These are very strange times in my life. I’ve been unemployed for what feels like a year, I haven’t been looking for a new job, and I know I can’t return to my previous job because it sent me three or four times to the ER due to stress. But there are silver linings, I guess. I recently decided to translate my beloved Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, the best story I’ve ever written and will ever write, into Spanish. I gave it to someone I know in person. Something they said back bothered me. It wasn’t about the quality of the story. What they said is actually a spoiler, but they said it in a way that suggested I had architected it to happen. And it bothered the fuck out of me. That story already existed as it came to me; I merely used my agency to render it as best I could, because I knew it was important.

But the comment actually sparked in me a new story regarding authorship and responsibility toward your creations. My new protagonist is a failed comic book artist, whom I already know lives in the coastal city of Zumaia. Yesterday, I figured out all the major scenes in what will likely end up being a novella. Tomorrow morning I’ll take a train to Zumaia, where I’ve never been, to take photos and notes to ground me in the setting.

Here’s the thing: I can’t immerse myself in the creative process of putting together the story like I did for We’re Fucked and Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. I can’t emphasize how psychologically destructive that level of obsessive attention to detail is. It drowns out everything else in your life. I did it in the past out of a desire for self-erasure, and pure masochism. But these days, I don’t think I can take it. Not as an unemployed person whose heart is permanently broken and whose brain may actually have been damaged by one of the emergencies I had at work about a year and a half ago. But I’ll do my best with what I have left.

I don’t believe in writing stories because you want to write one. I have dabbled in exercises for fun, but that’s not the same as a story that comes to you and you feel you need to render it. This new one is one I need to tell. It’s not going to be as great as the tale of Izar Lizarraga; nothing will. But this one will make me laugh at times instead of making me cry literally at every chapter. We’ll see how it goes.