Almost a year later, I return to you with a flourish, a bugle call, and a comically large bell: hear ye, hear ye, I have finished the book.

I have gone through and fixed and deleted all of my little ‘come back to this later’ markers (terms that would surely not crop up anywhere else in my writing, in order of increasing ridiculousness: QQQ, BEBOP, LOBSTER, and SKIBIDI).

I have swapped the names, faces, and little hats of countless interchangeable minor characters.

I made up an entire conlang and then didn’t use it nearly as much as I planned to.

I have tentatively plotted out Books 2 and 3 because I am nothing if not an over-writer and, naturally, this is going to be the world’s longest story.

And the completed draft is now in the hands of my beloved wife and a few dear friends for line-edits and emotional validation, since I am the writing equivalent of one of those nervous cheetahs in captivity who require a therapy dog to keep them from the brink of madness.

I have put together together a query packet and I am beyond excited to be able to (eventually) introduce the world to Vazarka, and to my very good friends, Golbahar, Petra, and Amadea, from my imagination sandcastle.

I’m also starting up a Professional Author Social Media where I will be posting shorter but more regular updates, if any of you want to check out what I’m doing over there, come and say hi!

Love you, bye! Be good.

Rules:

1. Has to be written by an author from another country, set in that country (for at least half of it)

2. Works in translation preferred but not necessary

3. Works from indigenous authors in English-speaking countries are allowed and don’t count as English/American/Australian etc.

• You Dreamed of Empires, Álvaro Enrigue (trans. Natasha Wimmer) - Mexico

• Brotherless Night, V. V. Ganeshananthan - Sri Lanka

• Trout, Belly Up, Rodrigo Fuentes (trans. Ellen C Jones) - Guatemala

• Of Cattle and Men, Ana Paula Maia (trans. Zoe Perry) - Brazil

• The Wall, Marlen Haushofer (trans. Shaun Whiteside) - Austria

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones) - Poland

• This Motherless Land, Nikki May - Nigeria

• Beka Lamb, Zee Edgell - Belize

• Celestial Bodies, Jokha Alharthi (trans. Marilyn Booth) - Oman

• When I Sing, Mountains Dance, Irene Solà (trans. Maya Faye Lethem) - Catalonia

• A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James - Jamaica

• Miss Iceland, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (trans. Brian Fitzgibbon) - Iceland

• What I’d Rather Not Think About, Jente Posthuma (trans. Sarah Timmer Harvey) - the Netherlands

So far, a lot seem to either orbit around grief or anger—often both, and how they bleed into each other. Grief of a sibling, of a best friend, of an identity fractured by time and distance. What do you do with your grief if you can’t feel it? If there is no closure? Then cycles of trauma and violence, hand-fed to successive generations who calcify into rage and vengeance if they can’t otherwise escape it.

I’m sure there are more cheerful books out there from each of these nations. But I haven’t read those ones yet.

In no particular order, here are some of my favourites so far.

BROTHERLESS NIGHT: Sri Lanka

In 1981, Sashi has four brothers. By the end of the Sri Lankan civil war eight years later, she has none. (I don’t think this counts as a spoiler, really–look at the title.) Growing up in Jaffna under anti-Tamil persecution, Sashi watches as violence escalates, as resistance breeds terrorism, and as home and identity splinter. This depiction of the rise of the Tamil Tigers, as seen through the eyes of a teenage girl, is as harrowing as it is powerful.

THE WALL: Austria

Our unnamed protagonist is a middle-aged woman on holiday to a cabin in the alps, suddenly and inexplicably the only human being left alive. Encased by an invisible and impenetrable wall, she is alone but for the dog and any other strays she may come across. This is a slow, introspective one about the day-to-day mundanity of survival, and about what makes life worth living at all. The prose is beautiful if you love reading about light through trees and rain storms, and I am a big fan of the way Haushofer writes about animals. In particular, I have never read about cats described with sooooo much personality and charm.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS: Jamaica

Not brief, and a lot more than seven killings. This was a HARD read. In 1976, rival gangs tear Kingston apart. Two days before the international peace concert that unites them under a tenuous truce, seven men break into the home of Bob Marley and attempt to assassinate him. This sprawling epic builds up to and then follows the fallout of this attack, envisioning the lives of those involved as well as the consequences on those affected by it. It follows gang leaders, CIA agents, rookie journalists, politicians, dealers and runners and enforcers in a growing market for drugs and power. At nearly 900 pages, much of it in Jamaican patois, with 16 different narrators each with their own distinct voice, this was a challenge, but by God, what an experience.

