations. That’s exactly how I felt before I started writing the Sky Curse series. Sharing my feelings on the subject with the world made me feel that I’m actually doing something about it, however small. It’s an empowering feeling to have and it’s that exact feeling that I want to share with the world. I would like to start some empowering and educational conversations around topics that cause climate and even AI anxiety. This book aims to inspire sustainability-related action without causing any feelings of guilt or inferiority to the readers.

Did you create an outline for the five chosen ones in the story before you started writing or did the character’s personalities grow organically as you were writing?

I did a little bit of both. I had had an initial outline for their characters, but later I added intricate story layers to the manuscript during the editorial process. The new and improved plot drove the characters’ personalities to grow organically and dramatically with the story, while I was reviewing the storyline over and over again.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

This is a highly entertaining, action-paced novel that touches upon topics such as the environment, mental health and resilience (happiness and self-fulfilment,) the future of ai and technology, spirituality etc.

I believe that the world has never been more fragile than it is now, but it’s definitely worth saving. We live in unprecedented times when our sustainability efforts as well as our technological advances and failures will soon define humanity. We must discuss important questions: will humans soon live, work, collaborate, compete, and integrate with machines? Will humans become an interplanetary species? Will human cloning become the norm? If so, what would that look like? What are our collective and individual roles in imagining and then shaping this future?

What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?

First, lets’ mention my previous book. Reaching Beyond Ourselves: Leading a Spiritual, Peaceful and Diverse World is my poetry book that tells my own personal story of enjoying different cultures and speaking different languages on my journeys from Ukraine to Israel to Canada. You can find it on Amazon Books.

As for the next book – the outline of the second book in the Sky Curse series is mostly written at this point and the novel will be called Sky Curse: Trial by Fire. It will shed light on some of the unresolved mysteries of book 1, while presenting new mysteries and adventures. Expected to be available in 2023. Please subscribe to my website to get notification about its release.

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