Six months in and the boundaries are blurring.
Project Mirror started with a single conversation back in July. A client asking for “influencer hands” through surgery, not manicure. That moment opened something I couldn’t close, and now I’m deeper in this fictional world than I ever intended.
The feedback on recent excerpts tells me I’m hitting something real. Readers aren’t asking about the technology – they’re asking if it’s already happening. Someone messaged asking whether her meditation app’s “mood tracking” counts as emotional regulation software.
It does.
Writing this book feels like reverse engineering the present. Each chapter reveals another way we’re already outsourcing our emotional experiences. Productivity apps that promise to eliminate procrastination. Dating algorithms that claim to optimise compatibility. Therapy chatbots designed to deliver consistent empathy.
My protagonist starts as a believer in the system. She genuinely thinks debugging emotions helps people function better. The shift happens gradually – through cases like Maya’s malfunctioning confidence package, through witnessing what happens when natural responses get categorised as errors.
I’m forty thousand words deep now. The hardest part isn’t imagining this world. It’s accepting how little imagination it actually requires.
Posted from London, where the future feels uncomfortably close to the present.
— Writer Julia Zolotova
