### **Morning Pages** 1:53AM: Well, I did my thesis work yesterday. Mirrored. Instead of prioritizing Anatomy or CW 198. Arguably my Mirrored novella is the most important priority. But it didn’t feel enough like work. I should be facing my fear more this week. Brainstorming is work but it’s not hard and it’s even fun. Or maybe I have it wrong. Maybe I can make 198 work fun by being bullheaded about it. I really wish I had more time to work on 3 separate tasks for Anatomy. I feel like I have no juice left in two days just to work on it. I will though. Even if it’ll cost me 198. Bruh. Ma’am Marby is only going back on 17th. I have time. She hasn’t responded to my classmate. Maybe it’s just my luck that I have 2 absentee profs this sem. My supposedly last courses. Constantly amazed at the interlocking set of decisions that I made yesterday. It seems so unlikely and yet they all happened so that I have a plot now of moderate appeal and very interesting themes. And a trickster scheming character who’s also lovable and redeems themselves in the end by sacrificing itself. It’s creative flow, and I’m really antsy to get this same cocktail for my Anatomy attempt which requires real brains for that crucial chapter 1. I just need to start on outline, then synopsis, then I’ll really dig in writing that ghost haunting a politician in the prologue. I just feel very scared of craft books and applying them. They feel like an insurmountable structure I have to chore my way through just to get a recognizable and functioning story. It’s why I seemingly sputter out because pantsing can only get me so far before I have memory failures and illogical characters and haphazard themes. So now I really have to make Anatomy into a “divorce” book, begging the question so that it actually happens in real life because people see it happening in fiction. Unless I make it so that divorce law passes, with a Pyrrhic victory, with the politician who refused to vote yes be haunted. And that’s not all she wants anyway. OH GOD OH GOD I CAME UP WITH A (STUPID) REASON. At some point John gives her the hint that maybe he is giving her the out (to deflect the idea or not that he might be the one who wants out) with annulment, but she says that “**An annulment declares a marriage invalid from the beginning, like it never legally happened**, while a **divorce** ends a valid marriage.” She has a principle (perhaps pride) that makes annulment really repelling and something she doesn’t want (ironically because it’s like it erases the reality of a whole marriage—like a disappeared ghost) Now ghost wants not only separation with divorce (John would have had to divorce her first in an acceptable way to her so that he’s also free to pursue Yasmine “the right way” but she also wants punishment for kabits everywhere and their erring partners. Like probably not monetary, because she isn’t in it for the money. Her pride is at stake. She is angry at the politician at the start because the landmark case—which you will brainstorm, OMG a fun thing I hope—is so eerily similar to her own situation of a wife being forced to live with bigamy. 4:43AM: Good news: I have now just figured out some triangle language stuff to be invoked so that printer notices me!!! Or Justine. Bad news: it will probably be longer than 20,000. I have more ideas than can be fitted into a 20k novella. Who is going to take a 40,000 novella? GigaNoto? OH HOLY FRIES I JUST REALIZED. I ALREADY HAVE A READY “FIRST CHAPTER.” WHAT BETTER WAY TO START MY CLARION THAN WITH MIRRORED?????? AND I ALREADY HAVE THE BAREBONES OUTLINE AND SYNOPSIS ANYWAY!!!! OMG!!!!!!!! I HAVE EVERY REASON to do this. First of all, I’ll work on Mirrored with my Clarion cohort, and I’ll shelve this project to be my second more “experimental” work after I finish writing Anatomy with the skills I learned at Clarion!!! And I’ll still be able to debut with Anatomy probably in 2029 na lang. At least I’ll be able to do it. I’ll just have to be really fast. But I need to weigh carefully the pros and cons of debuting with a very original work, instead of a reimagining. YOU KNOW WHAT. FUCK IT. Reread Sydney’s Matches story. I am going to make it win an award if I have to. Or not. I don’t care about awards so much as actually making a compelling story with nice prose. I just need to feel amazed at myself. Well, I’m stretched out to my limit and my thinking is beginning to slow down at 5:47AM. I don’t see how words are able to form at this point. Trying to force a plot when I don’t know shit about structure is hard. I can only think of causality in a very limited way if I have no idea what my story really is yet, but I have a sense of the ending. 