Something curious is afoot with the Department of Defense. For some reason, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is demanding hundreds of top military officials from all over the world come to D.C.
My fear, of course, is he’s going to demand they all pledge personal fidelity to Trump, like the Nazis did with Hitler with German military back in the day. That would be the first step, if successful, towards establishing an actual fucking military dictatorship in the United States.
You think I’m an vocal asshole about MAGA now, just wait until we’re a military dictatorship. I’m a man of peace, a man of ideas — and I fucking hate guns — but that doesn’t mean I can rant at an even higher degree about what the fucking fascists are doing to the country.
Now, obviously, getting them to swear personal fidelity to Trump would have no legal weight, but I suppose that would not be the point. The point would be to smoke out “disloyal” elements in the military.
I’ve wrapped the first act of my sci-fi dramedy’s second draft. The milestone feels significant enough to warrant stepping back before plunging into Act Two’s deeper complications.
My plan is straightforward: read through the complete outline, then review what I’ve actually written. This should give me the perspective I need to tackle the rest of the novel with clarity rather than momentum alone.
I’m also considering character studies for the major players. It’s foundational work that often gets skipped in favor of forward motion, but might be exactly what this story needs.
The pause brings up familiar anxieties about craft. I can construct a solid narrative, but there’s a persistent sense that I’m missing something—some technique or insight that separates competent storytelling from compelling work. It’s the kind of self-doubt that either paralyzes or motivates, depending on how you channel it.
I’ll use these few days for broader reading too. Sometimes the best thing you can do for a project is step away from it entirely and let different voices and perspectives shake up your creative approach.
The timeline is loose but intentional: back to full-time writing by late September, possibly early October if the reflection period proves more valuable than expected. The key is recognizing when the pause has served its purpose rather than letting it drift into procrastination.
Sometimes the work requires working. Sometimes it requires not working. Learning to distinguish between the two might be more important than any particular writing technique.
I don’t know what to tell you. Not only am I demonstrably bonkers, I’m old and I don’t handle stress well. So, here I am, contemplating the prospect of querying this scifi dramedy novel I’m hard at work on.
I am going to go into the querying process totally blind. I am going to try to read as many books as I can, but, lulz, that isn’t really going to prepare me for the real thing.
The whole point of working on a novel all these years has been to see how far I could get in the process before it became clear I just wasn’t good enough to get published traditionally.
Looking back at how I got into this specific situation of being, for all intents and purposes, too fucking old to do any of this and one thing is clear — I think I would have wrapped up a novel worthy of querying had I had a wife or girlfriend in my life.
A wife or girlfriend not only might have been a “reader,” she might have also kind of told me “publish or parish.” As it was, I just kind of drifting year after year towards my goal. Then, I actually finished a thriller novel, only to real it just was not good enough to query.
But now, with the rise of AI, I think, no I KNOW, that this novel is going to be good enough to query. And, yet, there are some pretty significant headwinds. I’m old. I’m bonkers. And I can’t promise you that everything I’ve done online will pass the “smell test” of your typical liberal white woman who probably makes up the vast majority of your literary agents.
And, yet, this novel is not nearly as “spicy” as my previous attempt to write a good enough to query. Although, of course, it is kind of white, which is something I worked so hard to prevent with my previous efforts at a novel.
I continue to zoom through the outline for the first act of the second draft of this scifi dramedy I’ve been working on. The novel itself is pretty good. At least in my opinion.
As I keep saying, I’m something of an “AI first” novelist in the sense that I use AI to help me with development. I’m doing everything in my power to not use AI to actually write anything, especially now that I’m in the second draft.
I’m so paranoid about people thinking AI has written *any* of this novel that I may give the novel a final once over before I turn it over to Beta Readers to make sure that there is absolutely no reason to believe that I didn’t write everything.
I will admit that I use AI to help me with scene summaries. But that’s it. I kind of learned my lesson with the first draft. It was too easy to just defer to AI to actually write the narrative, given that the first draft was intended to be a “vomit draft” that no one but me would see.
But the second draft is different. I intend to actually show other people it once I finish it. And the last thing I need is people dismissing me as “one of those people” who is too lazy to do the hard work of actually writing the fucking novel.
Anyway, like I said, I’m really pleased with how things are going with the novel overall. I hope to enter the second act of the novel pretty soon. Maybe by the end of the week, early next week?
Maybe. It all depends on my mind. I can be a moody motherfucker when it comes to actually sitting down and doing the work of writing.
The strange irony of this novel—at least right now—is just how white it is. After years of laboring over a thriller where I bent over backwards to make the cast as inclusive as possible, somehow I’ve landed here.
I keep turning it over in my head, asking myself if there’s a character I could reimagine as non-white. But the nature of the story itself makes that a minefield. It’s not that I don’t want to go there; it’s that the themes I’m playing with are already volatile. If I layered race onto them, that might overwhelm everything else. Instead of engaging with the questions I want readers to wrestle with, the conversation could easily veer into a very different debate.
So I’m in this odd place: tackling heavy issues with a lighthearted touch, but deliberately leaving race out of it—not because it’s unimportant, but because it would dominate in ways that could drown out the other signals I’m trying to send. Is that the perfect solution? Probably not. But for now, it’s the one I can live with.
In a move that I *hope* Emily Ratajkowski won’t think is creepy, I’m using her as my muse and pretty much basing the female romantic lead of this novel on her. She’s long been a celebrity crush of my mine and as I was developing this novel, I realized I knew enough about her details of her life that I could scramble things around a little bit and use her as the basis of my female romantic lead.
