Wake up. Train compartment. Night outside the window, Europe rushing past in the dark. Your pockets: a passport with your face but the name means nothing. A ticket from Petersburg to somewhere west. A sketchbook filled with your handwriting, your drawings, but you don’t remember making them.
This is Blank Spots. My new novel, written between Foundation Programme revision sessions and too much coffee at 3 AM.
The protagonist is an artist. Was an artist? His sketches are the only breadcrumbs back to himself. Each drawing unlocks something, but not enough. Other passengers might know him. Or they might be lying. The train keeps moving forward while he’s trying to move backward through time.
Been working on this since February. That comic convention unlocked something about visual storytelling. How images can hold memories that words can’t reach. So the novel has these graphic elements woven through it. The reader sees what the protagonist sees: fragments, half-remembered faces, scenes that might be real or might be fear.
Abbey College exams next month. Should be studying international business frameworks. Instead I’m researching amnesia, train routes across Eastern Europe, how memory physically exists in the brain. My economics professor would not approve.
But sometimes you write the story that won’t leave you alone. The one that sits in your chest like held breath.
Blank Spots releases soon. Get ready to forget everything.
Daria Ryzhikova Writer