Volume IOut now
The Blaze
Summer 1998. Teresa holds her family's gym together. Then Taro comes home from Japan, and two childhood friends learn what they've become.
A trilogy · Three volumes, one story
What Fire Builds
A literary slow burn about two young people who find and choose each other amid cultures, expectations, loss, and everything their families carry with them.
Riverside, California. A boxing gym that used to be an orange-packing house. Twenty-seven years in the making, published in English and Spanish at once.
Readers on
The Blaze
The Blaze
★★★★★
Good read. The characters feel very real. Even though they're teenagers, it's clear the book is aimed at more mature readers.
The volumes
Three books, read in order.
Volume IIComing soon
The Forge
Twelve years apart. Teresa and Taro become, alone, the adults they were always going to be — in the years before their paths cross again.
Tokyo · Riverside · San Francisco
Get updates on release date →
Get updates on release date →
Volume IIIComing soon
The Hearth
Warmer, funnier, and almost honest. Two people who can't quite say the obvious — and everyone around them, the cat included, who already can.
Writing now
Follow the progress →
Follow the progress →
New · Free
on Wattpad
on Wattpad
Two In, Four Out
Prequel · Riverside, California, 1988 · A new chapter every week
The Zárates run a boxing gym that used to be an orange-packing house, and live in the house out back. The Nakamuras arrived a year ago and live three blocks away, in a house where things start on time. Teresa is eight, with two chores and a way of telling everything. Taro is nine, and good at waiting. They meet on a Saturday, at a tournament, over a badly placed name tag.
It ends exactly on the first page of The Blaze. Free, chapter by chapter, no account needed to read.
English — Two In, Four Out
Saturdays, 8pm
Español — Dos Adentro, Cuatro Afuera
Jueves, 8pm
The author
Mirren Olguin
Twenty-seven years in the making.
This story started in 1998, as fan fiction, in a bedroom that smelled like instant coffee and teenage urgency. The characters grew alongside me for twenty-seven years. Somewhere along the way, they stopped being borrowed and became their own people, with their own names, their own city, their own stubbornness.
What Fire Builds is published simultaneously in English and Spanish, because this story was always meant to live in both languages.
Other work
All At Once
Short story · Two chapters · Free on Wattpad
A standalone piece, unrelated to What Fire Builds. Two chapters, read in one sitting.
Elsewhere
Ratings, reviews and the full bibliography live on Goodreads.
Mirren Olguin on Goodreads →
