The beta-blockers that I take for my heart issues put me out of commission by eight in the evening (if I’m that lucky). Last night I fell asleep at nine, only to wake up from a nightmare at midnight. Didn’t sleep a wink the rest of the night. At five I finally dragged my weary old bones to my desk and freewrote the remainder of chapter 112 of my ongoing novel. At six I prepared myself some decaf, took a shit, showered, then left for work.

Such nights, I try to force myself to sleep, but usually my brain falls into sequences of daydreams slash intrusive thoughts that I don’t recall entering. They force me to confront all kinds of nasty crap, from bad memories to hypothetical situations from which I could need to defend myself.

Among the many things that my brain bothered me with last night were a couple of questions: you’re supposed to be a novelist, right? Then how come you disdain most novels you come across? Well, brain, if you should know, I abandon most novels I start because the majority annoy the living hell out of me. The modern ones are much worse; the author is in a hurry to assure the reader (but mainly the gatekeepers) that he or she is onboard with the Sole-Allowed Ideology, the secular god of the godless (and I say that as an atheist). As many writers have said, you won’t get published these days if you don’t belong to the right demographics and don’t believe the Right Things. I’m an ethnic European dude who wishes that the Romans had never tolerated the growth of Abrahamic religions, so I’m pretty much toast. I also write smut, though, which is hard to publish.

Politics aside, I feel that most writers waste my fucking time. I’m a hedonist: I care about beauty and about having fun. That’s not to say that I elude bad thoughts (as if I could); there’s plenty of beauty in the black depths, often more than in the light. But my point is, I can hardly remember what novels gave me what I sought from them.

In my early twenties I fell in love with Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, which is, curiously enough, the least Murakami-ish of his novels as far as I’m aware. Years later I found out that he got the urge to write that novel after a girlfriend he cheated on and abandoned quite cruelly ended up killing herself; Murakami was in his mid-thirties or so when he found out about her death, and it impacted him. Destroyed him, perhaps.

I’m trying to remember what other novels impacted me in a similar way. Maybe John Fowles’ The Collector, and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. To a lesser degree, Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity. Can’t remember any other at the moment. For me, they have in common that you live through those novels. You see what the protagonists see, you touch what they’re touching, you feel what they’re feeling, and they rarely pull you out of the then-and-there. That’s what I inject into my own stories: the experience of sensing the world through a peculiar person, forcing me (as the writer) to deal with their feelings, neuroses, delusions, as they try to better or ruin their life. I want to be there, mainly because I have never felt “here” in my own life. The vicarious escape allows me to forget for a while that after all this time I’m still me.

Last night’s rumination made me think about my previous novel, first one in English, titled My Own Desert Places, about some ghost who comes back to life because she fell in love with a suicidal person. I remember moments from that fictional life as if they were memories of mine, stronger than most moments I’ve actually lived through. I think that for some people, maybe just defective ones, the act of immersing themselves in producing such narratives convinces their brains to record those moments as real experiences. I remember eating a lemon ice cream with the protagonist’s beloved while staring at the bay of a neighboring town. I recall when the protagonist lost her mind during a long trip to Asturias. I remember hanging out in the balcony of a house that doesn’t exist while looking at and talking to someone who never existed. I feel pangs of pain and regret for the griefs that the story contained. In a few months I intend to revise the whole thing (mostly to catch glaring errors) and republish it, but I suspect that I will need to take advantage of a couple of weeks of unemployment to withstand the mood changes to which the process will subject me.

As I kept thinking last night, I remembered a series of books that I truly enjoyed, that I looked forward to reading as a teen: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. What a clever, funny bastard that guy was. I wanted to continue reading those novels if only to find out what witty thoughts or images he would come up with, many of which made me smile or laugh. Why did I stop reading his stuff? Back in my early twenties, it became obvious that Terry was dying of whatever brain shit ended up sending him to his grave, and that someone else, likely his daughter, was writing his books. But as an adult, I think I never returned to his works because I associated them with my miserable middle school and high school years, of which I remember very little likely due to trauma-induced amnesia. I’m not sure if I’m exaggerating with that, given that I was constantly slipping in and out of psychosis; I was an undiagnosed autistic teen who lacked a place to be himself and do the things he needed to do, and who was never left alone. I despise my teenage years to the extent that I threw away the vast majority of my writings from that era (and I was close to reaching a million words by the time I was nineteen), as well as the letters I received from people I knew. That last part I regret; years later, I wished I would have gotten further insight into some people I knew from back then (as referenced in my free verse poem “A Ghastly Scar”).

Anyway, I figured out the reading order of Pratchett’s City Watch series, and since then I’ve already read through twenty percent of his Guards! Guards!. Either Pratchett influenced what I wrote later on, or he just had the same notions about what I want out of fiction: the joy of coming across interesting “images,” and being amused and intrigued by silly and/or absurd situations. Those are what I look forward the most when I’m writing my own stuff, and I usually feel that a chapter is good enough when I have come up with a few such instances.

Tomorrow I have to visit my cardiologist for a check-up, and I’m still not sure to what extent I will share that I feel in a daze during most of my workday (even woozy at times, like today when I was fixing a printer’s network connection), perhaps due to the beta-blockers I’m forced to take in apparent perpetuity. Also, that ever since a certain jab, the pressure I feel in the area of my heart has gotten worse over time, although I don’t feel it daily. Last week, after five days of covid, when I left the house to figure out if I had recovered enough to take a walk, for a long minute I felt a stabbing pain in my old ticker. And I’m reluctant to share that with my appointed cardiologist because the fucker got annoyed at the reality that the jab caused my heart damage, which a different cardiologist confirmed. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if any of these days I simply pass out suddenly and crack my head open against the floor, or end up with ventricular fibrillation, which would drop me in seconds. Just today, one of my female coworkers was missing because her brother, as he was jogging near his home, passed out for no apparent reason and broke his nose, and now he’s in Intensive Care. Months ago, a different coworker’s brother, a football player in his early twenties who was getting regular check-ups, dropped dead in the shower. His remains were found about a week later, hot water still running.

I’ve barely started the current contract and I already yearn for it to end. I’ll never get used to the life of an adult. I want to wander around while daydreaming and scribbling nonsense in notebooks like I spent my days doing as a kid.