It has been one month since Parallel Recollections first appeared. When I published it, I knew writing the book had been hard. What I did not yet know was that finishing it was only the first step. I had reached the point where every further edit seemed to make it worse, so I took the plunge and put it on Amazon as a self-published work.

There's a saying: before you can enjoy the view, you have to climb the mountain. Well, let me tell you, boy, when you try to launch your own book, that saying is nonsense. First, you have to build the mountain with your bare hands. Then you can climb it. And only then, if the weather holds and you have not fallen off the edge, might there be some kind of view to enjoy.

So when I set out on this project, I made myself a few firm promises about the kind of story I refused to write:

I would not follow a standard plot. We all know that story: a body is found, and we spend the rest of the book trying to guess who the killer is. If we are lucky, there is a deeper story underneath that keeps us mildly entertained. But that road has been walked too many times.

I also wanted to avoid the familiar “boy meets girl, they suffer beautifully, and they live happily ever after” story. C’mon, people. Surely, we can do something different. I think readers are tired of the norm.

The comfortable beginning, middle, and end narrative is also nowhere to be seen. There is no neat, layered pyramid here, and none of the usual storyline machinery is quietly doing the heavy lifting.

So what did I build instead?

The narrative of Parallel Recollections had been living in my head for a long time. On my second attempt at turning it into a book, I made sure the story centred on one bold event — something significant, unsettling, and unlike anything I had seen done before.

That event gave me a way into the questions that sit underneath so many of our choices. What is right, and what is wrong? How do we decide when we do not have all the knowledge? And what do we become when the answer is not obvious?

Since then, I have worked hard. For a month, my evenings and weekends have gone into getting this book into as many hands as I could. I approached bookstores and libraries. I bought copies and gave them away for free. I made mistakes, plenty of them, but thirty days in, I am beginning to see a flicker of light.

And that flicker matters, because every person I know who has read the book keeps telling me the same thing: the plot surprises them, the ending stays with them, and the story reads the way I hoped it would.

It would appear, then, that although I am still only three shovels into building my mountain, the old saying may have had a point after all:

Build it, and you may get lucky. Build it well, and they will come.

In my next blog post, I am going to unpack something else that might surprise you: how someone who is not English, either in language or origin, managed to write a novel in English, set in England, and still make it feel true.