Life could be a dream

While "forging" the story for my first novel, tying up all the loose ends, and connecting all the dots as in children's activity books, I started thinking a lot about life and death and fun things like that. And I know what you're all thinking: Irfan, you've reached that stage of life when it's natural for those thoughts to randomly pop into your head, and to that I would just burst out laughing.

"My dude...they never leave"

But aside from overloading my brain, my overthinking has resulted in something positive - a just-written novel aptly titled The Bizarre Art of Living.

Cheers! My name is Irfan, I'm a small-town writer, a local film buff, and a generally kind of (albeit really) boring eighteen-year-old. Welcome to my blog :)

"The Bizarre Art of Life" is an amalgamation of my outlook on life/world and nine years of writing maturity. Five to six years in the making, this story has been evolving and, metaphorically speaking, pouring from glass to glass to finally result in a great 2l bottle of sparkling water.

It all started with a simple, short story written in the style of a letter from Miles T. Johnson to his Alice. Set in World War II, Miles was a sickly Jewish doctor who was later killed by the Nazi army. But alas I never told the whole story. After that the essence of Miles' humble character was carried through the subsequent works in progress. Sometimes later, I believe it was 2019 when I was in Zagreb on summer vacation when the name "Bradberry" was coined. Then Miles T. became Peter Bradbarry-Johnson. In the story I was making up at the time, he was supposed to be a significant figure that set things in motion in the past. And after that, the rest is, as they say, history.

Honestly, the reason none of those stories progressed is pretty simple – I would have lost interest. At one point, a smart decision appeared: Why not write a story about Bradbarry, if all roads lead to him? And then everything just clicked, everything fell into place. While thinking, the Jewish-English doctor became an English-Scottish writer/journalist named Peter Barrie. At the very beginning, the plot was supposed to revolve around the love story of Peter and his girlfriend Gray, and later we would meet the demon Lues.

As I was getting ready for the first day of my sophomore year in high school, the first "Fantastic Beasts" came on the television, which for some reason gave me the idea to create more characters so the story wouldn't be boring. That very thought gave birth to Detective Quentin Clark and the lovely Wanda Proskauer. The young Fritz Proskauer also appeared in the story. Later, Peter became Bartholomew "Barthol" Jones, Grey became Ernestine "Erna" Gambit, and Fritz became Sigmund "Siggy".

The story of "Bizarre Art" became much more focused on life and everything that life is made of. With mystery and supernatural elements thrown into the mix, it truly lived up to the "bizarre" part.