Becoming What You Fear: The Story Behind Memoirs of the Felmed Coof

How a short story evolved into a dark psychological fiction novel

The following is how On Writing Memoirs of the Felmed Coof came to exist.

This book was never supposed to exist.

I did not sit down with a mapped story, a named protagonist, or a theme to chase. I sat down with fragments. Stories pulling at each other. A list I made at three in the morning when sleep had turned hostile. A character I had left behind in the digital wreckage of an earlier life. Memoirs of the Felmed Coof came out of that mess.

The beginning, if there is one, was a short story about a psychotic ex-girlfriend. That story kept reaching toward another, which reached toward another, and I started splitting them apart, treating them as discrete pieces, each one meant to stand on its own. That was the plan for a while. A few years, actually.

Then one night I sat down and wrote a bulleted list. Just a raw inventory of some of the worst, strangest, and most formative things I had been through. Hours later I had pages. I moved the list to my phone and started logging story flashes wherever I was: parking lots, waiting rooms, the middle of conversations I should have been paying attention to. The plan was still a short story collection.

Ran Kime working at his desk writing dark psychological fiction and literary noir stories — Ran Kime at work, developing psychological fiction rooted in grit, memory, and Boston noir realism.

Something grounded in lived experience but shaped into fiction. That felt manageable.

Then I started writing about a kid named Shane.

He started in Ardlynn Hill. Boston Irish. A not-so-rough neighborhood. A family with weight to it, the kind that lands on you before you are old enough to understand what inheritance really means. I worked on Shane for a while, got a foothold in his world, got him into mine, then tucked him away. Life needed attention. Writing went into a drawer, not metaphorically, but literally, buried in folders where unfinished things go to wait.

I gave up on writing. Not permanently, but seriously. I was going down a bad path. Getting my life together took precedence.

Then one snowy morning I went back through the archive. I do not know what I was looking for. Something to salvage maybe. Something to bring me back. Or maybe just the habit of opening old files and seeing what was still there. And there was Shane, sitting in a pile of dormant digital words, waiting. Not finished. Not abandoned. Just waiting.

He wanted life.

I was his creator, so I gave it to him.

I pulled him forward and put my head down. And as Shane walked the streets of Ardlynn Hill, something happened that I had not expected: he became me. Not in a surface way, not by borrowing biographical details or wearing my history like a costume. He became me in the deeper way only fiction allows. He could live inside my events without being crushed by them. He could carry the pain, the chaos, the love, the failure, the rare flashes of hope. He could be the vessel for all of it.

So I told Shane, in an early morning whisper, to hold on for a while. I told him what was coming would not be easy. But I promised him he would experience everything, every sensation, every consequence, every moment his life had been moving toward. Then I wrote his story.

It dragged sometimes. The manuscript sat idle for weeks, then months. Relationships suffered because of the time it took and the mental space it occupied. I picked it up, put it down, picked it up again. There were years between drafts where Shane waited again, patient in a way I never managed to be. Then something clicked. The through-line became clear. The architecture of the book, Shane narrating and looking back, the psychological framework of the Felmed Coof itself, all of it snapped into place. Once it did, I did not stop.

This book is different from anything else I have written. The earlier work, the short fiction, the stream-of-thought poetry, the abstract pieces living on the other end of the spectrum from narrative, those came fast. Bursts. Single sittings, or close to it. Memoirs of the Felmed Coof took years. It accumulated. It changed shape. It insisted on becoming a novel while I kept trying to make it something smaller.

The Felmed Coof itself, the psychological condition, the dissociative break where consequences fail to register until after irreversible things have happened, did not arrive as a thesis. It arrived as recognition. Something I understood from the inside and needed fiction to make legible.

Shane is not me. But he could carry what I could not explain otherwise. He could live the events I could document. He could feel the aftermath of choices I had been trying to understand for years.

There was an editorial principle I held to throughout: correct errors, preserve damage. The prose in this book is deliberately rough in places. Fragmentary. Psychologically dense. That roughness is not a failure of craft. It is the texture of the thing. A mind fractured by inherited violence and chronic dissociation does not narrate cleanly. It circles. It loses its sheen. Polishing that away would have been the real mistake.

I owe Shane a debt I cannot fully articulate. He let me live through him, telling my stories, but also telling his. He gave the chaos somewhere to go. In the end, we are the same person the way all characters and their creators are the same person: distinct, but inseparable. He could not exist without me. I am not sure this version of me could exist without him.

This book is an autofiction memoir of becoming exactly what you fear.

It took years to write.

It was supposed to be a short story.

~ Ran Kime

Genre: Psychological Tragedy | Literary Fiction | Autofiction

Memoirs of the Felmed Coof book cover showing Shane McAlister outside childhood home with Boston skyline.

At the center of the novel is Shane McAlister — a teenager navigating loyalty, masculinity, addiction, and grief inside a culture that codes silence as strength. The story traces the moments that don’t feel pivotal while they’re happening — the ones that leave permanent marks later.

Written with autofiction elements, the novel treats memory as unstable but necessary. Truth bends. Timelines blur. What survives is not factual precision, but emotional residue.

Paperback · 6×9 · 550 pages · ISBN: 979-8-2955-1318-3

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