In the silence between whisper and shout

You'll learn that I'm a bisexual person with slightly goth tendencies who's into things no one else I know has ever heard of. Because the first person I think of is Conrad Veidt.

Now that I've gotten my plot to do precisely what I want it to do, I no longer have an excuse to ignore the underlying issues I knew were there all along but wasn't addressing: there are no stakes, and there is precious little character development.

Why haven't I tried to fix these problems? Simply put, I'm afraid. I'm afraid to delve into the minds of my characters and figure out what matters to them. Am I afraid of what I might find? Afraid I'll end up having to throw my entire plot out and start again from scratch? Afraid I've only been deluding myself that I could write a novel? I don't know. These characters all seem so real and vibrant in my head, but come across as painfully flat on the page.

I love this book. I'm also afraid of it. I don't know if it's possible to truly love and fear something at the same time. I know the only way to deal with a fear like this is to confront it. I'm committed to finishing this book no matter what, but it's becoming clear that I'll have to step back and do some serious thinking if I want to have a solid foundation on which to build.

Why do I always have these revelations right when I'm trying to reach word-count goals? It's annoying.

I've been considering hosting a playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas on this journal, in the style of the Let's Play Archive (basically a bunch of screenshots with commentary). Not sure why, though—I already have enough on my plate writing-wise at the moment, since I restarted my book this month after my failure in November. And it's not like anyone would read it, unless I linked it on Discord, and even then, I doubt anyone would be interested.

(I had the idea of making the Courier a Pony Express rider on a mission to fix the space-time continuum, since the game contains so many references to historical figures and events. It's a silly idea, since time travel does not exist in the Fallout universe, but I can see myself having fun with it.)

I wouldn't say the book is going well, since it's as incoherent as ever thus far, but it's certainly going. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to happen in the middle and at the end; I just need to make it through the beginning. :P I'm not worried about it, though. I'm saving my worrying for the second draft.

I don't know how the pulp-fiction writers of old did it. Sure, they wrote for a living, but how they managed to write thousands of words per day that were good, or at least didn't need extensive revising, is beyond me. 625 words are as many as I can comfortably write in a day, and most of them are bad.

1. Feeling sorry for people who don't deserve it.
2. Convinced everyone secretly hates me and thinks I'm annoying.
3. Keeping my emotions bottled up, and feeling bad that I have those emotions at all, whether they're positive or negative.

Right now, it's all three at once.

It was a vanilla cake this time. It came out okay texture-wise, but ended up tasting rather strongly of coconut because the recipe called for coconut oil, and I hate coconut. Olive oil was the only other kind we had, though, and I doubt that would have worked any better.