I have plans.

This is saying something. I am not what anyone in my life would call ‘a planner’. If you can forgive the twinge hint of edgelord to the comparison, I am not unlike the Joker in Nolan’s The Dark Knight, dressed in a nurses’s outfit still complete with clown make-up, I am forced to ask the broken vial of rage sitting in the hospital and indeed the audience themsleves, “Do I really look like a guy with a plan?”

I am a hodgepodge of half plans, self-loathing, and delusions of adequacy. I am not more certain of what my day will hold than a naked man running backward through a house of wall mounted dildos.

What sort of adventures are we going to have today?

But this year I’m trying something different.

Novel or not. Successful progress or not. I have to try something different. Three years spent colliding with the madness of nothing ever being good enough, I need to let this current branch of my life alone and start cultivating something else closer to the trunk of the tree in which I define myself.

So I have decided to try and write a short story. Some of them may end up being novellas, one may end up being a novel, and a couple may not come off as anything other than concept left to die in the reignited pyre of creative epiphany.

At least that was the plan. Six days in and things are already going poorly.

I have a list of a dozen or so things waiting to be fleshed out, to give me that feeling of a child inside someone else’s toybox, but it’s never where my mind wanders. No, instead my mind wants to drag my back into hell. Into the world of Red Boar Jones.

I’ve posted about him before, and more recently. Indeed, I have considered him on and off since my senior year of college. But he was always this sort of idea, this absurd, broken man with a world, but not a story. And that hasn’t changed, not really. I just feel him closer, his world closer to mine. The fear and anxiety has my mind in cocaine-ladden shackles.

To know, to feel, that we are less than two weeks away from an organism stumbling into absolute power with the tact and finesse of a Randian frat boy has me drenched in sweat and grinding my teeth as I sleep.

Red is going to tell what’s going to happen. I’m not sure there is anything I can do to stop him.

So now I have three things: a set of stories to let the mind wander, a book that refuses to be written, and a book that refuses to be ignored.

It’s going to be a tough year.