We were in the basement because a bomb alarm rang through the city of Zagreb, and my mother was in pain because she was miscarrying my sibling from the stress. I only found out about this when I was a teenager. Innocent little girl that I was, I thought she was just hungry because I was hungry as well. The time spent confined in the basement was a total of twelve hours, I believe. Now that I have a small child that is the same age as I was back then, I only have the utmost respect for my resilient mother.

By the age of four, I believed all men were born with missing arms or legs.

When the war initially broke out, my father and my mother first fled to Germany as a newly-fanged couple, but it did not last long. My father could not live with himself watching his countrymen being slaughtered by (quite literally) the neighbors they shared streets with until recently. He was twenty-one or twenty-two years of age when he decided to enlist as a military volunteer (domobran, literally ‘defender of Home’) and he was sent to the same front where he came from—Osijek.

Croatia did not evoke a general draft of any men to fight this war. There were plenty of domobrani.

There were a few weekends when he was allowed to visit my mother taking refuge back in Zagreb, and that’s how I was conceived. There is a photo in a tucked away family album of him holding me when I was a few months old. He was wearing an army uniform and his eyes glistened with held back tears.

The war ended. My father came back with shell shock and all his limbs, much to my surprise. The theory evolved. Only men older than my dad had missing limbs, then, except for my grandfather. He was too angry to have lost limbs somewhere.

At the tender age of seven, or eight, we were driving down to Slavonija. Back then, that meant a six-hour drive weaving between abandoned villages. My little brother was asleep for most of it, and I sat in the middle of the backseat (to hell with child boosters and seat belts) with my elbows up on the seats and asked my father a million questions.

“Why are there holes in the walls of houses here?”

“Why are there no kids around? We just passed a playground and there was no one there!”

“There’s only old people sitting in front of doorsteps!”

“Is this village empty?”

So my father, after a glance at my mother who pretended to be sleeping, decided to tell me everything, to pass the time and keep himself awake for the drive, and finally process what he had been through.

He explained the war to me in great detail. The people who he played cards with were suddenly on the other side of Dunav, shooting at the bars where they drank themselves stupid every Friday together. The friends he lost, the friends he made, the friends whose bonds were only strengthened by being in the same trenches together. He told me that the war was inevitable and it was only a matter of time, and that he did cry when Tito died despite only just becoming a teenager, because he knew on a base level instinct that it will lead to a war. He could only hope to be a part of it himself, not his father or his son. That he was angry at the people who had lived in Croatia all their lives, who shared bread with Croatians, only to turn their backs and join the JNA as soon as shit hit the fan because they suddenly remembered they were Serbian. The soil and the good faith relations mattered little when blood made a calling; something a lot of people on the Left seem to conveniently ignore. Brotherhood and Unity, but only in name.

When I asked him if he ever fired from his weapon, he was quiet for a bit, and I let the silence linger because I wasn’t an annoying kid. He then said no. I thought he was lying, but I did not poke further. This was the only time we talked about the war directly and extensively.

We then arrived to his childhood home in Slavonija, and we found it riddled with bullet holes, the windows were broken, the doors unhinged. It was even worse than the houses I saw on the way there. My grandmother was completely heartbroken, she cried and cursed, then wiped off the tears and went to check the damage. The next few years were spent on repairing the only home they had ever known. The garden of red roses bloomed once again.

The Music of my Childhood

As a kid, I thought it cringe when the adults would get drunk and sing Čavoglave (link with English lyrics), but now I understand. I get it now, dad.

Here’s a version of the song from last year, without fancy editing and filmed straight from the audience. The chant Za Dom Spremni (For Home, Ready) is classified as an offense akin to Heil Hitler because Ustaše used it way back when. No one cared about this until the EU started waving their finger. The government said they will prosecute the people who yelled it at the concert. Good luck, bozos.

As one can expect, I was part of many weddings as a child. People were getting married left and right after the war, to finally seal their love and hide the pregnancies, and they invited everyone they knew that was still alive. There was no such thing as a “child-free wedding” back then, and it still is a foreign concept here. The flags of Croatia were waved with patriotic vigor; the veterans showed up in army uniform instead of suit and kravata; the rakija flowed ceaselessly into throats, and the songs were always the same. Nationalist tear-jerkers, and everyone sang along with a loud resolve and tipsy hugs. Sude mi (They Judge Me) by Miroslav Škoro was a song for 1am, when most had left after food and dance, and the ones remaining were waiting for the drunken group therapy and high emotions. Here’s a Rentry link with translated lyrics. Look at this man singing the song in 2003 and tell me honestly that it did not touch your heart. The same goes for Mojoj Majci (To My Mother) by Prljavo Kazalište, a song that was banned by the Serbs because of one lyric that they deemed too nationalist.

I kako sad ovako sam // And how am I supposed to go alone
Protiv tuge i oluje // Against sadness and the storm
Kad smo bili kao prsta dva // When we used to be like two fingers
Prsta dva jedne ruke? // Two fingers of one hand?

As anyone who looked into the Yugoslav war would know, the Serbs used three fingers (middle-index-thumb) of one hand to signal to each other, while Croats used two (middle-index) to signal V.

The link to Mojoj Majci leads to the concert in 1989 in the heart of Zagreb. The war wasn’t there yet, but everyone was feeling it seeping into the pores of society, the electricity in the air before blood gets spilled. This concert was a huge problem because the tensions were already rising. 300,000 people showed up. It was obvious proof of nationalism taking root in an otherwise completely idyllic and peaceful Yugoslavia, and if you claimed it was otherwise, you were a fascist. The year is different, the playbook is the same.

Since Slavonija and Baranja were under direct occupation by JNA and the Serbs, and were liberated during Operation Flash and others, many songs were inspired by the blood that had already soaked this land once known as the Bread Basket of Yugoslavia. If you would like some zeitgeist of this musical uprising, have a listen to a folk rap song Dođi u Vinkovce (Come to Vinkovci) with lyrics in English here. There are many, many more songs, but this article would be far too long if I included them all.

Subcultures were a big thing when I was in high school, and one of them was the skinhead / neo-Nazi / hooligan aesthetic that a couple of my classmates adopted. We were fourteen years old. This was mildly frowned upon by teachers, and that was the extent were willing to deal with it. The loudest guy, the de-facto ringleader of the group, meticulously shaved his head every week and wore Dr Martens boots with red lace and a black blazer with a swastika hidden on the inside, and his washed out black jeans were held up by suspenders. He was choleric and angsty, and my first look at excessive virtue-signalling. He instigated fights and often ranted about the Serbs. Serbs this, Serbs that. Serbs deserved even worse fates than the Americans delivered, we should have genocided them, we should have gutted them for what they did, all during class because he was bored and angry. One of the teachers had enough one day, and asked us to raise our hands if our fathers were a part of the war, either as official military or as domobrani. More than half the classroom raised their hands. He did not raise his.

The children of cowards are always the loudest. It is a common pattern that holds true in the entirety of ex-Yugoslavia, and something to keep in mind when one interacts with younger Millennials from these parts.

“Where were you in ‘91?” is a common question to stop any further historical discussion with people who are deemed unworthy or are twisting the truth. It is the Croatian equivalent of “post physique” or “post hand” from /fit/ and /pol/, respectively. The Homeland War, as we call it, is in living memory for most Croatians. People know people who died, and they know who made that happen.

Except for the people he personally knew, my father did not instill in me, or my brother, a hatred for the Serbs as a people. He was correct when he said that the flames of war were fanned by the media. But my father is a man with a soft heart, and his daughter is too good at noticing patterns.

Counting Blood Cells

This is a common phrase in ex-Yu territory, to count one’s blood cells. It is usually meant in a dismissive way (“Let’s not count the blood cells”) to avoid bringing ancestry into arguments and being petty about the smallest things, but the existence of such a phrase means that ancestry and history are the only logical outcome of any discussion around here. All roads lead to DNA.

To understand how schizophrenic Balkan people can be, you have to consider that genetic maps and research are a favorite pastime of many bored housewives and forum connoisseurs. They will read stuff like this and then argue that no, in fact, there is a higher percentage of Illyrian DNA (which is a magnificent meme at this point because Albanians claim it for themselves and no one else) in this particular region they come from compared to the gypsy dwelling that the opponent is from, obviously. This minute bickering can be found at the smallest level, where one village of people will feel superior over the neighboring villagers because there is one family whose haplogroup is J2 instead of I2. The arrival of the Internet to the Balkans turned these discussions into science-backed shit-flinging. Until then and still today, recognition of one another by pure physiognomy exists without normies necessarily knowing the name for it. The broad knowledge of haplogroups only emboldened the common Balkan man to argue and discriminate now based on FACTS rather than FEELINGS.

Many different maps depicting different criteria look basically the same in the Balkans and ex-Yugoslavia, and it can be reduced to the below image.

Linguistics

Unfortunately for Serbia, they were under direct Ottoman occupation intensely for about 350 years, with regions gradually falling starting from the year 1371 until full liberation in 1912.

Anyone who knows a person with a superiority complex will tell you such a person harbors great insecurities which are masked as bravado and confidence.

