APOCALYPSE

The previous article ceased with the timetable of my first ever writing session for the novel to which this article is now being dedicated. In it, you might have noticed one peculiar line that read something like this:

Indeed, there was a moment when I associated the essence of this novel with being an extension of my debut work.

However, A Deal *** is a piece of writing that, in the course of its development, established its own soul, its own heartbeat, its own rhythm, its own signature structure, and its own ambiance.

As the title of this article has already revealed, the beat of the novel has mostly been fed by the song called ‘Apocalypse’ by ‘Cigarettes After Sex.’

If this isn’t your first time being an endearing guest on my website, you might already know how there is an almost eerily preordained and providential relationship between the song I always stumble upon accidentally and the novel that comes as a result of that divine trouvaille.

My creations were born and raised in that direction. I have already shared the history of ‘I LOVE YOU’ as the soundtrack of my debut work, and the song ‘The Essence’ as the melody responsible for the birth of my upcoming work titled ‘I Made ***.’

Consequently, you might be expecting the backstory of how the musical creations of the group ‘Cigarettes After Sex’ naturally provided the sustainable nourishment for the progression of one of the latest manuscripts of my artistic quest.

I do not intend to disappoint the expectations you may have already raised, but there is no genesis I can grant you here.

I can’t recall how exactly I sought out this specific melody, this particular group.

Or wait.

Maybe I do.

With the arrival of the year 2025, January was the last month during which I could sustain my momentum, my consistent creative labour, and my one-dimensional fixation on my second ever original novel, and fifth ever fiction work in general. In other words, ‘The Essence’ by AURORA, by the end of that first month of the year, could no longer hold me in its tight clutch, having lost all its power over me. No longer did I feel aligned with the story I was writing. Yet that didn’t mean I would abandon it altogether.

To continue working on the novel ‘I Made ***’ felt excruciatingly painful. The words were still coming as beautifully as before, as regularly as I had long anticipated, as earnestly as they had already been shaped from the very first page. Yet coming to and leaving the coffee shop, after having concluded its deserved three to five hour writing session, started to become a chore I felt repulsed by.

Yet I would do it anyway.

And even anyhow.

I’m afraid of positioning myself as someone who might come across as perfidious and protean, yet I’d rather be that than be deceitful. So, to be honest, I began to loathe the song ‘The Essence’ in degrees harsher than how I abhorred the novel itself, and that I could be capable of such intense and immense enmity toward the works of my own creation and nourishment is something I would never have guessed in a million years back at twenty-three, when I had only just stepped onto the path of fiction writing in the role of a newbie.

Working on adaptations felt more exciting, perhaps even more trenchant and pregnant. It brooks no argument. In a way, it most definitely should have been that way, taking into account how they were then being moulded into their newfound skin, their old skin long shed and long denied. They were like bodies drifting farther and deeper from the land from which they had dived, only to encounter an island where life was still existent, still plausible, still available, perhaps even decorated with its most natural breath.

In contrast, the novels that came to me, and from me, with the arrival of September 2024 had had no past life, no history, and no background to dig into.

And I blame this novel itself for becoming the last, for letting no other stories join the gang, join the catalogue that was initially meant to grow differently.

Right at this moment, I can’t distinguish between these two:

Whichever alternative manifests, does it really bear relevance? Does it really matter now, when the novel has already shaped itself so deeply into the mud of no return?

The investment I have made in it is unmeasurably heavy, be it in regard to time, or soul, or heart, or the mental lingering where my thoughts would keep teetering on the precipice of overthinking, sadly calling upon themselves not only anxiety, but excruciating dread and existential heaviness.

I grasp what possible thought, or rather what wondering question, might flash across your mind right at this moment:

But it is precisely owing to all of that that today I am where I am.

And where I am today is an abyss of creative discovery, a precipice of artistic digging, a gulf of passionate search.

And because ‘A Deal ***’ is the novel that just happened to coincide with the lowest point of my artistic depletion, all I can associate with ‘A Deal ***’ is, indeed, death.

How ironic.

The irony of it all is that the story is about death.

And it came because of death, I thought.

And once it formed itself into a more or less recognisable shape and scope, it brought death upon me.

Throughout February of 2025, I would encounter nothing but consistent, efficient, and deeply flow-induced writing sessions within the space of my habitual writing hub, with my long-accustomed beverage, at my long-reserved writing desk.

Unlike how it had been with my other novels, where, once the writing session ceased at its scheduled time, I would leave the area in my most ecstatic, prideful, hopeful state, however long and productive my writing hours for ‘A Deal ***’ were, I would end up leaving the terrain of its sacred hub as my most melancholic, apathetic, existentially depleted self.

To feel disappointment, though, I was entirely bereft of vigour, of all the animosity that proved itself incapable of living side by side with the deadly-smelling ambiance of death.

That timetable I inserted above was the last writing session I had in February of 2025.

I was supposed to have my confidence in myself elevated, my self-esteem raised. Yet what happened was completely different.

The story that was supposed to ‘fictionalise’ death suddenly and strangely turned into the one that ‘enlived’ it in the most ‘non-fiction’ life...