Overture: You Failed Us!

A collective shaming of a writer by her characters

One day they all had enough of my nonsense. 

It was almost a mass revolt.

A collective rebel.

All characters from my novels-in-progress, including a black fox and a cat, voiced their disappointment in me.

“Hey you, writer,” they said. “How about you follow up the promise you gave us? When we whispered our secrets to you, when we carved-opened our heart to you, when we bared our souls to you - you promised to be our voice. You promised to write our stories. Where are they?”

They’re everywhere: in scrapes of paper, in notebooks, in Trello, in abandoned drafts, in my head. 

Works-in-progress. 

One novel is in progress for a third year now. 

2023 was meant to be THE year of a promised outcome: a completed manuscript. It didn’t happen. 

What happened was:

 - I stopped productive daydreaming, an ability I cherished a lot;

 - my characters lost patience and gave up on sharing their stories with me, so I hit the wall experiencing the heaviest writing draught to date.

I don’t know the reason. Maybe it was due to something called an “existential burnout.”

But there was a glimmer of hope: I missed my characters. I needed to regain their trust.

That’s how an idea for this publication was born.

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The anatomy of this Substack

What happens when a writer gets face-to-face with characters from her novels-in-progress? 

• Conversations, chats, sometimes monologues;

• Spontaneous topics for discussions; 

• Open sharing of opinions and experiences; 

• Improvised mini-explorations.

The best thing is that these meetings are unscripted; they’re free to meander, to go in circles, to get lost, to explore. An adventure for both parties involved. 

And hopefully for the reader, too. 

You’re very welcome to sneak in.

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Thank you for reading. This is 100% human-written, ai-free publication.