With every page I revisit, I ask myself these questions

Whenever someone asks me, “What is the hardest part of writing a novel?”
I always recall that joke a friend made, interrupting me while we were watching a film:
“This is the last time I watch a movie with you… You kill the suspense!”

As simple as that remark sounds, it holds a truth every honest novelist knows: it is the small details that construct worlds and keep them coherent. Every inconsistency, no matter how trivial it may seem, has the power to undermine the story in the heart of the reader.

What weighs most heavily on a writer are not the glaring mistakes, but those subtle details that might go unnoticed: the arrival time of a flight at a particular airport, the price of a taxi ride, or even a passing word in a side conversation.
Few may ever search for these things, but the point is not how many will notice – rather, it is a matter of the writer’s honesty with themselves and their reader.

There are readers – especially those who live with a novel rather than merely read it – who may be tempted by nostalgia or curiosity to follow in the footsteps of the story’s heroes: to arrive at a certain place in the same city, or take the very road the protagonist took, or stand before a monument exactly as described in the novel.
How would it feel for the reader if the path does not lead to where the author promised?
What disappointment would await if the inscription cannot be found precisely as the novel described?

With every page I revisit, I ask myself these questions.
Writing is not a luxury, nor a display of knowledge; it is a commitment to ensure that the world built between the lines is real in its details, open to exploration beyond the boundaries of fiction –
That the reader finds the road as it was described, the schedule as it was set, the place as it was imagined;
That they do not collide with illusion or misdirection if they decide to walk in the footsteps of the story’s characters,
Nor feel that events were mere fantasy isolated from reason or place.

This challenge grows ever more daunting when the story unfolds amid an ancient civilization like that of Egypt – a world around which legends have multiplied, and where reality and myth have become so intertwined that at times it is nearly impossible to distinguish fact from what has been added over centuries of misinterpretation.

For this reason, I have tried in this novel to chase down every detail, however small, to look behind every event and every symbol, and never to leave a question unanswered – or at the very least, never to hide from the reader that I heard their question and shared their wonder.

True stories rarely provide ready-made answers; instead, they awaken in us a thirst for knowledge and prompt us to ask more questions.
And perhaps, the more a writer honors the intelligence of the reader and the details of reality, the more a story can remain alive in memory and imagination alike.

Maybe what makes writing a long test of patience and precision
is that it is the smallest details that build the world –
and that forge the reader’s trust in a story from which they never wish to awaken.

The Inverted Pyramid

A.I.A
The Great Order ✨
Written by Ahmad I. Alkhalel