I wrote a book

is now a good time to reintroduce myself?

I write to you tonight from my Los Angeles flat, which has great massive Victorian windows that look out to a courtyard of trellised ivy and geraniums. The world outside is ashy and blue; somewhere far away is a police siren. It’s just past seven o’clock in the evening, and I’ve just finished writing a novel.

I don’t blame you if you don’t remember who I am. It’s been two–three? years since I really dedicated myself to posting; first to TikTok, then more sporadically here on Substack. In the interim I quit my job and moved to Europe and took a punch and moved in with my parents and had a handful of life experiences that translate to lessons a girl in her twenties needs to learn. I moved to Los Angeles, where I live now. I fell in love and made friends and figured out answers to questions that before felt impossible. And just tonight, I finished the novel I started writing at the very beginning of all this.

My account was created during a panic attack in the stall of a women’s restroom on a very high floor of a very tall building. I’m not kidding, I remember this moment in color: walking toward the toilets and thinking there must be a better way to avoid losing my mind. My job at that time was spreadsheets, bps, percentages. Formulas in excel. Rigor, stringency, men twenty years my senior breathing down my neck while I explained a report. Some days I so badly wanted to kill myself that when arriving home I forced myself to take the stairs instead of the elevator, up twenty-two flights, so that by the time I was in my apartment I would be too depleted to think about leaping from the balcony.

taken on the balcony I sometimes had to avoid

But on this specific day of hyperventilating in the bathroom, I decided I simply needed something to focus my energy on, an outlet besides pregaming my two o’clock meetings with a good sob. Something that reminded me of the person I used to be. And though I had only ever considered writing with the same casualty I considered breathing—both reflexive and unminded—I became rapt at the concept of its accessibility; it did not require a budget or location or outside support. It did not even require an identity. I could write something right from that stall. It was there I threw a dart a pseudonym and made Charley’s Journal; for two days the account sat blank while I tried to decide what I wanted to do with it. My first post (now archived—only seen by maybe one-hundred people) was a copy-paste directly from my notes app, agitated scribbles I had not had the time to write with a pen. The next was the most recent page of my journal. The next was an entry from high school. The details smear from there.

This account has always been a mixing bowl of fiction and truth (which, I believe, most good writing is)—names are changed and events are enriched to best protect the story and serve the emotions. I wrote about my feelings and memories the way I wished to remember them; I wrote about friend’s experiences; I wrote about people I only heard about through stories. It was all very honest fiction. And somewhere in that tumble Charley became a sort of character both separate from me and the same; the author as well as the subject. While she so closely mirrors my past, I’m not sure we would have been friends.

Charley is the protagonist of my new novel. I started charting it while I still worked at the job that gave me panic attacks; at the time I rented a corner high-rise, my living room was completely glass, and for months I had the windows plastered in post-it notes which outlined the story. I began writing during lunch breaks and workouts and all the hours between the getting home and going to bed. I worked, I wrote. Eventually the two became one.

a thunderstorm at my old apartment, the beginning of the outline

Then I quit my job and moved away and went to Portugal and Paris and the rest; I continued the work. For a summer I set up a studio in a flyover state and slept and ate and worked and did nothing else. It’s been nearly a year and a half I’ve lived in Los Angeles, where I’ve still been working. I’ve been working on this novel so long it seems funny there was ever a time before it. But tonight I’ve finished the work, so I’ve decided to again write to you. Please excuse me for running a bit late.

Now that I’m not absorbed with the pedanticism of writing a great novel (only editing it, which is nearly done) I feel more tilted to return to what incited that book; short-form writing, new and old journals, aspects of my life and aspects of Charley’s. I’ve missed that part of the process (but I do have the obnoxious trait of needing to put my focus in one spot, or else I lose it). And I can’t overextend how grateful I am to you, even if these are the last/first words of mine you ever read, for not only planting the seed in my mind that I might be a writer, but for sticking around long enough to witness the fruit. All I ask you do now is wait just a little bit longer. Thanks for being here.

— EC