7:32AM: Still not asleep. Raring to buy electric toothbrushes for me and my family. But maybe in December. I have to prioritize getting money to consult on Chaos draft. Woke up 5:20PM. There’s shooting sharp pain in my right pinky finger. Hoping to God it isn’t carpal tunnel syndrome. Also, I won a Tin House lottery! BRUH. The universe’s arrow landed on me!! I realized I haven’t really had a good cry over a movie. I need to find one so that it shocks my system again, something to aspire to and reorient my emotional barometer. What I pretentiously like: Quanta Magazine, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sigur Ros, MA’AM KWE IF YOU CAN SEE THIS, PLS REPLY 🥲 20mg Dihexa mixed in 1ml DMSO — 2,211 for complete equipment+DMSO + 5100 PHP for Dihexa. Some anecdotes on Dihexa saying it wipes attention span. I should be able to counteract this by focusing on my discipline and habits. Minor irritations: cockroaches in my CR, small flies in my room that are apparently surviving off nothing. 1:15PM: VALUE EVERYTHING. FAMILY. YOUR PRECIOUS TIME. ALL SLIPPING AWAY ANYWAY AS YOU VEGETATE. TRY, TRY, NEVER STOP TRYING. 63 HOURS COUNTDOWN FROM DEADLINE ON NOV 14. CLARION. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Barring sleep and chores and all, I have 30 hours left. Impossible, but also, what can I do at this point? Minus 3 hours so I have ample time to apply. So that’s 27 hours. 2:57 AM: Done with Clarion application short of actually attaching my manuscripts. I’m planning to submit ALL_GO as a preview of what I can do. Talk about catfishing. WAITING, WAITING, WAITING… _sighs_ SO MUCH of my life is just waiting and being suspended in time, just so much anticipation trapped in my body with nowhere to go. So many deadlines to get to, so much work to do, so many updates yet to be updated. I have to get somewhere, I need to go somewhere, and I’m constantly thinking about my progress. A little worried because I can’t seem to write inspired prose anymore. It no longer flows naturally from me. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a goal that’s clear. I just go through the motions. The goal is to convince yourself to read a story. First. Conflict. Specificity. Desire. 6:05AM: Took armoda a while ago. Submitted to 6 places. I got rejected by Radon, Apex, and Split/Lip Press. GODDAMMIT I AM SO HORNY. PLS STOP. I AM GOING TO DIE WAITING. EITHER FOR UPDATES, OR SEX. FUCK. Remember, if you have no idea what prose to write, just look at word clouds or other people’s writing. Sometimes, you’re just crumbling under the weight of better writing that you inhibit any new ideas or stimulus from your own head. It’s a super humility that does you no good. I’m so lonely but I’m so incompetent at not being lonely. I hope to find a super introvert like me someday. But who’s marginally more extroverted than me because I can then learn from them. Because I wish I was extroverted more. Biggest problem I have seems to source in not having any productive obsessions. Whereas before eros turned on your brain so much you were practically breathing words, you are now a dry husk of empty and basic thoughts. How mightily convenient for computers to take programming instructions—literal words—and make something new happen. Like I know it’s partly—mostly hardware doing the job—but I can’t help but be envious at the illusion. That just simple words can make a computer do stuff. Whereas with writing a book, you can’t exactly program society if you want because you speak a programming language that doesn’t get interpreted by everybody or slides off their brains because they’re not the target audience. 11:20AM: You have literally been planning since October. You have a lot of tasks piling up. A lot of them not done. Well, you tried, but you need to try harder.