Ever since I started writing my new novel, The Scrap Colossus, that my basement girl urged me to work on, I’ve been waking up regularly at one to three in the morning, often struggling to fall asleep later. My dreams are extremely vivid; although I forget them upon waking, I remember traveling through tremendously detailed environments, meeting people I had never met before, and having coherent dialogues with them. Of course, dreams are a mystery. I have a hard time believing that the human brain is capable of sustaining such internally coherent worlds for hours every night; I wouldn’t be surprised if we actually connect to something, some other plane of reality. In any case, the increased vividness of my dreams, how I wake up spontaneously with ideas ready to be noted down, and the rest of the time I feel immersed in a somewhat oniric state, they are a testament to the fact that my brain allows my subconscious to flow mostly unimpeded at the moment, which is the best possible state of being.

Basement girl regularly knocks on the ceiling to share meaningful moments for the new novel, which I hurry to write in my growing document of material (131,839 words as of now). Recently she had been struggling to connect both storylines (the one about Elena writing her novel, and the novel-within-the-novel involving the stand-in for a certain songwriter I was obsessed with); she proposed alternatives that never quite gelled. But earlier today, as I peed at work, minutes away from sitting with my serrano ham sandwich and reading a bit more of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, my basement girl had an eureka moment and hurriedly painted a vivid daydream of how the climaxes of both storylines should merge. Obviously I can’t be specific, but the point is that the major hurdles to develop this novel have been overcome thanks to my beloved girl’s tireless work, and now I can write each scene at my leisure while tinkering with the architecture from time to time.

Artificial intelligence has been, unsurprisingly, very useful. As I improve my structure, that includes the detailed summary and purpose of each scene, I ask either OpenAI’s Orion 1 or DeepSeek’s R1 to offer constructive criticism, trying to determine the weak points. AI is “objective” (of course, each company tries to inject their own ideological bias into their AI), but asking AI for criticism solves the issue of requiring a human being to criticize your stuff, which they would almost invariably half-ass to avoid getting into arguments or hurting your precious feelings. I regularly involve AI in my interactive erotica, so I know it’s quite comfortable with being rough.

Anyway, the worst part of having regained my creative stride is definitely having to work for a living. I should be at my writing desk. But at least my job computer includes an internet connection, so I can rearrange my notes and work on development further.

Hope you’re enjoying my new story, whoever the hell you are. Yes, you. I’m right behind you. In any case, my tale is a bit of a hard sell, but it’s not like I write for others. I’m sure at least one person will get something valuable out of it.

I have a few things to say regarding the first scene of my new novel, named The Scrap Colossus. In the first scene, that encompasses part 1 and part 2, the protagonist attends a writing class and presents her latest piece, with generally disastrous consequences. From now on there will be “spoilers” when it comes to the two released parts, so if you’re interested, you should probably read them first.

First, let’s start with the following three photos:

That weird-looking fellow, all six-foot-two and two-hundred thirty pounds of him, happens to be me from back in 2015, when I attended the writing course that the first scene of my novel is based on. I don’t own, or at least haven’t found, better quality photos, because I hate being photographed. I suppose I’ve always had some degree of body dysmorphic disorder, and I don’t appreciate how I look at all. It doesn’t help that in my fantasies I’m rarely myself.

Anyway, that version of me from ten years ago presented a piece to the class. In it, the instructor, who had requested to be the protagonist, traveled back in time. Instead of showing her having a good time, I sent her to a primeval epoch. There, after suffering a bit, she ended up accidentally preventing the evolution of mammals, which led to her vanishing from existence after a little jab at how she focuses on her social image. Well, the class didn’t like it one bit. When I finished reading it, the room was silent, and shortly after, the nervous instructor brought up the fact that I had never mentioned her daughter. She accused me of lacking empathy. All of this may be sounding quite familiar. Because fiction is generally much better than reality, my fictional version of events is far more eloquent. Anyway, the class continued, with me seated there while wondering why on earth had I decided to sign up for that course. By the way, if that instructor read the two parts I posted on here, she’d be livid.

