I sat down this afternoon with a goal: write.

It’s the same goal I’ve always had for every shred of spare time, but lately my spare time as been relegated to extensive bouts of napping and general lamentations of the creatively stifled.

I’ve been stuck on the same bit of a novel for the better part of two years. Probably, time stopped having meaning in the context of writing once you stop making progress. Null sets combined with null sets don’t grow, the just fold together like temporal paper and leave you opening yourself to the idea four months later realizing that the last time you touch the keyboard or the notebook was some rogue night in January, no doubt stoned on exhaustion and staring as incoherently and overwhelmed as the attempt before it.

This is the point mania slips in. Not wishing to fall into the stifling box of broken and obsolescent creatives, you start tugging at strings, deleting and moving words from the paragraphs you’ve accumulated over countless nights in order create something new enough you can call it progress, or more excuse yourself as being lost in experimentation. Any sort of movement forward or sideways, hell backwards would do if it meant some former flaw was discovered that needed to be addressed. Just to move, to be able to feel the words arranging and collecting in the way they should would be such a lovely thing as to approximate being born again between the breasts of Aphrodite.

This is all, in what creative circles is derisively known as whining. I know this, but I also know my hands are running across the keyboards with an ease I can find in no other way, so it’s taking the Pyrrhic victory with the not so small crevit of antagonizing your demons and anxieties in process.

They’ve already got me by the balls, might as well let them get a good squeeze in every once awhile, renew the cycle, or some such rot.

So the book. The book starts off simple. A relationship ended by headhunting and poaching of a girlfriend all the way across the world to a company that even the internet doesn’t seem to know a thing about. Meanwhile, that void lingers, driving him further into depression and grief as his dreams become more violent and deadly each night. The days are filled with hiding, coping, and slowly introducing the psychosis that follows one who even with his eyes, closed isn’t making the connections required to call it rest. Madness, paranoia, semi-anonymous sex, and no shortage of alcohol are indulged in order to make the smell and size of the apartment seem somehow less suffocating. Until one of the dreams crosses the realm from synaptic fiction to trans-existential reality. The dreams are no longer dreams, but invasions, his mind following and occasionally seizing control of strangers’ scattered all across the world. He watches and occasionally engages these unknown souls moments before their sudden and violent kiss with oblivion. The answers will come, clues trickled through side glances and characters, but it has become something so loaded in a specific moment that it’s, to my mind, become the crux of the transition for the first 80% of the novel and the last 20%.

It is the place where everything crumbles and the world you know and the world as it is are so tangentially opposed to each other that you are left reeling and distrusting everything that has been given to you before this moment.

It is the main character breaking through the wall of conscious and going from passive mental observer to a fully consciousness invasion and supplanting of an individual’s mind in order to save them from the death he knows is waiting somewhere around the corner.

It’s slightly more complicated than that and infinitely more complicated to build the required materials for this moment. The evolution of the novel from one about grief and madness to one of origins and unfathomable chaos.

So instead of working on that I’m telling you about it. Thereby psychologically fulfilling my idea of progress by telling the four of you that will read this that beyond the weirdness that makes up this blog, there is something many times stranger still waiting in the wings to be finished, published, and consumed as my catharsis, a spewed and smoothed novel of loneliness, madness, and alcohol that I won’t say is any good, but desperately hope it might be.