The Turkish loanwords in the Serbian language have become so instrumental and absorbed in every day vernacular that they do not even register them as loanwords anymore, and if they do, they hide behind the “Serbo-Croatian” moniker, as if Croatians commonly use words like pendžer for window instead of prozor. The Croatian language went through a lot of reform to streamline it with a puritan perspective and removal of loanwords. We say povijest (history), they say istorija. While there are still many Germanic loanwords in northern Croatia and Italian ones in Dalmatia, it is confined to dialect and region. The official, unified Croatian language was cleansed.

Serbian language uses Cyrillic alphabet (I can almost hear a Bulgar in the distance screaming at me to add that they invented it) as the main one, while Croatia first used glagoljica then Latin alphabet like everyone else west of us.

This divide is not only linguistic, but religious as well. Croats are majority Catholics, Serbs are majority Orthodox. A conspiracy theory of mine is that the bottom half of Serbia is cursed because of the Dunav river line cutting them off. The line also somewhat neatly separates Orthodoxy and Catholicism, taking into account the mountainous and islamicized Bosnia as a cut off.

Very Quick Rundown of History

To exemplify the eternal butthurt of Serbia, we can simply have a look at our history together. After WW1, we made a union together, a State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (Država SHS), but then!

On 1 December, Regent Alexander proclaimed unification of "Serbia with lands of the independent State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs into a unified Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes".

Look at the naming order from one to another. Incredible things happening.

Stjepan Radić famously resisted the unification with Kingdom of Serbia, with a quote “Do not rush like geese into fog”, which every school kid here knows about. Later he was shot in the stomach by a Serb Puniša Račić and died after agonizing for three weeks.

Now let’s take a break and do a physiognomy check.

This guy above is Stjepan Radić.
A Croatian pure of heart, with only love for our beautiful homeland.

The guy below is Puniša Račić, the Serbian guy who shot him, a member of People’s Radical Party.

I hope you will draw your own conclusions here, without my intervention. A juxtaposition like this should be good enough.

There is no need for me to go in-depth with our history, plenty of Youtube videos cover this extensive topic, however biased it can be. A lot of the facts were muddied, changed, hidden away, and Slavs in general are not really notorious for writing down what happened and keeping records straight.

All I can tell you is that the entire history of Croatia, from 7th century onward, is taught throughout elementary and middle school, and it was a tangled bowl of hell porridge to learn. It is a rabbit hole that unravels, and keeps on giving.

The Real Deal

There is so much more that I could include, but most of the things are easy to look up online. Except for the racism. Well, that’s not true, and if you’ve ever been in a Balkan thread on /pol/ or on the now-banned r/2balkan4you, people do not hide their disdain from each other. It is easy to meme about it, and every thread devolves into complete chaos within six posts.

Most memes are rooted in some variation of genetic shitposting, political turmoil, religious differences, and food banter. They say it’s all ironic, but art imitates life and I have heard how people talk about different ethnicities.

But, without further ado, let me break it down for the Westerners so they can be accurately racist online. Keep in mind that every single country listed has a rampant problem with corruption and nothing is ever taken seriously about it. It runs so deep, one can bribe a cop for drunk driving or hitting a gypsy with like 50 euros, if you have the extroverted charisma to pull it off.

Serbia

There’s a joke in Croatia that goes like “First came the Serb, then came the amoeba”, as they love claiming everything and anything under the sun as theirs. Wikipedia had problems with Serbian editors claiming random people as originating from Serbia, and now I found this article that they banned six editors because they kept re-writing history of the Yugoslav war and Serbian politics in the year of our Lord 2026. None of the six people had any connection to each other, they independently did this regardless of political orientation.

Vojvodina up north should secede and join either Croatia or Hungary, they would be much better off and they are spiritually and genetically closer to us than anything south of Beograd.

Beograd is a cesspool of drug addicts and prostitutes, much like our own Split, which no Croatian likes except for dumb tourists. Serbian politicians cannot help themselves but suck that ruski dick. They delude themselves into thinking Russians are their brothers because of Orthodoxy, but Russia does not even think about Serbia unless it’s to use them to destabilize the geopolitics of the region to rattle the EU bureaucrats. They gobble it up without question, and even elected a president with lips fit for the job to make sure nothing goes to waste.

They are not even in the EU, but they still import tens of thousands of migrants from fuck-ass places like Nepal and India and mainland China. Kosovo will never be Serbia again, they just needed a nationalistic chant because they had none before that.

Anything south of Beograd is basically what Russia was in the 90s. The poverty level is unfathomable to a Westerner. No flat screen TV, no newest gen smartphones, no new shoes for years, because they cannot afford it. Some still use outhouses or those squatting toilets. Though to be fair, a lot of Italy has those as well. There is nothing to do there but get drunk and complain about the government, which can be comfy on it’s own. This is true for most of the Balkans.

Serbs are not the kebab removers that they made the online Westerners believe they were. One meme song does not erase centuries of history. Good PR campaign though, well played.

Median salary is 600 euros, and that includes Belgrade as an industrial powerhouse. Niš and Novi Sad aren’t too bad, everywhere else is crkavica (loose translation would be living on a wage just enough to not die) and it’s specially bad in the rural areas.

Serbia concentrates the biggest amount of Yugonostalgics, people who wish for the old days to return so they can piggyback off of others. The Boomers, and the Zoomer communists are the worst about this.

There are literal prostitutes reading the news on TV, and there was a prostitution ring that involved female dogs that was recently busted in Serbia. Before you cast your judgment, most of the ‘clients’ were Westerners.

Self-sabotage is the name of their game. I genuinely do hope they claw their way out of the shit pit they dug themselves into before it gets even worse, but I can see them backstabbing their neighbors quicker than they admit fault.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Most of the jokes in ex-Yu star two Bosnians, Mujo (Muhamad/Mustafa) and Haso (Hasan), and sometimes Fata (Fatima) as the wife of Mujo.

They say the jokes are all actually true, and it’s easy to believe them. I will try to translate some of them to give you a glimpse into the kind of people they are.

After a car crash, Mujo and Haso enter paradise. A gentleman donned in a white robe greets them and says,

“Welcome to paradise! You do not have to worry about money because there is none here. You do not have to worry about jobs because there are none here.”

Mujo looks at Haso and says,

“Why the fuck did we come here then, it’s the same as in Bosnia!”

---

Fata died and Haso visits Mujo when he hears him playing the piano.

“Mujo why are you playing the piano, your wife died yesterday.”

“Don’t worry, I’m only using the black keys.”

---

A Frenchman, an American, and Mujo drink together.

The Frenchman says, “I have such good hearing, I heard a mouse eating sugar in the pantry last night.”
The American says, “I have such good hearing, last night I heard rust eating the rim of the car in the garage.”
And then Mujo says, “I have such good hearing, when I heard something in the closet, I went to check and it was the coat going out of fashion!”

There are thousands of these. It is silly humor that has been central to the Bosnian mindset and identity for decades. These go very hard once everyone’s drunk and the spirits are high.

Bosnians are technically Muslims by majority, but they’re the kind of Muslim that drinks a lot of alcohol and doesn’t really pray all that much. Their official unemployment rate is 13%, but that’s just on paper. Everything is just on paper, while reality is wildly different.

The country of Bosnia and Herzegovina is actually run by a guy called Christian Schmidt as he has power over their elections, for some reason. So the lovely multi-ethnic diversity peace and prosperity project of the tri-religious and tri-ethnic union of BiH falls flat because it’s barely held together by a German.

The Saudis have been investing a lot into Bosnia, not for the infrastructure or anything useful, but to build more mosques.

The Serbs had at least tried to get their independence back from the Ottoman Empire; the Bosnians just took it up the ass. Couldn’t be bothered. For centuries.

When people threaten kids to be better in school, they tell them they’ll end up as a sheep herder in Bosnia if they don’t, which I now realize is being romanticized in the West and I have no clue how to reconcile that at all. We’ve come full circle.

I mentioned this in a Note somewhere, but it’s been lost to the wind, so I will repeat for archival purposes. Some years ago, one of those old wooden electric poles fell down due to harsh winds and hit a guy right on the head, he was completely pancaked by it. Residents of nearby buildings saw this and rushed out to help him, but he just started cursing a lot, and people realized he was Bosnian due to the accent. He just dusted himself off and went on his way. I cannot find any news article to prove this, you’ll just have to believe me.

It’s hard to hate on Bosnians, easy to meme about them. They gave us Dubioza Kolektiv, and this video describes them better than I ever could. It’s even in English, so I hope you enjoy it. Absolute banger.

Kosovo

The Đorđe Martinović incident.

Đorđe Martinović was a Serb farmer from Kosovo who was at the center of a notorious incident in May 1985, when he was treated for injuries caused by the insertion of a glass bottle into his anus. Although the facts of the incident remained in dispute for years afterwards, it played a role in worsening ethnic tensions between Kosovo's Serb and Albanian populations.

Also, there is a statue dedicated to Bill Clinton, situated in Bill Clinton Boulevard, in the capital city of Priština.

Excuse the BBC article, but here it is in case you want to know more about this.

