Beginnings are hard
New year, new musings.
Beginnings are hard.
I don’t mean the New Year (though here’s wishing us all a constructive 2026!) so much as the novel I accidentally started writing last spring.
Originally envisioned as a serialized co-creation, HOUSE OF SNOW gradually evolved into a more traditional mode of presentation. The result is the opening 40 pages of a literary manuscript steeped in my “form follows function” methodology - a prime example of “Iceberg Theory”, underpinned by countless hours of research and literally hundreds of pages of prewriting material.
Whether in film or fiction, there is always more beneath the surface than meets the eye. Those hidden depths are what lend a story its “lived-in” quality - the sense that it preexists the writer, excavated rather than fabricated.
It’s a hard-won degree of verisimilitude, and it’s why a big part of 2025 was, for The Lighthouse, a HOUSE OF SNOW-themed Year of Reckoning.
I shared the beginning of the story last April and a subsequent chapter in November, and do you know what I found? It wasn’t quite working.
Your feedback helped me see that the opening asked too much of the reader. There were too many perspective shifts and not enough orientation in place and time. It wasn’t clear whose story we were tracking, or why. As one test reader put it: “In the taxi driver metaphor, I do like the guy’s driving a lot, but I am not sure where he’s taking me or if he will pull it off. I wish I could see more where he’s going.”
So I went back to the drawing board to find the shape of the thing.
HOUSE OF SNOW follows a narrator (inspired by yours truly) who unearths a journal tracing the fate of a vanished expedition in Nepal. Its author, Edmund Bainbridge, is a geologist obsessed with finding his uncle, Arthur, a controversial academic who disappeared in the Himalaya chasing a theory about “cheating death.” Amidst the tea estates of Darjeeling, Edmund falls in love with Samantha, an unhappily married aid worker who entangles them both in a covert CIA operation. They’re drawn deep into the Tibetan mountains and a doomed guerrilla war, where their shimmering, luminous connection starts to influence the narrator’s own love story with Kasia decades later.
Structurally, HOUSE OF SNOW is a Russian doll. Kasia’s commentary frames the telling. The narrator’s first words foreshadow his disappearance in the mountains, echoing Edmund’s and Arthur’s before him. He writes most of the manuscript in the weeks leading up to his last expedition, anchoring it all in his past and an imaginative reconstruction of Edmund’s. The two threads braid together and eventually collapse into one, embodying the idea that our lives echo the lives of others.
In plot and form, the story reaches into the deep time of history - “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” - and reveals how we mythologize our experiences in order to survive them. It is a recursive, deeply personal love story about how the stories we tell ourselves can ground us, reorient us, or swallow us whole.
I’m grateful to everyone who weighed in with notes, and to all of you for reading this past year! I’ll be sharing the finished forty pages with you soon, along with my audiobook-like narration which folks seem to enjoy.
With that, we’ll officially wrap The Year of Reckoning. HOUSE OF SNOW will continue - I’ll keep writing - but it will take up residence in a quieter corner of The Lighthouse, making way for new musings on cinema, travel, and everyday life.
And to kick off the New Year, I’ve opened a handful of free 1:1 storytelling consults for the filmmakers and screenwriters among us. Beginnings are hard - let’s ride the January momentum together! ✨
