title

Whatever

Totally phoning this one in today. I have other shit to write before I go to bed, but I realised that I forgot to do anything here.

Good day. The cacao experiment continues to not crash and burn. The positive feelings allow the day to flow more smoothly, which allows me to engage in sessions better, which makes me feel generally better and more satisfied. Nothing much else to say really. Went to the store to get parts for one of my contraptions. Hopefully it’ll work.

Goodnight.

Blorp

Ok, so it’s a bit pat if Orson goes to the neurologis himself and it just so happens that the kid who kills himself is also a pateint of the same neurologist. What makes much more sense is that Orson is led to the neurologist on account of the kid’s brain scan. Some light randomly flashes in the doctor’s office, or there’s a brownout, or the doctor accidentally hits the light switch, something like that.

This is the essence of every detective novel, there is no happenstance, you may not know where you’re going, but there’s always some piece of information that is leading you wherever you’re headed. Anything that breaks causality pushes you out of the story.

TAKE IT FROM THE TOP

To be honest, I really just want to start the whole thing again from the beginning. There’s no inspiration to this at all, and re-working another 4,000 words into the first person… I might as well just start again it’ll take me so long. I also feel like I need to do a lot more research to come up with a story line that will really work.

But then, maybe I’m just being over-ambitious with this, expecting it to become a novel. If anything, it feels like a novelette, or a novella at the most. 20,000 words max, but really, it could be 10,000 if I was more economical in the writing.

Don’t worry about skipping between locations. Chapters are plotting, not temporal.

I’m really unsure about the premonitions thing. I just don’t think it fits into this story, unless I finagle it into the ghost story thing again.

The big muscle man could easily become a spirit of some kind, as it was supposed to be originally. The premonitions, the ID scanner.

Only one in 1,000,000 people become ghosts when they die, and it is utterly random. The myth about it being intense deaths and unfinished business is just romantic confirmation bias. When you look at the statistics, there’s no correlation at all.

Some people can see ghosts, but even fewer than actually become them. Neither Orson, nor Victor are one of these people. They deal with the corporeal dead, not the incorporeal.

*handwave* magical realism… he has premonitions, and is losing his mind, and has epilepsy, and dies and becomes a ghost.

See, this is the problem, this is where DWS is exactly right, once you start thinking about the plot and trying to plan all of the logic of the story, you’re fucked.

The main reason for the conflict around this point is the sheer amount of explaining you have to do to make the ghost thing work. Some popel can see him and some can’t? How? Why? Only kids can see him and certain open-minded or highly religious adults?

If he doesn’t die, things simplify immensely, but also allow for more complexity. There is a lot of potential in this underground city of absurd, obvious, and accepted inequality. Dark stories of people doing bad things, but always with a middle-to-happy ending.

Ok, so he is definitively not a ghost. He has epilepsy/schizophrenia, and needs to continue taking his medication, otherwise things go squirly. But otherwise he exists in a concrete world. He gets bad juju feelings and what seem to him to be premonitions, but they aren’t as clear-cut as I’d originally had it. That can be a different series of stories. For right now, the point is to work on writing clearly and strongly. A bit of linguistic muscle ain’t bad.