Montenegro

I honestly have no idea what these people do down there, probably nothing. They say a Montenegrin keeps a chair next to his bed to take a rest after waking up.

I heard they make Western tourists pay an extra tax for breathing air when they enter the country. I also heard they are moving forward with the EU application recently. They’ve been using the euro as their official currency since 2002, even though they’re not in the EU at all. Before they adopted euro, the official one was Deutsche Mark. I don’t even understand how exactly they are a functional country, but then again Belgium exists, so they are excused.

Albania

No one likes the shqiptars, and they don’t even like themselves. Over 10% of their population has accumulated in London to presumably fight other Muslims who are too brown for them. If they settle elsewhere, they usually open up an ice-cream shop or a bakery. It’s always one of these two, they do not venture into anything else. The bakeries are actually decent and open until ungodly hours on the weekends to serve drunkards after a night out. They sound funny to the rest of the Balkans, as if they have a built-in lisp. Čokoljada hehe.

Highest % chance of getting shanked by one of them out of any other ethnicity.

Dua Lipa is a PR ambassador to improve the Albanian image in the West.

Macedonia

Imagine being Macedonia, the land of an amazing flag and Alexander the Great, and you really want to be a part of the EU (lol) so you keep applying for it (lol), but Greece keeps vetoing your application because they are drama queens and they tell you that if you rename your country into North Macedonia, they’ll give a thumbs up with Brussels (lol). So you do, you go through with it on all official documents, everything gets changed into North Macedonia as if you are some province of another country, and the EU “begins talks” with you. It’s been years of “talking” about it, and anytime there’s any movement in the EU direction, the political opposition holds protests to block it despite the name change and all.

You even held a referendum about the name change, but only 37% of the population actually showed up to cast a vote so it was deemed void. But at least you get to enter NATO as the 30th member, right before the global collapse in March of 2020.

Bulgaria

I consider Bulgarians to be the actual prototype of modern human. The out-of-Africa theory is bullshit, we all came from Bulgaria and evolved, while they stayed there as they are. One day I will visit them and prove my theory correct.

They cannot keep their politics in place for more than two weekends, but they can hold their liquor well. They have had eight parliamentary elections in five years. The most recent one was eleven days ago as of time I wrote this. Banana republic with the highest emigration compared to other EU states, but I find them fascinating enough to observe from afar. Weird, existential sense of humor and constant mental anguish imposed on themselves for nothing. All those Russian depression songs that are popular nowadays are actually about Bulgarians.

It seems to me they have also been cursed by some ancient deity and they still suffer for it.

Romania and Moldova

I do not consider them to be part of Balkans. They do not consider themselves to be part of the Balkans. Every Balkan map made by a Westerner includes them both. No one knows why.

If you call them gypsies, they will break into your home and fuck your wife while holding you at gunpoint. We all hate gypsies, but they have to deal with them a lot more than anyone else. If the EU allowed it, they’d have cleansed their land of them yesterday.

Moldova gave us Dragostea din tei by O-zone, and they have a catchy banger for Eurovision this year.

Every (actual) Romanian that I’ve met has been the silent type with a lot of pride and inner rage that they drink back down if it tries to come up.

Croatia

I will not slander my homeland.

However, the people on the other side of Lika, from Rijeka to Split, would sell their own mothers into slavery if it meant more money made during the summer. They live by working intensely for 6 months during the season serving fat entitled Germans who are too poor to go to Mallorca, then doing nothing but shitpost on Facebook during the winter. Spiritually, they are closer to Sardinians than anyone else, but they do have a strong sense of Croatian patriotism and would not blink twice to murder someone who talks shit about our Homeland. High drug use rate, specially in Split, high extroversion and low impulse control, to their own detriment. Constant sun exposure does something to people, I swear.

Soft spot for Dubrovnik and the people of Dubrovnik. Leave them alone.

Croatians can be very passive during times of peace, too passive and too yielding to a lot of imposed things from others. We suffer from feeling like we’re too small and insignificant to do anything by ourselves. I wish we were different in that regard.

During times of conflict, however, the passivity dissipates. Our history is bloody and metal as fuck.

Slovenia

Now I know that Slovenes do not like to be lumped in with us barbarians on the Balkans and much prefer the neighboring Austria and Switzerland, but you are locked in here geographically.

Slovenes are commonly referred to as the femboys of the Balkans. Small country, beautiful land, can travel through from one side to the other in under an hour. I don’t understand a single thing they say and find great pleasure in forcing the gas station clerk speak Croatian to me as I am obliged to buy a 7-day vignette just for passing through. I take my wins when I can.

Sorry to that one person from Slovenia who subscribes to me, you cool.

All in all

I have long said that I am happy with my comfy shithole. When the migration crisis hit in the summer of 2015, I saw the writing on the wall and watched in horror as Western Europe suicided in front of us. I also knew that all these “economic migrants” are not interested in the Balkans. We do not have big bucks to give away for free like Germoney does.

The world is changing rapidly and for the worse, but I am sure that my dearest Balkans will still be the same, as it ever was, no matter what happens. There is no zoomer shortage of alcohol drinkers. Men aren’t breaking their bones to be taller and women aren’t delusional about how the world works. Clocks still tick correctly in this part of the world, no matter which haplogroup we’re talking about or what’s the % of PVRE ILLYR1AN DNA. No matter the “population collapse” or “AI takeover”, the rakija will still be drank, the lambs will still spin over fire, the people will still curse their governments. Nothing changes on the Balkan front.

As I was writing this, my thoughts were filtered through the prism of an American man reading this, and boy cowboy I can tell you that if you ever want to learn how to be a proper Chad and go through a proper rite of passage, spend a year or two in the Balkans. There is no masculinity crisis down here. Men still duke out their genetic differences outside of bars when they hear a different accent. Women will likely devour you whole, and you might wake up in a bathtub filled with ice cubes and a pressure gauze taped over the skin where your kidney was. Maybe.

You can be racist to a Balkan person if you are correct about it. They will argue against it to death, but they will not call the cops or try to get you cancelled or make you lose your job. They will open up a bottle of rakija or order three rounds of beer and then the discussion can continue. There is still integrity and acceptance that words are just words, until of course they become fighting words.

There are quite a few things we all have in common down here. Most notably, there is white-hot hatred for gypsies and communists, cursing every third word and deeply appreciating when someone outside of the region curses in our tongue, hard alcohol, a melancholic acceptance that the world is shit, and to never trust anyone, especially not the Jews.

It took a long time to write this. I hope there is some new obscure information about the Balkans that you were not aware of before. The post will remain free to read until ten thousand Serbs spawn in the comment section.

Buy me a ko-fi

Following the internal logic of antinatalism, there is only one moral outcome of such a philosophy, and that is the natural conclusion of suicide. Continuation of own’s life whilst condemning creation of others’ happens to be the uttermost hypocritical point of the war against the Physical realm. It is also downstream of the modern world and an inevitable thing to have come about in pseudo-intellectual circles. Any antinatalist is a deeply unserious person who did not resolve spiritual issues brought about during the teenage years of self-discovery and placement in the world.

But Mea, the world has never been so shit as it is now! People are suffering everywhere, there’s world hunger and war and and and!

The world has never been as peaceful as it is today. There was never a single generation of human kind that has not experienced war, famine, disease, poverty, death. Infant and mother mortality rate has never been this low, the vast majority of young men are not sent to die elsewhere. Food is abundant and available, medicine has advanced enough so people don’t die from diarrhea. Overload of information is the problem, never before have people taken news from half a globe away as seriously as now. Objectively, our physical lives have become too easy compared to our ancestors’ lives, so we are, in a very humanly fashion, at war with it all.

The people of today have very little in way of definitively becoming better than previous self. The schism of the body and soul happened a long time ago, and while some seek to reconcile the two, most do not even realize it within themselves. No coping or defense mechanism was needed to evolve, until now, when we are caught with our spiritual pants down. The masses are depressed and anxious and autistic and neurotic and overtly homosexual.

Medieval time being so popular in fiction, to the point of every second piece of media being set during that historical time period, is due to the medieval allowing itself to be a very physical representation of humanity. The bread has to be baked to be eaten; the wheat needs to be reaped; the seeds sown; the beer brewed; the eternal stew renewed; over and over and over again, from birth till death. What does the modern man do? Walk into Walmart or Aldi (or Lidl, Spar, Krogers, Whole Foods, Billa, Hofer, Target) and buy any iteration of bread and beer and ultra-processed meat that God had no hand in creating for (arguably now too high) a price that excludes any physical labor in making the food. Even in medieval times, you did not bake the bread but you did help your neighbor with harvest and storage and processing the very same wheat that you would eat later. The social contract was sealed without any signing. It was understood, implied, expected.

High neuroticism of today can be traced back to this problem. People hardwired to perform simple repetitions of the hand, a skill useful for all of human history for various tasks, are now caught in a brain death loop of scrolling with their thumb to microdose happy hormones for six hours per day.

The physical is dying, to please the cerebral.

