2024. It has been so long, I see it now, since that year passed, and even so, since it first arrived.

As of July 2026, I wish, no, I crave, to cease all these fruitless efforts of attempting to finish this novel. Maybe I should practice being more prudent and patient, both with the process itself and with its finish line. After all, there are people who spend nearly decades before eventually writing the long-anticipated line “The End” on the final pages of their manuscripts.

But I was already patient with the story of my first fiction book. It took the deeply overinvested endeavors of my 19-year-old self, and 20, and 21, and 22, and 23, and 24, and 25-year-old self to eventually publish it.

In contrast, ‘I Made *****’ has stayed with me until today for just twenty-one months.

That is a hilariously short timeframe to even consider the option of defeat.

NOVEMBER 2024

When the idea for the story first came, when the seeds in the shape of its first 1,300 words and four pages were planted, the feeling that enveloped me first was not ecstasy, not pride, not relief. Rather, it was something that was both bitter and sweet.

FIRST WRITING SESSION

12 November 2024

From that day onwards, something happened. Something changed.

I would have certain hours dedicated to writing this novel. I would walk to the coffee shop while, in my headphones, the latest discovered song by Aurora played at its highest volume.

I did not know what it was; even to this day, I do not know how it works. Nonetheless, music has such power over me, over my identity as a novelist, and over the progress of my writing that once my brain, at its subconscious layer, establishes a connection between the core of the story I am trying to convey to the external world and the heart of the song reaching me internally from the external realm, I easily fall into the flow state the moment the first note of the approved song plays in my ears.

And in that flow state, I can remain for several hours at its bare estimate.

I would write this story not in the place where it was born, but at the "placeholder" spot, the place in which, for two months, I had already been exposed to an experience of original novel writing rather than adapted work.

I would walk to this place having absolutely no idea what exactly I would write that day, but carrying within me the belief that I would write something regardless.

And, as foreshadowed by my own intuition and pattern-reading subconscious, I would end up writing scenes that I had neither planned nor thought about.

FIRST 10,000 WORDS

19 November 2024

FIRST 20,000 WORDS

25 November 2024

DECEMBER 2024

The last month of the year demanded that I zoom out and take a look at the broader picture. As the first snow of the season fell onto the trees, covering their leafless branches, and onto the ground as though a mother were covering her freezing child with a blanket, I re-read what so far had been written.

The feelings that I found rising within myself as the word count grew, namely a sense of pride for how far I had gone in this overall artistic pursuit, a sense of relief that the story was advancing at a consistent rate instead of sporadically despite the absence of any concrete plan, and a sense of ecstasy that not only were the stories I was writing developing, but so was I as a person, just as I was as an artist and creator, all of a sudden started shattering, bringing back the very first feeling that had embraced me at the beginning.

I would look at the pages of the story I had been writing for the last month and wonder, all puzzled and bewildered, from where exactly this story had taken its origin. I would take my old orange notebook, its once-orange cover now faded, and browse through the list of ideas that I had once jotted down.

Though the story, the storyline, and the characters were novel, the feeling that brought them alive was as old as time.

But another blank page offered itself at my service, and new lines were born.

After all, it did not take me a decade to reach that long-anticipated line, "The End," though I still have not arrived at the last page of the manuscript.

Though I put the line "The End" inside this novel, its last page continues to change to this very day. It all reminds me of something. Maybe life itself.