Wrong Star would, logically, be my sixth or seventh series of p..ms, but as I only count the one I wanted to publish in 1998 and the idea of the one I abandoned in 2008, it’s probably the third. The list of the p..ms in this series is not final. I have a couple of ideas on .txt files in folders with photographs taken by kind and brave people that inspired me to write down those ideas; and I am planning to still work on that. But the concept won’t change. Wrong Star is a trip through the last quarter of the century, fusing the feelings and history to form a set of strange, eerie metaphores and deny a bunch of misbeliefs, as well as prove that you don’t have to forgive and approve everything in order to feel something for another person. On the contrary, you’re more likely to notice someone’s flaws if you pay attention to them and, for the sake of their well-being, it’s pretty human to worry.

In most of the Wrong Star p..ms, there are at least four things happening: one is referring to a historical event of the recent past that most people appear to have forgotten, one is referring to one of the character’s feelings towards the other character – doubts, pain, supressed love, ignorance, one is a parody of a fairy tale or some other written work, one is a parody of some religious concept.

Let’s get this straight first: I feel really sorry for people who are facing the consequences of the said historical event (and I’m pretty sure my own hormonal disorder comes from a combo of that event and bombing of my country X years later…) and I do not hate any person whom I put as a character in this story, either. I love them all. I am not anti-fairy tales and anti-religion to a radical point, I love children’s literature and I respect all classical religion concepts, though I have to admit that post-WWII movements and open source religion scare me a bit. This series just wanted to write itself.

The stage of Wrong Star is bigger than Luxembourg, yet everything feels claustophobic.

In Wrong Star, there’s a lot of denying of everything. There’s a lot of sparks and toxic stuff, as well as toxic feelings. There’s a motif of eternity and there’s a couple of seconds that change everything. Everyone who reads it is encouraged and very welcome to take it any way they want to.

In October 2008, I told my friend Katie, whom I consider to be really intelligent, a better human than me and a really interesting and knowledgable person, that one of my biggest wishes at the moment is to become one hundred percent rational. 18 months later, I am not able to achieve something as drastic as that as I think it would take a robot to never be wrong, always see through things that end up being untrue etc. On the other side, I believe that always-happy and never-thinking-anything-bad people are a myth as well.

Around this time, I finally found that I am not having any mental issues at all and that the reason for my occasional lack of balance is of hormonal nature. The symptomes that were mistaken for possible breast cancer, thyroid hypoactivity, depression and anxiety in the past were all pointing to one single thing: PMDD. If you don’t know what that is, look it up.

Come January 2009, my PMDD got me into a situation where I wrote a long, nonsense rant about things I didn’t even know (but it all felt completely smart to me when I was writing it) and I ended up being, I think, pooped on in a very delicate way. I can’t elaborate further.

I spent 12 months trying to figure out what was that supposed to mean. I realised only one thing – that I did something horribly wrong or that I’m constantly doing something wrong and that it was a way to make me suffer permanently. Before that day and whatever is that I compared to being pooped on, I lived with a question mark above my head. Since that day, I feel like I’ve been living with a billboard that says IDIOT above my head, the question mark was replaced with an identification I am not fond of because I am NOT an idiot. I realised that the only way to solve this problem would be really bold, likely quick and that it could result in either relief or enormous, humiliating pain (no I am not talking about suicide or anything physically dangerous, I am just avoiding proper words). I also realised that, until that very day, if that day actually exists in my lifetime, I’m stuck and that I actually wasn’t stuck before this happened. It’s like one of those games where you have to stop when you’re told to and you remain crouching until the further notice. In the Serbian version of that game, we say that “the clock fell into the well”. Sometimes, the game ends and the clock is still in the well.

In December 2009, I spoke to some friends over various current events, amongst them the long-awaited visa-free regime for the residents of my country going to EU; and we agreed that almost everything can be reversed and undone. And I felt like writing, a lot. I needed something undoable, wrong, eternal and long-term to use as a motif.

I started thinking about everything that happened in my lifetime and what did not repeat. There were three wars in this region. There were two wars in Asia. Flicking through the newspapers, I tried to remember what can kill more people than wars in modern times, I knew there was something that I’m forgetting…

…and then, right in the newspaper, there was a black and white photo I have seen many times before since my earliest childhood, a day I remember through the yellowness of time and strawberry-blonde locks of hair. The same photo was in a couple of different newspapers. In one place, it was pretty close to the news that crashed down my website. I found it!!!! I found a couple of seconds that screwed up a large part of the world for good. Or, for an ungraspable number of centuries.

I started thinking of that day and its numerous consequences, intensively. I didn’t know much about it, as the event in question is a tabboo topic in Serbia, given that we have our own problems, that we caused ourselves. I was reading one website after another, even some in the language I actually don’t speak (but it was easy to figure it out more or less) and I was finding many interesting motifs, scary and unbelievable at the same time.

For the first couple of weeks, I could not sleep. Then I sat down and wrote a single p..m. I did not like it much. I felt like it was forced out. But every next one was coming on its own, simply writing itself, without any explanation. It’s like I was roaming around, highlighting places and things and then they would suddenly be on paper. Then I ended up mixing it with Christian eschatology. Then I added parodies of fairy-tales to the whole thing. Then, for the first time in my life, I tried to make p..ms have some repetitive lines and sound rhythmic, as a family friend, a piano master and a former music school teacher, said that I have the poorest feeling of rhythm in the world. I ended up somehow sneaking in another thing: the still present skepticism of the “first” world towards the “second” world.

I am very pleased with the initial result, though I still consider this to be work in progress.

Special thanks to my wonderful “critics” who never get annoyed when I tell them that I have a new p..m: Mirjana Jevremović-Tanacković, Eleni Philos, Kathryn Hayes.