WHEN I SING, MOUNTAINS DANCE: Catalonia

I have got the ‘sing’ and ‘dance’ the wrong way around every single time I have referred to this novel. How on earth do I describe this? Imagine a book written about a series of tragic deaths, narrated by a storm cloud, or by a mountain, or by the ghost of a witch, or by a child, or by a deer. Everything is connected in this book, both on a personal level and also by the natural world they inhabit. A little confusing at times, but so lyrical and imaginative that I didn’t even care.

I’m off to continue reading - if you have any recommendations, let me know!

You ask, what will be most efficient? and you do that. You ask, what will be the easiest? You revel in the convenience, the ease, every step of the process made thoughtless, frictionless, loveless. You have spent—on average—100ml of water, 0.34 Watt-hours of electricity, rather than think, or God forbid, create. But you have saved so much precious time.

With that time, you could do anything. You could create something else, another idea, another poem, another dog answering the doorbell. You could scroll through your phone in search of your next prompt.

You want to create. You don’t know what, or how. You don’t own a pencil, apparently. You want to make something. No, you don’t. You want to have something already made.

You ask, what will get the most attention? and you do that. You ask, what will give the illusion of my having worked hard? You ask, what will make me the most money? and you do that. what will save me the most time? What will acquire my desired end-result, or something close, with a minimum input on my end?

Maybe it’s your message to your team to say how proud you are. Not proud enough to articulate your own emotions, but proud. It isn’t you, but it’s fine.

Maybe it’s a pair of dirt-cheap houndstooth trousers with plastic sewn into the fibres and blood sunk into the seams. They aren’t good, but they’re fine.

Maybe it’s a movie that dutifully fumbles through the same three beats, character dialogue on a patient and unflinching loop to ensure that it sinks in between Instagram reels. It’s bad, but it’s fine. People will still watch it.

Maybe it’s a book you half-wrote, based on a book you half-read, cover concept peeled neatly from a Pinterest board of half-credited illustrations of beribboned dogs and brooding white boys. It’s bad, but it’s fine.

Maybe it’s a TV series you received three years and $400 million to make. It’s bad, but it’s fine.

Maybe it’s a derivative and uninspiring album churned out less than a year and a half after the last one, every song an echo of something or someone else. It’s fine.

Maybe it’s six thousand posts on every social media page you frequent, written in the exact same cadence.

This cadence. This exact cadence. Cadence that crops up everywhere you look and can’t be escaped. Possibly ever. And you’re right to notice it, to hate it. Because it’s not just annoying. It’s unforgivab—[gunshot takes out the back of my head]

You have an idea to express. It’s almost your idea. It’s close enough. It’s fine.

I grew up overseas, moving country on average every three years, moving house more frequently still. At eighteen, I settled in a medieval university town with a castle and a cathedral and enough independent book shops to keep me busy, and there, for the first time ever, I stayed put.

Thirteen years is the longest I have lived in one place, in a city that I adored. I loved the tilt of its old timber buildings, the arches of its Georgian windows, the bright splash of colour in its murals. I loved its open air market stalls and the art nouveau arcade and the endless call of seagulls. It was the first place I had ever been with aggressively queer vibes—blue hair galore!—and made me feel comfortable getting gradually bolder, year on year, at Pride. I felt very myself there, and have secretly worried that I might not feel so much myself anywhere else.

Yesterday I left that city to move 250 miles* northeast and into an excitingly shapeless and indistinct future. All of my underwear is in a box and my socks are mostly soft receptacles to brace bottles of oyster sauce in transit. I am in a much nicer house, in a much nicer area (everyone say, “Thank you, in-laws”) and I am looking back now at my flat with fond nostalgia. Yesterday, when I closed the door for the last time, I found myself weirdly compelled to pat the door frame à la that’ll do, pig.

*Yes, I know that 250 miles is not that great a distance for many. It’s two-thirds of the length of my entire country!

