All of my novels are works of fiction. They’re not autobiographies. Naturally, all authors have their subconscious to contend with. It’s difficult to avoid sentiments bubbling up from somewhere deep within, feeding into a scene or plot.
Most of my spare time in 2021 was taken up revisiting and editing an old novel I had abandoned a decade earlier. This one went to an editor in November last year, for a thorough review by an author based in Los Angeles.
In the meantime, through December and January, an entirely new novel came flowing through my fingers, tapped into a 2012 MacBook Pro. This one a kind of indirect sequel to the previous one, set thirty years ahead in the midst of the pandemic, introducing new protagonists, while passing over the old.
When the first of those two novels returned to me in the last week of February, I was supposed to spend the weeks and months that followed working on it again. However, that barely happened, for my mind has been all over the place.
In truth, I have been rather thrown discovering that reality is in fact far stranger than fiction. Indeed, some things that occur in real life we would describe as unrealistic and implausible if we wrote them into the plot of a novel.
I could say that my winter writing inspired real life, rather than the other way around as would be expected. The characters of that novel inspired me to be more forgiving, I suppose. To reach out to others, just as they did.
Another case of life mirroring art, perhaps. Who knows if the novels themselves will ever see the light of day. Maybe the act of publishing isn’t necessary anymore.
Last modified: 10 August 2022
