Distraction

Bah, dogfucker, I had a thought and then got distracted by something and now can’t remember what it was.

Ah, yes. Worrying about the artfulness of my writing is the block. it is the thing I torture myself with and the one thing I really don’t need to worry about.

Expansion

Ok, this idea is ballooning into a full thing. A real novel, even, a kind of Homes/Watson thing with Victor as the master/genius disassembler and Orson as his ghost side-kick. This is the first story, O’s own death.

Uh, huh. And V is also an addict, but not heroine/opium, but sex, sometimes participatory, but preferably voyeur.

Don’t get bogged down in the thinking.

This idea is amazing. It opens up all kinds of avenues for gruesome back-alley stuff. Black market bodies, murder investigations and such, though I don’t really love those.

It’s getting harder and harder to make this a ghost story as more concrete details get added in. Unless he becomes a ghost that can somehow interact with the world.

The majority of the setup here is crime scene. So inventive deaths.

This, however, feels like the thing I’ve been missing, a clear world for the story to exist within. For the future, i really need to do this work for myself, and I now understand why so many writers do series and universes: it gives you a concrete reality with its own set of rules that everything follows, from morality to gravity, such that once you are fluent in it, you never need to think about it. The insecurity of this is what has been stymying me in both this book and the island one, as well as Tyul.

DO NOT TRY AND THINK TOO FAR FORWARD FOR IDEAS, THAT IS HOW YOU SHUT YOURSELF DOWN