I am writing this post at the request of my writing mentor who said "We all want to know!" Irkadura was supposed to be the book that drew from the wealth of information I'm sitting on, having grown up in Soviet Union, lived in GDR in my teenage years, witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and having returned to Moscow where shortly after snipers were shooting people from the roofs, and the country as I knew it ceased to exist. This was the book he asked me to write. It didn't turn out the way he envisioned it, as I was still going through lots of personal pain which spilled itself out in Irkadura. I wasn't ready. Nor am I ready now. TUBE is not what I thought it'd be either. I'm still healing, still trying to find the ground under my feet. Hell, I'm not even supporting myself financially yet, after turning my life upside down and giving everything up to write and finding happiness where I didn't think was any. But I will try. Because these are the times when I must speak, and speak I will.