Weaponizing the Present
defeating writer's block by looking out my front window
Not to say I’m one to whine about writer’s block, because I’m really not. I’ll always be willing sit down and write something new as it comes to mind, but the blockade for me is always the emotional struggle of self worth.
“Yeah, I could write this, but it’ll be dogshit. Or it might be good, but no one will ever read. And if they do, they won’t get it. And if they do, it’s not like it’ll mean anything.”
And so goes the spiral.
But like I mentioned in previous posts, I am at the point where I can’t just keep editing, drafting, and querying the same manuscript over and over. I kicked off 2025 with a full revamp of The Sea of Rapture, including soliciting feedback from beta readers, editors, and then writing another 2 or 3 drafts before it ‘felt’ like a ‘real’ book, then dedicating the next nine months to writing endless letters to agents, begging for a chance of representation.
Regardless of the [underwhelming] results, my brain is just exhausted. Sick of supplicating to agencies, sick of rewriting the same elevator pitch hundreds of times in slightly different variations, sick of constantly thinking and overthinking every sentence of every paragraph of the opening chapter, hoping to make some indelible impression.
I needed to work on something new — and y’all know I have ENDLESS concepts, storyboards, and setups floating around on my laptop, waiting to be turned into a first draft. So I did what I always do when I hit a wall, and I started sifting through old projects that deserved to finally see the light of day.
A few dark projects stood out to me, and I started messing with their opening chapters just to
A) Get back into the habit of writing something from scratch
B) See what actually feels like a story that I’d be invested in writing from start to finish at this point in my life
And the choice I made on the project I officially started writing this week was…surprising. But also not.
Nothing felt right for this moment in time.
I had been excited to revisit some old projects; First Tuesday of the Month — the ghost story about my hometown, Evisceration — the generational epic about a city repurposed as a massive prison state, any of The Heretics of Hell — my 6 part YA dark urban fantasy about a demonic revolution…But none of them struck a chord in the present moment.
I looked at the outlines that were close to being completed; A Legacy of Thunder — about the next advanced species that inherits the Earth and digs up relics of humanity’s worst moments, With a Mouthful of Diamonds — the tale of a thief and con artist in the future who gets suckered into a digital reality they can’t escape until they pull off an impossible heist as an avatar in the hidden databanks of Silicon Valley, Suicidal Thoughts of Bisexual Bodybuilders — a cheeky, werewolf parable about men who are hopelessly addicted to outdoing one another to the point of abusing themselves.
But I felt nothing for these upon further inspection. They didn’t resonate. They didn’t feel right. Not right now.
And a large part of this dissonance is definitely because of my current level of distraction, primarily due to events in the world writ large. Political turmoil, economic collapse, blahblahblah, but especially and most distressingly, the deployment of a Gestapo-lite paramilitary force into the streets of my city for the sake of intimidation and harassment of my neighbors.
TURN ‘EM PINK!, originally titled Relapses in White, is my latest project, and one that feels incredibly November 13th, 2025 coded…In so much as I suspect the whole story will age terribly and feel incredibly dated by the time I finish in 3…4…maybe 6 months or so.
But I need to write it. I need to exorcise the anxieties and worries before they consume me completely. I need to play out the absurd scenario in my head on paper, or risk having an absolute meltdown one night when I’m a few too many drinks in and hate-watching some Youtube essay about the end of everything.
Relapses in White was simply the goofy premise of, “What if THE GAY AGENDA was real?”
What if there was a secret council of leading Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, 2 Spirit, etc. individuals who gathered and made decrees on all the important topics in the realm of Queer Culture?
What celebrities may now be deemed ‘gay icons
Which diets are currently trendy and which are passe
Fashion — period
Who should we cancel this month?
New ideologies to inject into college curricula
How do we get more trans people into the Olympics?
A special division of spies dedicated to sneaking into the wrong bathroom
And so and so forth.
The premise didn’t go much further than, and that’s kind of why I never expanded on it further. There’s no story there. Just a fun setup or goofy skit. I needed the crux of the tale: I needed a character and a conflict and a driving force and a ticking clock and all that shit you hear in Creative Writing 101.
Enter the bullshit that’s been going on in Chicago for the better part of 3 months now…Untrained, overweight, dipshit extremists who have spent their whole lives in basements, wasting their brains away on 4Chain rot and right wing subreddits suddenly being catapulted into the streets of a big, scary city at the whims of a jackass president who wants to use them as pawns in an optical illusion and distraction for his base, all while promising endless benefits and salaries he never intends to pay.
