About

There is a particular kind of 2 AM that runners know. Not the fun kind. The kind where you've been lying in the dark for two hours, legs full of tomorrow's long run, your brain doing something you never asked it to — narrating everything.

That's where this newsletter came from.

Thoughts in Knots is a weekly dispatch about the things I can't stop thinking about. Fiction and how it's built. Mountains and what they do to a body at kilometre 35. The slow, strange work of trying to live a life that makes sense. I'm a product manager by profession, a thriller novelist by stubbornness, and a trail runner by some compulsion I've never fully explained. I live in Bengaluru with a six-year-old Labrador named James, who has no interest in any of this.

I write scene-first. A moment, a place, a sensation — and then whatever idea lives inside it. No argument made in advance. The thinking happens in the writing. That's the knot. This newsletter is the untangling.

Issues arrive weekly. Some are free. Most require a small subscription — roughly one chai per week, which feels right for something that tries to take its time.

If you're here, I'm glad. Pull up a chair.

Akshit