Primalsoup

How I Decided to Upcycle My 2008 WIP in the Name of Sustainability (and Shame)

[Representative Image generated using AI]

Back in 2008, I had a dream.
Well, I had a Word doc, a pirated version of Scrivener, and a protagonist who quoted Paulo Coelho unironically, but same difference.

It was a different time.
Dr. Manmohan Singh was at the helm. The rupee still had self-esteem. Buying apartments didn’t require being spiritually aligned with real estate agents on Instagram. Orkut was still thriving. People wore FabIndia unironically.

And Bollywood?
Bollywood gave us Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, a film where a woman fails to recognise her own husband because he wears a fitted shirt and a pair of skinny jeans that were frankly too aggressive around the crotch.

Absolute facepalm. And I say that as someone who will believe anything Shah Rukh Khan says while blinking wistfully into the distance. But that was 2008, a gentler, dumber time.

At least it wasn’t 2024–25: the age of Nepo Baby Cinema, where star kids mumble their way through pastel-hued heartbreak and seem to put more effort into their Instagram grids than into learning how to act.

But I digress.

The point is: I wrote a novel back then. Or, more accurately, I started a WIP. A Work In Progress. Capital W, capital P. It lived on a pen drive in a folder titled FINALFINAL_USETHISONE_V3.

The protagonist was a marketing girl with a dark past and a love interest who wore linen shirts and spoke in metaphors. There were long passages of internal monologue. And a truly concerning number of slow-walk scenes.

It was raw, overwrought, and slightly plagiarised from three rom-coms and one Jhumpa Lahiri short story. But it was mine.

Literary Vibes: Then vs Now

2008 felt like the literary world was actually doing something.
Junot Díaz won the Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Aravind Adiga took home the Booker for The White Tiger. Both men made my heart sing and my fingers twitch toward a keyboard.

Another time, I’ll tell you about the class I signed up for that was taught by Díaz (yes, that one), and how I may or may not have once slid into Aravind Adiga’s DMs.

Look, I wasn’t productive, okay. Not particularly skilled either. But my ambition was wholly made up of rehearsing acceptance speeches of all kinds: Pulitzer, Booker, Oscars, you name it, I had an acceptance speech.

Now? I couldn’t tell you who’s won anything in the past five years. The literary world has been swallowed by newsletters, content calendars, and a 72-hour attention span.
Books aren’t events anymore, they’re carousel posts.

The Case for Emotional Upcycling

So why am I going back to my 2008 WIP?

Because… I don’t know. Maybe I owe it to the girl who wrote it.

She was messy and dramatic and thought every glance across a coffee shop meant something. She hadn’t gone through a quarter of what I have now, but she still believed her words mattered, even when they were overwritten, under-edited, and sometimes painfully sincere.

I’ve outgrown parts of that novel. Honestly, I’ve outgrown parts of myself. When I read it now, there are whole paragraphs that don’t sound like me anymore. The voice is younger, rawer, more certain of the world in ways I’m not sure I ever was.

And yet – there’s something pure in that voice. Something that hadn’t yet been dulled by algorithms, deadlines, or the creeping anxiety that anything too honest will get someone mad on the internet.

Another reason to procrastinate from finishing the novel?
Ozempic.
Let me explain.

I recently started a weight loss program (only for the 100th time), and the only thing I fear more than not losing weight, is losing weight and having everyone assume it was Ozempic.

They’d just need to peek into my bank account to know I can’t afford it.

And that holds true for writing too. If, after years of crying wolf, I mean book, I finally produce a tome, everyone’s going to assume it was written by an AI model.

And that, dear readers, is reason no. 127862816 for how not to write a novel.