Storms and Oranges: Inside the Making of a Book That Refuses to Behave

There is a book coming that I did not write the way books are usually written.

Storms and Oranges is not built on plot twists or neat arcs. It does not move in straight lines. It moves the way memory moves, the way a feeling lingers long after the moment that caused it has passed. I did not want to write a novel in the traditional sense. I wanted to build something closer to a film that plays quietly in the back of your mind for days, one that you keep returning to without fully knowing why.

This is not a story about two people. It is much bigger than that. It is about the parts of ourselves we lose without noticing, the rooms we disappear inside even when surrounded by people who love us, and the strange, unspoken grief of realizing how much of our lives has been spent unseen, even by ourselves

Why This Book Asks You to Slow Down
I did not write this to be read in one sitting. I wrote it to be lived with. To sit beside your bed for a few days. To catch you off guard on an ordinary afternoon when a line you read three days ago suddenly makes sense in a completely different way. This book asks to be revisited, reread, carried around in the back of your mind the way certain films replay themselves long after the credits end.

There is a storm in this book, and there is something impossibly tender inside that storm, existing in the same breath. That contradiction is the whole point. Because that is what it actually feels like to come undone and slowly, quietly, find your way back to yourself.

A Story Built Like a Film, Not a Novel
I did not follow the usual rules while writing this. There is no neat structure guiding you from one plot point to the next. Instead, the story unfolds the way real life does, in fragments, in silences, in the moments that only make sense once you have carried them with you for a while. If you go in expecting a conventional novel, this book will surprise you. If you go in willing to simply feel your way through it, I think it will stay with you longer than most books do.

Why I Wrote It This Way
I built this story slowly, the way you build something you are not willing to get wrong. Every chapter went through versions I was not satisfied with until it finally felt honest. I was not interested in writing something easy to summarize. I was interested in writing something true to the quiet, complicated ways we experience our own lives, the ways we lose ourselves and the ways we find our way back.

What I Hope You Take From It
I am not going to tell you this is an easy read. I am going to tell you it is an honest one. And once you let it in, I think it will make you look at your own life a little differently, the relationships you have kept, the parts of yourself you have hidden away, the quiet moments that shaped you more than you realized.

Storms and Oranges is coming soon. Closer than you think.

Written by Saumil Jain. Edited by Yashila Vikas.