Now that the page has gone public, I think it would be useful for me as the author (rather than the omnipresent narrator) to come in the spotlight every so often a little more. So, hi!, and welcome to the first (hopefully, of many) author updates/intermissions. If you’re reading this in your email – thank you for subscribing! If you’re seeing this post on the page, that’s your daily reminder to subscribe and follow for more.

For this first break in the narrative, I wanna talk about a fundamental question that every story faces: why write it at all? Depending on who you ask, you’ll likely get varying answers; mine is rather long-winded. I’ve been writing as a hobby for something close to a decade – most of it very mediocre, with occasional flashes of brilliance but nothing to write home about. Decembrism, at first just called Courier (I am not good with names), came about during my second year in the UK, when I first began rationalizing all the experiences of being an immigrant entailed (for those not in the known, I am originally from Russia). Brexit was a big reason for this novel – it’s kind of a heartbreaker to have spent as much time as my family did on trying to become “Europeans”, only to have that rug pulled from under my feet only a month before my 17th birthday.

For all intents and purposes, then, Decembrism was first written for myself, as a way to cope with personal and social challenges one faces in the process of “becoming” in a completely new environment; meditation of sorts on my experience living and growing up abroad over the last decade, a story of belonging and finding one’s way amidst the chaos of being in your 20s (at first, late teens) and making sense of the world that continues changing for the worse. Terrifyingly, the more time passes since I started, the less fantastical many elements of the story appear (take the E-Currency trader bit, written in 2019, before the boom of 2020-2021, or the general descent of the British government into fascist tendencies since 2016), so I really hope the full story won’t be outdated by the time I wrap it up.

In recent years, with the outbreak of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that dynamic has undergone yet another change. February 24th, in this respect, is my before and after date of when I still felt like I belonged, both politically and socially. Since then, I’ve been plagued by a knee-jerk need to justify my own presence everywhere I went. This isn’t to say that I think alienation of Russians is not warranted – I know my compatriots pretty well, and they have a terrible tendency to disappoint, so I do not wish to make this into a “woe is me” post. Purely as a matter of fact, however, it began to feel like, rather than the usual conditions that come with being a foreigner somewhere, there was now an added moral calculation for allowing me to be abroad. That day also caught me living away from London for the first time in years, which I’m sure didn’t help in the long run. Regardless of whether the war or the distance is what’s done it, upon my return to London in the summer, things just didn’t feel the same anymore. If you are not familiar, let me spare you the experience and say that it is not great, feeling like a tourist in a city that you tried calling home once.

That, I think, is where Decembrism received an additional purpose: helping me to work through the process by which a place I once thought could be my new home became an antithesis of that idea as I accommodated myself to a life in exile. And although the book is not autobiographical (really, I am not anywhere important enough to write something like that), I’d like to think that me and the main character share similar anxieties about our place in the world. Hopefully, you too can agree that this theme comes through clearly enough.

And that’s where, I think, the last reason for “why write?” emerges: as personal as this story may be for me, I am not its sole owner any longer. I’m a big fan of the “Death of the Author” – there’s something really reassuring in the notion that, no matter what you yourself meant with your writing, there can (and will) be something different in it for others – but that comes with caveats of judgement, analysis, and critique. Terrifying as the prospect may be, there isn’t exactly an alternative, besides simply writing “into a table,” as we used to say in our family. I shall instead sincerely hope that, in my lengthy ramblings, you can extract something separate that I haven’t explicitly considered – if they can make you feel less alone, in foreign and familiar places alike, give you a chuckle from semi-fictional anecdotes in which you recognise your own friends and loved ones, or provide an engaging mystery to follow along, then I’ll count that as a job well done.

So, why write? For yourself, for the people, and because no one else will tell the story you want to tell.

Anyway, I think this will do for this intermission – thank you for joining me tonight. I’m certain I’ll find a more interesting topic to cover during the next one, whenever that happens.

Night 2 is about ~15% written. Until then, stay tuned and stay safe.

– Daniel