Even war has changed, despite popular claim. War used to be close quarter, man to man. The blood of your friend splattered on your armor as you decapitated the enemy in front of you. Horses trampled corpses, mud and disease crawled into wounds, the unyielding sword pushed into soft tissue. It used to be intimate, personal, life-changing. A stark contrast to begging at the altar of the drone camera before it explodes on you in an empty field in the middle of nowhere fighting for a leader you don’t even know, for an ideology you cannot even spell properly.

Rites of passage for young men do not exist anymore. One could argue the young women have physical rites of passage, with the entire endocrine system dictating phases of a woman’s life. This can be confirmed as a true statement by observing the absolute one-sided barrage of synthetic pills and universal push for hormonal birth control for girls as young as 10 years of age.

The women, who are usually perceived as more in tune with the spiritual world, are being attacked in the physical realm to disrupt their balance. We actually do have a way to reconcile the spiritual and the physical, and that is through birth of their child. I had never felt more alive. And this is a process they are trying to take away from us, as well.

The men, the physical ones who can move mountains if necessary, are being attacked in the spiritual realm through promotion of porn consumption and blackpilled nihilism. Destroy the body and the man perseveres. Destroy the spirit and you destroy the man.

Each has their own unique battle to connect the soul with the body again, to make beautiful things from scratch again, to create art as a means to channel divinity, as it always has been.

Anything less, and it’s a human battery waiting to be consumed to subjugate the ones who attempt to transcend. The antinatalist nihilists should be thrilled at this proposal, they can be the first ones to go.

There is a parameter of online games that manages to bring out the frothing frustration even in the calmest people, and that is Player vs Player, or PvP for short. This Post will be relatively long. The psychology and the mind games have been too juicy to condense into a simple little snack.

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since about 2011, mostly on a private Wrath of the Lich King server, but also had a phase of playing on retail, from Warlords of Draenor till the end of Battle for Azeroth, and on a Classic+ server for a short while. In any iteration of the game, I have thoroughly enjoyed PvP, and did PvE content such as dungeons and raids as a means of obtaining good enough gear to actually be competitive in PvP.

And to establish any credibility among the people that do understand what I’m talking about here, I achieved 2k rating on retail as a filthy female Human Holy Paladin in 2v2. Not the best, but I’m not a complete scrub either. At the time, in the middle of BfA, I was in a Cutting Edge-chasing guild as well, and it was probably the peak of my WoW “career”, as they say.

So I’ve been through a lot, and I’ve met a lot of wildly different people in dozens of different guilds I’ve helped make and be a part of as a bystander, and boy am I good at bystanding. A true INTP experience of observing and noticing patterns, all pixelated and easily accessible on a screen and through voice chats.

As I came back to the private WotLK server after a long hiatus post-BfA, I briefly joined a PvP guild, then took another break. I’ve since returned to the server, and everyone has gone mad.

To set up the story, let me explain. The server itself is on a smaller side, forever locked on the last WotLK patch, and Alliance is outnumbered by Horde in a 40-60 ratio. There is cross-realm PvP play with and against realms that are Pay2Win (swipe some money, receive desired gear), so an average player from the non-P2W would have a miserable time in Battlegrounds (10+vs10+) or Arenas (2v2/3v3/5v5) for the simple math of stat check, as one would have a hard time outskilling a complete overgeared and overtuned class (*cough* warrior *cough*).

In such dire conditions for PvP enjoyers who do not wish to spend money to get gear, there are only 2 real conditions where PvP can occur without any P2W, and that would be World PvP within the realm itself, and Battle of Wintergrasp.

Wintergrasp is an event that happens every 3 hours or so, where Alliance and Horde players voluntarily duke it out in a winter map by using vehicles and brute player force to bring down the fortress to gain access to a raid for the faction that wins. It is always either a defense or an offense scenario, depending who won the battle in the previous event. It’s both a strategic tower defense and a numbers game of who can overwhelm the other. More players of one faction on one side usually means an easier win, but it’s not always the case.

This event, which I’ll refer to as WG from now on, has been a point of emotional warfare, doxxing of players, smear campaigns, and general butthurt behavior by the big PvP guilds on both sides. It has been an incredible journey to witness all of this as a sideliner, a random that joins as many others do, to get their Honor points to spend in-game for better gear or mounts.

To introduce the main actors, I will refer to them as <Blue Square> and <Red Mark>. <Blue Square> was an Alliance PvP guild, which was very active in both WG and World PvP, including defending Alliance cities from Horde attacks, and raiding Horde cities to establish dominance. <Red Mark> was a Horde PvP guild, doing basically the same but opposite.

For months, and I do mean months (considering a raid lockout is once per week per character), <Blue Square> held WG in prime time of raiding hours, somewhere between 4pm and midnight, every single day. Alliance was thriving, people were getting geared, it was a great time for all blue players and it seemed easy, effortless. Soon enough, the randoms that would join the battle would simply follow orders barked by <Blue Square> leaders, without considering the reasons of going to a certain spot at a certain time. They just did as they were told. No thinking involved. Horde players changing factions because of this became relatively common, so when one big shot Horde player swapped to Alliance, many people had very big feelings about this.

<Blue Square> saw this as an absolute win, that they’ve poached someone crucial to the Horde. The sun would never stop shining in their favor, they thought, they have it all now, and more Horde players will now change faction seeing that this big guy holds the <Blue Square> guild tag under his name, and is massacring his old friends from the Horde in WG.

When I saw this guy on Alliance, I knew well enough that this was the beginning of the end. In all my years playing this game, there is one recurring type of player that keeps popping up. The Psychopath.

Subscribe now

The kind of people that infiltrate guilds, charm everyone with little social favors and freely given resources, then wait for a good time to start sowing seeds of doubt; usually when the guild leaders cannot make it for a raid or scheduled event; the Psychopath rises to the occasion, and does it oh so much better than the usual leadership; after a month or two of subtle comments and whispers, the Psychopath has a few talks with few of the good players from the guild; they get poached into the external group; rinse and repeat until you make a guild with all the best players you could find to push content to it’s limits. And I know all this because I basically tagged along one of such players who started from basically zero, out of morbid curiosity and intrigue. A fascinating case study, if you will. The Psychopath decided to chase Cutting Edge, and the Psychopath was ready to demolish years-long online friendships in order to achieve it.

To get back on track. As the hotshot Horde player was now on Alliance, the smear campaign by <Red Mark> began. The automated message in Global chat appeared one day, and was repeated every 60 mins for about two or three weeks.

[6. Global]: [RedMarkGMonAnObviousAlt]: The Leader of <Blue Square> is a known pedophile! He likes little boys and girls! We have the evidence of it! <Blue Square> is a pedo guild!

There was never any evidence, of course. When pushed to show it, they would simply block you. And it didn’t matter. It was all about optics.

Many Alliance players either didn’t believe it, or they didn’t really care, but the campaign probably had some effect, as less people joined the Battle of Wintergrasp. It could’ve been fatigue, or disinterest as they got all the possible gear already, but the fact remains that less people joined than ever, meaning that WG was harder to win, and the time slot of controlling the map was reduced to 6pm-10pm or so.

A power vacuum opened up once the leader of <Blue Square> went offline for a long time. Some speculated he started playing on Horde, some said he was focusing on getting a job, but in the end it didn’t really matter. He was offline, and the players were babied into winning a lot, which meant no one really understood large-scale tactics of this vast map and how to win without being told what to do at all times.

Old, recognizable names started popping out of nowhere trying to lead Alliance to a WG victory. There’s a certain nostalgia about it, seeing a name of a player’s character you remember from five or ten years ago, even if you’ve never directly interacted. The veterans mostly secured a win, if only once per week.

The complaints in global chat were incessant and ever-increasing. People would sit on their pretty mounts in a major hub, complaining about the WG being lost as they’re typing. Incredible stuff, really. True slacktivism shining through.

But it’s hard to blame them. I had tried to join every WG I could while online, and it was more akin to a humiliation ritual than an actual battle. Horde was farming Alliance at spawn, as the usual ratio was about 3-to-1 at that point.

This feeling persisted through Battlegrounds (BGs) as well. Though the ratio was the same, in 10vs10 / 15vs15 / 40vs40 format, Horde was more prone to make premades that sit in Discord voice chats and farm Honorable Kills for 10 hours per day, every day. A couple of unemployed people even shared a few accounts to keep the farm going across timezones as well.

They were also the first ones to leave the Battleground instance at the first hints of losing, especially if against non-premade groups.

And then there’s the infamous Mercenary mode, where a player could be queued for both sides with a click of a button on the website. This feature made sense for the large, pay-to-win realm, but on the small realm where you cannot outright buy Best in Slot gear, the realm that I played on, this was a grand betrayal. Within a small realm, it is easy to be remembered. The people you raided with, who you helped get some good gear, are now using the same gear to hunt you down in a battleground; it could actually be fun to duke it out with them in the open field, but I mostly played healers, so it was yet again a new humiliation ritual.

I have since stopped playing WoW, one of the many times when I take a break then come back to the cursed pixel world within a year. Funnily enough, it was not the PvP psyops and guerilla warfare and slandering and propaganda that broke my will to play this time, it was actually PvE. Raiding with retail refugees was raising my blood pressure like nothing else could.

