2025. As of today, I remain unconvinced whether the ‘essence’ of that particular year will one day finally cease its parasitic clinging onto my..., if only body, the very clinging with which I associate leeches. My hope is that one day that very leaching will at last stop preying upon my vitality, my vigor, my whole self, if only just artistic.

The arrival of 2025 had no right to feel that excruciatingly exhausting. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it had been only four full months since the birth of my novelist identity, exclusively in a direction of original fiction production where the history of its screenplay predecessors was of little to no importance. By the arrival of the year that would mark one quarter of my life, though I had an experience in original fiction writing spanning slightly more than one full season, prior to that I had already exhausted my creative well more than once: I had years wasted practicing the composition of screenplays in Russian, another span of seasons dissolved in the chase after a literature degree, its significance lying less in being literature and more in being the best next thing close to my filmmaking dream, and then a further expanse of youth consigned to an obsession, the one teetering on the edge of being possessed, an obsession with piling up screenplays written in English, all to end up being not the final destination itself, but a bridge toward their adaptation into prose.

My body beginning to feel exhaustion was valid. Yet there was something that whispered that all of that was just a mere excuse to surrender. Hence, flirting with my vanity, a hostage to my pride, I vowed not to falter. And that is so amusing, considering how the moment almost felt like a déjà vu. And not even the one of the second time.

Because my novel titled ‘I Made a Clone of You’ and its narrative trajectory had fractured into an inertia worthy of a heavy description of a gloomy abyss, I needed some other story to carry my momentum.

Immediately, on the 1st of January, I rushed to construe their first two to three pages. I felt ecstatic that day, and the one that followed. As a result, I ended up being deluded into the impression that my artistic reservoir had restored itself. Well, it hadn’t... for sure. It hadn’t, at least not for those four stories still in the process of having their plots cooked.

Though I gave up on those four stories immediately, unconsciously, but who knows, perhaps partially consciously too, I returned to the flow of ‘I Made a Clone of You.’

January of 2025 was the third month in a row I kept my creative streak going. And all of that for the sake of that one particular story.

Every time the story agreed for me to carry it, I would feel like drowning while listening to ‘The Essence’ by Aurora. Yet every time my soul, my heart, my mind, and every fiber of me failed to preserve the momentum, faltered to refill the dry well, fell short of carrying the story to its end without taking any hiatuses or detours, then I would find myself in a state where listening to the ‘soundtrack’ of my novel would become a labor no smoother, no easier, no clearer than the act of artistic creation itself.

As January 2025 was reaching for its exit, apparently without my agreeing to that, it called for ‘I Made a Clone of You’ to accompany it to the ritual of valediction.

As closer we got to the last month of the coldest season ever known, the harder it became to lose oneself in the ambiance the song in my ears could create, yet somehow now wouldn’t.

SPRING 2025

2025 February passed me by. So did the months that came subsequently, namely March, and April, and May.

I would discuss the essence of those months here, too, but their history does not belong here, as it has nothing to do with ‘I Made a Clone of You.’

The exact date on which I returned to ‘I Made a Clone of You’ is something I no longer remember. What I do remember is that I lost my momentum somewhere in April 2025, and recovered it somewhere in the first half of May 2025.

By then, I was juggling too many projects. I had lost the capacity to remain hyperfixed on one prominent project, one particular path. I was sustaining myself through adapted prose, through original works that had been born later, and through retracing the path that had once led me to my original identity as a screenwriter.

Spring 2025 was the last time I worked on screenplays with that same feverish intensity. ‘Watch ***’ was the last screenplay I finished so far. It was competing with two other screenplays at the time. I had three WriterDuet drafts open simultaneously, and ‘Watch ***’ won. The other two were abandoned.

There is something I had not revealed before, something that now seems like an unnecessary secrecy. It was not intentional. It was arbitrary.

In October 2024, at JAS Coffee Shop, I had already been creatively working on screenplays during my habitual visits there, before ‘I Made a Clone of You’ was conceived in November.

In retrospect, I can see a kind of divine logic in it. After adapting all the screenplays that I believed were worth redeeming, it was time to retrieve a part of myself that I had discarded, specifically the identity of the screenwriter, along with the filmmaker dream that had been buried with it.

Two screenplays, later called ‘BIS’ and ‘SSS,’ had lost their hold on my imagination in Spring 2022, losing to ‘Watch ***.’ Yet they were the stories that ignited my artistic self again in October 2024, after my first original prose work, ‘Angel,’ had stopped replenishing my creative reservoir.

I had gone to JAS almost daily, in ecstasy, after more than two years of being out of touch with screenplay creation, from May 2022 to October 2024. I thought it meant a return to my filmmaking dream, a rediscovery of my amour for cinema.

It did not turn out that way.

Perhaps it needed to leave so that, in November 2024, I would not have to juggle two screenplays alongside ‘I Made a Clone of You.’

There is also a reason I keep returning to the word ‘hyperfixed.’ It became something of a crucible through which I began to apprehend my own ‘essence.’ I am aware of how often I return to the word ‘essence,’ but I cannot seem to avoid it, perhaps because I am still trying to understand what it actually means in relation to myself.

Whatever I set my mind on tends to consume most, if not all, of my mental and emotional energy. Perhaps that hyperfixation was necessary. Perhaps it was the only way to prevent me from abandoning the path that ‘I Made a Clone of You’ had somehow been ordained to follow.

From the first half of May 2025 onward, I was juggling multiple projects across genres, mediums, languages, and degrees of realization. It was out of the ordinary. It was a bizarre departure from my usual form.

‘I Made a Clone of You’ no longer had my undivided regard. My attention was divided.

AUTUMN 2025

And then came autumn 2025, the most blissful and fateful season of my life.

In August 2025, another sacred writing spot closed permanently after having served me and my artistic work for one intense year.

JAS had itself been built on the ground where the previous coffee shop had stood, the one that had permanently shuttered in August 2024. And now JAS, too, followed the fate of establishments that close their doors.

I no longer had access to the place where ‘I Made a Clone of You’ had been conceived. I no longer had entrance to the hub where it had been nurtured.