Hello world
What is my idea? And just where did it come from? And why am I writing about this just now? Let me try to answer that. My idea was to make a Lovecraftian short story. I had the vague idea that the story should have three elements 1) Be set in and incorporate the often strange world of Onjuku, Japan, which I have been visiting for at least 8 years now and which has become a second home, away from the big Tokyo city 2) The main character should die or suffer some horrible fate 3) The main character should be a alternative version of myself, as some way to exorcise my own existential demons, or at least make them “real”. Where did the idea come from? Well, a few times I have been searching for my next fix of cosmic horror and thought “I think I could something like this or maybe better, I should just do that”. Just one day I did something about it. Why now? Who knows, some extra time (not really), better mental place (maybe), random photons hitting me in the head (probably).
From there I thought I would try to make the story into bit size chunks, perhaps because of my previous experience in writing a big book that was a lot of work to edit and play with as one big document. As Lovecraftian works are frequently found journals of some kind it seemed to make sense, and since I already had a website on this page from my previous book, I thought I would just jump in and make some blog posts that would flesh out the book. The first post was a police report, the premise being the main character has died, someone has come looking for him, and found these journal entries.
Over the course of about 10 days I vomited ideas, mostly for events, people, places in Onjuku that if taken in a different context could be quite eerie or fit well in the genre. I had two revelations during this process 1) I quite enjoyed the wring, far more than I was expecting. I think its something to do with having a creative outlet and building worlds, and being able to express my ideas through a medium I can control (as opposed to just blurting things out that I cant re-edit!) 2) I have perhaps no experience with creative writing and what I was writing was pretty gosh darn terrible. Embarrassingly so. I also had, and still have an idea that this could be some kind of video game, perhaps something very lightweight like a choose your own adventure book or such, maybe make a few bucks at some point in my life. So with those ideas and still being rather excited about all this, I enrolled in a creative writing course (I was “on” Coursera anyway for professional skill building) and am giving this thing a try. Wish me luck!