{"id":3933,"date":"2026-04-07T17:18:31","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T17:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/angelacuevasalcaniz.com\/?p=3933"},"modified":"2026-04-07T17:18:31","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T17:18:31","slug":"el-rondel-como-una-calle-de-pforzheim-se-convirtio-en-un-universo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angelacuevasalcaniz.com\/en\/2026\/04\/07\/the-rondel-like-a-street-in-pforzheim-became-a-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rondel: how a street in Pforzheim became a universe"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Three years ago, we moved into a new flat.<\/p>

The address had something about it that caught my attention from the very first moment: Ringstra\u00dfe. Ring Street. In a German city at the edge of the Black Forest called Pforzheim \u2014 or Portus, its Roman name, which happens to be the one I prefer.<\/p>

And of course, when you've spent your whole life reading too much (mostly too much fantasy) and your brain works the way mine does, moving to somewhere called \"Ring Street,\" with its Atlantean roundabout layout, surrounded by century-old trees that make you feel as though you're in the middle of a forest\u2026 well, it doesn't exactly leave you cold. It's an invitation for your brain to wander off to extraordinary places. And the neurons start tingling.<\/p>

So I began to look at the building's inner courtyard differently. To think about the neighbours, their lives, everything you don't know about the people living three metres away from you. There's a book I adored as a child, Tales from the Rue Broca by Pierre Gripari \u2014 and even if it's \"for young readers,\" if you haven't read it, you're missing out \u2014 where an entire neighbourhood becomes the territory of stories. And something like that started happening to me with this street.<\/p>

What if there were something more to this inner courtyard, this neighbourhood, than meets the eye?<\/p>

I'm not the quickest off the mark, let's be honest. Stories need a long time to ripen in my head. Ideas arrive from all sorts of different places \u2014 a historical detail, a mythology I've become obsessed with, an emotion I'm not quite sure how to process \u2014 and at some point the dots connect, like fairy lights all switching on at once, something clicks, and a fragment of a story appears. And then I start pulling at the thread of that story, dying of curiosity to find out where it leads.<\/p>

What I've just told you in a nutshell is a process that normally takes me years. The seed of a story, the time it takes to ripen, waiting for the click, pulling at threads, making sense of the whole tug-of-war... Years.<\/p>

And what I wanted was to write. At first, I just wanted to write. Period. Anything. Whatever (and I did).<\/p>

But then I decided that what I wanted to write was fantasy. The problem? I like too many things. I couldn't settle on a single story, a single mythology, or one particular fantasy world. The Rondel click came when I asked myself a different question: what if, instead of building a fantasy universe with fixed rules and a specific type of creature, I built a container? A space that would give me total freedom to write whatever I fancied, without having to choose between vampires or elementals or Greek mythology or spirits from German folklore.<\/p>

This is how the Rondel was born.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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the Rondel is (and what it isn't)<\/h3>

The Rondel is an interdimensional space. Larger on the inside than on the outside\u2014you already know that if you've read Gaiman or Lewis, although here the concept goes much further. It's a magical node, a point of convergence between the human world and the world of extraordinary beings.<\/p>

Extraordinary beings are all those who aren't ordinary humans: Courts of magical creatures, elementals, spirits, beings from mythologies the world over. They coexist with humans \u2014 sometimes in the same physical space, sometimes in parallel dimensions. Most people don't see them. Not because they're exactly invisible, but because they aren't looking with the right eyes, or because they simply aren't ready for it.<\/p>

Rondels exist all over the world. The one I'm concerned with right now \u2014 the one that appears in my first stories \u2014 is the Rondel of the Black Forest, in Portus, on the Ring Street. Yes, exactly where I live. No, it's not a coincidence.<\/p>

What I love about this structure \u2014 and here comes the selfish part of the decision, which is entirely valid \u2014 is that it gives me total freedom as an author. If I want to write a vampire story further down the line, I can. If I want to write about the elementals of the Black Forest, same. If Medusa \u2014 who is going to have a very important role in this universe, consider this your warning \u2014 needs her own saga, there's room for it. I haven't locked myself into a subgenre. I've built a world. Just like that. Because I'm worth it. \"\ud83d\ude02\"<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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What already exists (and what's yet to come)<\/h3>