We lived in a neighbourhood that we referred to colloquially as Stab Alley, although for legal reasons I need to make clear that no-one was stabbed in the neighbourhood. The violent deaths on my street were with a gun and with bare fists, respectively, and the person who was chased with a machete survived the encounter unharmed. We enjoyed front-row seats to multiple armed drug raids and, on one exciting occasion, to a car chase that resulted in a Kia Sorrento flipped upside down into someone’s garden. Our first-floor flat was nestled between maniacs: below us, a woman attempting to recreate the bass and reverb of the Ministry of Sound on a budget every night; above, someone I can only assume suffered horrific night terrors, if the regularity of their harrowing screams at 3am were anything to go by. Another neighbour renovated his flat, very slowly, with drills, most days over the course of four years. The walls bloomed with black mould and the paint came away in great white flakes and we cheerfully ignored the asbestos under the carpet—and yet!!!!!

In that flat, I started my teaching career and then, nine years later, ended it. I adopted two cats and said goodbye forever to one of them in that flat. I got engaged to the love of my life in that flat. I endured remote teaching through Covid. I recovered from a tonsillectomy. I spent 800 hours playing Civilisation. I spilled endless cups of tea whose puddles I discreetly wiped away with my sock. I knew every nook and cranny, all its little quirks and foibles. And somehow, in the space of one very long and exhausting day, it is no longer mine and I will never be there again.

Before we handed in the keys, I considered leaving a note for the new owner. Thank you! Enjoy! Good luck! Please don’t send a complaint being like, hey, you never mentioned the mould in the brochure! But also: please take care of her. Be careful of the jiggly door handle. The kitchen window on the left does open, it just needs some oomph. Don’t scrape the countertop. The bath gets scratched easily. Don’t paint over my butter-yellow hallway.

This all feels silly. It is just a flat that, most of the time, I didn’t even like—but I am nothing if not sentimental.

I taught for nine years and earnestly believed I was in it for life. At the beginning, I scorned the statistics: one in four will leave before the end of their training year; forty-four per cent will leave in the first five years. I thought, that won’t apply to me, because I am a good teacher. I am a good teacher—or I was—and at times I thought it might kill me. Not because the job is inherently perilous (although I have had a chair thrown towards me, and a quarter of teachers in Britain experience physical violence once a term) but because teaching is a slow and relentless chisel to the mental health.

Towards the end of my time in education, I began to explore why, exactly, teaching felt so difficult for me, more so than my peers. Certainly, it chipped away at us all and everyone felt that pressure—but it seemed to me that I was made, somehow, of softer rock than the others, of something more brittle. I didn’t particularly like the answer that I found. Namely, autism.

In my adolescence, autism was not discussed. We called it Asperger’s, for one thing, and it was a term reserved only for children—boys—whose experience was utterly alien to me. There was no spectrum; there was no variety. There were only little boys who liked maths and disliked people, and I was a girl who was simply ‘weird’. Looking back recently at childhood videos of my family, I’m fairly baffled by the behaviour of the wide-eyed creature my mother points out, and more baffled still by the notion that this was shrugged aside. I’m not suggesting that I should have been pathologized, or that I resent my family for not understanding what was, at the time, not understood—but it’s a shaky foundation beneath my feet that I thought was solid. I am autistic.

Modern teaching creates a fascinating disconnect. We live in an age with the greatest awareness of neurological and cognitive differences in human history, and yet all of our compassion and understanding isn’t extended beyond the children we teach.

I can’t count the times I sat in long professional development meetings intended to raise awareness about the difficulty of being neurodivergent, listening to SEND coordinators explaining how an autistic person will feel in the classroom, and thinking, yes. What am I supposed to do about it? The answer comes: the child may require time to process, a moment or two to understand the question; the child may become overwhelmed by excessive sensory stimulation and need to step outside for a minute; the child may need a safe, calm, quiet environment in order to regulate themselves; please be patient with that child.

And what accommodations for the teacher?

Rationally, I understand. I am not a child. I’m expected to have learned how to regulate myself. I am expected to manage. Teachers are, in effect, expected to model perfect neurotypical behaviour. We are organised and focused and efficient; we are patient and receptive and understanding; we are firm but fair; we are warm but have clear boundaries; we are able to empathise and connect but never to take on the burden of a child’s feelings—and we are all of this for thirty-two children at a time, for six hours a day, five days a week, and then we are asked to do more.

Pretty difficult for any. Herculean for the neurodivergent.

I found myself falling into that familiar routine of the high-masking autistic child: coping at school, having breakdowns at home. On four separate occasions, I was signed off work for more than a month due to mental health crisis, and the increasing impulse to veer my car into a tree during my morning commute. I felt I spent the majority of my life putting on a high-energy pantomime for a largely ungrateful audience, and each matinee took more and more out of me, and required more and more of my home life to recharge.

