Journal 2025-05-16

I have arrived in Palm Springs. There’s a donut house outside this Starbucks whose signs have zero donuts on them. I’m still in the desert but it feels slightly less like being in the desert. I’ll go out to Joshua Tree for the next few days, should be fun.

I bought plenty of edibles the other day, and I already kinda love and hate them. They’d be great if I could always guarantee that my work was done for the day. I’m not great at that. But I think I also need some kind of routine to actually have an “end” to the work that I’m doing. Otherwise I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. Which is already what I’m sorta doing — the plot of this novel has been simmering around in my mind for a while. I can probably write a few scenes up from the early part of the novel, maybe some backstory and so on, and at least up until our fated medicine man encounters his eventual young ward and perhaps some bits about visiting other villages and getting harassed or whatever, something to set the scene that Doctors are generally mistrusted, and then there’s probably some precursory scenes about the boy and about his mother and so on. So there’s a lot of groundwork that we could begin laying on this. But it has a bit more shape right now. I actually look forward a bit to thinking about it, even if it’s slightly exhausting to think about. So much exists in a world, even (especially?) one of your own creation.

But in thinking about this fictional world, I’ve probably paid a bit less attention to the world right around me. That’s okay though — the New World is one that will occupy my mind for months, years potentially, so I’m okay taking my time and getting settled into it. But I think we take for granted how unimaginably tough it is to construct worlds like this. The amount of time and so on that it really takes to actually craft a world like this with care. It requires you to sit and stare and babble into a phone for hours on end. I had a five hour drive today and probably spent 2 of those hours concretely thinking about the book, not to mention that inevitable background processing that seems to happen all the time while we’re just doing the usual stuff.

Ummmm what more do I have to say? I don’t know. I have a Finite and Infinite Games chat with Dan this afternoon, which I’m sure will be great as always. I don’t have a ton to say about it this time around, but I’ve been, as I mentioned, pleasantly preoccupied. I still need to get down to brass tacks and do some writing though. Partially writing with the outline but also with getting some words down on the page. I will feel infinitely better about it once I have five or ten pages down. That’ll at least make it feel real and true, in its own way. I mean, I have the 30 minutes of babbling that constitutes some amount of information, but all of that really needs to be crafted into something useful.

Describing the main character’s physical characteristics turned out to be incredibly helpful. I should remember that for the future probably, that I’m a fairly visual imagine-er and so it’s helpful for me to be able to imagine the character out and about in the world instead of them being some kind of strange amorphous black hole in my imagination, or worse yet replaced by some kind of weird stock character. But no, the Doctor is a bit of a Jizo-esque character, very monkish — bald head, blue oversized shirt and blue pants layered over a denim jacket and white T-shirt, with brown loafer/moccasin type shoes. He looks very sweet and innocent in that way, but don’t worry — he’ll be put squarely through the wringer pretty early on in the novel.

I just had an idea for a scene in which he gets harassed by town people. He gets tied up and left overnight, only for a citizen of the town, who he eventually learns is also a Doctor, lets him down and essentially smuggles him out of town. That’s a good start for something, we’ll see.

Anyways, I’m nearly at my word count, and I need to walk back to check in to the hotel and so on. So I’ll be back later post-F&IG chat.

Peace.