I’m about 2,500 words into the next part of my ongoing novel The Scrap Colossus. Will probably be up in a couple of days. These last few months I’ve been trying to process the myriad notes I took on writing technique, gleaned from the loads of books on the subject I bought and read in my early twenties, which is somewhat ironic, as The Scrap Colossus is one of the strangest, most non-functional stories I have ever planned. This tale is all about Elena X. I’m the narrator, also one of the main characters, but Elena is the protagonist: her flaws, motivations and goals drive everything. It’s like The Great Gatsby, if Gatsby were a total failure.

Elena X is based on my subconscious during my twenties. The story itself is a way of burying that decade of my life, which was characterized by heartbreak, reclusion, obsession, and bad work experiences (when not outright terrible). Elena isn’t a carbon copy of me; through the process of adapting an inspiration into a narrative, a character changes in many ways, becoming unique. But I consider the story as my present self going back in time metaphysically and helping out an average of my former self during my twenties, a period in which I received no support whatsoever in the ways that mattered.

In my twenties, realizing that I had no future in the workforce (or more accurately, I feared I may off myself if I continued having to endure those experiences), I put on a serious face and wrote six novellas back-to-back. I have long forgotten how they even came to be, but I recall me hunched over in the study room at the local library, freewriting longhand like a maniac. I’m quite sure the college-age students saw me as a nutcase, which, to be fair, I am.

I believed the novellas were good enough for publication, so I sent them to a couple of contests. My tales didn’t reach the elimination rounds. Then I sent them to a few publishers. Rejected. In addition, by then I had found myself ostracized from the local writing scene; one of the most prominent instructors made a point of calling out my “lack of empathy” during a class, and there were rumors going around that an elderly instructor was blaming his stroke on my writings, concretely the excerpts I provided of the novella The Emperor Owl. I’m not sure what I intended by messing with the local writing scene, but I ended up considering it a terrible mistake that added to my life more people I had to avoid in the streets. I also found out that I dislike most other writers. Paired with my inability to get those novellas profesionally published, I basically quit writing for a year and a half, completely disillusioned. Never wrote a story in Spanish again, and I doubt I ever will.

Anyway, if you’ve been reading The Scrap Colossus, you know that it starts with Elena getting ostracized from the local writing scene (concretely a single writing course, but there was no point in stretching out that part). In real life, I found myself adrift. It wasn’t my Dark Night of the Soul per se; I had such moments throughout my teens and early twenties. But I when it comes to my creative output, I had hit rock bottom. The failure with those six novellas came after other failures: two abandoned novels, both based on an obsession I don’t want to detail, as it’s related to the main plot of The Scrap Colossus. I don’t remember what I did from the moment I gave up writing until I ended up getting a semi-regular job that didn’t entirely make me want to kill myself, but I assume there was lots of fucking around unproductively.

Very early in my twenties, I was involved in my latest, and likely last, romantic relationship. A mistake in retrospect. She ended it by monkey branching. The whole experience solidified the notion that I wasn’t made for intimate relationships, and that I didn’t want to go through such humiliations ever again. By the time I got ostracized from the local writing scene and those six novellas went nowhere, I also had given up on therapists (waste of time and money) and on interacting with local autists (had a bad experience with one of them, as well as with one of the therapists guiding the sessions; believe it or not, she was offering herself romantically in quite an open manner). So, as I mentioned, I had no support.

As I started this post suggesting, The Scrap Colossus likely doesn’t work as a regular novel. The current scene, that by now must be about seven thousand words long, almost exclusively features the two main characters sitting at a coffee shop and getting to know each other in a generally congenial manner. A big no-no. But ultimately I’m doing what I want out of fiction, and what I want rarely aligns with what’s available out there. You see, one of the reasons I’m so enamoured with manga is because many of them give you the vicarious experience of genuine camaraderie as a group of interesting people try to solve a problem.

In Western fiction, most of the characters I come across seem like unbearable assholes to me, who keep bitching to each other as if they fed on conflict. And don’t get me started on the fucking politics. I’m not sure to what extent this phenomenon is due to the writing techniques that have been passed on, or to the modern Western ethos. But Western fiction for me lacks that special feeling of making me want to keep reading just because I want to spend more time with characters I like, who seem like genuine people. With The Scrap Colossus, I expect that a few years from now, grieving the loss of yet another cast of characters, I will look back at that experience and think, “I wish I could hang out with Elena again.” It’s the main thing making me eager to wake up at five in the morning and head home soon in the afternoon, just so I can sit at my desk and continue writing.

I don’t know if anyone else is getting anything positive out of my current novel. And by anyone, I mean the three people or so reading it. Ultimately I’m not sure if I care. The notion of someone reading my stuff and enjoying it is a good thing, but it makes no difference in how I approach this stuff. Fifteen years ago I was writing entirely in the dark, and I don’t feel like I lost anything by it.

I’m not sure why I had to write these words, but I did.