About the Author

The Headmaster is the author of the Montavera books — the novels and the Black Index — which he writes in English and Spanish and files from his office in the city itself. The Montavera Chronicle records his decrees, his teachings, and his seal. He publishes under his own roof: Montavera Games, with the books issued by Montavera Press.

Below is his statement — how the books are written, set down once, in full, so it never has to be explained again — and, beneath it, the receipts.

I'm Sebastian Aguilar. I'm a bilingual elementary school teacher, and I've been writing since 2009 — over a million words by hand, in the back of work trucks and at coffee shop tables, building worlds nobody had seen yet.

This year, those worlds became books. Real books, with my name on the cover.

The old teachers of this craft had a rule for when a writer is ready: write a million words, the absolute best you can write — then you're ready to begin. I didn't throw my million away. I built worlds out of them.

I wrote these books. All of it — every story, every scene, every line. I have held these stories in my heart for a long time, waiting for the day they could be published properly.

I teach writing. I have taught creative writing to my students, out of what I learned in college, in craft books, and in a lifetime of reading. Over the years I settled on what works and what doesn't, and I compiled it: my rules, my guidelines, my system for how a story is built and how it is edited. AI helped me organize that system. The system is mine.

The old way of publishing had a gate in it, and the gate was money. To publish well, you hired people — structural editors, line editors, proofreaders. I know, because the one time I scraped the money together, I hired an editor through Reedsy. We weren't a great match, and the work crawled; scheduling across an ocean saw to that. I don't blame her, and I don't blame the system. But I understood what that gate really does: it doesn't keep bad books out. It keeps authors without money waiting — some of them forever.

So I built the editing team I couldn't hire, out of the tools that exist now, and I set it to work inside my system. Here is my process, plainly. I plot. I discover as I go. And I write the prose — all of it, myself, first. Then the team goes to work on what I wrote: a structural edit against my own rules, making sure I stuck to them. It hands me results, and I take them and rewrite. Then a line edit — grammar checked, alternative words and phrases offered — and I read, and I choose. Human beta readers read the book. And before anything is finished, I make a final pass over it in my own voice. The prose comes first. The editing comes after. The decisions are mine at every step.

I know some will turn their nose up at that. They came from a time when it had to be done with people, and to them the gate looks like a standard. I'm not writing for them. I'm writing for readers — and I'm speaking to the editors and publishers who care less about the uppityness of the old way and more about what actually matters: an author who can produce great stories, in a voice that is unmistakably his own. The books come with the world already built around them — a novel in English and Spanish, a language of my own invention with its own textbook, games, a living calendar of that world — and an author who shows up with the character, the personality, and the brand to stand behind all of it.

Let me be clear about something: the traditional way isn't going away, and I'm not here to judge it or to say my way is better — it isn't. The traditional way holds a depth of experience, talent, and skill that I respect and honestly can't claim to match. These tools simply make it possible for me to get my stories out while I'm still young — and that's really the only thing I ever wanted. I want to write my stories, get them out, and let people read them.

I know there will always be those who criticize and judge. This isn't for them. This is for those of you who want to read my stories and enjoy them. And it's for the other authors who are scared to take the plunge because they have no other way to get their stories edited or critiqued: you can do what I've done. Use the tools that are available to us now. They're a blessing that was never available before. You can get your stories out there for the world to read.

Because of this team, these stories reach readers now — while they are beating in my heart, racing through my mind, and itching to come out of my fingertips and onto these keys. I don't want to end up like the many authors who never finish their series. I intend to finish mine.

Make your dream come true.