As of the eighth of this month, I’ve been writing my novel We’re Fucked for two years. Two goddamn years of near-daily, painstaking work that has filled plenty of my spare time, as well as whatever time I could steal from work. The novel is already 3.12 times longer than the average. A few humans out there in this wide world have followed Leire’s descent into interdimensional derangement from the beginning, and if you’re one of those people, I must question your motivation, your sanity, and maybe even your level of mental retardation; I can’t imagine anyone other than myself genuinely enjoying this story, that delves deep into my psychological issues. In any case, thank you for the blips of dopamine that I receive whenever someone presses like on my stuff, and I hope you’re getting something out of the narrative other than nightmares.

I’m a couple of days away from finishing the current chapter, which is the climax of its sequence, as well as the longest chapter in it. My current contract at work is supposed to end this Friday. If I’m lucky and they don’t extend it under some pretense, next week, happily unemployed, I’ll take a documenting trip to a certain beautiful spot in Donostia, Jacqueline’s city, because the following scene is supposed to take place there. The protagonists of my previous novel also visited the place, but I faked the whole thing up; I hadn’t been there since I was a kid. I’m a grown-up writer now, or at least a literal grown-up even if it happened against my will, so I figured that I could make the effort of traveling there like I’ve done for some other real-life spots. I suppose that I’ll upload some pictures taken with the shitty camera of my tablet.

I spend the rest of my spare time, when I’m not reading, taking a walk, or despairing for the future of Europe, playing video games. This week I’ve gotten into Crusader Kings 3 once again, using the Community Mods for Historicity compilation. Given that I don’t plan on burdening any innocent child with my genes, it always felt weird to play a game focused on creating an enduring dinasty, but then again in real life it’s rare to kill your neighbor, gift their land to your child, and get rewarded for it (unless you’re from the Middle East?).

Anyway, behold the king of the Kingdom of Navarre, my alter ego, forty-five years of age at that point:

Quite dapper, if I say so myself. I always pick the Kingdom of Navarre because some of my ancestors were from there. Although I wanted to play a Hellenist, I would have gotten dog-piled on by my Catholic and Muslim neighbors, so I picked some obscure Christian faith that inexplicably was focused on carnal desires and didn’t have a head of faith. As for my achievements so far, I stole Brittany from the Bretons (although I’m currently working towards hybridizing my culture with theirs), part of the duchy of Gascogne from the French (because a couple of counties were Basque; the French had split some years ago, which made it easier), a vertical strip of the east of Iberia, as well as part of Algeria (because some guy there asked me to oust his brother). Navarre has ended up as an unsightly vertical country that spans from Upper Brittany to slightly south of Tlemcen in North Africa. I try to avoid thinking about the shape of my domain. In general, most afternoons after work I look forward to spreading my medieval reign of depravity throughout southern Europe. My alter ego is already fifty years old, and my daughter slash heir is trying to murder me, so I’ll likely continue playing as that wretched mother of five soon. You must steal so much land from your neighbors so that four non-heirs don’t take most of your heir’s titles when you die.

That’s as much as I care to share about my life right now. Ta-ta, as one sexy demon says.