When Failure Opens the Door

I returned to Berlin elated and full of dreams about the insanely beautiful things we were going to create together with the Bulgarian masters. And we did start creating them.

The great director — whom I’ll now refer to as Mr. X — put me in touch with a group of young computer animators and programmers, who were supposed to take care of the software side of the project, while he and his team would handle the animations. My task was to write the script.

Of course, we all knew that a serious computer game couldn’t be made with such limited resources. The idea was to produce a short demo — just a few minutes long — which my friend Avram Agov, who was working for Samsung in South Korea at the time, would present to potential investors there, in the hope of securing full funding. And so on.

Oof. My teeth hurt just thinking about it. Scene after scene, experience after experience, began to stack up — slowly, but inexorably pulling me down to earth and giving me a clearer picture of what it really meant to work with “masters” from my dear homeland.

It’s a strange thing — Bulgarian work never reveals itself as hopeless right away. Whether people have just gotten more cunning over time, or whether it was always this way, I don’t know. But the typical pattern seems to unfold like this: the overall picture of the “work” remains vague and ambiguous just enough to keep you hoping for some eventual success — or at least no visible collapse. Something is happening, something drips, something squirms. And so you keep going. Hoping. For what exactly, you’re not sure. But you keep going. At least while there’s money.

The main problem, always, is communication. For me, Bulgaria is the land of promises never kept. “I’ll call you Monday.” “We’re working on it.” “We’re moving things forward.” All of these, in my experience, are just coded phrases for one and the same message: “You brought the cash. You paid. Case closed.” You sit and wait, nervously twiddle your thumbs, try to discreetly hint that this isn’t how things are supposed to work… but of course, we mustn’t offend each other. We must treat people with respect, with trust — because, after all, they have names. They’re not just random people...

I don’t even remember exactly what came out of that “work.” I’m not saying it was nothing. Over the course of this story, I’ll show you a few images — quite beautifully done. There were some individual animations that looked genuinely fun (years later, I used them in the video trailer for the completed books). Very soon, though, Mr. X became completely unreachable. You couldn’t get him on the phone. He didn’t answer emails as a matter of principle. One day he was in Sofia, the next in Vienna, the next… who knows. He was always working on a hundred projects at once, creating the impression of frantic momentum. Hooray! Come on! Let’s go! You know — that kind of thing.

But on the ground? Nothing. Or almost nothing. And so an entire year went by.

You might think I sound bitter, full of anger — the way people often do in Bulgaria. But actually, I believe everything happened exactly as it was meant to. Everything followed the correct plan. It’s just that the plan wasn’t mine. It belonged to the one upstairs — the one who moves things in this world.

Because all that time, I was kind of overcoming — with trembling fear and enormous effort — my deep inhibition around writing. Imagine someone struck down and paralyzed for years, slowly learning to move again. To speak again. To walk. All of it anew — but without the blessed forgetfulness of childhood. That’s what happened to me. I was at the edge of despair dozens of times. I can’t even count how often I was ready to throw everything away. And if it weren’t for that damn “project,” I probably would’ve. But once you’re in the dance, you can’t just let go. So I trudged forward. Slowly. Step by step. And before my eyes, the tangled and difficult story of a journey began to unfold — full of adventures whose real depth I would only grasp much later, when people from all over the world began to call me...

In the meantime, small miracles were happening — though I couldn’t recognize them at the time. My son Paul, who was just six years old then, turned out to be a stunningly powerful and gracious collaborator in creating the magical universe. Every time I hit a dead end — and that was the whole principle of the game before it became a book — I would turn to him and ask what to do. And, imagine this: he would smile that shy smile of his — some teeth there, some not — and say something that made my jaw drop. Things an adult could never come up with, no matter how hard they tried. Just like that. A toothless smile, and a boundless child’s imagination.

Here’s a typical example. Early in the story, Firecurl meets Grandpa Hedgehog — one of the main characters who would go on to appear in many adventures (though of course, I had no idea about that yet). Grandpa is a kind, gentle old man — based on my own father, may he rest in peace — who has built a small, charmingly built watermill on the riverbank, complete with a large wooden wheel. But the wheel is stuck. No matter what the old man tries, it just won’t turn.

That’s all I knew. But why it wouldn’t turn — I had no idea. And the whole direction of the story hinged on that detail, because in order for Firecurl to continue her journey, she had to solve the problem and help Grandpa fix the wheel. The situation was made even harder by one important fact: at that time, Pouchy — Anne’s talking backpack (and faithful companion) until the very end — didn’t exist yet. So I was missing the main mechanism through which problems in the Ghost Forest are normally solved: teamwork. Anne, or I, or anyone else had to figure it out alone.

And no solution came. All the reasons I could imagine were boring, adult explanations: a storm, a shifted axle, something mechanical. Tedious ideas — with no place in a magical world.

In frustration, I went to Paul. And what do you think happened? He smiled, scratched his nose with a pencil, and said, “Well… a mouse built a nest at the base of the wheel, Dad. That’s why it won’t turn.”

I stared at him, stunned. What nonsense. What ridiculous thing was this child saying? How could a mouse block a watermill?

And then it hit me. Like lightning.

Of course the child was right. Only — it wasn’t a mouse nest. It was a beaver’s. What a magical solution! But who could come up with something like that, without the help of a child?

And so, for the first time, Mr. Heino the Beaver appeared in the story — the villainous genius of the Ghost Forest, whose presence would become the central driving force across more than a thousand pages and three full books.

But that… would take time.