The one thing I have learned from quietly observing the social dynamics of PvP is to never trust anyone. Whatever you send out into the world, be it in Discord DMs or whispers in-game, or voice chat raging, it WILL be screenshot and recorded and shared for ridicule and clowning. People WILL ragebait you, they WILL make up stories about you, and any person who thinks men don’t gossip needs to spend a few months playing WoW at any social capacity to learn how wrong that belief is. The most drama-farming I have witnessed came from male players, it was directed by male players, and readily shared in meme formats.

I have since played and finished Dark Souls 3, which is an amazing game that allows for PvE co-operation and PvP, all without any text or a way to communicate beyond in-game gestures. One could discern what type of player invaded their world if the invader actually stopped to bow, and give you the space to do so as well, before attacking you, making it into a proper duel, or if they were just there to treat you as another creature to farm.

It could be viewed from a purely socio-economic perspective; as in, a child named MacKinleigh carries a specific aura pertaining to lower middle class in the US South region, therefore will probably grow up in a certain childhood in a certain predisposed, pre-determined trajectory of life which often includes teenage pregnancy by an older man, or marrying an army guy at the age of nineteen and divorcing him at twenty-three.

But this isn’t about American stereotypes. It’s about foreshadowing in fiction through the character names.

I see them as small Easter eggs that an average reader will probably not catch onto, but is oddly rewarding to anyone who does realize it. It’s also a method to help the writer come up with a suitable name.

To try to explain it, it comes down to the graphical and visual identity of a word, in this case, a name.

Subscribe now

If we write down a name in a lined notebook, there are certain parts of the letters that peek through the bottom line, and the upper baseline of the word. I will try to explain this to the best of my ability, which I suspect won’t be good enough, but all I can do is try.

g j p q y

The upper baseline is broken by a lot more letters!

b d f h i j k l t

The pesky ‘j’ is accounted in both.

When we break down letters in this fashion, we can use names to signify both plot and character development within the simple visual structure, and to such a degree that it’d be consider major.

Let’s take the name Edward as a first example. A classic name in modern literature, really.

The full blue line is the base that the name lays on. None of the letters in the word ‘Edward’ break the base line, except the capital E, and the 2 d’s break the upper line.

So here’s the actual meat to this naming convention.

The base line, or the blue line in this case, is the physical representation of the character’s inner world; their steadfastness, their focus on the goal, their emotional and mental state throughout the written work. In the case of Edward, it would imply no straying of the path laid out in front of him, and little emotional turmoil in reaction to the plot.

And the plot would be the dotted upper line.

The dotted upper line is the representation of how the plot treats the character, from start to finish of the name and the plot.

So in Edward’s case, we have something like this.

The plot for Edward starts off on a high note, due to the capital E upper ledge being long and straight, but it quickly turns into chaos because of the chasm created by the 2 parallel lines of E; which then builds back up into a high created by lowercase d, and it again descends twice into the holes of w. From there, it’s smooth sailing over a r and part of d, until problems arise again at the very end. But, because the base line is not broken, no matter what happens to Edward, it’s like water off a duck’s back. Or he is constantly in mental anguish and that is his baseline that he does not deviate from all that much throughout the novel / poem / short story / whatever.

Magda would, by this logic, have a horrible childhood and/or early story development, absolutely horrendous behavior, emotional state of ups and downs, and the plot would be bashing her over the head in the first quarter of the story because of how capital M is designed.

Then, the plot would mellow out in the mid part (dotted upper line), but her emotions would be out of order due to the writer’s mistreatment because of the g arch out of line, and she’d come to accept the abuse, even with the plot bump of d just before the end.

The problem with this method is that there are very little Western names written in Latin alphabet that contain lowercase g j p q y, so for the romance(-adjacent) writers, this method of visualization through letters can also be reversed, depending if the writer wishes for a very emotional back-and-forth with little plot, so the line representation would simply be the very opposite of what I explained—the dotted line representing inner world, and the base line representing plot.

Admittedly, I have not yet published any work that used this method of naming that intertwines with plot structure, but it is how I named all my main and major characters in the novel that I am in the process of writing. As I had all this in mind, and honestly became a bit obsessive about, I managed to come up with quite unique and original names that sound natural for the characters’ backgrounds. Once my novel is ready for the world, I will add them in this section for proof of success, I suppose.

If this was helpful to you, consider buying me a coffee to support my autism.

ko-fi

Last year, I took up baking as a small hobby to let off some steam. It’s a wonderful way to apply physics and chemistry to make lovely baked goods that people cannot resist.

Bakers and writers share a common problem with a funny name - the soggy middle part. I have yet to run into that issue with my banana bread and poppy seed cake, but my novel is suffering greatly.

All the elan and the spirit of creation that possessed me for a few months decided it was enough, packed the bags and abandoned me. It thought I had learned and could continue. It was wrong.

Intrusive thoughts of mediocrity and unworthiness are creeping in and settling down. The story sucks, the narrative is weird, I don’t know which Amazon categories it belongs in. It is full of moral questions with explicit gore and violence. It is religious in theme, but the religious will get mad at me for writing this. It is set in the future, but it is basically in the past. They live in a monarchy, but it concerns the entire world.

I might have gotten in a tangled mess that actually lacks any substance. This might be the little dark age of my writing process.

I have amazing support, at home and online. I must push through, even at a hundred words per day. Otherwise, I am a fraud.

The vibe shifted drastically between 10 000 words.

Here’s to the next 10k, whenever they might happen.

Some scenes were planned to be grim, but some took me by surprise. It is weird to claim that as the one who plans and writes, but letting the fingers take over while the mind is in a state of creative flow and trance is beneficial sometimes. So, here we are, more gruesome stuff than intended.

Externalities

Since I started seriously writing this WIP, I have also been intermittently fasting. It has done wonders for mental clarity and determination to keep up the habit of daily writing.

One thing that I have also been practicing is a media fast, of sorts. I do watch documentaries and such, basically non-fiction in video format (the name for this alludes me), but any fiction media is off limits. My mind is always working on the story in the background, and watching series or film or anime completely re-wires my thought patterns. This is something I do not like, and try to avoid as best as I can. Pure of mind, to see what comes up, and a lot does.

Reading Crime and Punishment is the only fiction I do read while working on my story, and it has been a double-edged sword so far. The dialogue style did influence my own dialogue style. I find it flows more naturally, how people talk when they are excited or angry is usually with a lot of words, asking questions and immediately answering themselves. Dostoevsky solidified this observation in me, though it was not really the intended purpose.

The problem is that this could be hard to read. I recently ran a paragraph through Hemingwayapp, and every single sentence was very difficult to read.

My dear readers, you tell me if this is very hard to read or not. I cannot tell anymore if this is good advice or advice that wishes to cut the kneecaps of prose that surpasses 6th grade reading comprehension.

Internalities

Unfortunately, I still follow the news, so there are many things that I am mad about in the world. Those things are re-packaged and written out. With great effort to not allow it to happen, some malice still seeps through my fingers, towards certain positions, certain titles, certain situations. Maybe I will give in to it once I’m on the second draft. For now, I have to simply write my story as it is.

All in all,

decent progress. I am happy with where it’s all at, and with my pace of writing. The real victory lies in the daily habit that I am surprised I kept up for this long. It’s … easier than anticipated, which is maddening.

Thank you for reading, and for your support. It really does mean a lot to me.

Journalism has been unsurprisingly tangled with governments and politics in an abusive relationship for as long as it existed. If the history of journalism was a simple line, it would wave between decades if freedom of speech was taken as the only variable. Some of the time, a benevolent ruler allowed newspapers to write truthful articles during the good times, or in other words, let the journalists do their jobs. Most of the time, though, that simply was not the case.

At first, it was the outright banhammers. They would just discontinue a certain newspaper that allegedly tarnished the ruler’s name, or dared to subtly question the authority, which was often done by force, or threatening the use of it. Many journalists of yesterday ended up imprisoned for a long time for having the courage to speak out very publicly against the ruling regime. They knew exactly what would have happened to them once the paper was printed and distributed, containing damning text with their names above it, and they still chose to do it. If that is not the highest form of courage, I don’t know what is.

The authorities eventually had to stop being so bold in their misuse of power as the readers caught wind of what was happening, and they did not like it one bit. When distrust sows its seeds in public opinion, it is hard to nip that in the bud. The dictators started taking marketing classes, and quickly learned there is a much better way to suppress journalists while keeping their reputation squeaky clean.

Taxes.

Slowly, they raised taxes on printed goods, until it got to the point that no one could afford newspapers anymore. Except, of course, the news that acquired ‘donations’ from the ruling class to keep afloat. How kind and generous of them.

For the journalists, it was a lose-lose situation. Either voluntarily fold to the boot, or get folded in prison. The third option was to go into a different trade, dropping journalism entirely, which was also a win for the government. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well, not quite the same.

The journalism of today is that only in name. It has no basis of operation in journalism for what it should stand for. Pursuit of truth, objectivity, respect, fairness, correctness, balance and, most importantly, remaining unbiased in any situation should be the pillars of journalism well practiced. Yet, an article with all those settings in mind is keeping everyone in great anticipation since 1970s.

