During the first Trump administration and the Covid lockdown, I was unable to pursue filmmaking, the medium I was trained to practice. I spent those years writing fiction, which had the advantages of being free and private – a field of pure invention. I eventually published three novels between 2019 and 2023. Over the course of the trilogy, the narrator becomes a painter. I followed the path of my fictional character and started painting seriously in 2022, almost immediately after the writing was finished. As a friend of mine put it, I wrote a future for myself, and it came true.