About the author
Not the name on my birth certificate.
The story behind Fusion.
My name is Jake Marshall.
Well, technically, it isn't.
Jake Marshall is the pseudonym under which I write. Behind the name is a young writer with an overactive imagination, a lifelong fascination with storytelling, and a stubborn determination to turn the worlds in his head into something other people can experience.
My love of storytelling began early. From the age of four, I was performing in school plays, memorising entire movie scripts and recreating scenes for anyone willing to watch. I never wanted to be merely an audience member. I wanted to step inside the story—to become part of it, to understand the characters, and eventually, to create worlds of my own.
That instinct never left me.
The notebook
When I was fifteen, I began filling a small notebook with ideas. At the time, I had no intention of writing a novel. There was no carefully constructed plot or grand literary ambition. I simply had too many ideas and nowhere else to put them.
There were characters. Experiments. Strange abilities. Science. Friendship. Violence. Survival.
Pieces of a story were beginning to emerge, although I had no idea what they would eventually become.
Then one day, my mother walked into my room.
She picked up the notebook and began reading.
A few moments later, she looked at me and said,
“You should write a book about this.”
Then she closed the notebook and walked out.
It was a remarkably simple comment, but it stayed with me.
A couple of months later, I told her, “Mom, I'm going to write a book.”
She didn't exactly believe me.
And, realistically, who could blame her? I was fifteen. At that age, enthusiasm can arrive with extraordinary force and disappear just as quickly.
Except this time, it didn't.
About a month later, I returned carrying something that I hadn't expected to have myself: the first one hundred pages of a novel.
I called it Serum.
That was the beginning.
Five years
What I didn't understand then was that those first hundred pages would become the starting point for the next five years of my life.
The story changed constantly. Characters were rewritten. Entire plotlines were discarded. New ideas replaced old ones. Scenes that had taken hours to write were sometimes removed without hesitation because they no longer belonged in the story I was trying to tell.
- There were countless late nights—sometimes writing until four, five, or even six in the morning.
- There were energy drinks.
- There was my questionable tradition of writing with my special Carvo caramel vodka.
- There were periods when I was convinced the entire thing was terrible.
- There were moments when giving up seemed considerably easier than continuing.
- And then, occasionally, everything would fall into place.
- Those moments were enough to keep going.
Serum becomes Fusion
Over the course of five years, Serum evolved into something far larger than the story I had originally imagined. The characters became more complex. The world became darker. The themes became more deliberate. What had begun as a collection of ideas gradually developed its own identity.
Eventually, Serum became Fusion.
One of the most important parts of that evolution was the creation of its characters. Many of them contain pieces of people I have known, including myself—fragments of personalities, relationships, experiences and observations transformed into something entirely fictional.
I wanted the characters to feel human before they became extraordinary.
I also wanted Fusion to occupy a space of its own.
I grew up immersed in stories such as The Hunger Games, Twilight, The Vampire Diaries and The Maze Runner. Each offered something different that captivated me: survival, mystery, supernatural elements, relationships, danger and worlds governed by rules that were often far darker than they initially appeared.
Eventually, I began asking myself:
What would happen if I took the elements I found most compelling in those stories and built something entirely new from them?
That question became one of the foundations of Fusion.
A young adult dystopian sci-fi thriller about genetic experimentation, human transformation, survival, friendship, and betrayal. When ordinary people are pushed into extraordinary circumstances, survival comes at a cost — and becoming something powerful might mean becoming something monstrous. Five years in the making, started as a notebook of ideas at fifteen and originally titled Serum.
What Fusion is about
At its heart, however, Fusion is about people.
It is about what happens when ordinary people are placed in extraordinary circumstances. It is about the choices they make when survival comes at a cost. It is about identity, loyalty, fear and the uncomfortable question of whether becoming something powerful also means becoming something monstrous.
I didn't want to write a story simply because I thought there was an audience for it.
I wanted to write the story I would have wanted to read.
The universe begins
Five years of writing, rewriting, questioning, rebuilding and refusing to let the idea disappear eventually brought me to the finished novel.
Looking back, it is strange to think that all of this began with a fifteen-year-old boy filling a small notebook with ideas that, at the time, seemed completely disconnected.
That notebook became a manuscript.
The manuscript became Fusion.
And Fusion became the beginning of an entire universe.
What started as an experiment in storytelling became five years of obsession, sleepless nights, mistakes, rewrites, unexpected discoveries and a determination to see the story through to the end.
I don't think that fifteen-year-old version of me understood what he was starting.
He simply had an idea.
And, fortunately, he refused to let it go.
This is the story behind the name Jake Marshall.
And this is how Fusion began.