Comrades, friends, fellow readers,

Above is a proof of concept film called ’The Old Believer’ we made based on a feature script which is now the book in question. The film was used as footage for a music video for the band ’All Them Witches’.

Anyway.

I used to try often to stick to reality when writing because there is enough horror in this world already. I heard that from someone once. In my first books I kept to some kind of rule - Stay on the ground, be pragmatic, realistic and resourceful. But above all, be brutal.

I started this story as a feature film script to protest against something within myself, I’m not sure what. I think it was self imposed creative limitations. There is a lot of advice out there, a lot of styles, ways, preferences, books, videos, professionals, geniuses, charlatans, wannabes and one hit wonders. It can be confusing.

The script took me the better part of a year to finish and I finally cracked the first draft before Christmas in 2016. Two weeks before a competition that I wanted to enter the script into, the script was deleted by the software I was writing on. I’m not going blame any software in particular, but it was Celtex, and may that software burn for the shit it has caused me. Weeks, months, years of work vanished in the click of a mouse.

In a mist of blind rage when I should have been celebrating Christmas, I wrote the script again from scratch in two weeks. I edited and re-edited trying to remember the story piece by piece, all with my newborn son climbing over my laptop. He would slap the keyboard with his tiny paw while I was deep into an edit, and like a shotgun blast, the edit was peppered with typos and baby language. Line by line, night by night the process would begin again and again and again.

I did get it done in time for the competition, but it got rejected in the first round. No feedback, no reason known. Page one. Line one. Return to zero. Think.

I wrote the book in its entirety twice to know it better, but it didn’t feel right, and you will find them drafts in my recycle bin.

Most of the time you will find me at tv shows running VR graphics for analysis segments in sports broadcast. Other times I’ll be writing, researching, making short films, changing nappies, teaching my eldest spellings, running late for flights, and trying to convince my girlfriend that this is not a catastrophic waste of my time.

I like storytelling.

So, here is the inception of the struggle.

I came across an article of a hermit woman who was found by a team of geologists in the 1980’s living alone in deep Siberia. Her plight was published in the book ’Lost in the Taiga,’ by Vasily Peskov, the only Russian journalist to spend any prolonged period with her at that time. It turned out that the woman had been living alone for 27 years in pure isolation, terrified of the world outside of her cabin. She had never even seen a child before.

The woman was born in the forest and had survived in primitive conditions for her entire life. She lost her two brothers to a strange disease that they contracted from a wandering explorer that found them in the 1950’s. They both died within a few days of each other. Then her mother of starvation, and her father of age. She buried them all, then she was alone, with a two hunded year old bible.

She is the sole survivor of the Lykovs, a family who were driven to the edge of the earth during Stalin’s collectivisation. They went into exile to avoid the gulags. Her father and mother ran as far as they could into the Siberian wilderness to preserve their faith, but the persecution of this particular sect of Christianity dates back to the 1700’s when Patriarch Nikon introduced reforms to Russian Christianity. Nikon ordered that all denominations of Christianity conform to his interpretation or face trial and burn. Those few who did not accept the reformations became known as ’Old Believers’ and they have been detached from society ever since.

Many Old Believers were found dead in make shift cabins hundreds of miles from civilisation. Their bodies were found sat up, becasuse it was more pleasing to God to sleep sitting upright.

During the research of this woman, I came across an article about Russian special forces being sent to isolated Old Believers to learn from them how to survive with nothing, and how to navigate the Siberian Taiga without a map. It was a survival exercise to learn how to fight and survive should a war needed to be fought in Siberia. I could find no other details of these exercises. But as a veteran of the British Army, I understand survival and endurance in such places, and so I merged these two stories and wrote this tale.

If you made it this far, many thanks. I hope you find the time to read the first chapters. I hope it will keep you awake, in the dark, as it did to me for so many nights.

The woman is still alive. Her name is Agafia Lykovia.

With your help, I want to publish this book for her.