The hardest part of writing a book isn’t writing it.
It’s coming back to it the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that.
What eventually became The Journey to the Left Side took me five years from the moment I opened a blank page to the moment I finally held a finished book in my hands.
Not because I was writing every day for five years. Quite the opposite.
I was working full-time, building a career in marketing, taking care of my dog, travelling when I could, and trying to maintain something that resembled a normal life.
The challenge was never writing the book. It was making room for it.
The first draft alone took me about two years to complete.
At first, I was simply writing. I didn’t fully know what I was doing, and I certainly didn’t have every detail figured out. But as the story grew, so did the amount of work happening behind the scenes.
I spent hours building the world, drawing sketches, developing characters, and trying to understand who these people were beyond the role they played in the plot. Every answer seemed to create three new questions, and the world gradually became more complex than I had originally imagined.
Somewhere around the middle of the book, writing stopped being something I did when inspiration struck. It became a commitment.
For the last year of drafting, most of my evenings belonged to the manuscript. After work, I would do the things that absolutely needed to be done, walk my dog, make dinner, and then I would sit down and write.
- I stopped watching most television shows.
- I stopped reading almost entirely, which was quite difficult because I genuinely love books. Every time I picked up any book, I felt guilty, thinking that I should be spending that time working on my own.
Then came a challenge I hadn’t fully anticipated. The book existed only in my native language. Translating it into English became a project of its own.
Although I speak English fluently, I knew from the beginning that I needed to write the first version in my native language. It’s the language in which I think and dream, and the language I understand best. I could only fully capture the voice of the book that way.
Professional translation was beyond my budget, so I approached the process piece by piece. A few native English-speaking friends helped along the way, and later I continued working independently, using every tool and resource available to me.
Most importantly, I reread everything – again and again. Every sentence. Every paragraph.
I wasn’t simply translating words. I was trying to preserve tone, personality, humour, emotion, and all the little things that make a story feel alive.
That process took another two years.
Looking back, I’m glad I never approached the project as a race.
I tried very hard not to sacrifice my entire life for the book. I still travelled. I still spent time with people I cared about. I still allowed myself breaks.
At the same time, the book was always there in the background.
Even when I was relaxing, some part of my brain was thinking about a chapter, a translation problem, a character, or something that still needed to be done.
After the translation came the final stage: cover design, chapter titles, glossary creation, formatting, publishing preparation, and all the hundreds of small decisions that no one really thinks about when they imagine writing a book.
That part took another several months.
Fortunately, it was also one of the most enjoyable stages. For the first time, the project started to feel real.
What began as an idea eventually became a finished book.
Today, I’m already working on the sequel, and there are many things I would do differently. I understand my process better. I know how to manage my time more efficiently. I know where I wasted energy and where I worried too much.
Persistence is not about working twelve hours a day, punishing yourself for taking breaks or setting impossible deadlines.
It’s about regularly returning to the work, even when progress feels slow. Because the longer we avoid something important, the harder it becomes to come back to it.
My book is written one page at a time.
My world is built one idea at a time.
And five years later, I look back and realise that all those small efforts quietly became something real.
