About The Cellar Dweller

The Cellar Dweller is the journal of Russell Street.

It is where I write about the work behind my books: the writing, worldbuilding, history, research, maps, publishing decisions, mistakes, revisions, and occasional odd turns that sit behind Panimálay and the stories set within it.

The main Russell Street Press website is the official home for the books, series pages, publication details, and formal information. The Cellar Dweller is a little different. This is the workshop space. It is where the thinking is allowed to show.

I have been building worlds, histories, maps, and imagined cultures for as long as I can remember. For many years that work stayed private: part hobby, part wargaming, part historical curiosity, part habit of mind. Panimálay began that way too. It was a world built for play, maps, campaigns, and questions. Over time it became something larger.

My background is not in publishing. I worked in web and UX development from the early days of the public web, through the dot-com years and into the fully commercial internet that followed. In 2016 I stepped away from that world. The languages, frameworks, slogans, deadlines, and constant noise had become too much. I left and took a clock-in, clock-out job on the warehouse floor of a large online retail company.

It was a deliberate simplification, and it changed more than my working life. It gave me back time, attention, and the ability to think properly again.

In October 2023, while recovering from surgery, I had another pause forced on me. Around the same time, my wife made a simple observation: I spent so much time building worlds, histories, and cultures that perhaps I should do something with them.

She was right.

That is how the private work began turning outward. The maps became settings. The settings became stories. The stories became books. Russell Street Press became the imprint, and The Cellar Dweller became the place to talk about how the work is made.

This blog is not a marketing machine. It is not a performance of author life. It is a record of the work: how fictional places are built, how stories grow out of landscape and pressure, how history shapes imagination, and how one world slowly becomes something other people can enter.

Mostly, it is about making things properly — and keeping a record of the road while doing it.