It was a cycle of exponential effort, until the holidays came and I could collapse, usually to succumb to some sickness bug I no longer had the strength to fight off. I would sleep my free time away—and incidentally, forgo the necessary preparations and rehearsal for the next term’s panto, putting me on the backfoot. This, again and again and again. Each term more chaotic and exhausting than its predecessor, each year more draining and demoralising.

I am not writing this to complain. It’s a sad fact with which I have slowly come to terms: modern British teaching is not compatible with neurodivergence in its educators.

I say this with certainty because my final, humiliating release from the sector of state education was from a school so unwaveringly supportive that I knew I would struggle to find its like anywhere else. Its leadership was strong; its policies largely sensible and easy to follow; its departments empathetic and well-managed; its students mostly polite, keen, and amenable if not strictly interested. And I still couldn’t do it.

There is, at present, no clear way to support neurodivergent educators.

An enormous and inflexible exam syllabus requires a relentless pace of learning and progress in Key Stage 4, while Ofsted requirements demand a clear through-line from Key Stage 3 and more definitively quantifiable results, creating the need for test upon test and then to teach to those tests. We have too much content to teach and not enough time to teach it; in nine years, I have never finished a unit on time, and all my colleagues were in the same boat.

Everything was always a rush, everything a case of shifting priorities. If I skip Act 4 Scene 2 of Macbeth, perhaps I’ll have time to do their Spoken Language unit before we break up for the summer. I can get an essay out of Year 7 on their modern novel, but they won’t finish reading the book. Where is there the flexibility for a teacher to slow down, to process, to create calm? If I step outside to regulate away from the demands and expectations of nearly three-dozen children, who will supervise them? Another teacher? An extra pressure on the time of a colleague, then.

It isn’t possible—at least without complete overhaul of everything about our current curriculum and teaching practice.

The chisel isn’t just one thing: it is myriad. It is the hypervigilance of supervising every action of every child in a room all day long. It is being educator, therapist, parent, and social worker all at once. It is jumping through hoops to meet new educational metrics designed by bureaucrats who haven’t set foot in a classroom in decades. It is a culture that admits to Sisyphean hard work but professes that we do it because we love it—as though to say that if you are struggling, you simply do not love it enough. It is a workday that doesn’t even begin, in terms of preparation and evaluating progress, until three PM. It is the relentless demands on your attention and your energy. It is being perfect, all day, for children who do not see you as human and fallible until you start to cry.

I didn’t want to give up teaching. I wanted so badly to be in it for the long run—but I am made of softer rock than that. One day, when the anxiety fades, I’d like to see what other shapes I can take.

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Holding my indoor cat up to an open window like a benediction, giving him the gift of the wind and the sun and the birdsong, parcelled into a safe view. My arms tight around his soft, pampered belly. His paws flex and press against my forearm, for comfort perhaps or out of love—thank you for showing me the horizon. His eyes narrowed to careful slits, narrow as coins, as he breathes it in.

2

I, Charlemagne; you, Tencendur, if Tencedendur loved hogging the fans of my computer until they whir and struggle and overheat, a raucous death scream still matched by the loudly adoring rumble of your purr. You work your paws into the space between my laptop and the desk, where it’s warmest, like you’re getting an expensive manicure while I conquer the Celts. In another lifetime, you’re Marengo, I Napoleon, and nuclear winter takes Scythia while you contort yourself into concentric circles in which to sleep. You Fibonacci swirl yourself into whatever space you find, like pouring liquid through the maze of whatever else was already on my desk when you made yourself at home. Mouth opening and snoring while I build Machu Picchu with my hand resting on your tail. You’re Nielson, I Washington, and you butt your head against my charger, push yourself dangerously near to the edge of the desk, as perilous as my cornered cavalry. I’m Caligula, you Incatitus, blinking awake to ask me how goes the road to Rome.

3

You are no less lovely now than in the summer of your life. Eyes still bright, chest still white, the headbutt to my breast at night—these are the same as ever, steady, unflinching. Your back legs, bowed and stringy. Your spine, sharp beneath my fingertips. The way that lifting you feels weightless. This is a coat you’re wearing. One day you will cast those off and beneath it you will be as you were, safe and soft and well.