At the time I was enrolled in two writing courses. The other was imparted by a local writer of English origin who was in his eighties at the time. His classes were a sham. He basically put as assignments for us to continue excerpts from his stories, and then tried to guilt us into buying the books the excerpts belonged to. He let us present our own pieces, but whenever anyone said a word that he didn’t know (and many of them were relatively simple words), he accused us of being pretentious, of trying to look more intelligent than we were. He argued with me for a bit about the word “jade,” for example, which I used to refer to the color of a sea. Throughout the weeks, I presented scenes from the novellas I was revising at the time (you may already know Smile and Trash in a Ditch, although there were four others). Well, the guy was supposed to take the pieces home and correct them or whatever, but by the end, he refused to do so with mine. He was clearly bothered by them.

The way he pushed back my excerpt during the last class, which happened a day after being accused of lack of empathy by the instructor of the previous class, made me decide that I had no business involving myself in these people’s lives, so I just quit both classes and detached myself from the local writing scene. I never interacted with any of them again. Perhaps a week or so later, the instructor in his eighties suffered a stroke that ultimately led to his death, and I heard through the grapevine that he actually blamed me for it. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if that blame is real or if I hallucinated it.

The last time I saw him, he was weakened from his stroke, and some family member was holding his arm as he tottered down a corridor of the library. The moment he spotted me coming along the same corridor, he looked scared, and told the woman holding his arm to move into some adjacent room. Can’t say I feel too bad; not only I found him quite fraudulent as a writer, but also who fucking blames a stroke on one of his students presenting stories? And there’s something extremely disturbing for me that as a writer, he was so disturbed by someone else’s writing. However, it wasn’t surprising: he admitted that he hadn’t read fiction in decades, even though he kept writing it. But perhaps his demise never bothered me due to my lack of empathy.

Yeah, I can’t care about most people. I was wired that way. I’m not a good guy, nor do I pretend to be. I do care enormously about people in certain circumstances and from certain angles. My new novel is mostly autobiographical, although I mix in many elements from other people I came to know. So many other shameful aspects of my life will be brought kicking and screaming into the light. That’ll be intriguing to render.

I think that The Scrap Colossus will be a solid, entertaining tale about a reclusive autistic person who is trying to honor the songwriter she’s obsessed with by writing an elaborate novel about the songwriter’s life. That’s what has to happen because that’s what I did. Full-blown autistic obsession that lasted from about 2011 to 2013, an experience and perspective that most people aren’t familiar with, so maybe it will make for an interesting story. Regardless of what others will think about it, I need to do it because my subconscious has demanded it, so my hands are tied.

The hardest parts to handle will be the many, many scenes of the story within a story, the novel that the protagonist wrote inspired by this songwriter. The novel actually exists in different stages of production (the first two “books” of the novel are revised to a publishable state, the third would require at least a couple of revisions, and the last two books are in the draft stage), so it would be feasible to include actual excerpts from that other novel into the current narrative, but I think I’ll prefer for my narrator to act as myself reviewing and offering criticism to my actual past self’s production from ten years ago. That sounds like the funnest angle to me. Besides, I no longer feel like the same person I was in 2015, let alone during my obsession, so I can be somewhat objective.

Anyway, it’s a quarter to four in the afternoon of this Saturday. Although I’m quite groggy due to having woken up at five in the morning to finish the second part of my new novel, now I’ll head to the location where the third scene is going to take place, so I can take notes. Thankfully the story is set where I actually live; I hate having to fake my impressions of a place I’ve never been in, even though you can go quite far with photographs and videos.

That’s all for now, I think. See ya.

The holidays are over in my country (they end later than in others). I’ve bought myself a new pair of VR glasses, my fourth over the years. The feeling of being immersed in a VR experience can’t be properly described in words. You forget it over time if you haven’t been at it. The brain gets deceived into believing that you’re truly walking in wide open spaces, and that a zombie is heading toward you. You reach with one hand to hold it in place while with your other you push a knife through its brain, and in the meantime you feel like you’re going to get bitten. Too bad VR hasn’t progressed far enough yet so that it’s more mainstream and the hardware less cumbersome. Part of the issue is that people simply don’t have enough space to play VR with the necessary leeway. Still, you can just fire up a ping pong match and play against a computer while striking the ball as if you were handling a real paddle, so that’s cool. The porn is also fantastic, of course, although I have the sort of female mind that gets turned on more by written erotica. I say that somewhat facetiously, but given that I grew up with barely any testosterone due to my pituitary tumor, the lack of testosterone during development likely made permanent changes to my brain.

