ANGEL BABY

For the novelist identity that I have today, I owe everything to my intense, painful, delusionally pursued screenwriting journey, whose denouement led me to that grieving stage which refused to arrive at acceptance and instead lingered around every possible way of preserving what had been created yet left on the verge of waste.

I did not start writing novels merely driven by the urge to write them, and that I admit with a slightly bittersweet feeling at heart.

I started them, as you might already be cognisant of from all the articles published prior to the one you are reading now, because I felt that immense, or rather insane necessity to save my dear screenplays. No, to rescue them.

I wanted them to survive, needed them to mean something, craved for them a future that was way superior, way brighter than simply getting drowned in the mud of oblivion.

Alas, as the last month of summer 2023 arrived, the words, the sentences, the scenes that came to me all belonged to the novel form, the prose medium, the language that I could recognise from all the reading I had done, though not yet from my own writing.

The design I had in mind was simple: by turning the best of my screenplays into novels, I would find a way to bestow upon them a new life, a new breath, a new body in which to live freely.

The process of adaptation for *Blackbird Whisper* and *Double Intervention* was completed successfully, and here by success I do not imply that they achieved bestseller status or landed a deal with a top publishing house. The case of my novels is far distant from that. Their success was that I managed to adapt them from start to finish without abandoning them halfway along the path. Their success was that they survived, survived the form, the shape that had rejected them by adopting a new identity, a new medium.

*WTM* is the work of adaptation that did not. Did not survive. However, if this is not your first visit to my website, if by now you have browsed through a significant portion of it, you have surely come across the “Future Novels” section, where one of the upcoming works is titled *WTM*. You know what that means, don't you? Though *WTM* is still struggling to adjust to this new style, this new dress I am attempting to put onto it, I am still not giving up on it, still not calling it defeat and walking away.

I started the process of “resurrection” for *WTM* in the summer of 2024. Most of it I ended up adapting according to its original source, its screenplay form that I am speaking of here. Still, what it represents today is like an undercooked piece of meat that has the right colour, just not the right texture, not the right foundation.

Regular visits to my habitual coffee shop, which had all been pleasant from the autumn of 2023 through the spring of 2024, by the arrival of summer began to show cracks, began to make me miserable, perhaps even excruciatingly exhausted.

Still, pulling myself out of bed as early in the morning as possible, dressing myself in the neatest attire that in factual reality did not quite align with the messy mind I was battling inside myself, I would walk to my regular writing spot, which at that time I did not yet know would permanently close within the approaching two months.

Long into the creative labour of *WTM*, I would contemplate and count the days until my third adaptation work would finally end, after which I would start querying all three manuscripts to every agent who might find them their irrefutable fit.

But something didn't work out in the end.

I should have known better. I should not have allowed a sense of newfound hope and belief to make me forget the rule by which life generally operates.

Or, as that famous quote from that no less famous movie states:

It will be a mere deception to claim that I had never planned to become a novelist. In fact, the moment, the age, the day I figured out I would become a filmmaker, I had reckoned that the closer I came to retirement age, the further I would turn from the filmmaking world, and the more I would attempt to hone my craft in prose. I had considered the high likelihood of becoming a fiction writer once my age came close to forty. All of that I used to browse through in my mind in that almost reverie-like state when I was around 13 to 16 years old.

Past forward ten years. Now, at 26, I fear life mistakenly reversed the order, whether deliberately or providentially, of my envisioned original artistic pursuit.

This novel, this manuscript titled *ANGEL *****, had never been something I had contemplated writing or considered developing, neither in prose nor in screenplay form.

I just got impregnated by an idea, as if prose had grown so sated, so averse to all the adaptation work I had been doing, that it needed to become strict and direct in its demand that I turn toward the conception of “biological babies” rather than “adapted” ones.

Now I remember. Though I highlight and define September of 2024 as the month of origin of this novel, in factual reality it was the month of March, a half-year earlier, that the idea first struck me.