Nowadays, these so-called journalists are glorified PR goblins standing on top of each other, hiding under a long trench coat. They copy from each other like school children, parrot the government-approved memos, and share irrelevant, random opinions to clog up the news space that is already full of shit.

And the reason for that is because real journalism is illegal.

Not directly, of course. Freedom of speech, and by extent freedom of press, are guaranteed in any country which practices democracy. Yet, there is no freedom of consequences, a right usually granted to journalists to protect them from libel lawsuits, or worse. Journalism is illegal, not in the judiciary system, but the social one. Once self-censorship rears its ugly head, it often becomes a rampant, unstoppable beast propelled further by social media, a place where everyone can share their opinion, no matter how unfounded it may be.

In their drive to push government agenda, all journalists, regardless of chosen colors, got caught up in the very beliefs they are supposed to be imposing. The backlash for wrongthink would not come from the court, nor the government, but the very society they should be serving the truths to. Unbiased no more, but shackled, with festering Stockholm Syndrome on a grand scale. Pick a side, oh objective one, or burn at the freedom stake, but don't tell anyone about the new rules whichever fate you choose.

I am beyond jaded when it comes to this topic, because all the above is not even the worst part.

The main objective of modern journalists is to garner as many clicks, likes, shares, and hearts. For profit. Integrity and principles, sold for $0.001 per engagement. Comments disabled, naturally. No dissent towards the ruling class, citizens. No discourse, just absorb what we put out.

They relish in the power they should be questioning in the first place. Journalists have become useful idiots for [CURRENT REGIME], whichever it turns out to be, and they see it as a Good Thing™ because now they are not prosecuted and they can write freely about the dildo sizes of trans Guatemalan drug traffickers, instead of shedding light on the truth that matters. It’s just a job, not a calling anymore. Politics got journalism under its control, subdued and muzzled, so there’s no real power struggle left, just chihuahuas yapping for a crumb of public attention.

There’s no turning back, I’m afraid, because the 24-hour news cycle Chinese-water-tortured people into being cynical and apathetic. People do not care anymore, how could they? Most normies don’t even have any trust left in legacy media.

And the ones still trying, still revealing documents and exposing the ruling class at their own detriment, have to do so covertly, in hushed tones, away from electronics. The freedom of press is better preserved in Minecraft than in the Western world.

In the end, if all other means fail, someone else can take care of them.

The problem with the current state of media is multi-faceted—and there’s a whole lot more to be said about the language used in news headlines and articles to “guide” the reader into the “correct” opinion—but it really does not matter. The ruling class had won at making everything clickbait and everyone jaded and news-fatigued. Klippenstein will be memory-holed, oh here’s yet another low-stakes scandal that will be astroturfed, consume consume consume, forget and consume some more.

This is not my usual content. Still subscribe if you enjoyed it.

Subscribe now

All things modern are designed to completely hijack our ancient brains, and it’s really not that hard. Everything is brightly colored and vibrant and shapeshifting, moving constantly to keep you glued and dumb and addicted. When we think back to our ancestors from before the Industrial Revolution, before mass production of goods and quick travel, we often neglect the fact that they simply did not meet as many humans as we do today. Their daily lives looked much different to ours, even if we set aside technology for the sake of the argument. An average person was not a city slicker, but someone out working on a farm. Besides the village, the average person saw maybe a dozen new people in their lifetime. And this was the norm since history began, up until now.

How did it come to life then, the notion that it’s perfectly fine to be surrounded by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people each and every day? That is far too many faces. We are supposed to be able to experience a billion colors from all corners jumping around on quicksilver screens, then come home and consume videos and movies and reels and shorts, and somehow remain sane? Our minds, understandably, start blurring out the faces, the smells, the colors, the micro-movements, the sounds. It is an information overload, on a daily basis. And with the facial blur comes the slow dehumanization of others and of self, then comes the apathy.

And ‘experts’ are ‘concerned’ about rising statistics of more and more people needing anxiety and depression medication. You will not hear a farmer call himself a ‘cog in the machine’ or a ‘wagie’.

My personal theory is that this is part of the blame for the downfall of writing in entertainment industry. The writers of anything popular live within a walking distance of kale smoothie shops and are experiencing this sensory overload day after day after day, and then are supposed to sit down with a clear mind and write something of substance, when their minds are screaming and pleading for 15 minutes of green grass and fresh breeze and silence, both visual and auditory silence. This is extendable to any creative endeavor and industry, to any job, and to any life satisfaction numbers.

We are not made for the modern world. I don’t know who made it this way, but it’s not sustainable at all and we’ve been collectively gaslit to believe otherwise. Sooner or later, a seam will burst and the social fabric will tear apart, and then when the world becomes quieter, we might hopefully, finally make and consume some good art.

The reason why I wrote this is because I saw a couple of people pose the question of media consumption and inspiration. Since moving to the countryside, I realized that my mind works best if I let it be. Just, quiet. If I don’t consume media, specially film and series and most things fictional and visual, my brain conjures it’s own entertainment. The ancient brain avoids work at all costs to preserve energy, but still produces the fun. With nothing occupying my eyes, my kopf-kino (head-cinema) can run it’s own show and do the inner working needed to write. My inspiration comes from my own neurons.

Allow yourself to not be stimulated by external sources. Sit somewhere without a podcast or music or videos or… and just, sit. Go into your mind and see what’s going on in there, clear some cobwebs and let the old mill run again. Gaze at clouds, lay on grass, close your eyes, listen to birds. Time will pass faster and slower, and it won’t matter.

Allow yourself to be welcomed back into your own skull. It’s the only place that is truly, sincerely yours, and everyone at every turn is trying to take it away from you. Hold it firmly, hold it gently, reclaim yourself away from the talking heads and bright demons. Let the birds talk to you and see what they have to say.

About the draft

The first draft of my novel currently stands at 9,025 words.

Some people write their first drafts as ugly as possible, just to vomit out a word salad that has barely any coherence in order to somehow get the words out. And I get it, I really do, but my mind cannot work that way.

For the better or worse, it seems I write quite slowly. There are a million excuses that I could come up with that would probably justify the pace, at least a dozen of them would get many to nod in solidarity, but there’s really no point in that. Struggle Pages was brought to life over a month ago, and I only have just “over 9000” words. But slow as it may be, I edit as I write, I think thrice about sentences and words as they are being written, and I mostly write at night when I am alone, physically and mentally.

That is all to say, the words written so far are the actual skeleton being built up, they’re not just scattered bones from different animals I picked up along the way and now am trying to glue together so that they look like something. The spirit of the novel is infused already, now it’s just a matter of writing.

About the novel

The idea for the story came about three years ago. Since then, it evolved and developed and grew, and is being refined every day by my restless head. It is many things all at once, and the premise is quite serious but the accompanying elements are fresh and new. At least I’d like to believe that.

Some of the characters and the story are very Slav-coded, as the terminally online would say nowadays. There are not that many stories that have consistent Slavic-ness to them, and it’s a shame. Most people are familiar with Greek / Roman / Nordic mythology, and so the names and behaviors associated with such cultures are easier for the EOL (English Only Language) reader to understand and pronounce than it is for anything to do with Slavic culture. There are certain games (Witcher and Stalker come to mind immediately) that break this, but let’s be real, Slavic content1 in the Anglo-dominant internet is sparse.

So, the story is set in “mitteleuropa” as they call it, somewhere between Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia. Such setting is usually associated with medieval stories, but we will be going into the future with this one.

A really odd future.

I am being vague on purpose. Forgive me. All will be revealed on time.

About the process

Oh am I unpacking a lot of things from my childhood while writing this, and it’s not even trauma. When I need a character or a house or a room, I just pluck it out from my memories and alter a bit so that it fits nicely. The smells, the colors, the people of the story, all of them stem from my early childhood.

In a way, it is quite entertaining to observe my mind fold itself out like that.

When it comes to naming the characters, there is a whole enormous post waiting to be written about the linguistic, etymological, phonetic and symbolic level name autism that I apparently have. I will publish it once the book is out, as the names are very dear to me now.

As it is right now, my little nightly writing has been tremendous for me. For the first time ever since I started writing at the tender age of 10, writing has become a lovely habit, rather than inspiration-crazed 20k words in one week then burnout for the rest of the year. My writing process is slow but steady. And honestly, this is preferable than whatever the hell I was doing before.

Lastly,

there are 15 of you who will receive this post directly in your e-mail inbox.

I am ever so grateful to have your continued support.

Thank you.

The infinite scroll is an evil, evil thing designed by evil, evil people. Never even opening a website might help, but gosh, does the brain remember unending stream of two-second thoughts going in and out, in and out, on a loop, in a circle, like an overzealous hamster caught up in the wheel.

Enough. Writing needs to be done. The wheel stops, the pumpkin spice posts in baking communities pop up and in an effort to not engage, in an effort to re-direct myself, I have come here, to the new altar of my creations.

Autumn is the best season. Autumn allows for the high of summer to leave, and we get to wave goodbye until next year. Some places do not even get autumn, just goes straight from scorching heat to unforgiving cold, and I pity the people who live there.

