There Is a Book I Am Supposed to Be Writing. I Am Writing a Different One.
I have a book I am supposed to be writing.
The timeline makes sense. The audience is there. The content ecosystem is built. The marketing strategy exists. The burnout book is the logical next step and I know it and everyone who has been following this journey knows it and the spreadsheet absolutely knows it.
And then there is the other one.
It arrived in a dream. Not a vague feeling or a loose idea. A full scene. Characters with names. A world with rules. A girl whose hands are marked in a way that makes her visible in a world that wants her invisible. She survives by cleaning rooms and knowing which corners swallow sound and which cameras hesitate. I woke up and it was still there. I started writing it down to get it out of my head so I could get back to the burnout book.
It did not leave.
The thing that arrives uninvited does not negotiate. The burnout book waits patiently because it is a decision I made. The fiction book is not a decision. It is something that is happening to me whether I scheduled it or not. I can ignore it for a week and it is still there on Monday. I can write three posts about something else and it is still there when I open a blank document. It has no respect for the content calendar.
So I am writing it.
And internally, if I am honest, it feels like failure.
The strategic version of my next eighteen months is clear and this is not it. The next book is the Brazilian philosophy book. The one that is also the burnout book. The one I am writing from inside the burnout while I am still in it. The one that when I mentioned it to a colleague here in Switzerland produced an oh wow that I am still thinking about weeks later. That book has weight. That book has an audience waiting for it. That book makes complete sense as the next thing.
The fiction book arrived and did not care about any of that.
I have been here before. I did not tell many people I was going to move abroad. I built the thing first and told people when it existed. The book was the same. Working, working, working, and then one day it existed. The pattern is the same every time. The thing I trust before I can explain it and protect from other people’s doubt by not mentioning it until it has enough weight to stand on its own.
The fiction book is that thing right now.
The timeline does not exist yet and neither does the title and I have no answer for how it fits into the brand architecture. I can tell you that a girl with marks on her hands is cleaning rooms in a building above a club and she has found something she was not supposed to find and the choice she has to make is not really a choice and I cannot stop writing her.
And here is the part that costs something to say out loud. This entire brand is built on the argument that the thing you cannot yet explain is worth trusting. The Identity Void, the loss of felt competence, the book nobody asked for that turned out to be the book everyone needed. I have been making that argument in public for months. I have been telling the parent who is lost in a foreign supermarket that the instinct she is carrying without language for it is real and worth following.
If I do not follow mine I am not writing about change but about the idea of it from a safe distance, and those are not the same thing.
The burnout book will get written and the Brazilian philosophy book will get written and the spreadsheet will be satisfied eventually.
But right now there is a girl who survives by being invisible and she arrived in a dream and she will not leave and I have decided to trust that.
I have been wrong about the plan before. I have never been wrong about the thing that would not wait.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
