Behind the Pages: The Familiar Parts of Lira

Lira isn't my life story, but parts of it were inspired by places, experiences and questions from my own life.

When I began developing the novel, I wanted to explore what an extraordinarily long life might actually mean for an ordinary person. Not someone with superpowers, extraordinary fighting abilities or some grand destiny. Just a woman who, for reasons she doesn't understand, has stopped aging.

What would she do? How would she survive? And perhaps more importantly, what would centuries of living, losing people and keeping secrets do to her?

Those questions helped shape Lira.

A Familiar City

I was born in York, so choosing it as a setting gave me somewhere I already had a personal connection to.

I'm familiar with the city, although I didn't spend much time there as we moved to Leeds when I was young, but have been back several times and it always captured my imagination.

When writing the walk through York in Chapter 24, I did some research to check what was there today, bringing that together with what I remembered and knew of the place.

There's something satisfying about weaving a fictional life into real streets. Places you can actually visit become part of a story you can only imagine.

York also felt right for someone like Lira. It's a city where different centuries exist alongside one another, where history is never particularly far beneath the surface.

Why a Bookshop?

Once I had Lira, I needed to work out what a woman like her would be doing today.

My first thought was an antique shop, but that felt a little too obvious. Of course someone who had lived through centuries would surround herself with antiques.

A bookshop felt more natural.

Not a large commercial bookstore selling only the latest releases, but a small, privately owned shop where old and rare books sit alongside contemporary fiction. Behind the scenes, there's a quieter business involving private collections and book curation.

It gave Lira a believable place in the modern world. Plus I love books, the smell of old books is comforting and I could see myself hiding away and being content to let time flow by in a place like that.

She's independently wealthy, so the shop isn't really about earning a living. It's somewhere she can exist quietly, surrounded by stories, history and the occasional customer, without having to reveal much about herself.

By this point in her life, Lira has become very good at surviving.

But surviving and living aren't necessarily the same thing.

Why Henry?

This was one of the more important decisions I made while developing the story.

I couldn't see a random stranger walking into Lira's shop and somehow breaking through the barriers she'd spent centuries building.

It needed to be someone who already had a connection to her, even if that connection belonged to a past she believed was safely behind her.

That became Henry.

In the 1980s, Henry was a boy living in York while his American parents were working there. He didn't particularly feel that he belonged, and on his way home from school he would stop at Lira's bookshop, spending time among the books and reading the ones she left out for him.

It became somewhere he felt comfortable.

Forty years later, he returns.

He finds a woman who appears unchanged from the one he remembers. He's shaken by what he thinks he recognises, while Lira immediately and coldly ignores the connection.

For her, Henry represents something deeply unsettling: a piece of the past she believed would remain in the past.

She has spent an impossibly long time learning how to close doors in her mind, putting away memories, relationships and experiences she would rather not confront.

Henry's return begins to disturb that carefully constructed existence.

That was the opening I could believe in.

There's also a lot of me in Henry. Not because his life is mine, but because some of his questions about purpose, identity and what comes next grew out of my own reflections on my own stage of life. The book idea came to me shortly after finding myself in a similar position to him.

I think that's something fiction allows us to do. We can take a familiar feeling, place it in an entirely different set of circumstances, and discover where it leads, and as an author, perhaps subconsciously work through our own feelings.

The Quiet Ledger

Another part of my background found its way into the story through the Quiet Ledger.

I've spent much of my professional life working as a software product owner, developer and business analyst. That experience naturally influenced how I imagined the systems, decisions and practical details behind the Quiet Ledger.

I found myself thinking about how something like that might actually work. What would it need to do? How would it be organised? How would people interact with it? What problems would it solve?

Apparently, even writing fiction wasn't enough to stop me thinking about software requirements.

It wasn't a conscious attempt to put my career into a novel. It was simply a case of drawing on something I understood to make an imagined world feel more convincing.

The Surprises Along the Way

One of the things I enjoyed most about writing Lira was discovering that the story didn't always go where I expected.

Some elements were planned. Others emerged through the writing itself.

A particularly good example was a small detail involving Lira's elixir. What began as something relatively minor developed into a much more significant part of the plot, eventually taking the story in directions I hadn't anticipated.

I won't explain exactly how, because that's something I'd rather readers discover for themselves.

But it illustrates something important about how the book came together.

I collaborated with AI throughout the creative process, using conversation to explore ideas, challenge assumptions and consider possibilities.

Sometimes those conversations brought out something I hadn't thought of. An idea would surface, we'd explore it, and occasionally it would grow into an important part of the story.

The elixir was one of those moments.

That doesn't mean every suggestion made it into the novel. Far from it. Ideas were questioned, rejected, reshaped and sometimes abandoned altogether.

But the collaboration created room for surprises.

And some of those surprises made the story better.

The Familiar and the Imagined

Looking back, I can see how much of Lira grew from things I already knew, even though the story itself is entirely fictional.

York gave me a place with personal meaning.

My professional experience helped shape the Quiet Ledger.

My own reflections on life and purpose influenced aspects of Henry and Lira.

And conversations with AI helped me discover possibilities that weren't there when I first started writing.

None of those things is the story itself.

They're the foundations I built upon.

What emerged was something quite different: a woman who has mastered the art of surviving, but who may have forgotten what it means to live.

And perhaps that's what I find most interesting about writing fiction.

You begin with things you know, ask questions you don't know the answers to, and somewhere along the way, the characters begin to take you somewhere unexpected.