Guus Kooij is a Dutch fantasy author based in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and the founder of independent imprint Continuing Press.
Guus is developing a collection of accessible fantasy stories that can stand on their own while gradually building a larger shared world. His interests are fairly broad: strange places, memorable characters, systems and societies, adventure, difficult choices, humour in places where people probably should not be joking, and the question of what ordinary people do when the world around them becomes considerably less ordinary.
He especially likes the idea that readers can pick up one story without needing homework first, but that those who continue reading will slowly notice familiar places, names, historical events and consequences appearing from different angles.
The Cloaked Saviour is the first of those stories and the first novel released through Continuing Press. Guus founded the imprint because he wanted to be closely involved in the entire process of turning a manuscript into an actual book, and because apparently writing the novel itself was not enough work.
The goal is not to pretend Continuing Press is already some enormous publishing operation. It is to build something carefully, learn with every release, and hopefully give each new book a slightly bigger audience than the one before it.
About The Cloaked Savior
In Hearthollow, an unfair system does not survive because it is broken. It survives because it works exactly as the people in power intended.
A deliberately overweight tax stone can turn an ordinary shortage into legal debt, and challenging the rules is far more dangerous than following them. When a masked wanderer begins interfering, people start attaching hope to someone who never wanted to become a symbol.
The Cloaked Saviour is a standalone adult low-magic fantasy about rebellion, bureaucracy, inequality and the uncomfortable question of what happens when a community begins waiting for one extraordinary person to save it. The story starts with a mysterious outlaw, but increasingly shifts its attention towards the ordinary people who have to decide what they are willing to do for themselves.
The novel tells a complete story, but it is also the first window into a larger interconnected fantasy world. Future books will follow different characters, places and conflicts. Some connections will be obvious, others much smaller: shared history, consequences that travel further than expected, familiar names appearing somewhere they probably should not be, and characters occasionally wandering into somebody else’s story.
The interview
Why do you write in the genre that you do?
The simple answer is that fantasy lets me go somewhere else.
I like reality, mostly, but it comes with a lot of pre-installed rules.
Fantasy gives you permission to ask: what if this place worked differently? What would people value? What would they fear? Which rules would seem completely normal to them and ridiculous to us?
You can take things that are very real, like inequality, power, loyalty, bureaucracy or the tendency of people to accept something because “that’s just how it works,” and move them far enough away that you can look at them differently.
And then there is the much less intellectual answer: making worlds up is fun.
I love fictional settings that feel bigger than the particular story you happen to be following. Runeterra is a good example for me. The regions can feel wildly different, yet you always have that sense that they belong to one world and that somewhere, eventually, two things that seemed unrelated might collide.
That is a big part of what I want to do with my own books.
The Cloaked Saviour works completely on its own, but Hearthollow is not the whole world. It is one place, during one conflict, seen through one group of people.
I like knowing that somewhere beyond the edge of the page, other stories are already happening.
Are you more interested in plot-driven stories or character-driven stories?
I’m going to cheat here and pick both.
I know that defeats the purpose of an either/or question, but I really do need both.
A clever plot can make me admire a book. Characters are usually what make me care about it.
At the same time, I struggle with stories where characters seem to move through events purely because the author needs them to be in the next scene. I like actions to have consequences. If somebody makes a terrible decision in chapter four, I want chapter fourteen to remember.
So I probably think quite structurally when I write. I want the pieces to fit. I want reveals to make sense afterwards. I want the ending to feel like the result of everything that came before it rather than something dropped in from above.
But then characters have an annoying habit of becoming people.
Sometimes you plan for somebody to do A and, by the time you reach the scene, it becomes completely obvious that this particular person would never do A. They would do B, make everything worse, and probably create a much better story in the process.
At that point I would rather change the plan.
For me, plot gives the story direction. Characters are allowed to grab the steering wheel occasionally.
How do you keep track of your ideas?
Poorly. Then extremely well. Then poorly again.
Usually it starts with something small.
I get an idea, put it in a note somewhere and think, “great, I definitely won’t forget this.”
Three weeks later I find another note containing something that appears to have been written by a stranger.
Then, once an idea starts becoming an actual project, I swing completely in the opposite direction. Suddenly there are outlines, character notes, timelines, worldbuilding documents, lists of unresolved questions and probably a spreadsheet that nobody asked for.
Then I have another idea that does not fit any of those documents.
So I make a new note.
Eventually that note becomes important enough that I reorganise everything around it.
Then I discover the original note again.
That is more or less the cycle.
The shared world makes some structure necessary because future standalone books can reference the same places, history and people. I need to remember what actually happened, not what I vaguely think happened six months later.
But I never want the organisational side to become a set of rules I have to obey.
If I suddenly see a better direction, I want to be able to take it.
My ideal system is organised enough that I can find things but loose enough that I can still ruin my own plan with a better idea.
Finish this sentence: “People will like your book if they like stories about…
…people slowly realising that waiting for someone else to fix everything is also a choice.
