Solo Action

I can relate to this.

“And maybe it’s our drive to be alone — not all the time, certainly, but enough to read and dream and reset our mental energies in order to deal with People again — that at least partly impels the drive to write. Reading and writing become the bridge crossing us from our carefully guarded alone-zone into the world, into the human condition itself. We contain multitudes, and those multitudes contain us.”

The sad irony of course is that I’m in a cafe doing this, instead of in the home office with the door closed. I can’t help it, I either need to be completely isolated or be surrounded by people who aren’t entitled to one iota of my time and attention.

I’m not so sure the solitude has to do with my particular drive to write. My drive comes from the struggle to take ideas from my head, some that’ve been there for years, and spit them out in a form others might appreciate. I’ve been doing the spitting part for years, anyway–why not construct something from it?

I Can Buy This

Pretty, Fizzy Paradise: For Want of a Hero…

But the thing is. Anti-heroes don’t mean anything without a heroic presence to offset them. There needs to be a voice of conventional, approachable, relatable morality to make the counterbalance and contrast mean something. There needs to be a hero.

Again, thinking back to the one story anyone’s bought so far (I won’t link it, because it’s depressing that I’m the only reason the link pops up on my Technorati watch list anymore) which features an anti-hero of sorts, there is another character who provides that conventional, approachable, relatable morality.

This is also the reason, I believe, that a current project I’m working on is flailing right now. The main character is an anti-hero surrounded by scum. And I’m running–actually, the main character is running–into this wall…

An anti-hero doesn’t have to make the tough decisions, to choose their heart’s desire over an innocent child’s life, for example. Anti-heroes CAN’T make those tough decisions because once they’re faced with them, they can’t be anti-heroes anymore.

So, it’s clear what needs to be done, but how? In any case…

“The one about the regenerating assassin…”*

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
4,160 / 5,000
(83.0%)

*(This is a project title; I haven’t even been able to think up a working title yet.)