The draft and not much else

My restaurant closed in June 2023. I managed it for eleven years. Twelve staff, whom I helped find other work, and a mortgage, which I am still managing, and an excess of free time that I did not handle well for about three months and then started to convert into something else. I have been living in Athens my whole life and I was a restaurant manager, not a writer, and I want to be honest that I came to this by process of elimination rather than vocation. What I found when I started writing was that I had more material than I understood. The restaurant was on Adrianou Street in the Monastiraki neighbourhood and it closed because of a rent increase I couldn't negotiate down, not because it wasn't working, and the feeling of watching a functional thing be ended by economics is something I keep trying to put into prose. The novel is about a neighbourhood during a period of change. Not my neighbourhood specifically. A composite. People who have been somewhere long enough to see what it was, watching it become something else. The people who stay and the people who leave and the specific quality of the ones who stay not because they can afford to but because they refuse to calculate. I don't know if it's good. I know it's going somewhere.