There is a masked wanderer. There is rebellion. There are secrets, danger, politics and people making decisions that seem sensible right up until the consequences arrive.
So, if you enjoy those things, good start.
But the part I care about most is the community around them.
The Cloaked Saviour is about people living inside an unfair system for so long that parts of it have started to feel natural. It is about how easy it is to admire somebody brave from a safe distance. And it is about the uncomfortable moment when admiration has to become participation.
I think readers who enjoy stories about class, resistance, reluctant alliances, ordinary people under pressure and systems that are unfair by design will probably find something here.
It is also intentionally approachable.
I love enormous fantasy worlds. I also think a reader should be allowed to meet the characters before being handed the complete economic history of three kingdoms.
So, The Cloaked Saviour gives you one complete story.
If you enjoy it, there is a much larger world behind it.
What are some of your passions outside of writing?
Travel is probably the biggest one.
I love arriving somewhere and immediately noticing all the tiny things that work differently. Different food, architecture, habits, public transport, ways people use a city, things that locals consider completely normal and visitors immediately photograph.
Part of me is always comparing places.
Not necessarily deciding which one is better, just wondering why they developed differently.
Reading is another obvious one. Although writing has slightly ruined the innocence of reading because sometimes I am enjoying a scene while another part of my brain is quietly asking, “Why did that work so well?”
Games are a big interest too, particularly games with interesting worlds or systems. I like seeing new ideas, new technology and new forms of storytelling develop.
And I spend probably too much time thinking about what is happening in the world.
I find it fascinating to compare current events and social changes with earlier periods in history. Which things are genuinely unprecedented? Which ones have happened five times before under different names? Which things feel enormous because we are standing in the middle of them?
That kind of thinking inevitably finds its way into fiction.
Usually wearing a cloak so I can pretend I hid it.
What is a misconception that others have about writing that bothers you?
That the hard part is having the idea.
Ideas are great. Ideas are also extremely well behaved while they are still inside your head.
Then you write them down.
Suddenly the brilliant scene has pacing problems, somebody’s motivation makes no sense, the dialogue you imagined as devastating sounds strangely like two people explaining the plot to each other, and a chapter you love turns out to be completely unnecessary.
A huge amount of writing is rewriting.
With The Cloaked Saviour, I reached the point where virtually every sentence had been read multiple times. Some changed once. Some changed five times. Some survived ten revisions untouched and then annoyed me at the very end.
I am quite perfectionistic, which is useful right up until it becomes very unhelpful.
There is always another sentence you could improve.
Another transition.
Another word.
Another tiny consistency issue that no normal person would ever notice but that has now ruined your evening.
The strange thing is that repeated revision does eventually make the manuscript converge. The big problems disappear. Then the medium ones. Eventually you are mostly moving commas around and beginning to suspect the book may actually be finished.
Learning when to stop is part of writing too.
I am still learning that part.
How do you measure the success of your writing career?
This is probably the question I am least certain about.
Writing exists alongside the rest of my life, so I do not have a dramatic five-year plan where I either become a full-time author or dramatically throw my laptop into a canal.
That actually takes some pressure off.
But it does not mean I take the books casually.
I am very perfectionistic about things I care about, and The Cloaked Saviour made that particularly obvious. Revising it became this constant balance between wanting every part to be better and recognising that endless revision can eventually make a book worse rather than better.
So, I think success has to come in layers.
The first layer was: can I finish a novel I am genuinely willing to put my name on?
Then: Can I turn it into an actual professional book?
Then comes the scarier one: Will complete strangers read it?
After that, success becomes things like readers finishing it, talking about it, recommending it, recognising a character or place later, or being interested when the next story appears.
Financially, I would obviously like Continuing Press to become increasingly sustainable too. I am realistic about the fact that one small Kickstarter is not suddenly going to create a publishing empire.
But if one book makes the next release easier, and the next one easier again, that is meaningful progress.
The long-term dream is that the shared world becomes something readers know.
That someone opens a future standalone novel, sees a familiar name or place and thinks, “Wait, I know what happened there.”
I think that would be incredibly cool.
If Hollywood bought the rights to your book, would you want it adapted as a movie or TV series?
I’m going to cheat again and say: it depends how many books they buy.
For The Cloaked Saviour by itself, I think a film could work really well. It has a contained conflict, a clear beginning and ending, and a story that can stand on its own without needing three seasons of setup before anything happens.
But if we are talking about the wider world, then I would absolutely start arguing for television.
That is where the interconnected standalone structure becomes fun. Different seasons could focus on different places and different characters, with some people appearing again later in ways that only become meaningful once you have seen more of the world.
I would love that feeling of watching one story, then starting another somewhere completely different and slowly realising, “Oh, this is happening because of what happened over there.”
That said, this is all currently a very luxurious imaginary problem.
For now, I would be extremely happy if Hollywood first sent an email.
Preferably one that does not end up in spam.
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