How the Olga Sverchkova Website Became a Home for My Books
If someone had told me a year ago that I would spend several months rebuilding the Olga Sverchkova website, discussing fonts, menus, buttons, image sizes, page layouts and roughly a thousand other things I had previously managed to live quite happily without knowing existed, I would probably have laughed and said that I had far more interesting things to do. Writing a book, moving to another country or dealing with a complicated legal case all seemed considerably more straightforward than building a website. As it turned out, life has very little respect for plans, especially when those plans include words like quick, simple or it will only take a few days.
The story of the new website began innocently enough. I already had a website, then came new pages, new sections, new ideas and new projects, all of which seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. The problem appeared one day when I opened the homepage and realised that it looked remarkably like an apartment in the middle of a move. Everything inside belonged to me, every item had once been useful and every item came with its own story, yet if I had been forced to decide what was genuinely worth taking into a new chapter of life, I would probably have discovered that half the boxes were travelling with me simply because I felt guilty leaving them behind and vaguely hoped that something I had not used in eight years might suddenly become indispensable.
Why the Olga Sverchkova Website Had to Change
The website had gradually developed exactly the same problem. It began primarily as a place connected to my legal career, then Tbilisi entered my life, followed by relocation work, consultations, property advice and helping other people start over somewhere new. Over time, the site became a place where I stored almost every professional role I had ever had, and eventually there were so many different directions gathered under one roof that a first-time visitor probably needed to conduct a small investigation simply to work out who I was and what, exactly, I was doing there.
None of those parts of my life were invented, and none of them had suddenly become unimportant. I had spent years practising law, years helping people navigate relocation and a considerable amount of time learning, usually through personal experience, what starting over in another country actually looks like once the inspirational quotes have finished and somebody has to find an apartment, understand the paperwork and work out why nothing happens in quite the order you expected. The problem was not that any of it was false. The problem was that the website was still trying to give every previous version of me equal space.
When the Books Took Over
Then the books arrived, and they began taking up more and more room without asking permission. At first I treated writing as another project, later it became something I did between other commitments, and then I noticed a very simple thing. Whenever I found myself with a free evening, I was not thinking about page structures, website strategy or whether a button should move three centimetres to the right. I opened a manuscript and promised myself I would write just one page.
People who write books know exactly what the phrase just one page means. It belongs in the same category as just one chocolate or just one episode. Nobody believes it, but everyone continues saying it anyway.
That is how Nobody Told Me About Tbilisi came into existence, even though it was never supposed to become a book in the first place. It began as observations, notes, accidental conversations and small stories about life in a city where I had planned to stay briefly and somehow remained for years. Then readers appeared, followed by questions and messages from people who recognised themselves, their neighbours, their taxi drivers, their dogs and their own attempts to understand Tbilisi in those stories. At some point I realised that the book had acquired a life of its own, while my job was simply to keep writing and occasionally pretend that everything had been carefully planned from the beginning.
Then a completely different story arrived. Instead of Tbilisi, there was St. Petersburg. Instead of observations about everyday city life, there was an old murder case. Instead of a narrator wondering why the fastest supermarket queue is invariably the one you did not join, there was advocate Olga Vorontsova and a crime committed twenty-two years earlier. That was how The Alibi of St. Petersburg began, and around the same time the website finally stopped fitting into its old life.
What I really wanted to do was write, rather than redesign another section, rearrange another collection of blocks, debate whether a particular shade of beige felt warm enough or spend another evening choosing between two buttons that looked almost exactly the same.
Although I should admit that after months of working on the site, I have now seen so many shades of grey, beige and cream that I could probably offer consulting services to interior designers. Free of charge, for a very limited time and with absolutely no guarantee of useful results.
Who Are You Now?
The funny thing is that technically building a website today is probably easier than it has ever been, while deciding what that website should actually represent can be much harder. The real difficulty has very little to do with buttons, menus or photographs, because sooner or later a website asks a considerably more uncomfortable question.
Who are you now?
Not ten years ago.
Not in your previous profession.
Not in the city where you used to live.
Not in the life you once built with complete confidence.
Now.
At first I resisted the question, then I tried to negotiate with it, then I attempted to find an elegant compromise, and eventually I admitted defeat and discovered that the answer had been sitting in front of me all along.
I write books.
Even now, seeing that sentence written so plainly feels slightly strange, perhaps because we become accustomed to our old identities much faster than we accept new ones. Yet books are what make me sit down at my computer early in the morning and lose track of time late at night. They are what keep producing new ideas at exactly the moment I had intended to work on something else, and they are also responsible for the fact that people who do not actually exist can spend hours arguing inside my head while showing absolutely no respect for whatever plans their author had made for the day.
What the Website Eventually Became
Once I understood that, the logic of the Olga Sverchkova website became much simpler. It no longer needed to explain everything I had ever done or preserve every professional role simply because it had once mattered. It needed to give the books room to live, let readers find free chapters without conducting another small investigation and make the Journal a real part of the site rather than somewhere I occasionally placed whatever did not fit anywhere else.
That is what the Olga Sverchkova website has become. My books live there, readers can discover free chapters, and the Journal finally feels like what I had always wanted it to be: not a news feed and not a collection of random updates, but a place for stories, observations, notes and conversations. Nobody Told Me About Tbilisi is there, The Alibi of St. Petersburgis there, and judging by the steadily growing number of manuscript files on my computer, more books will almost certainly follow.
What I like most is that the website no longer feels like a storage room for everything important I have done over the years. It feels much more like a bookshelf, not a particularly large one yet, occasionally a slightly chaotic one and almost certainly one that will continue growing, but a bookshelf nevertheless.
I think that is what I wanted from the beginning. It simply took me a surprisingly long time to understand it.
Although if you visit again in six months and discover that I have redesigned half the website all over again, please do not be surprised. Some people never finish renovating their homes.
I appear to have the same relationship with websites.