2025-05-01 Journal Entry

It’s May! And I’m (almost) officially out of the house, once I get a few more things organized. I have some people coming to pick up my patio furniture, and then I just have to chuck stuff into my car and otherwise get the rest of the assorted odds and ends into the trash or into storage, which I don’t think will take much more than an hour or two.

Unfortunately, the storage unit is quite full, and some things that I was hoping would stay accessible (like all my books) are now behind mounds of furniture and so on. But that’s what I get for holding on to all of that stuff that really should have been gone a long time ago.

Unrelated note, but it’s probably worth recognizing by now that I continue programming mostly because it’s easy and not because it’s particularly fun. It helps me feel productive when I have little else that I feel confident in doing, but for the most part I don’t really want to keep doing it. I’m not going to feel that much better about all of it once I’ve rewritten rubyfmt into Prism.

And so I mostly do it to put off writing. I could be out here crafting characters more deeply or thinking of engaging storylines, but instead I sit around filling out various Prism implementations because that’s easy and achievable and goal-oriented.

Which reminds me: I need to get cracking on an outline.

I think I need to cut myself out of the novel if I’m going to have any chance of writing it. There’s still a narrator, but the narrator cannot be me. There should be a main character who is one of the musicians, but it should probably be someone like Mark Macha’s character, someone who I like to think of as having a solid moral grounding but who more importantly really needs the orchestra to stay alive, someone financially and/or socially indebted to the whole thing. So I think the novel probably starts with them, a young musician scrounging around at odd jobs for cash to pay for their expenses at school. Maybe they work at a store in order to pay, and then they cut back their hours there (or just quit) in order to play in the orchestra, probably doing the odd shift every now and again when the owner needs a hand (for some reason TBD). And when they agree to play in the orchestra – supported, of course, by a mysterious benefactor whom they’re encouraged to think of as a kindly uncle – they slowly drift into the orbit of the whole thing, like turning a corner and taking in the Titanic bit by bit. And so anyways there’s probably several scenes earlier on involving folks who already played in the orchestra, perhaps some moments of disgust or at least distrust from faculty, the usual through-the-grapevine sort of discussion common in green rooms or at lessons.

And then there’s the whole issue of Zander’s role in all of this. I can entirely imagine him essentially being a mule for money being laundered into the US for some kind of designer wearable tech, or maybe not even designer but simply highly addictive brain implants for high-profile patients.

Honestly, part of me wants to make Wyss or St. George out to be more “Obviously Evil,” the sort of bad guy that needs no real explanation of what they’re doing. But the reality of that situation is that it was far more pernicious, far more subtle and intangible. I don’t really think they need to be Big Bad People or whatever – they can be broken like real people.

I’m trying to think back to novels I’ve read and loved and what their antagonists were like. Many of the ones I’ve read don’t really have a huge role for antagonists. Even IJ, which I was kinda basing the whole Wyss narrative off of, in that book the bad guys are almost more indirectly bad. They’re almost entirely there for the role of getting Don Gately into the hospital and so forth.

I think there’s something to the idea of just writing characters and seeing how they fill themselves out. Of the core components, there’s an MC, Zander, David St. George, there’s the rest of the BPO staff (like the other Larry-David-esque guy and Ben Vickers), there’s the bookshop owner and perhaps some regulars, there’s the NEC teachers and staff,