I’ve been quiet since October. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that’s not unusual. I go through stretches where life gets loud and the writing here goes still. This time the quiet was about something else. I was writing something else.
I wrote a novel.
The working title is “Sen”, and it’s the story of five girls who arrive separately at a Yorkshire boarding school across the 1980s. They share a surname, are all individually brilliant in some way, and they are all orphans. When they find each other, they become a family.
On the oldest sister’s eighteenth birthday, a strange inheritance reveals that their bond was never a coincidence.
If you’ve read enough of this blog, you might remember a post from a couple of summers ago where Momo and I were debating fate and free will. I wrote then about how the Mahabharata frames that tension: destiny is supreme, but we are responsible for our actions. That idea has been pulling at me for years. “Sen” is what happened when I finally followed the thread all the way through.
It’s a retelling of the Mahabharata, reimagined through five women in Thatcher-era Britain who don’t know they’re carrying an ancient story inside them.
It’s about dharma: what is mine to do?
It’s about family, and especially chosen family, and how the people we find can matter as much as the ones we’re born to.
The manuscript is finished. This week, I’m sending to beta readers. After that comes revision, editing, and if I can navigate the publishing world without losing my mind entirely, a book on shelves sometime in 2026 or early 2027.
If you’d like to follow along with the process, the decisions, and the inevitable stumbles, I’ve set up a newsletter that you can sign up for below. It won’t be frequent. It will be honest.
More soon.