Nonsequitur Life

I was digging through some folders in the black hole that is my hard drive and found this…screenshot? showcasing ADHD versus reality, and while I have no idea where I found it or who created it in the first place (Whoo! Etch-a-Sketch brain!) it struck me (probably in the same way it did when I first found it…whenever that was) how well it explains……this.

And by that, I mean the hot mess of a website I’ve been dragging along like a worn out security blanket for…a lot of years.

Anyroad.

Writing about writing.

Hoo boy, am I out of practice on this stuff…

I started writing a story in December 2019 solely based on an idea for a single conversation between two people that quickly escalated to more than thirty thousand words in little more than a month, then kept climbing. After the nightmare of Zoloft and Lexapro that was Summer of 2019, that progress felt like a goddamn lifetime achievement. And in true Basil fashion, it also spawned no less than a dozen WHAT IF plot lines involving the same characters in a slightly different situation. If I include all of the pipe dreams that involve reasonable facsimiles of all those characters, it probably quadruples. It’s actually probably more than that. And that doesn’t include all of the ideas that haven’t been written down. Yet.

BASIL HAS BEEN BUSY IS WHAT I’M SAYING.

The umbrella code name for this multitude of nonsense is Vices and that is far more fitting than I ever thought it would be when I first settled on that choice. (The code names I give each story frequently have nothing to do with the actual story. It’s more likely a reference to a song I was listening to when I created the document, or a very roundabout association no one would ever understand even if I explained how I got there in the first place.)

Not pictured: the unholy number of Word documents that lurk inside each one of those folders. And I’m just now realizing how many have redux appended to them in this batch. (And how many more could have it.) Then again, reviving old ideas into new attempts with different characters is kind of how I operate.

Anyway.

Despite all of the What If tangents, the original idea—code name: Wicked—has consumed my brain for most of the past three-plus years. It has tested me in ways I don’t think any other story project has, and despite the fact that it is an absolute train wreck, I REALLY LIKE this one. Like, I don’t even care how bad it actually is. It’s currently sitting at 94-some-odd-thousand words and it is, at best, half finished. And that’s a stretch. If I were to write everything I want to cram into this monstrosity, I am really not sure how much longer it would get. The smart thing to do, would be to break it up into a series of shorter stories. Which I might end up doing if I get far enough into it. As is, I’m already keeping track of the timeline by years. It wouldn’t be too much of a shift to focus on each one as a stand alone volume. (The SMART thing to do would be to cut out a whole lot of unnecessary filler.) The whole plot covers a solid decade-plus in the lives of these characters and there is a stretch of time where not a whole lot happens. I might need to figure out some creative time jumps to skip over areas that are sparse on the happenings.

Somewhere around the 80k mark, Basil popped up with a pretty substantial What If that actually made me stop and consider its viability. One specific change would change the entire trajectory of the story from that point on and it ate at my brain until I started writing it as a separate story. In some ways I think the original could be better with that change, but in others, I think it would lose a lot more than it would gain. So I took a few pieces from the what if that would still work with the original, and set the bigger plot change aside (to be poked at whenever the inspiration strikes) to get back on track.

And by back on track, I mean writing very little on said original idea, and creating one Word document after another to accommodate Basil’s infinite deluge of HEY HOW ‘BOUT THIS!?

Because attention spans are for SCHMUCKS.

And THEN he decided to drop another bomb of HEY. I know you’re pushing six figures on this thing, but, and hear me out, WHAT…IF…THIS happened?

It would be a parallel universe where significant pieces of backstory were entirely different, leading to some hefty changes in the story proper. And despite it being the same characters in the same point in time, it would be a very different story that unfolds. And while it is currently missing a whole lot of plot points, it’s not that bad of an idea.

But JFC, BASIL. Direct some of that avalanche into the original story and tell me what happens in years eight through twelve when like—two significant things happen before all hell breaks loose again. One through seven are stuffed to the gills and suddenly it’s practically silent until halfway through year twelve when things pick up again, which is nearing the end of the story.

None of this makes any sense outside of my own head.

Who am I kidding?

None of this makes sense inside my head either.

But these are the kinds of things Bob listens to as he falls asleep at night. He knows I’m not going to be sleeping anytime soon, so he gets me yapping about whatever story nonsense is eating my brain. He knows it will distract me from all the shit that stirs up when left to my own devices in the dark and keeps the spiraling thoughts from taking over. Because anxiety and depression and ADHD and grief and…you get the point.

Cooper’s haggard, frazzled visage is a pretty accurate representation of the inside of my brain. She also would like Basil to just focus so she can find out what happens to Hallie and the boys of Wicked White. (Fun fact, the story was code named Wicked long before the band within was ever named Wicked White.)

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World I Used to Know Ryan Star