While I’m looking for an agent for my Urban Fantasy novel “The Glint of the Luopan” (Working Title), I’m currently working on a Coming-of-Age-Story that revolves around fears, music and psychedelics. Here’s a little extract:

I was starting to meditate as well, sitting on my bed cross-legged for ten minutes every morning and evening. One after the other, I felt all the mental barriers fall away, until there seemed to be nothing left to hold me. I had to breathe in deep not to start panicking. Medication only blocked my access to music, made everything I recorded sound flat.

When taking LSD while listening to it, on the other hand, I started to see sounds behind the curtains of my eyelids. I started to hear colors and shapes in my ears, and I could almost touch them. I played the keyboard with the pulse of my body. The sound of a bell just a hair’s breadth from my lips suddenly had a pinky-purple hue to it, like I could ‘hear’ the actual sound and reach out to touch it with my tongue.

And yet, after a few hours, there was this profound restlessness that in my first weeks, I had only felt faintly. Time and tide were mulling around in my head. The drug wouldn’t let me get to sleep.

I called Rob several times, and when he answered, I didn’t know what to say.

Finally, I just said: ‘This is the coming-down-feeling. Do you know about it?’

‘Yes, I know all about it,’ he replied, and he sounded pretty bored, he was tired. ‘Just drink something, or make yourself a hot-water bottle. You gotta ease into it.’

The hot-water bottle eased my mind for a bit, shooing away the tingling in my nerves. But I started to get this gnawing sensation in the pit of my stomach, and I couldn’t remember how to breathe.