So I’ve got this thing I’m working on. It’s a novel, Science Fantasy, you know, with castles, vat-grown flesh, and pistols in it. Its working title is Clusterfuck, a Novel. It rose out of two distinct stacks of story corpses. The characters in both stacks resemble each other and some of the thematic stuff is similar enough that I’m mashing them together to see if they form a new entity with an actual plot.

Simultaneously I can’t forget they’re also a pile of story corpses: jagged beginnings, characters without plots, situations without resolutions, junk like that, and I’m scavenging and cannibalizing so I can make a Frankenstein Monster Draft I can then rewrite and cannibalize again to find the more supple and sleek monster within.

Writing those first thousand words, even on Draft 0, terrifies me, but taking half a dozen collapsed stories and pasting them into one document gets me so deep into the maze that I feel like I’ve rocketed past the gate and left the fear of starting behind me.

And that’s a good thing.