Writing journal X (Patreon)

Okay, I’ve got this month sewn up. Now I’m doing a little addition to The Murdered World—I realize now that most stories will have a big event, and they’ll show the immediate reaction to it, then they’ll skip ahead a bit to the point where the characters have accepted it and are moving forward. Star Wars, Obi-Wan dies, Luke screams, we cut ahead to him being sad, but it’s settled in for him. But those intervening scenes where it really sinks in for him, I think you rarely see those because they’d be too intimate, too extreme, and if they weren’t pulled off right, it’d be risible.

The way I write… I don’t know, it might be good for the word count to skip from “big crisis!” to “now we’re resigned to it and a bit bored,” because it is almost sixty thousand words, it is not far from sixty thousand words. But I like having it be this big auteurist work. Like, imagine if instead of making a live-action Lilo & Stitch remake or whatever shit, Disney spent 190 million dollars on a three-hour-long Friday the 13thmovie. Would that not be the most interesting thing in the world? You haven’t even heard the cast or the premise; you wanna see the 3-hour, 190 mil Jason movie, right?

Same principle for me, I guess. I don’t want to write the version where shit doesn’t get wild. I wanna write the Caligula of vigilante thrillers.