Emrata
After a bit of spinning in place the last few days, things are again beginning to move forward at a nice little clip.
My dream is that this novel will evoke the same vibe as The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind meets, say, Ex Machina with a dabble of Annie Hall. I hope. That’s the dream.
I still seem to be on course to wrapping this baby up by the end of the year. Maybe. It’s possible. Not probable. If I do, however, then I can use the first part of 2026 to sort of sort things out with beta readers and such.
As I’ve said before, if I was 25 years younger, I would be in LA right now, writing this thing as a screenplay. I love movies and as an adult, I’ve found that watching movies has inspired me more than any novels I’ve read.
I kind of hate that about myself. I used to read fiction like crazy when I was a kid, but something happened once I got older. And I know they say if you have time to write you have time to read.
It’s just…a real struggle.
But, if I was to compare the vibe of this novel, it would be with The Martian or Project Hail Mary. Those are two really influential novels for me.
Things are going quite well with this scifi dramedy novel I’m working on. I’m zooming through the outline for the second draft I’ve written at quite a nice clip. Today, however, I have also been a little moody.
I’ve got a fair amount of writing done, but I should do a lot more before the day’s over and I’m not so sure I want to. I just want to stare out into space and daydream.
And, yet, I also know that this…unique moment in my life is probably going to wrap up pretty soon and I need to squeeze every moment of writing out of it.
Ideally, I will finish the second draft of the novel no later than…maybe the end of the year? Being “AI First” is really speeding the process up because I often will ask the AI insecure questions that in the past would have led me to go on a creative wild goose chase that would have tired me out and wasted a lot of time.
If I do finish this novel’s second draft by the end of the year, that would put me in a position to query it sometime in the spring. I just want this thing to be good enough to query.
The case could be made that, in hindsight, it will look inevitable that the USA collapsed into chaos directly because of the actions of malignant ding-dong Trump.
But it hasn’t happened yet, so there’s that.
Having said that, just from eyeballing my Tik-Tok feed, it continues to be clear that the cultural and political forces tearing the nation apart show no signs of abating.
On one hand, we have Chappell Roan going into graphic detail about lesbian sex in her longs and on the other, we have grown men carrying around huge crosses at the Charlie Kirk funeral. What the fuck?
There just seems to be some pretty big structural problems within the USA that are just growing deeper and more complicated. I can’t help but think of the photos you see every once in a while of Iranian women in mini-skirts just months before the revolution changed everything.
I fear something like that will happen in the US, if in a more localized way. Like, if there was a big reaction on the part of Blues when Trump fucks with the 2026 Federal election, the Red parts of the country might have some sort of fucked-up counter revolution.
Ugh.
I have written AT GREAT FUCKING LENGTH since the advent of this blog about my personal fears about a civil war or revolution and, to date, nada. So, if anything, that should temper my fears some. I clearly can’t predict the future, so, lulz?
Say what you will about malignant ding-dong Trump, there is definitely going to be a “before” and “after” America when it comes to him. There are, of course, still a few lingering issues that I can’t game out.
The one that is zooming towards us is what will Blues do when Trump does something like declare a state of emergency so he can fuck with Federal elections. While I have a hunch he’s probably going to leave state and local elections largely enough, he’s totally going to everything his power to ensure there are not free and fair Federal elections.
There is something of a spectrum on the matter, I guess.
On one end of the spectrum, Trump fucks with elections and…nothing happens. There are protests, but no general direct action. Nothing that really catches the attention of the regime. We just grow accustomed to the idea that our votes won’t correctly be tallied and that will be that.
We will become a zombie democracy like Hungary and then the real issue is how far will MAGA tyranny go. Will we become, eventually, something akin to Russia or not? Will ICE inevitable mission creep into an SS-like organization take place and the next thing you know nobodies like me are rounded up for telling Trump to fuck off on blogs like this, or not?
That’s one end of things.
One the OTHER end of things is something akin to a civil war / revolution on the part of Blues. I just don’t see Blues wanting to leave the Union in some sort of National Divorce. I do, however, see the potential for rolling, massive uprisings, probably lead by the political leadership of California.
That is kind of scary and I don’t want that because even though I consider myself a “survivor,” I sure don’t like the idea of having to dodge bombs and bullets. I suppose, if things get bad enough, I won’t feel safe where I live and I’ll have to head north or something.
I really, really don’t want to have to do that.
But it will be interesting to see how much sand the MAGA Right can kick into the eyes of Blues before there is some sort of reaction.
I’m breezing through the first act of the second draft of this scifi dramedy I’ve been working on. It continues to breathe some. The detail of scenes get changed and moved around a little bit.
But, in general, things are moving at a nice little clip.
I continue to worry that my life is going to collapse and either I’ll have to pause writing or the context all of this effort will be so different as to make me not nearly as happy with it as I am now.
And I know I’m not getting any younger. Because of how post-production works, even if I sell this dang thing, I could be in my late 50s before it actually hits bookstores. And that doesn’t even begin to address how the fucking Singularity might happen between now and then, making all of this very, very moot.
Anyway.
The biggest problem I have now is I’m just moody. I often find myself wanting to write, but not really feeling it. But, then, to make up for it, I will have the spurts of writing where I get a lot of scenes done in one big burst of energy.
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