As deplorable as every last agent that works for that department is, I can’t deny that there’s not a hell of a story there. A really fascinating deep dive into the psyche of someone who gets so radicalized and brainwashed that they agree to commit themselves to becoming, essentially, the SS.
So I thought, “how funny would it be if a paramilitary agent in an occupied city got kidnapped and taken to court in front of those who run the Gay Agenda?”
Again, funny sketch, but not necessarily a proper story.
That was, until I thought about some of my favorite stories from this year…Namely, Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Alex Gonzalez’s Rekt, Ari Aster’s Eddington, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, and the common thread between them all.
Wish fulfillment. The cheeky, satirical nature of giving readers exactly what they want — whether or not they know it — and repeating it 10 times louder throughout every subsequent scene, just to make a greater point about how the general populous is skewed in their viewing of a particular issue.
And suddenly, Relapses in White, now TURN ‘EM PINK!", unfolded before my eyes over the last few days.
A disheveled agent who works for a paramilitary force in a recently occupied city tries to feel as proud as he can about the work he’s doing — apprehending illegals and confining them to a massive compound just outside the city as they wait for their tribunal and imminent deportation.
And yet, the city he’s trying to save seems to hate him. His very presence is loathed, as he’s constantly swarmed by protestors and violent agitators. His ex-wife resents him, his family has disowned him, his kids won’t talk to him…He’s entirely on his own to prove himself worthy to his government and his god.
After months of failing to make friends within the agency, he takes a risk and visits an inviting gay bar without his usual military outfit. Seemingly a standard civilian, he hopes to make idle chat with the locals and find himself a new friend and, subconsciously, maybe something more.
But things go south when he finds himself drugged and wakes up naked and hogtied in a blinding white room. Before him, upon a variety of brightly colored thrones, sits the Reborn Rainbow Coalition. After endless scrutiny, the Coalition decides to “re-radicalize” the agent by forcing him to watch endless clips of media that reinforce the Gay Agenda (a la A Clockwork Orange) and then subject him to mass amounts of plastic surgery that effectively make him look more like a woman.
From there, the agent’s life descends into hell as he’s left to return to the compound, rejected now by his own government and treated as a turncoat. Confused and alone, he flipflops between doubling down on his violent behavior as an agent to get back into good graces with his commander, and turning a new leaf to start aiding “the resistance.”
Meanwhile, word from above is that the government is soon to issue an end to the occupation, and they only have weeks left to complete their mission of ridding the city of every last illegal. Conflicts amplify and tensions boil as the agent is left to wonder who he is, what he’s done, and what will be left of him after the occupation ends.
It’s intentionally goofy as hell.
My hope is that, after another 4 drafts or so, it’ll come across as both hilarious and deeply upsetting, as I try to incorporate as much of the news surrounding Chicago as possible into this ludicrous narrative, giving it both a realistic and a “stranger than fiction” vibe.
I definitely don’t aim to make the main character likeable — at all. But I do hope to at least make him understandable…If that makes any kind of sense. I think one of the most pressing and distressing questions in regards to the government’s attack on its own citizens in the last 9 months is…
“Who would follow this order? What kind of person would sign up to deploy themselves into American cities and violently abduct their own people?”
And while I do agree, they’re abhorrent monsters with little to no moral compass and whose families, friends, country, and god will never forgive them for what they’ve done, that doesn’t really answer the question.
They’re still humans that, theoretically, made an explicit decision to do something terrible after specific circumstances brought them to that choice.
So TURN ‘EM PINK! is, at its core, just an exploration of that character arc. What kind of decisions bring a person to do this, what must they be thinking as they carry out these atrocities, and what will ultimately happen at the end of their story.
But told in a way that, ideally, is very campy, funny, self-aware, and pointedly mocking.
Who knows how it’ll pan out. Even with the novels that I’ve mapped out from start to finish (which is 100% NOT the case with this story,) I almost never end up with the tone and message that I set to create from the start. It’s just the nature of creativity, I guess. Things change in life, your mind adjusts, and those changes seep down into the world you’re creating at that time.
But I can tell you that, only 5 days into the process, I’m already feeling a little bit of the pressure in my head start to release. It’s absolutely helping me to expound my worries and catastrophic thoughts into a fictional world that mirrors reality, but makes a joke of the whole thing.
If laughter is the best medicine, I’ll need to make this novel a riot just to get through the winter.