Always wished for anonymity on the internet, and always made sure to maintain such a modern day luxury. Never did I let any of my beloved hobbies and mediums combine lest I be discovered, somehow. The fear of being perceived overrode the wish to be recognized.

Photography has been a part of my life for a very long time. Actually started out as a first grader when my mother gifted me a small film camera for my class zoo trip. It became a dear ritual between us as with each trip I’d get a new roll of film to document what I experienced. The anticipation of getting back the photos from the shop and the excitement of sliding them neatly into photo albums is something that stays throughout the years. Begged for a DSLR for a long, long time, but times were tough, and when I finally received one for my 16th birthday, a Canon 450D, times got even tougher but I could not have cared less as my focus was now manual and seen through a kit lens.

The world became brighter, and the world became darker. My eye and my mind became highly trained at spotting everything. Suddenly, random faces became intricate and full of lore that I wished to capture, but people turned away.

An urban myth that ‘a camera captures the soul’ was always quite intriguing, but I never really believed it. Until I wished to share my photos with others and I downloaded Instagram. Now, well, our ancestors were not as silly and dumb as modern midwits would like to believe. People were not meant to stare at themselves for any period of time. Maybe a quick glance here or there in the reflection of a clear pond, but now it seems that middle school children need to prop up a front-facing camera at themselves in school and during class to monitor every single micro-movement of their shiny faces. Soul = captured. You let it happen to yourself.

Rarely have I ever turned the lens on myself. Such a fascination with outer self seems like quite a dull hobby.

ko-fi

The very publishing industry that is basically an artsy circle jerk of people in New York whose noses tear the sky apart.

The very publishing industry which operates on word count limits, despite the fact we’re not living in the 19th century and e-books exist. E-books should have been an overwriter’s dream come true! You can write and write and write tens of thousands of words, and you can publish it without expensive paper printing. I do wonder how the classics from yesteryear would’ve been written if e-books existed back then. It could be a reader problem, wherein if they see 200k words, they likely won’t take it up, but will happily read 109 volumes of manga. People won’t watch a movie, but will binge watch a season. And yet, the voracious reader does not look at word count. And yet, the agents are scared and limiting.

Even here on Substack, people write a lot of words, and I mean a lot of words that ultimately don’t really say anything, or are just repeats of previous sentences. I’ve read word salad odes to very mundane feelings and ideas on here, like the whole discourse about having children which, for me, culminated after reading a 10 000 word essay explaining in great detail and verbosity how population decline is harming the world, only for it to end with “Women need to be removed from education, here’s a bullet point list why”. What’s with the buffer zone beforehand, if that’s the conclusion?

Now, I come from a journalist background; specifically daily news reporter. My words are usually straight to the point, without any fluff. Who, what, where, when, why. Therefore, I am a chronic underwriter. My first, and second, and third drafts are hungry skeletons with no meat or even tendons on them. For comparison and transparency, here are the first and final draft of a scene in my latest story In Utero.

84 words // 261 words

The scene is the same, but even just visually, that’s a big difference.And this is something I struggle with a lot. If let be, my stories would just be micro fiction, and yet that is a format that I could not really do properly. Perhaps it is an issue of years of journalism that pounded into me to capture the very essence of the problem / idea / concept / news, and let the details out the window. Perhaps I am simply too impatient to get the story out of my head. Or too eager. Or too robotic.

Lastly, a confession.
I am jealous of the overwriter. I wish I could trim away the excess fat, instead of trying to put anything on the skeleton and make it stick to the bone. The process of deleting is much easier than the process of adding. And adding more. And more… Fingers crossed that this works. Otherwise, I’ll have to keep reading 19th century Russians.

“Think I see it,” he said.

A small speck of light appeared on the horizon, barely visible through the thick fog sprawling above water. The ship cut through the water with a quiet slowness, and reached the dock with a thud.

“See you on the other side,” he said. “Goodbye, love.”

She did not grace him with a farewell—a punishment she saw fit for having to do this against her will. The captain, a man in his 60s with a rough beard and a pristine hat sitting on his weary head, came down to give her a silent nod as she boarded. Besides Clove and the captain, the ship was empty. She looked around to determine the best seating, and spotted a red velvet seat in the center of the hall, as if it was waiting just for her. She plopped into it and ran her hands over the soft material. The ship docked again, this time with a heavier sound. The captain appeared in the waiting room.

“We have arrived,” he said.

“Already?”

The captain brushed the brim of his hat and led her to the dock. He held her hand as she stepped down the ship. She turned to nod at the man and thank him, but she was greeted by murky water instead.

There were dozens of buildings with multiple one-room apartments scattered all over the island. All rooms were fitted with a double glass door that spanned the entire outside wall. Many of the rooms already housed occupants, mostly one person per room. Everyone's activities were on full display to anyone nearby. One large ball room was situated in the center of the island, where dozens of men and women danced together but never fully embraced. Their feet were bloodied and their faces were grimacing, but they did not rest or complain. Among them was a black silhouette of an animal with long thin legs. It moved it’s head slowly from side to side in silent observation of the people below, it's ear occasionally twitching from the loud music. Clove stared at the solid black visual noise that has come to life. The shifting sketched flesh slowly hypnotised her mind, until it's head turned and a red grin spawned at the mouth.

Her blood ran cold. There were no visible eyes, but she felt it's bloodthirsty gaze on her skin, like prey about to be devoured. All she wanted was to run as fast as her legs allowed, but fear overtook her system, and she froze. The dancing people noticed her staring, and stared back at her, their eyes crying black tears. They mouthed words at her, to run, to hide, to save herself. The silhouette’s grin widened even further, and it made a step toward Clove, right through a couple of dancers as if made out of air. Her knees were about to give in, when small ratlike humans appeared around her and brought her back to her wits with ankle bites and pinches, and ushered her along to her designated room. Saliva coated in stars dripped from the creature’s teeth, and it disappeared, and all the dancers fell to the floor.

The room was small and made yellow by the old ceiling light. An uncomfortable bed overlooked the glass door. On the other side, a small desk was leaned against the wall, and only had a dusty switch and a plastic case with pills in it. A flimsy clothing rack was between the desk and the bathroom door frame, but there was no door. The bathroom consisted of a pristine toilet, a small sink, and a one-way window with the view of the street, with a deep sill.

With a quick jerk of the head, she downed the pills then sat on the bed and stared at the scratched popcorn wallpaper for days. She thought she had become liquid, like a gelatin ooze which seeped into the lining of the hard mattress. It was far too warm. The room had effectively become a pot of bone broth sitting on low fire for hours. Clove hated it. She wished for anything else but turning into a congealed mass of flesh soup.

And a knock on the door was a wish fulfilled. An older woman with blonde hair stood in the hall wearing a baby blue hospital gown that reached down to her ankles. Her fingers kept touching each other and her otherwise kind eyes glanced down the hall between words.“You are new here,” she said. “Can I come in?”

Clove moved to the side. The woman sat on the messy bed and sighed.

“My name’s Lorraine, I am your neighbour to the right,” she introduced herself. Clove could only look at her extended hand, as her own was heavy as lead. There were several colourful rings adorning the fingers. Some were ancient and thin, some were new and polished, but all were far too small for her.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked, “a husband? Someone who loves you?”

“I think so, yes,” Clove answered, and cleared her throat.

Lorraine leaned forward for a whisper. “Do you still remember him?”

Clove thought for a long time. The smell and the voice and the skin all lived in her memory, but not his face. Not anymore, at least. Perhaps the voice was a bit deeper than she recalled. What was he wearing at the harbour again?

"What's your name?" Lorraine asked.

"Clove."

Lorraine's face scrunched. "That's a weird name. Did you just make that up?"

Clove shook her head. She would've gotten impatient with such intrusive questions had she not been watching the small shadows that came in with Lorraine darting around the room. She could never seem to catch them, her eyes were far too slow, and she didn’t really want to bring it up as it may cause awkwardness.

“How long have I been here?” Clove asked, and immediately swallowed spit which painfully accumulated in her cheeks. Much to her surprise, her voice was raspy and broken. She had not spoken in a long time, though she stepped off that ship just yesterday. Or maybe it was last week. Not terribly long, surely, as the administration barely took notice of her residence. There wasn't even any paperwork to fill in, no check-in at the reception or a check-up with the doctor. Only prescription pills at the desk, like a welcome gift.

Instead of answering, Lorraine offered a smile emanating a pity reserved for children who did not know better.

"Have you been clicking the switch?" she asked, and straightened her posture to look at the top of the desk. Clove nodded, but the switch was off.

"No you have not been doing that, were you not told about this? Let me do it right now, or we are both in trouble. Oh, I see. You ate the pills. The pills that were on the desk, that they gave you. That’s good!”

At this point, Lorraine had already gotten off the bed and was now kneeling in front of the bathroom. Clove deemed her far too enthusiastic and chatty and active for her liking. All she wanted was a nap.

The wrinkles on Lorraine's face showed through with worry. The women shared a long, uncomfortable look, neither breaking the moment. Clove’s hands started feeling sweaty. The room was getting a bit too warm.

"You haven't the slightest clue what this place is," Lorraine said. "Here, maybe I can show you."

