Journal 2025-05-17

I always seem to waste a few hours of my day by just doing a bunch of random nonsense. I’d really rather be writing, sitting quietly at this little computer and thinking, imagining. The stories in my head are much more interesting, or at least they could be.

I realized how interesting they were today — I found myself, whenever I saw some cool overlook or felt some experience, wondered how that would feel as my characters, how they may all experience the same world around me, if they were in it. How the heat would feel on their skin, the dust on their clothes (I am in the desert, after all — a place they’ll probably never be), the exhaustion from a long walk.

And I was thinking how much space there could be for them to roam. There’s this whole web of stories, actually, that all need to be told in order to get the novel to its current form. And so many more characters, like the mother and the boy, the townspeople who all distrust medicine men (and The Event that precipitated that), the people they meet on their travels, the worlds they’re traversing through. All of this is unworked ground, space for me to paint and scrawl and otherwise discover in the act of writing. How exciting that is! It’s a lot of work, but in a way I look forward to it. I just need to jump on it, instead of thinking so much about it.

I think I can do them this way — I can start with some general scene synopsis, or at least what I want to achieve in that scene (some person finds some thing or experiences some event, learns some information, etc.) and then I can continue drafting until it’s ready for some kind of editing. And then there’s something being in broadly the right location in the book and so on. There’s so much to figure out, to learn and fiddle with. This is the feeling of being a writer that I always felt like was missing, and I think much of it can be owed to the fact that I essentially never sat down and put in all the time to actually be in that headspace. I feel like words are flying out of my hands right now, and we’re really not even halfway through this particular Morning Pages. But ah, it’s the afternoon anyways.

So there’s the man with the backpack, who probably makes his trade not by taking money from others but by retrieving artifacts from them and selling them. I don’t think he sells them to a dealer or anything, but rather he goes to these Doctor gatherings where they trade for money, and then he can use that cash however he pleases. Later on in the book, one of these gatherings could in theory be a trap of some sort, like someone tracks the Doctor into the woods and finds one of these events, and the townspeople set out to kill them or whatever.

I also worry that this book will come off as some kind of pandemic book. That’s really not at all what it is, and that wasn’t even in my mind when I really conceived of it. But that’s the reason I don’t want him to be called The Doctor, because I think that would come off as some kind of on-the-nose “I Believe in Science” kind of thing. Plus there’s Doctor Who and all of that that already references that. Perhaps I just call him Our Hero. Our Protagonist. (Really has that Hiro Protagonist ring to it.)

Side note of something I just thought of: if the townspeople so disdain doctors, then the man will probably need to sneak in. Maybe he gets a message from the boy asking for his help.

But there will also need to be some preliminary chapters where he travels from town to town and helps people in advance. Or maybe that’s just the opening sequence — he finishes healing a woman, goes to the market before leaving town, and on his way out he gets a message from a boy several towns over asking for his help.

You know what would really be fun for this would be like a very William Faulkner-esque style, not really in the Deep South necessarily, but rather some Southern Gothic with a Cormac McCarthy-esque richness to it. That would be neat. (This last sentence is just for word count — there we go!)

Talk to you soon. Mwah.