It took me twenty years to go through the historical material which enabled me to reconstruct the story about the emperor who killed his father to inherit the throne, and a further six to abandon all that material and develop the novel. I wrote several novels in the meantime but I could only start writing about him seriously once I met him in music. I found a one-month-old kitten someone had abandoned in the street, she wasn’t able to feed herself and screamed the moment I left her, so I started watching videos on the internet about how to feed kittens and, as the pictures ran across the screen, I realized she liked the sounds, so I started turning on the music for her to calm her down, and I danced for her. She gazed at me, in disbelief at first, then she also started whirling around the room after me. The emperor knew I was going to write a novel about him. I was never sure, even though I had spent such a long time of my life studying the reincarnation theory. That was the second turning point of our encounter – the realisation, for a writer, that it is his protagonist who is leading him through the story. Music saved me. I showed him that, rather than the theme, the important thing is the style a writer uses to build a story. In this way he accepted the new situation, that Iwas not weak with him and that without me this story would simply not be. Then our music started, and he learned to dance in the language. ( © Copyright 2019 Fensi Denser. All rights reserved.)