In Living Memory Origin Story
Origin Story
If you’ve read In Body, In Mind, you’ll know that one of the protagonists, Sam Kane, is encouraged to write a novel. He eventually hits upon an idea, pitches it to his best friend and colleague, Hugo, and over the next few years, produces a draft manuscript for In Living Memory. With Hugo’s help, he offers the manuscript for publication, and it is accepted. That’s the origin of this book, well, that’s the simple story anyway.
When In Body, In Mind was itself a draft manuscript, a number of dear friends provided me with generous feedback, and one of them was the friend who gave me the motivation to proceed with the project when it was still just an idea. In his very detailed comments he wrote, “I thought that Sam’s plot for his book was utter genius … I want to read that.” That was when the ghost of an idea to write In Living Memory became real, and I began to plan what it would look like.
It took me quite a while to get my head around what it was that I would be attempting: I’d be writing the book, as per the general idea Sam pitched to Hugo, as Sam Kane. I needed the whole project to reflect the motivations that Sam would have had to write the book, as well as use his voice, and plausibly reflect his interests, influences and style. As In Body, In Mind describes the work as Sam’s letter to Rachel, I also needed to weave into the narrative some of the messages that Sam would have tried to embed in the story.
In February 2017, I began researching some background material I’d need to know for the story. Then in early April, I set up a timeline and a chapter outline, and began making notes. By August that year I had the first three chapters written, but then had to put the project aside to finalise the editing and publication of In Body, In Mind, which was subsequently released in September 2019. By April 2020 I had six chapters drafted, but that’s when progress slowed again.
By this stage, I’d long had the idea to embed another book, In Medio Dierum, into the narrative of In Living Memory; it was time to flesh out how that would look, and how it would dovetail with the timelines and narratives of both In Body, In Mind (sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that an excerpt of In Medio Dierum is also in the early pages) and In Living Memory. It didn’t take me long to realise that In Medio Dierum needed its own space, referenced from within In Living Memory, but occupying a completely different perspective.
By the end of 2020, it had become clear that two additional books were required to complete the story of philosophical revelation I hope will emerge from the collection. So, these too had to be factored into the In Living Memory storyline, and I now have clear in my head how the five books are connected, or at least the basis of those connections.
In many ways, the origin story for In Living Memory is the origin story for the collection. It’s how two separate books connected only by circumstance, formed the kernel of a more coherent whole described in a collection of five books, each in its own idiom revealing a philosophical component of a profound subjective Truth.