4

Getting ready to say goodbye and I am struck by the things I wanted to share with you again. The balcony, on a sunlit morning. The kitchen counter as I chop and peel and sauté, your little face wincing at the onions but determined to stay. The crook of my arm, for an afterschool nap. The weight of the blankets, a refuge for us both. A piece of cheese, forbidden but delicious, to your uplifted paws. My tea, whenever I took my eye off you for even a moment. My squash, as above. Any beverage left unattended, as above. My desk, as I worked and taught and wrote and watched TV, as I marked papers and played campaigns of strategy games. My dressing gown, to be plucked and pushed into the perfect pillow. My laundry, when you wanted somewhere quiet to sleep. My attention, always.

5

A fresh wave of missing you in a year you have not seen. A year in which I slowly forget your face. I wonder would you like the way it sounds, the bustling soar of the street below.

I brought Cleo back from the cattery and couldn’t fathom my cresting anxiety. Muscle memory, I think, expected you, too.

The greeting wend round legs. The eager chirrup to come when called, no reward other than to be loved. The way you would stand expectantly between my feet, ready to be cradled in my arms. To lie on the floor and feel you tuck your crescent body against mine, glad to be with me.

I looked up today and wondered when you were coming home.

I dyed my hair orange and it took me five days to think of you. Like your absence is a ragged nerve of a broken tooth and I have learned to eat around the white shock of it. Today, unthinking, I bit down hard.

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• I wrote a higgledy-piggledy nonsense collection of notes—a friend of mine started using the phrase ‘discovery draft’ recently, which I like a lot. It did feel like discovery. A lot of worldbuilding and Pinterest boards and a clear vision of a Cool Scene in my head with no real idea how to get there.

• I wrote a ‘zero draft’ which ended up being three acts and approximately 300,000 words long, and I never got to the end of it, because by the time I reached the end I realised that I had done the middle all wrong, and also that I needed to completely overhaul Act 1 for one particular character.

• I rewrote that chunk of Act 1 not once, not twice, but about four times, before I was satisfied, and then I revisited Act 2 and realised that it was spiralling out of control, and I decided it would be best to saw the novel in half a la my nemesis Brandon Sanderson, and finish it at Act 2.

• This meant restructuring much of Act 2. Rewrites again.

• My zero draft scenes are very scrappy and read like nothing, so having finished Act 1 and Act 2 of a zero draft didn’t feel like achieving anything given that it was a jumble of dialogue so heinous that I wouldn’t show it to anyone with any grip of the English language, and that I had handwaved all description and detail with a nebulous QQQ (a Ctrl+F tool that essentially means ‘screw it, I’ll figure that out later’).

• I rewrote, scene by scene, the entirety of Act 1 and Act 2, added a fourth POV character, rearranged endings so that they made sense for a conclusion halfway through the original arc… and that is where you find me today.

At 4.58pm today, I pressed my full-stop key and I ended that sucker. Wahoo!!

I have a printed draft of Act 1 that I am currently scribbling all over ft. possible working titles (colour-coded Post Its for POV characters) and I am so incredibly excited to print out Act 2 and get to it!

Even though I have still got a LOT of work ahead of me, it feels incredibly surreal to even be able to say that I have finished a real draft.

I actually feel like a Real Author now. Look, ma! A novel!

• when I finish school

• when I finish university

• when I manage, during my full-time job, to write a novel I am proud of

• when I manage, during my part-time job, to write a novel I am proud of

• when I get around to it

My first book was called Detective Dog and Superkitty, and it was nothing short of a masterpiece, a high that I have chased ever since. It was about, if I recall correctly, a dog who was a detective and—bear with me—a superkitty. I was six years old. That heady success was, ever after, a laudable bar to clear.

In the time since then, I have written an awful lot of angsty self-insert teenage tragedies, an awful lot of fanfiction, and an awful lot of silly posts online. I’d like to start the terrible task of Taking Things Seriously.

I am in the process of writing queer high fantasy under the name Kit Thomasin. My first manuscript is nearly finished (!!) and is the first instalment of a Bronze Age desert fantasy in a world of two suns, endless daylight, and very little water. It follows three women: the puppet queen of a minor satrapy, the engineer tasked with finding out why their water is failing, and the half-divine warrior child sent to enforce imperial rule. It is called Vazarka—for now—and I am very excited to start sharing it with people!

My thought in beginning a Substack is to create a central place where I can post snippets and updates of anything I’m working on, as well as foisting my terrible opinions onto the general public.

Thank you for coming along for the ride!