Do you use a pseudonym? Why or why not?
No. I'm Adam Porkolab — that's my legal name, the one I sign as Dr. Porkoláb Ádám back home. I dropped the accent marks for publication. Most editors would strip them anyway, and keeping them just means extra emails and extra proofreading rounds over characters that half the typesetting systems on Earth will mangle. The work should do the talking, not the diacritics. If a story can't hold your attention without a foreign-looking byline, it doesn't deserve your attention in the first place.

What works do you feel have been left out of the western literary canon — works from other countries, in other languages, or by marginalized people?
The entire body of Central and Eastern European speculative fiction, for a start. Where is Stanisław Lem's The Cyberiad in the conversation about the greatest comic fiction? Where is Frigyes Karinthy's Voyage to Faremido (1916), a Hungarian proto-SF novel about sentient machines, written before R.U.R. coined the word "robot"? Where is Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, arguably the greatest fantasy novel of the 20th century, shelved under "literary fiction" because it's Russian?

Hungarian literature exists in a kind of linguistic quarantine. We have one of the most demanding literary traditions in Europe, and almost none of it crosses over. Kosztolányi, Krúdy, Mészöly, Ottlik — these writers would be household names if they'd had the luck to write in English or French. Thank God for Kertész Imre's Nobel in 2002 and Krasznahorkai László's in 2025. The stranglehold is starting to loosen. But there's still a long way to go.

What writers/artists/filmmakers/musicians have influenced your work — either the work itself, or the way in which you work?
Hungarian literature will always be in my writerly DNA. I spent years teaching literature and history, and that shaped me before I ever tried to shape a story. It's less an influence and more an aesthetic paradigm for me — untranslatable, locked behind linguistic grids, a literature of extremes that either chatters or strikes, like a heartbeat. The poets gave me my moral compass: Babits, József Attila, Radnóti. Among prose writers, Kosztolányi taught me that a child's point of view can unlock the whole world, and Mikszáth Kálmán — son of the same Palóc hill country I come from — showed me that folk horror and village gossip are the same thing, and neither one is lying.

The Western classics came later. In Hungary, much of this was unavailable until the fall of communism. My absolute role model is Philip K. Dick — his speed, his restlessness, the way an idea would seize him and he'd chase it down in weeks. His Hungarian translations are unfortunately poor, which is part of why I ended up reading in English. Stanisław Lem is a kindred spirit: science fiction that's also philosophy, also comedy, also deeply, unfashionably humane. I learned horror from Stephen King, not to imitate him but to find my own voice by studying how precisely he controls his. Borges taught me that an encyclopedia entry can be a horror story. Bradbury taught me to love a sentence the way you love a person — unreasonably, and without apology.

Is there one part of your creation process that's harder for you?
Translation. I can only write in Hungarian — that's my working language, the one where my instincts live. I read English fluently and I can write in it, but the creative ignition only happens in Hungarian. And "translate" is the wrong word for what happens next. The English version is practically sixty percent of the original. I rewrite, I cut, I restructure. Hungarian is agglutinative — a single word can carry what English needs a full clause to express. So the English version isn't a translation, but rather a second organism—one that shares the original's skeleton while growing different muscles, sometimes even beating with a different heart.

I also never stop polishing. After every three rejections, I go back and ask whether the English is doing everything the Hungarian did. Sometimes a rejection isn't about the story at all — it's about a rhythm that didn't carry over, a joke that only works in Hungarian. That revision cycle is the hardest part of my process, and also the part that makes the work better than I could make it in a single pass.

How do you handle rejection? Do you have any advice for other creators about handling rejection?
Most of my submission process is automated. I run my own server with my own database — every submission, every rejection, every response time, logged and tracked. I work on a monthly submission rate. This sounds clinical, but it's actually the opposite — it removes the emotional narrative. A rejection isn't a judgment on your soul. It's a row in a table. The table doesn't care about your feelings, and that's the kindest thing about it.

I allow myself exactly ten seconds of being upset per rejection. Then I log it and start looking for the next market. Same day. Always same day.

What still hurts — genuinely hurts — is the "almost." The longlisted-but-not-picked. The "we loved this, but we just bought a witch story last week." Those prove the work was good enough, and the answer was still no. You can't automate your way out of that feeling. You just sit with it for a moment, and then you move.

I call my approach the PPSh method, after the old Soviet submachine gun. The PPSh-41 wasn't the most accurate weapon ever made, but it fired and fired and fired. For every finished story, I target as many simultaneous-submission-friendly markets as I legally can, as fast as I can. One of my stories was rejected six times before it was accepted — by a market that sent a personal note calling it one of the strongest pieces in their reading period. Same story, seven different desks, seven different answers. And the moment that acceptance came in, I withdrew the story from every other market where it was still pending. Immediately, same day. That's not optional — that's basic professionalism. Editors remember who wastes their time, and they remember who doesn't.

Form rejections are not about you. They can't be — the editor spent sixty seconds on your story. Personal rejections are gifts, even when they sting, because someone bothered to tell you why. The worst thing in this business isn't rejection. It's silence.

What is your biggest creative doubt?
That the thing I'm best at might also be the thing that makes my work hardest to place. I write what I sometimes call "love-fi" — speculative fiction that uses science fiction and fantasy as a disguise for something uncomfortably intimate. My characters set the table for Death and pour him coffee. They call Death beautiful so he'll smile (yes, Death is usually male in Hungarian). The speculative element is real, but it's not the point. The point is always the human thing underneath.

I worry sometimes that this falls between chairs. Too strange for literary fiction, too quiet for genre. Too American, too different for the Hungarian market — and I take that as a compliment. But I'm grateful to the Anglophone market. It taught me to write better — to always reach for the sharper sentence, the rounder thought. My Hungarianness isn't a limitation but the material. English is my second, chosen language, one I respect and care for deeply. And I feel I have a great deal more to say to the English-speaking audience.

What piece of creative advice have you received that sounded good, but was ultimately not useful to you?
"Write what you know."

I'm a software engineer with a PhD in Linguistics. I grew up in a Hungarian village called Tar — which means "bald" in Hungarian and, well, you know what it means in English. I didn't have internet access until I was sixteen. Every foreign film and novel reached me in translation — and Hungarian translations of that era had the authenticity of an eighty-three-year-old Hungarian schoolteacher of English attempting to render the latest US slang. If I wrote what I knew, you'd get a story about a man debugging a Java microservice while conjugating irregular verbs in a language you've never heard of. (Actually, I might write that one day. But it would still have a ghost in it.)

The better version of this advice: write about what's strange. You're watching a YouTube short about Japanese self-mummification at midnight, and then the algorithm serves you a surgeon analyzing a video of a Mexican man who survived an accident that should have killed him. Connect them. That's a story. Write about what unsettles you, not what you already understand. I write down every stupid idea I have, consciously, deliberately. Most of them are useless. Some of them aren't. I also hunt for English words I don't know — words that have no Hungarian equivalent, words that name things I didn't realize had names. A new word is a new room in the house. Sometimes there's a story living in it.