Anyway, I suppose that the reason why I needed to write these words is that I found myself at the hospital cafeteria (I work at a hospital), holding a serrano ham sandwich in one hand, an ebook reader in the other, and I had to hold back tears, because getting through Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger a second time has turned out to be an emotionally taxing task. That novel is about grief regardless of anything else that happens on the surface. It starts with the protagonist, Alicia Western’s bereaved brother Bobby, coming across a mystery through his work as a salvage diver, but that’s just an excuse for the main goal, that seems to be about exploring the fringes of human experience and knowledge. Grief is the bedrock of it all: there’s hardly a scene in which you don’t feel that Bobby is preventing himself from reminiscing about his dead sister, and whenever anyone brings her up, he’s usually moments away from leaving. And I feel Alicia’s presence buried under it all as if it speaks to something or someone else from my life, buried in a similar way.

Only in my late thirties I began to understand my complicated relationship with grief. I don’t process it well at all. Three of my cats died, and as part as my OCD, I get intrusive thoughts about them regularly. Those memories cause me cold aches in my chest, the sudden need to be left alone, every single time. I don’t even retain untainted memories of them. But there’s something deeper there, a missing presence that should have been there from the beginning but wasn’t. I recall feeling that way even as a child. The catalyst for me becoming even aware of the fact that I was grieving came when my subconscious suddenly compelled me to write the story Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, which became one of my favorite things that I’ve ever done. I’ve never had anyone like Izar Lizarraga in my life (if there had been and she had died, I wouldn’t be here, and if she had lived, I would have had better things to do than write these words). Sadly, I’ve never been in love in anything resembling a healthy way. I’ve had obsessions that tasted like love to me, but as in two people who love each other and want to be in a romantic relationship, never. Obviously I won’t in the future, as I don’t expect to ever be in a relationship again.

As it relates to McCarthy and his The Passenger, mainly the figure of Alicia Western, McCarthy achieved what I suppose is the usually unspoken goal of every writer: to haunt someone else with whatever has haunted you. But isn’t it a necessity of that very haunting, a “mind virus” that uses the host (a story) to pass itself into new hosts? Is it a good thing that when now I think of Alicia Western and her tragedy, my chest gets cold and tight, and my eyes watery? It feels more compelling than not feeling anything, for sure, but I don’t know if it’s precisely contributive to my survival as a human being. I haven’t forgotten the other stories that have haunted me, and I’m sure they’ll inhabit my depths for the rest of my life. If anything at all remains of me when I cross over into the dark, I’m sure they’ll be floating around in the mix. The question that comes to mind is, “So what?”

So what regarding anything we do, I suppose, about any legacy we may want to leave. Good luck leaving anything for the future in this civilization, where the “modern Westerners” are deliberately trampling over what came before. If they get their way, they’ll erase your legacy from the register. At the very least, they’ll appropriate and contaminate it. It doesn’t feel these days that there’s such a thing as “leaving a thing that matters.” It’s perhaps an odd thing for me to say, when McCarthy’s last book affected me this way, but I’m just a dude in Spain, completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

The young woman pictured is McCarthy’s real Alicia Western, named Augusta Britt:

She was an abused foster girl, sixteen or possibly fourteen, that McCarthy fell in love with when he was forty-one or so, during a period of his life in which he wore atrocious pants. And what I meant to bring up with this is that I don’t doubt for a moment that if McCarthy had the option to return back in time and spend his life with her, he would have done it, even if it meant sacrificing every word he ever wrote. Perhaps I’m sure of that because I would have. The arts are a substitute to what you can’t live.

For the last few months, ever since I finished writing my story about a motocross legend, I haven’t been compelled to lose myself in the creation of a story again. I mean it literally: my subconscious isn’t about that shit at the moment. Getting through the aforementioned story took a lot out of me. I suspect it tore out some festering parts that were part of the fuel that made me anxious to tell other stories in the past. I don’t know when I’ll return to this game, hopefully to finish my ongoing novel first. At this point of my life, I’m just drifting through it all, trying to hold on to whatever sense of fulfillment, or at least comfort, floats by.

I guess that’s all I needed to say today.

The following is an excerpt from a letter that McCarthy wrote to his muse (the inspiration for Alicia Western as well as many others):

I have to confess that in a way, I was hoping that I wouldn’t hear from you anymore. I have to confess too that there are times when I feel enormous resentment toward you. Baby, there was nothing wrong with our love. You just threw it away. I never hear that song I don’t start crying. I never got over those blue eyes. I make lists of places in the world to go and things to do now that I have no responsibilities, but everything is just empty.