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Juan Araizaga

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Jon Ureña

Goodreads Author

Born

in Irún, Spain

Website

http://jonurenawriter.com

Twitter

jonurenawriter

Genre

Fiction, Humor and Comedy, Science Fiction

Influences

Daphne du Maurier, John Fowles, Donna Tartt, Haruki Murakami, James C ...more

Member Since

December 2009

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/joeloverbeck

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I was born in 1985, in the north of Spain, right in the border with France. For as long as I can remember I have felt uneasy around people, and I have preferred to isolate myself and interact instead with the worlds and characters that kept popping in my head. Besides translating those daydreams into written stories, I also drew comics up until high school. I'm an anxious person, easily agitated by any kind of change or stress, and prone to falling into the rabbit holes of obsessions. Generally an unpleasant person to be around.

I was good with computers, so I studied to become a programmer. However, those jobs in the private sector were either too stressful for my fragile mind, or I got discarded, despite my technical skills, because I wasn I was born in 1985, in the north of Spain, right in the border with France. For as long as I can remember I have felt uneasy around people, and I have preferred to isolate myself and interact instead with the worlds and characters that kept popping in my head. Besides translating those daydreams into written stories, I also drew comics up until high school. I'm an anxious person, easily agitated by any kind of change or stress, and prone to falling into the rabbit holes of obsessions. Generally an unpleasant person to be around.

I was good with computers, so I studied to become a programmer. However, those jobs in the private sector were either too stressful for my fragile mind, or I got discarded, despite my technical skills, because I wasn't perceived as a team player. I'm weird and make people uncomfortable. At this point I realized I was fucked and I may end up living with my parents forever. I went to therapy with little success, until a couple of psychiatrists realized I have high-functioning autism, formerly called Asperger's syndrome. Ironically, I had thrown out the possibility of having this neurological condition, because I thought that one needed to be good at math, and unemotional. That's what happens when you get your facts from popular fiction written by normies. So if you want to get an impression of how reality feels like through the lens of high-functioning autism, you may be interested in my fiction. Warning: it's disturbing. Anyway, I eventually got a job as a computer technician at a hospital, which I can tolerate.

My life was a mess. I failed to write for long periods, as I believed that nobody would publish my shit. However, that gave me the chance to learn how to play the guitar, which became one of my most fulfilling hobbies apart from reading and masturbating. I consider that learning how to play an instrument was key to figuring out how to bypass my conscious mind and access my subconscious at will, which I rely on during every writing session.

I didn't want to die without at least trying to publish some of my stories, so I got serious and attended a few writing courses. I discovered that I dislike most writers, I don't share their reasons for why they need to write, and my tastes clash with theirs. They were disheartening experiences. I ended up writing six novellas in Spanish that became my two books "Los reinos de brea" and "Los dominios del emperador búho". I sent them around, but no traditional publisher wanted them. When I ended up self-publishing them, they didn't sell for shit. The whole experience taught me that nobody cared about what I did, and that due to my peculiarities I would never find my place in this life. I stopped writing for a couple of years.

However, the daydreams didn't stop, and I kept receiving sparks for stories that felt compelling, so I thanked whatever demons still believe in me and I started writing again, this time just for myself and in English, the language in which I always felt more comfortable. I didn't think I have any business writing in a different language than my native tongue, and I doubted that I could do it well enough, but I said to myself, "Fuck it, I'll do it anyway," which is how I usually push through my mental barriers. This time I know that nobody will publish my shit, so I write without the slightest thought of whether anything I include in my stories will bother some faceless, oversensitive gatekeeper. I'm only writing to satisfy my lurid desires and to drag myself out of the cycles of depression. If something I write makes someone else happy, even better. ...more

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Jon Ureña’s books

Average rating: 5.0 · 1 rating · 3 reviews · 3 distinct works

	My Own Desert Places it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Los reinos de brea 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2018 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Los dominios del emperador búho 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2018 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

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Jon Ureña's Blog

Living Narrative Engine #11

There’s only three people I feel myself wanting to speak to these days.

