10/31/25: divine union

If you're like me, you tend to have a lot of ideas that resist actually coming to life in a manuscript. Maybe you have trouble finishing things. Maybe you have trouble starting. Maybe you can go for a while and then hit a roadblock that you can't get past. I have experienced all of these. It's easy to hold an idea for a novel (or any creative project) in your head and go "yeah, this is a great idea, it would be so good!" but then you go to actually write it and find you can't or that it's terrible. Usually for me this is because what I've got is a premise or concept, not an actual story, not a thing. I can trick myself into thinking it's a thing when it's in my head and has yet to collide with reality and my (lack of) abilities and fail. It's really easy to feel defeated at this, and the temptation is always there to never actually work on anything so it can continue to exist in your head and never be ruined by your failure to actually write it. Lately I've been thinking about what I have done to get past this and work.

A novel tends to really get going when 2 or more ideas collide. If I have 1 idea, it tends to be inert, more of a premise than a story. When 2+ inert elements meet, they set off a chain reaction. 2 parents for conception, I guess.

My sci-fi/eviction horror novella Hate Zone was quite inert for a long time, even though it was an action story. I wrote the first draft in 2017, when I was dealing with my first and most contentious eviction. I wanted to write something that captured the powerlessness and rage I felt at having my shitty basement apartment intruded upon by realtors and prospective buyers, and by the landlord. I wanted to capture the feeling of being kicked out with nowhere to go, and no ability to stop it from happening. I was also watching a lot of terrible movies on DVDs from the library. Hate Zone was a sort of Robocop-knockoff/Terminator-knockoff/Hardware-knockoff. I was particularly inspired by the mood of Hardware. I came up with an idea for a gothic sci-fi/horror story about eviction, came up with what I felt was a pretty novel idea for the "monster" and wrote it pretty fast. When I was done, it felt like it would make an ok b-movie in the direct-to-video era but I didn't see why or how it could stand as a book.

It took on life as a book a couple years later when I went to the beach one day and, completely unconnected to HZ, wrote a bunch of satirical pseudo-philosophical manifestos. I churned out 20 or so pages of material based on reactionary transhumanist and post-human thought that I had been reading. (if you're curious, a partial list includes Xenofeminism by Laboria Cubonix, Transgender to Transhuman by Martine Rothblatt, Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert, and Curtis Yarvin's writing as Mencius Moldbug, as well as older stuff that I had been interested in for a decade or more like Kurzweil, Hans Herman Hoppe etc etc). I got excited. This would fit with Hate Zone.

In my initial draft of HZ, I had created a world where women are dehumanized as aesthetic and utilitarian objects (imagine that) and grown in vats for men to use for fun and profit. But very little of that was in the book, it was mainly just backstory for why the villain - the Hate Girl - existed (the Hate Girl is a Love Girl - a vat-grown biological sex robot - repurposed for military applications). Without meaning to, by writing a few partial fake manifestos, I had created a philosophical background for the scifi world my story was set in. Now I had not just a bad b-movie project but a book: I'd create a cut-and-paste novella consisting of my schlocky sex-doll-gone-violent monster movie plot intercut with faux-nonfiction screeds taht laid the ideological background for the capitalist powers that were at work. The real villains were not the Hate Girl but a cadre of hyperpatriarchal post-techbro businessmen. They would operate huge bioengineering startups and, in their spare time, exercise soft power in favour of their interests by steering culture with their reactionary antifeminist genetic engineering philosophy. This philosophy would masquerade as a sort of Retvrn to Natvre movement while actually being just more post-post-modern alienated gnosticism.

So now I had two major ingredients: the micro of the action plot and the macro of reactionary intellectualism. Between them was an elastic tension that fired me up to work on the story again. Most importantly, it made me feel like I now had something that could only work as a book.

And it opened new aesthetic possibilities. I wrote a new draft crammed full of cut-and-paste collage elements: computer screen readouts, diary entries, a zine-within-the-book, excerpts from my fake manifestos, and the sci-fi pow pow action. The heros of HZ are anarchist punks, so now I had a draft that fit their DIY ethos. Loose, fractured, frankensteined together, like a zine.

When I thought about how these two elements had combined to make HZ come alive for me, I realized this process had worked for me before and that the trouble I was having with other projects might be solved by it. When I think about manuscripts I've written that have come together easily and rapidly, I can look at the first draft and see 2 or more different ideas vying with each other and energizing each other. Now when I have an idea that I like but I'm struggling to get a draft to go, I step back and thik about what other idea I could mash in there to make it go.

So far this has been working well for me as far as problem-solving and productivity goes, and has further strengthened my idea that completing projects is not a matter of discipline or willpower but a matter of alchemy. When you've got the right ingredients, the thing wants to make itself happen.