I have written the first draft of "Ruthenia & Galicia" in 2010.
It was a pretty difficult time for me personally, being the third year of a particularly hard and persistent illness, a mix of chronic fatigue and an unidentified digestive disorder that left me barely able to walk a couple hundred meters. Fortunately I could still work but there was preciously little energy left for anything years.
Those who have experienced chronic - and particularly those more vague and unusual - illnesses know both how debilitating and mentally straining they can be. You know you are ailing but you don't quite know what it is, how to treat it and how long it will persists.
Unable to do very much else aside from work, I have spent the first two years of my sickness treating myself with books and DVDs. Fortunately there is never a shortage of good entertainment. But what got to me after a while was the essentially passive nature of my pastimes. I am by nature rather lazy but even I got sick and tired of "wasting" precious time with nothing much to show it. And yes, reading is wonderful but there is a such thing as too much of a good thing.
So sometime in the early 2010 I sat down at the computer and started typing. I'll write about the genesis of the story itself some other time, but in this case, unlike with my first novel "Night Trains", I only had the hook or the concept and no idea where I was going. A certain degree of structure and planning come in later, as the book all of a sudden developed three plot lines, making it more essential to keep all the pieces in chronological and logical order.
I finished the first draft later in the year - and that's where it has pretty much stayed. I have polished the product a bit, a second draft of sorts, had it read by two writer friends who offered encouragement and some helpful suggestions. But for most part, "Ruthenia & Galicia" has sat in the proverbial bottom desk drawer for the past decade.
If I persisted - and been successful, which in publishing world is a big "if" - and the book one way or another saw the light of the day in the early 2010s, I would have been able to update it with the blurbs like "Prophetic" and "Ripped from today's headlines". Today, when you read "Ruthenia & Galicia" bear in mind that this story set in an Eastern European country finding itself under a multi-pronged assault from Russia was written years before the Ukrainian-Russian conflict (which still smoulders to this day). I don't actually make any claims to being prophetic; Russia has always been an uncomfortable neighbour to countries it considers the "near abroad", its own backyard and often former parts of the Russian and the Soviet empires. As it is, "Ruthenia & Galicia" has not been "inspired by true events"; it predates them - and fantasises them. But all that is by and by.
Now comes 2020.
It was supposed to be a great year. Everyone has had such high expectations, particularly since so many people I know has gone through some challenging times recently. Even the number itself, twenty twenty, has such a nice ring to it.
And then somebody decided to eat a bat - or whatever else has actually happened. Ironically I'm at the moment feeling better and fitter than I have been at any time in the past twenty years, certainly eons away from my dark time in 2008-10, but the world itself is now quite unwell.
Having read over 80 books last year, I have already made a New Year's resolution to read less in 2020, but now, with the extraordinary circumstances of the economy in limbo and the society in self-isolation, I've again come to the conclusion that the pandemic might as well be the time we get to do things we haven't had time or inclination to do before. Don't let the precious time go to waste and hibernation.
Hence this website and the book. In dribs and drabs, somewhat reminiscent of newspapers and magazines serialising books in ages past, but arguably better than nothing - although you will be the judge of it.
I won't claim that what you will read is a highly polished finished product. It is only the third draft. But the very process of making it available bit by bit forces me to, slowly but hopefully surely, make that third draft a reality. Otherwise it might have never happened.
I hope you enjoy it. Maybe this turns out to be a bit of a crowd-sourcing experiment with readers becoming a part of the process of turning a draft into a book. So I'm always happy for feedback and suggestions. But even if it doesn't, I will still feel that I haven't quite wasted 2020.
In Boccaccio's "Decameron", written in the aftermath of the Black Death, which killed between a third and a half of the European population, ten young people at the time of the plague self-isolate themselves in a country monastery and while away their quarantine by telling each other 100 stories. "Ruthenia & Galicia" is only one story but I hope that by the time I finish (if I of course finish) we shall all be alive and well and Coronavirus just a bad memory.
So welcome to Europe's very own magic kingdom.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash