THE ESSENCE

2024. It has not been that long, I see it now, since that year passed, and even so, since it first arrived.

My novel-writing journey had begun as an act of half redemption, half salvation. What I meant to save were my dear screenplays, and what I meant to redeem were all the failed contests for which I had brought myself into a self-isolated artistic pursuit. I kept that part of my journey a secret; I took it as a vow to succeed in it.

Yet I failed.

I was obsessed. No. I was possessed.

I believed in myself as much as I believed in the stories I had been writing, no, had been struggling to conceive at the time.

My novelist identity came into existence because my screenwriter role had collapsed, and with it I buried my filmmaker dream. But to dig a coffin for all the screenplays I had written from 2020 to 2022 felt repulsive rather than defeating, so I rejected the possibility of doing so, especially because all of them, written in English, my third language, I had brought to life.

In the summer of 2024, when I finally finished adapting the first two novels I have published so far, along with two other novels whose adaptation process I had damaged to the extent that they turned into “pieces of junk” that, as their creator, one would feel humiliated to even admit they had written, I arrived at a coffee shop that had become the consistent, habitual shelter for all of my adaptation work.

I found it closed. Permanently closed.

There were repair works taking place because, apparently, the place had been resold to another business owner for further restoration and renovation under a different brand.

To say that I did not feel even the slightest sense of betrayal would be deception. The place I would come to during the early morning hours to have my three to five hours of writing. The place that would transport me into a flow state where hours passed without my noticing. The place where all the baristas recognized me as their regular. The place skipping which, even for weekends, would bring me excruciating headaches and anxiety. The place where my first ever novel, my first ever finished screenplay-to-novel adaptation, was born.

That place was now locked away from me. Forever.

I was forced to search for an alternative, or at least a placeholder, until the first place that had sheltered my creative grinding would return.

Both, as expected, happened: I found a placeholder, and a new coffee shop was built in the place of my old one.

Do you believe in destiny? Or coincidences? My belief is in the former.

Perhaps I have been living for so long in this zone between the ground and sky, in that middle abstract realm where one feels neither grounded nor dead, that believing in mere coincidences is something I am barely capable of. An incapability for which I believe I must apologize in front of my 20-year-old self, whose obsession was only further fueled by this seemingly foolish belief in destiny.

In this “placeholder” coffee shop, some magic happened.

Instead of reworking on the adaptations of my two other failed novels, I ended up working on another manuscript: a story that had no screenplay blueprint to serve as a roadmap for a further 100,000-word work of fiction, a story that had no backstory from which it needed to originate, a storyline about which I had no idea where it was going or where it was leading me.

And no, that is not the psychological sci-fi work titled ‘I Made *****’ that I mention here.

It is a novel that, for now, I do not intend to publish or even finish producing. It also has its own “soundtrack,” and this piece of writing is not about it.

Throughout September and October of 2024, in this “placeholder” place, I worked on my first ever original novel.

Not that my previous novels were not original, considering how their adaptations came from my own original screenplays, but there is a clear difference between writing manuscripts that have dozens of screenplay drafts serving as their skeleton and writing a fiction book that has nothing apart from that particular day and those partial hours dedicated to writing.

Momentum and novelty. Those were the two things that drove everything forward, propelling acceleration in my writing consistency despite the exhausting full year spent creating word counts for adaptation works: all on a daily basis, where even skipping for holidays or weekends would immediately be recognized by my soul as taboo, almost as the world’s greatest unforgivable sin.

By late October, the new coffee shop at the place of my old one had finished its final touches of construction, thus announcing its opening date.

In November, I became a witness to another piece of magic.

In this new coffee shop, whose soil and rudimentary core underneath remained the same as it had been a year ago, yet whose “house” built upon it now possessed a completely unrecognizable facade and design compared to its former state, I came up with the idea for the psychological sci-fi work titled ‘I Made *****’, which this article is about in its entirety.

The original plan was that I would either query or self-publish my already finished two novels. Yet that fatal day of November had a different design for me, as it turned out.

I came there with the intention of restoring my loyalty to the place from which I had lost all access and connection. Strangely, the mood upon entering immediately shifted. The furniture was arranged differently, and so was the view.

I could no longer face the mirror hanging on the wall, which used to portray my own reflection lost in reverie. Instead, the new vista offered to me was the window facing the outside world, where I would watch everyone but myself.

I do not recall what particular project or what exact task I meant to accomplish that day. All I remember is that words initially refused to come and fill the blank page.

To confess, I am the type of writer who cannot write unless there is a song playing in my ears through my headphones. And no, it is not classical or instrumental music that I listen to while writing. I need to hear the lyrics. They do not distract me. Rather, they teleport me into the necessary emotional tone and vibrancy.

That day, I was listening to random songs, allowing Spotify to choose the music for me, trusting the taste of divine direction.

All of a sudden, ‘The Essence’ by Aurora started playing in my ears.

I knew the singer. I did not know the song.

I checked what kind of music it was without delay. The song was from an album released just five months prior, in June of that year, 2024.

The music hit immediately. It just did. Somehow. For no reason. For no explanation.

For several minutes, I tried listening to the entire album, without the possibility of excluding any particular song. In the end, I returned to the very song that met me first, made the greatest impact first, and transported me into some eerie zone first.

These were the lines from the very first verse.

And these were the outro lyrics.

I played the song on repeat. Maybe it was half an hour. Maybe an hour. But I listened to that masterpiece nonstop.

Then I looked at my Google Drive, opened a new file, and in a moment that blank page became filled with ink.

I did not know about the copyright rules applied to song lyrics, so the first sentence of my novel I wrote was:

Then came the second sentence on its own:

Once I became familiarized with all the copyright rules, I ended up deleting the first sentence, thus allowing the second sentence of my novel to become the first.

Then, when I reached the second page, another line appeared:

But once I decided to be careful not to violate intellectual property rules and deleted the lyrics part, that section of the novel became:

This novel is something I can say with almost one hundred percent confidence and certainty originated from this very song. The song that, even to this day, continues feeding the heart and soul of the novel. The novel that, even today, at its 115,000-word count, I am still struggling to finish.