The Rondel universe has two sides to it.<\/p>

On one side, there's the fiction<\/b> \u2014the novels and stories of Stories from the Rondel<\/b>. The first one, Silvana and the Elixir of Eternal Life,<\/i><\/b> is the story of Silvana Mond, a fifteenth-century alchemist who has spent decades searching for the secret of eternal life \u2014 not out of ambition, but out of love, because the man who shares her life is ageing beside her and she cannot bear the thought of losing him. When she finally finds the elixir she's been searching for, it's already too late for him. What she does next sets off consequences that no book of alchemy ever warned her about, and forces her to take refuge in the Rondel of the Black Forest<\/b>: a liminal space where souls who haven't finished their story wait amongst the roots of an impossible garden. The second story, The Human Garden<\/i><\/b>, takes place in precisely that garden \u2014 where every plant is connected to a living person. Literally. No metaphors. Both are the perfect gateway to the Rondel universe.<\/p>

I am currently working on the third of the Rondel stories, a little longer than the others: Ghosts in the Snow<\/i><\/b>. Kat, a widow in her mid-thirties, begins to hear things in her flat. Music coming from nowhere. A word in the condensation on the mirror. A raven watching her rather too intently from the courtyard. And one day she goes down to investigate, and finds the Rondel of Souls<\/b>: a snow-covered, impossible garden where the dead who have unfinished business wait for someone to help them close it. That's where it all begins.<\/p>

On the other hand, there is the Rondel Library<\/b> \u2014the non-fiction books that orbit the same thematic universe. Mythology, folklore, traditions, the origin of words. These are books that also exist within the world of the Rondel \u2014 literally, there's a library inside the interdimensional space \u2014 that serve specific functions within that universe, and that in the world of ordinary beings are works of popular non-fiction for people like you, who enjoy knowing where things come from..<\/p>

The first one is already here: Nights of Shadows \u2014 Superstitions, Rituals and Mysteries of October 31st and November 1st Around the World<\/i><\/b>. A journey through the traditions, legends, and rituals surrounding the most mysterious night of the year: from the Day of the Dead in Mexico to ancestral rituals in Japan and Madagascar, including vampires, vengeful spirits, rituals that have endured in the shadows, and haunted places where time seems to have stood still. History, anthropology, and mystery\u2014the first volume of the Rondel Library.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Why this universe and not another?<\/h3>

There's a practical answer and an honest answer. I'll give you both.<\/p>

The practical one I've already covered: I wanted total creative freedom. And \"total\" as in actually total, not halfway there.<\/p>

Because obviously I didn't want to limit myself to a single type of fantasy, or mythology, or creature. But I also didn't want to limit myself to a single type of story. Only YA? Only dark fantasy? Only one particular aesthetic? No, thank you. I want a universe where if I feel like writing romantasy tomorrow, I can. And if the day after I fancy having Medusa rip someone's head off \u2014 spoiler: she's going to \u2014 I can do that too. And if I suddenly get the urge to write a werewolf solving crimes around the edges of the Black Forest, there's room for that as well.<\/p>

I know this isn't what's usually expected from a fantasy author. That what works, especially right now, is brand consistency, homogeneity, a clearly defined niche. But as my immortal Freddie once sang: I want it all<\/i>. And why on earth shouldn't I have it?<\/p>

The Rondel is the answer to that question. A container large enough to hold all the stories I want to tell. A universe with its own rules \u2014 because it does have them, and they matter \u2014 but with room for Greek mythology, German folklore, winter spirits, Courts of extraordinary beings, and whatever else occurs to me over the next twenty years.\u00a0<\/p>

And the honest answer: because I've spent a long time thinking about grief, about loss, about what remains when someone you love is no longer there. I wanted to write about that in a way that was neither saccharine nor hopeless. That was honest. That acknowledged that grief is complicated and strange and sometimes even has its absurd moments, and that even so \u2014 or perhaps precisely because of that \u2014 there's something beautiful in the way people move through it.<\/p>

The Rondel is the space where that can truly happen. Where the dead don't simply vanish, but sometimes linger because something was left unfinished. And where the living who encounter them learn things they didn't know they needed to learn.<\/p>

It's a dark-ish universe, yes. But not without hope. Never without hope.<\/p>

If you'd like to know more \u2014about Ghosts in the Snow<\/i><\/b>, about the spirits that inhabit the Rondel, about Silvana and what she did for love, about the Biblioteca and what I'm working on \u2014 the best way is to sign up to the newsletter. It's where I share things before anywhere else, and where I'll be slowly unveiling this universe, piece by piece.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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