The first one is the girl I’ll always have to think of as the love of my life. I met her when I was sixteen or seventeen. Her name was Leire. A basketball player even though she wasn’t particularly tall for a girl. Passionate if a bit reckless, she was romantically interested in me for whatever reason. One night, on the grass o Read more of this blog post »

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Published on October 14, 2025 05:51 • Tags: ai, artificial-intelligence, books, fiction, javascript, llm, llms, programming, technology, writing

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Jon Ureña wrote a new blog post Living Narrative Engine #11 There’s only three people I feel myself wanting to speak to these days. The first one is the girl I’ll always have to think of as the love of my life. Read more of this blog post »
12 hours, 11 min ago · like
Jon Ureña liked a quote “What is really required to defend ‘the West’ against the sudden rise of these barbaric and elemental forces is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life. Apart from the military-technical apparatus, the world of the ‘Westerners’ has at its disposal only a limp and shapeless substance – and the cult of the skin, the myth of ‘safety’ and of ‘war on war’, and the ideal of the long, comfortable, guaranteed, ‘democratic’ existence, which is preferred to the ideal of the fulfilment which can be grasped only on the frontiers between life and death in the meeting of the essence of living with the extreme of danger.” Julius Evola
Oct 11, 2025 08:02AM · like · more quotes by Julius Evola · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Metaphysics of War by Julius Evola. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Metaphysics of War by Julius Evola <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Jon Ureña liked Gorana's review of Londonistan: Britain's Terror State from Within: " Oh Tolkien you! Racist islamophobic....prophet? you! What has been happening for the past few years in the UK, especially in London, is just a foreshadowing of what will soon start to happen all across the Europe if people don't put away their pink-co" Read more of this review »
Oct 10, 2025 04:38AM · see review
Jon Ureña and 1 other person liked Benjamin Castiel's review of おやすみプンプン 13 [Oyasumi Punpun 13]: "fuck you Punpun. I used to like you 💔"
Oct 05, 2025 03:30PM · see review
Jon Ureña wants to read The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Apr 05, 2025 03:31AM · like
Jon Ureña wants to read The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Apr 02, 2025 05:15AM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Jon Ureña wants to read The Anomaly (The Anomaly Files, #1) by Michael Rutger	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Apr 02, 2025 05:11AM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Anomaly by Michael Rutger. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Anomaly by Michael Rutger <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Jon Ureña rated a book really liked it All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1) by Cormac McCarthy	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
[check out this review on my personal page, where it looks better] This one’s a bildungsroman about a teenager (I believe he’s sixteen when the story starts) named John Grady Cole, who lives in Texas with his deteriorating family. Cole intends to cont ...more
Mar 20, 2025 04:17AM · like · see review
Jon Ureña wants to read Strange Pictures by Uketsu	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Mar 12, 2025 04:14AM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Strange Pictures by Uketsu. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Strange Pictures by Uketsu <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Jon Ureña wants to read The Board Game Designer's Guide: The Easy 4 Step Process to Create Amazing Games That People Can't Stop Playing by Joe Slack (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Mar 11, 2025 03:59AM · like

More of Jon's books…

Jon’s Quotes

“What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are all the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people write. We write to escape our prisons.”
― Alice Weaver Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

11 likes

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

tags: writing

6442 likes

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
― Albert Camus

tags: civilization, writers, writing

2082 likes

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

tags: writing

1351 likes

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

tags: honesty, truth-telling, writing

5046 likes

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Jon’s Friend Comments

Comments (showing 1-6) post a comment »

date

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message 6: by Jon

Mar 21, 2018 11:45AM

Jane wrote: "Congratulations on your book and author profile :)"

Thank you very much. I hope the whole thing takes off somehow.

reply | flag

message 5: by Jane

Mar 21, 2018 11:38AM

Congratulations on your book and author profile :)

reply | flag

message 4: by Dolors

Dec 23, 2014 05:48AM

Thanks for the friend invite Jon. Pessoa is one of my top fav writers and I detected many interesting titles on your virtual shelves.

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message 3: by Amanda

Aug 08, 2014 12:16PM

Thank for adding!

I see you have tons of good books about writing in your shelves... I'll have to remember that :)

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message 2: by Madeleine

May 26, 2013 10:46AM

I think 86% compatibility is the highest I've seen in quite some time.

Thank you so much for the friendvitation, new GR pal! I am digging your taste in books (and how much of mine you seem to share!) and cannot wait to chat about what we are and have been reading. Take care!

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message 1: by Ricardo

Dec 25, 2009 07:04AM

Glad to see you here Jon. I knew you'd like Goodreads.

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Jon Ureña’s Followers (124)

Jon Ureña

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