2025-10-17 Journal Entry

—— ENTRY —— Title: Friday, October 17th, 2025 Date: 2025-10-17 Num Words: 756 Num Minutes: 14

Okie dokie, I’m back on here and journaling again. It’s pretty nice to just sit here for a bit and really let all my thoughts come out as fast as possible. I’m writing a lot more fiction lately, and I wish this was how writing fiction felt. There was a tip I read once from Sasha Chapin where he suggested that one should really just be allowing oneself to “write badly,” which is to say that if you don’t know what to write, just write the dumbest, most obvious thing you can think of. If someone stabs someone and you’re simply not interested in all the details of what the guy’s last words were and how his blood stained the pure white of his tuxedo shirt as he crumpled on the casino floor, you could instead just be like “Yeah and then Steve stabbed the bad guy in the chest” and move on. You can always come back and rewrite it later. But that’s my lesson to myself for today.

The reason I feel like I need that lesson today in particular is that I’m trying to really set big, audacious goals for myself with respect to writing fiction. The biggest, most audacious goal I have right now is to show up every day to write. (I am, notably not including 750words as part of what counts as writing – this is just a nice way to “warm up” in the morning and get something Productive under my belt that’s (1) easy and (2) not just a cheap dopamine pump like watching YouTube or whatever, which is my default source of morning entertainment. Instead, it’s nice to dump my thoughts out, “clear out the pipes” so to speak, and just focus on the feeling of my fingers on the keyboard and whatever weird stuff is swimming around my body on any given day. (I still maintain, as I’ve said several times, that just feeling your body and paying attention to what’s around you is, truly, psychedelic.)

The main difficult thing is that every morning, I then have to find out what’s most interesting about the story all over again. A lot of times I kinda know what’s going to happen, but then I have to get back to why I care, who the characters are, what sort of things they would do. In my current work, a bunch of students have more-or-less washed up on an island after going through this portal they found in their school. There’s a few things I want to establish now: one is that time doesn’t really pass, that they’re in this space for all time. The next is that there’s more portals that go to other places, and that the old door doesn’t take them back to their old house, that is that portals are strictly one-way phenomena. I don’t want to plan out the whole thing from there (cause it’s kinda making the whole thing sorta flat when I do that), but I think those are the main metaphysical seeds I want to plant. But anyways, at this point, they’ve all sort of washed up on the beach and they’ll all make a bonfire and eat the little bits of food they’ve managed to scrounge up for this first night, and then perhaps in the morning they’ll find that those same sources of food have replenished quickly or something – that they’ll somehow see that time hasn’t passed. (There may be a better way to show that, with smartphone calendars or something?) Anyways, the main thrust I want to get at is that characters are allowed to go anywhere and do anything, essentially that (barring anything that will get you killed) you are free to do anything, that that is the real nature of the world. And then what do you do, try to go back home? Or is home just as constructed and arbitrary as this? Why do you want to go back? Do you want to go forwards? What does comfort do for you? What does feeling bad at any given moment actually get you? Does it help?

So I have a lot of questions. Most of them I’ve stolen from other people, but hey, it’s a first novel. I’m just stealing as much as humanly possible so that when I glue it all together it’ll come out the other side as original. Perhaps it’s interesting, perhaps it’s not, but I’m kinda having fun with it. It’s just about everyday finding the fun over and over again.