Journal 2025-05-15

I’m waiting for the edibles to kick in and crushing a monster. Feeling like I need to switch in to a wife beater and go blazing across the desert in my Jeep.

Thoughts thoughts, words words. Characters are hard. They could be a whole anybody, it’s like having a kid — you’re chucking them into the world and seeing what they bounce off of, essentially. That’s what we’re all doing, in a way, just sort of bouncing around.

I was reading a DFW short story (posthumous and semi-clearly unfinished) that was more like a character analysis, and I thought it was at least slightly illuminating since it’s the sort of character analysis I would probably write — long and meandering, without a real point. There was some interesting themes in there about religious identity and how exactly that develops from really small instincts. There was a nugget in there, but it makes a hard turn in the end that implies it was meant to be one part of a much longer sort of monologue.

But it’s the sort of thing that I think my main character would experience. About some kind of strange instinct he had that made him more likely to see “mushi" — a name which I will not keep in the manuscript but which is appropriate enough for right now. It’s a character who will be able to these energy-creatures like mushi from the show Mushishi. But my mushi will be slightly different. Personally the personification of mushi in the show is basically anything vaguely invisible, which I think poses some issues. But anyways, the gist of it in my mind is that mine are seeable as a form of skill, as a particular way of paying attention to the world around us. The details of that remain to be seen — exactly what kind of attention or how that gets portrayed.

But the thing I was kinda thinking about was something about The Doctor’s own history. I’ve taken to calling people in this story by simple monikers like that, instead of using names. I want this story to be as old as time, in a way. To be a primordial story of the way things were. And how they still are, if we look.

And so I think I see a time where he was a young boy, and how his father always made a fire when the winter got cold. Even after long days at the port, his father always ended the day by splitting wood, making sure our supply never dwindled. As he grew older, he would take over this task from his father, his body growing into fuller maturity, his shoulders broadening from the repetitions with the axe. One night at the fire, his mother admonishing him for the whole in his shoe, whose top strap was torn, one end of the fabric shaking its frayed edge in shock. And his father would inevitably laugh and tell the boy a story or two from his youth, from long enough ago that the boy had now heard nearly everything there is to say but which the father enjoyed too much to recollect and so tells him, the boy, anyways about that bout with the fish merchant or how his aunt used to keep a pair of squirrels held hostage in her closet. And in the process of hearing such endless loops of stories that all blurred together, the boy had started watching the most interesting thing in his line of sight: the soft rumble of the fire, its yellow streaks reflecting back at him from his parents’ eyeballs. He stared and stared. The fire grew in his vision, his eyes wide open, stinging in the wind, tears collecting.

One brutal thing about the above is that aside from being obviously unfinished starting around the time the edibles kicked in, they’re also horrendously bad. Just writing on a sentence by sentence level the above is a whole bunch of doodie. Of course, maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be, that you just dump as much information as possible out and see what sticks. I think I could live with that, and then just rewrite the whole thing. Or actually, maybe you go back and rewrite it before going forwards, editing-while-writing.

That’s essentially what George Saunders says he does. I don’t think I had really understood it before though, but now I get it. Of course, I also let this sit for an hour or so and then came back, which made it easier to have some distance from.