2023-02-20 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Monday 🗓 Date: February 20, 2023 📅 Week: Feb 20 – Feb 26, 2023

Hi-dee ho, neighborino. ‘Tis a beautiful monday morning her in San Francisco and I’ve been out all morning just walking around and all that good shit, so now I’m back and ready to write.

I had this idea the other day for a story based on the guy who always takes the books from the Little Free Library on Duboce. I’ve seen him take shit a few times now, but he doesn’t take everything. I also don’t know what he does with them — I mean, I haven’t checked if my copy of The Tale of Genji is still in there, but I’d be a bit surprised if a (presumably?) homeless guy was reading a 1600 page, thousand year old novel on medieval Japanese court practices. But who knows, maybe they are!

I think the story I was thinking of was moreso along the lines of Jonwayne’s song “Paper,” where he talks about being paper that gets made into a book and sold for a dollar at goodwill, how its used for nothing more than shelter at the end of the day. I always really liked that idea, that our ideas for the power of a book are limited. What if they were used for shelter, what if they’re used as kindling for a trash can fire, what if they’re used as a makeshift plate or to wrap up some food. Would that be so bad? Is that better than the alternative?

It’s funny, I idolize the writer’s lifestyle so much. I spend so much time looking at where to live, publishing houses, and all that stuff. And yet I don’t actually use that time to write. I think what I should do is start setting short-term goals for things, which I started doing literally midway through this sentence right now and will finish afterwards. I hope that will be handy — I don’t want to totally “kanban” my way through this whole thing, but I think a little structure will be helpful instead of just winging it until I get somewhere. I’m going to try making little tasks for characters, plot, scenes, etc. as I go and see what happens. That way, if I think of something, I can chuck it onto the board and not have to think about it until I actually get back to doing the thing.

But the other bit here is that idolizing the writers life actually probably isn’t a terrible thing, as long as I’m aware that I’m idolizing. It’s providing a bit of a north start, some helpful and somewhat productive yearning for something that I’d like to achieve. At other points in my life, this was always a helpful thing to have, that little nugget in the back of my mind about what I wanted to do: going to music school, getting my first job, and now writing my first novel. Or alternatively, getting published (even a short story!).

But I don’t want to get ahead of myself, I think I just want to get something down and go from there.

What are the things we should know about a character? A bit of what they look like, their past, whom they love, whom they hate, the things they hate about their body, their comfort food, their comfort movie, the things that make their body tick, their fetishes, their surface level fears, their deeper fears, their surface level and deeper hopes, the things they tell their friends that are actually lies, the same for their families (if they have them). I imagine, unfortunately, that many of my characters will likely turn out like me, for better or worse.

I imagine most writers know that, and they go along with it. We’re all broken, anyways, and we write about broken people, more often than not. Wolf in White Van is surely about broken people. My brain feels a bit foggy right now. I can feel it want to pull away from this. I can feel it wanting something else, probably to sleep (…to dream, and on and on). I can just shut my eyes for 10 seconds, feel that drowsiness in my body, and it starts to fade. Isn’t that strange? I feel like that drowsiness is probably some emotion. Maybe it’s anxiety about writing, at this moment. Maybe it’s telling me to get away from the computer, to go outside and feel the sunlight. I did that this morning though, and I should get to some writing tasks.

I don’t really have anything in particular on my mind at the moment. I’m warm and sleep, and it’s a long weekend where I feel like I could stay forever. It got warm enough outside to just go sit in the park. I should just sit in my chair and listen to music. I don’t really want to be writing this particular “morning” pages and would rather be writing something from my list of things to do, so I’m going to do just that. I love you, you’re not inferior to anyone. I’ll see you in the morning.