Some very specific fears

 It occurs to me for as long as I can remember I've lived my life in high gear, waiting for the road to cooperate by producing a steep decline for me so I can gain speed.

This is a metaphor. I haven't exactly figured out how to describe the desperate need that's informing this obviously irrational strategy. Something about needing change within me to come from within, rather than being enforced by outside circumstances. Shifting down to be able to climb a hill would be acknowledging that the hill has power over me, or even acknowledging that I made a mistake putting my life-car in high gear. Better to pretend I'm above such worldly concerns as speed than to show my ignorance.

Just the same old fear of failure infecting so many of us victims of capitalism. I remember thinking it was worth it to pay any price to buy just another second before anyone had to find out I screwed up from when I was five years old. Maybe younger. And how little we've learned since.

Anyway I've deleted almost all my videogames to have less distractions to turn to when I get scared my writing isn't good enough. It's early to tell but I'm pretty sure this will let me get my book done before wasting another twenty years.

Just Writing Stuff

So sad when you go back to an old bit of writing expecting it'll have most of the chapter you want to write already done but it turns out really well written but telling the completely wrong story. The momentum and the stakes in the conflict is wrong, the characters' relationships are wrong, the setting is wrong, some character decisions don't even make sense with what they were doing at the time, you've got to delete half of it before you can start and half of what you keep you just have to hope doesn't sound totally off and Frankensteined together but it's just so well written you can't stand to cut it.

PS. Black lives matter. I try to do what I do well for the cause - write - and I hope the absence of a direct commentary on current events doesn't trick anyone into thinking I support the way things are. I try, in between yelling at racists on Twitter anyway.

On writing the mundane

I spend far too much time thinking through (actually vividly daydreaming my way through fictional scenes of) these boring details. Like, to take an example out of thin air, if I have a very rich character bribing her way through getting a library built in her city, how does that happen exactly? Who does she bribe and how does she find out about who those people are? If I was very rich my solution would be to get a lawyer to do it for me. A lawyer's job is not knowing laws so much as knowing people, I think. Knowing the channels through which to leverage power, be it in the form of legal authority or plain money or whatnot, to get people to show up where they need to be.

So, our character employs a lawyer to do lawyer stuff. Simple. But still I go out of my way to try to imagine the conversations they have, the ways the character need to convince everyone of her serious intentions, the existence of her wealth, et cetera, and how they convince her of their skills. The details of what their work entails, exactly. We'd have representatives of the city government and city planning and school department and architects talking about permissions and city images and education and building codes and wiring and plumbing and materials and designs and timeframes; possibly librarians and construction workers weighing in, maybe a rich asshole crashing the meetings because they can't countenance even a private library giving things to the pleebs for free.

That's as far as I can imagine. I'd have to do research to find out for sure, and I don't even know how much I have to learn. And I hate doing research. And, what's important, the story doesn't even need it. I'm writing a feel-good freewheeling romantic fantasy about using godlike powers and the wealth of Vladimir Putin to fix the world, it doesn't need to go into the minutiae of how buildings get built. It would be sort of like the blue-ray bonus feature on Blood Diamond where the filmmakers document their starting up a diamond mine in Sierra Leone to see how it's done, but intra-narrative instead of extra-narrative.

But still, I hate stories that just present large sums of money as a magic wand that solves problems. If Iron Man says his suit cost six billion dollars I want to know how that happened. It can't be the materials; a 200 kg suit of solid gold would cost close to one million dollars. And Tony is a genius scientist and engineer, he develops and builds the machinery himself. Is his time worth a billion dollars per hour? Where does the money go?

The movement of money and information. You can't cheat these basic logistics or you get a bad story. And you can't explain these dull details or you get a bad story. So I just spend way too much time thinking it through and then write "She spent five minutes on the phone with the lawyer".