e r i s e t h

Just spent 45 minutes researching what a specific street in a city smells like in october so i could write the word "damp." the word is in the final draft. it is doing its job. it cost me 45 minutes and a mild obsession with historical weather records. worth it. the word is perfect. you would not believe how hard i worked on that word.

In biology they told us that the eye doesn't actually see everything in the room, it fills in most of it from memory and assumption. your brain is just confidently making stuff up about what's probably there and you believe it because you have no reason not to. and i thought that was just a vision fact but actually it's the most important thing i know about unreliable narrators. your character isn't lying. they genuinely see the room they expect to see. that's so much scarier.

Writers have two modes and they are "i haven't written in three weeks and i am rotting from the inside and everything feels wrong and i don't know who i am anymore" and "i wrote for four hours straight and forgot to eat and it's dark outside and when did that happen and i feel like a god" and there is nothing in between. no chill. no medium setting. just famine or feast and a very confused nervous system.

americans are sooo desensitized to guns and sometimes it manifests in ways that affect your media literacy. like remember in the first episode of sherlock when john watson opens up his drawer and you see a gun in there and youre supposed to understand that this is narratively significant and conveys his suicidality as well as his willingness to skirt rules and laws but the first time i watched it i was like oh well theres his desk gun. lots of people have those

A non-writer asked me "but where do you get your ideas" and i genuinely did not know how to explain that it's not a place. it's not a website. it's not a folder. it's that i was on the bus and a woman was holding a paper bag very carefully and something about the way she held it made me need to know what was inside and then i needed to know why she was sad about it and then there was a whole person and then there was a whole story and the bus had already stopped and i missed my stop. that's where.