2025-10-18 Journal Entry

We’re back, gang.

The unfortunate reality is that I think the more I write this novel, the more it feels slightly wrong to me. I find it difficult to have this Obviously Evil main character, and it’s incredibly difficult to write from their perspective in a way that makes sense. I still like the conceptual framing of thinking of power as their antidote to meaninglessness, but without the whole superpower dynamic, I don’t think such a Big Bad Evil really makes sense, and by extension the really loud sort of multidimensional drifting idea also ceases to make sense. I think it’s worth considering just putting a kibosh on the whole thing.

And so what to do instead? Good question. I still quite enjoy the idea of having several characters navigating themes of meaning and meaninglessness, of my several main characters (Luna/Evan/Quinn) where Luna serves as both a horizonal point for the two of them that gets removed at some point in the narrative. I still feel pretty strongly that Evan’s intellectualization-to-dissociation and Quinn’s isolation-as-self-protection are meaningful and valuable themes to explore, since they feel like very real aspects of myself, and I’d like to push them against some other archetypes. Thinking of characters as somewhat archetypal manifestations of responses to meaninglessness is helpful to me. The main question then becomes: what are other scenarios where one is immediately exposed to meaninglessness? Perhaps there’s something in the Saramago-esque world of Blindness, in which the change to become blind is actually meaningless, strange, surreal in its simplicity. You have become blind, suddenly. Deal with it. There are moments in that book that I love dearly – the scene of the women bathing in the rain at the end of the novel nearly brought me to tears – though I’d be curious if I would be able to pull off something like that, or if my world is something more like Good Old Neon, a build up of interiority until it bumps up against its own limitations. Perhaps I’m attempting to do mesh multiple things together in ways that aren’t really compatible. I don’t know if the Luna-like archetype would work in Blindness, because it feels almost naive (the optometrist’s wife is a better example, the sighted who must conceal her sight).

I don’t know. If you can write anything, what do you write? What is the novel that I uniquely want? I want to pull all of these into something, I don’t know; that seems like a terrible idea in actuality, but I’m struggling to do just one thing. I think right now I’m just fundamentally wrestling with Wallace – I both love his style and enjoy reading it, and I think he’s one of the most virtuosic authors I know, but I wonder how such virtuosity can come forth without overwhelming the reader. Maybe you just have to overwhelm the reader, perhaps that’s to some degree a necessity. It may be the answer to the question posed in Good Old Neon: how do you ever communicate what’s going on in your head? It happens all so fast, practically instantaneously. It’s as if all of life happens in just a single second, and we’re stuck here watching it all play out. We’ve downloaded the file and then somebody hit play, and now I’m a character out here just jotting thoughts down and being generally far too worried about the whole prospect of it all. There’s this sort of self-obsession that I have with feeling like my own world model gets fed back into the world somehow, even though I know that doing so isn’t exactly something necessary or even good. In fact it’s almost certain that a better, more flexible world model would serve the world better. And yet I think that even though it’s obvious that other people exist and have inner worlds, that’s perhaps the most difficult thing to truly understand in the world. It’s impossible to know just the breadth and depth of minds unlike our own.

Anyways, I think my stance is to actually just go read a whole bunch. I don’t really love the concept I’ve got, and I’d like to maybe let this all simmer for a bit more until I get to something I like. I’ll keep on writing every day (and doing this whole Morning Pages thing for a bit, since it’s easy and fun) and perhaps something will roll forth from those characters. Anywho, that’s about all I’ve got for today then.