Very Old Friends
A sentence that betrays itself as soon as it's said.
“What was that all about?” Lochie asked his friend as Lara slinked away, wiping off the smile inflicted upon her.
The man who had dealt the smile turned to Lochie with an incongruent expression to making mirth in anyone.
“Whatever do you mean, Lochie?”
The inquisitive friend examined this revealed snake between narrowed eyes.
“Jesse, I’ve known you five years and I’ve never seen that woman in all the time I’ve known you. What is she to you?”
Jesse threw his chin to the sky and sighed. He brought it back down slowly and icily examined Lochie’s eyes.
“In the grand scheme of things, five years is only a third of the time I’ve known her. You and I are old friends. Her and I are very old friends.”
-The Hungry Man
Some of us have people hidden in the dark corners of our memory that exist in a world that only appears when those people enter our lives again. Without them, we live in ‘reality’ with the rest of Humanity. For some of us, we have people with roots in our minds deeper than anyone else we’ve let nestle into our souls. We hide their roots if we can, because who we have become and who we are surrounded with would not quite know how to reconcile a revelation like that:
The revelation that some of us had different lives before they knew us.
That somewhere back up the path there was an entirely different circle of people, of dreams, of geography and lifestyles surrounding us.
That who we are now could possibly emerge out of who we were then—that is understandable to them. People can change. But what about the possibility of our new selves suddenly tearing open to let that past reinstate itself? What would be the conditions for that happening? If it did happen, what does it say to the state our new world met us in? Were we ever real in the first place, or simply actors because our new environment was not hospitable to the past?
If I had to provide a blurb to my upcoming novel, then I think this is it. This is the root idea behind it. Who we are, who is mooring us in our identity, and who are the people that let us shapeshift in an instant.
If I had to get it down to a single sentence, I would frame it in a question.
Do you have someone in your life that you would destroy your own life for?
That is the book I’m writing. By hand, mind you. Which I’ll confess is sometimes very tiring, but the most rewarding experience I’ve ever had with writing. I am kind to myself and only write in A5 journals at this stage, but I have nearly filled up two and I am considering switching to an A4 one once done. Here’s an image for comparison.
So many more words fit on a page that size!! Helpful if you know what you’re writing. Thankfully I do.
I’m writing about the uncontrollable storm that very old friends attract. The storm which they don’t feel because they form the eye of it, but all around them their lives threaten to be ripped up by the winds of identities howling against each other.
Some people experience love like the love of the gods, and mortals are powerless to defend against it. It must be let to pass, and it must be forgiven the damage it causes. Or must it?
This book is also about the craft that mortals employ to unchain the love of the gods from their lives and regain mastery over themselves.
So, how goes my progress anyway? 80 A5 pages of writing. One book is lined, one is not. The unlined one definitely has less words on the page because I am not a neat writer! Thank God for lined pages. Here are my loose calculations to determine where I might be at with word count now.
A5 unlined: average of 113 words per page (multiplied by 42) = 4,756
A5 lined: average of 160 words per page (multiplied by 32) = 5,120
Total = 9,866.
According to Page Counter that is;
That’s like the start of a book. Wow.
This feels… pretty cool. I have been writing since I was in Grade 2 (proper stories with developed narrative, that is). I have always claimed that I write often.
I have published three anthologies. I have always claimed to support writers.
I have started and failed to finish many long-form pieces. I claim the stereotypes of a writer.
But I have not always felt inside like I was an actual writer. Why couldn’t I just sit down and write my own story? I think my degree and the people in it made me feel particularly terrified that the longer I was without a novel to my name the title of writer would more likely be relinquished from me. Absurd, I know, but that’s how I felt.
That’s how I surprisingly still feel sometimes. If you know me, I have spent years helping creatives be defiantly creative and pursue innovative ways to make creativity a livelihood. How could I possibly be struck down with imposter syndrome (something I rally against)?
I have had a story within me that I’ve wanted to tell for about a decade. In 2021, this story finally started forming into scenes in my head.
From 2022 to December 2024, I wrote short piece after short piece with different characters and adventures, but all around the same story. I’ve been doing 3 years of delving as deep as I can into the characters and into the way I want to write it. This is a character-driven story, not a plot one, so this was a very helpful way to go about it.
From early 2025 to now, I have been on writing retreats and rejoined writing circles which has made my writing routine and the novel materialise into getting WORDS ON PAGES! Finally. This is the year I finish the first draft, at least.
I have learnt many things in the process so far. The primary learnings being funny reminders that everything I learnt at university was right, I simply disagreed with the manner in which it was delivered to me (snobby writing faculty), which delayed my synthesising of their teaching into my writerly being.
Well I’m ready now, and I feel very strongly that once this is done, the next book and the next book will come incredibly quickly. Let’s get writing, hey?