She stood back up and helped Clove to the bathroom. She swiped away the dust gathered on the window sill with her forearm and propped Clove's elbows up. With their noses and cheeks pressed against the stained window, they smudged the condensation gathered on the glass.

"See that?"

Mousy black creatures, woven from the fabric of night itself and with glowing eyes, scurried about the wet street. Some carried plastic cases on their backs, a few were directing others, and most ran in groups, seamlessly blending into the walls and morphing out of the grey brick, as if they've done it a thousand times before. Clove rubbed her tired eyes. She'd been seeing them as quick little shadows all over, but never quite catching a direct look until now. Small pearls of sweat started forming on her forehead, and she felt as if someone had sat on her chest. She yearned for a deep breath, but the stuffy air was far too hot. Only when her hands trembled did Lorraine notice.

"It's fine, it's fine, just... Hm, it's normal. This is normal around here. You'll get used to it. Listen, I have to go now, okay? They'll probably try to get to you, so don't open the door for anyone. Especially not Him. Just, no one, okay? I'll see you again."

And with the promise, Lorraine left the room. Clove was alone again, more alone than before. That woman's visit only made things worse. She went back to the rough bed, and laid down in hopes of falling asleep, but it proved to be impossible. Tossing and turning and sweating, she never quite felt like this. Like a curious child witnessing the ocean's blue nothingness for the first time. Though the room was small and cramped, the terrifying vastness oppressed her soul. Soul? Since she got here, she has not felt a soul. This body did not belong to her at all. Her mind was overtaken, seized by an entity she could not even properly name or directly look at. Pathetic, utterly pathetic and weak.

Wet tippy taps ran down the hall, stopped right outside her room for a minute, then walked away, then came back. Since Lorraine left, twice now did a heavy pair of hooves hit the wooden floor and walk with a cocky stride to her door, but none of them ever knocked. At some point, the sounds blurred into background, like a cooling fan on a warm August night. Clove would die for a fan right now.

When Clove woke up, it was still night. Despite sleeping a long time, she still felt tired. The refilled plastic pill case was waiting for her on the desk. This time, she decided not to take the colourful pills as they made her groggy. But she did remember to press the switch. A small light turned on, blinking randomly at first and then steadying the pace into an uninterrupted stream of white light. And Clove felt better, more conscious of herself. She could feel her skin, she felt inside her skin, and the texture of the warm window sill she leaned on again. It was dawn, but there was only darkness outside. The sky was without a moon, without stars or satellites. The darting shadows appeared less often than before, or her mind had just gotten used to them. Hard to be aware of them all the time. Far too many of them.

Her eyes focused back to the street, and she saw it again. The strangely tall animal, with large horns protruding out of it's small skull and the tallest legs imaginable, strolling down with a pride and ease of a predator, looking through the glass doors of each room to check on the residents. It stopped right at Clove’s room. As it noticed the empty room, the ratlike creatures appeared and offered papers, but the dark creature dismissed them with a stomp and fragmented into a million drops, then materialised right in front of the bathroom window. There was only black visual noise where the creature's face would have been. It was ever-shifting and unpleasant to the eye, and the same grin cracked open, baring teeth in a jittery manner. The red grin of bloodlust.

Clove staggered back into the bathroom and against the wall, and as she pulled away, an imprint of an enormous wing formed in the steamy window, right above and to the left of her nose and cheek. The detail of each feather, down to the finest lines, was preserved. Right through it, the creature's tongue slid vertically on the glass outside.

Lorraine burst into the bathroom, threw herself on the ground and pulled Clove down. Her hand fastened around the mouth of the mortified woman. Lorraine tried to calm her silently, rocking back and forth in a predictable rhythm. The beast licked it's red teeth, and carried on with the stroll.

“Perhaps you are still lucid, still there. Give me your hand. Listen, this is of great importance. This place is not what you thought it would be, this is not a safe house, though it may feel that way to you. You've only been here, what, half a year? ... This place is haunted, the staff came straight from the depths of hell, did you see them? Did you see the dark animal? Did you see He was darker than the night itself? Did He also grin at you? Avoid Him, Clove, avoid Him, for His name is," and her voice came down to a hushed whisper, "His name is Death."

Lorraine squeezed Clove’s shoulder with a mother’s gentle touch, then dug her nails deep into the bare skin when she saw the wing print on the fogged window.

“It is too late,” she muttered, “I am done.”

The kind eyes became sorrow itself, the steadfast assurance became sweaty trembling, and Lorraine hurried to the door whilst trying to swallow pebbles. As if she had time. As if mercy would be shown, if only she could outrun the arbiter. She slammed the door behind her and ran down the hallway, and right after a stampede of tippy taps followed.

Clove was alone once again. She crawled out from the hot bathroom, and helped herself up using the shoddy desk, only to fall on her knees again. The goal was the bed, just to lay in bed, yet there were the dreaded steps outside her room. Hooves hitting the hardwood floor, passing the door and walking away, and she jumped as a scream from the otherworld echoed through the building, through the island. Her shaking hand barely reached the pill case. It would have been easier if she took them. None of this would have happened. The hooves made their way back to the end of the hallway and disappeared, and wet tippy taps of the smallest shadows ran up and down in a frenzy. Clove clenched her fist. She was tired, and tired of being scared and warm all the time. She got on the ground and slowly creaked the door open. To her immediate left, just behind a corner, a lifeless hand laid on the floor, a hand with rings drained from all color. Beneath it, a message was left written in black blood.

WE ARE
SO SORRY

Clove closed the door. She crawled into bed and cried for months.

“Male clothes?”

A man’s voice boomed through the corridor. Squeaky wheels of a giant yellow container never broke the pace until they reached Clove's room. The man knocked on the door, and opened it slightly ajar, peaking through the gap. He was hit by a wave of intense heat and smell of sweat.

“Any male clothes?” he asked in a whisper.

Clove was still in bed, facing the wall. She turned to look at the ceiling, just enough not to view him directly.

“I’m the only woman here."

The man shrugged his shoulders. He pointed at the light switch with a raised eyebrow before closing the door. Clove sighed a heavy breath, stood up from her despair and pressed the switch. A white plastic tub appeared on the desk, in it a white dog taking a bubble bath.

“Malteser?” she guessed.

The dog showed teeth through a forced smile, and the wall right behind it crumbled down to dust, revealing the bathroom. Voices appeared from the walls, becoming louder, and louder, chanting and giggling and cooing. Wrapped in a pure white blanket, a newborn showed up in Clove’s hands. At first the skull was there, and layers of tendons, muscles, fat and skin came on top of each other in perfect symphony. The eternal darkness was no more.

“It is time,” the baby spoke.

Clove walked right through the glass door into the blue dawn with her head held high. Cold morning air filled her heavy lungs. The wings burst open in painful waves from her back through the blouse, and finally spread apart with dignity. The baby’s mushed face relaxed. She hunched over and held it tighter, closer, to her chest and onto her heart. Their heartbeats synced and together they took flight into the bright.

This story was originally a dream, or rather a nightmare, so excuse the edginess.

Leave a tip

A small child was sitting on an uncomfortable bench of a bus stop, flinging his feet up and down. His head was encased in a thin membrane filled with water, and he kept twirling around to make himself feel sick. Stars grew and disappeared, galaxies rotated and glimmered, and he only cared for the ever-shifting lava lamp screen next to the shoddy structure. And much to the child’s amusement, it lit up.

ARRIVAL
ONE MINUTE

The child was not quite sure what it meant, the word ‘arrival’ or the concept of time. At first he thought he knew, but the more he thought of it, the more it escaped his head, quite like trying to remember how he got here in the first place, or what he was supposed to be doing out here. He didn’t pay it much mind, though, because the new focus was back to the scenery. Entire galaxies moved, and exploded, and shrunk, and danced to a silent hymn - a tune orchestrated with his little fingers stirring the dark matter.

A minute had passed, and it was both slowed and accelerated at the same time, and the child heard a clear sound for the first time. He stood, carefully balancing his heavy, bulbous head with both of his hands, and peeked around the thin wall of the stop. A purple bus trotted along a road that conjured stars to drive on, which dissipated after contact with the naked tires. He was curios about the shiny trail and the vehicle as it became bigger, until it stopped right in front of him. The driver was a figure with a ball of blinding light as it’s head, and it illuminated the inside of the bus, and he felt it’s radiating warmth.

On the other side, the door opened, and two people got out, ushering smaller creatures with them, all made out of fabric torn from constellations. They thanked the shimmering driver, and the excited creatures skipped straight to the child, sniffing and licking his hands and feet and legs and arms and head. The child giggled, and it reverberated throughout the universe.

“Ah! You must be…” the woman gasped. The man silently nodded, with a smile strewn across his face.

They sat next to the child, one on each side, both speechless. The child looked at them, and offered the woman a red dwarf summoned on the tip of his finger, and she kindly accepted and ate it with a crunch. His toothless giggle warmed their hearts, and he was at ease. They felt familiar.

“He must be cold,” the woman said. “Did we bring a blanket?”

“Doesn’t seem like he feels it,” the man shrugged. “Is he your first as well?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Yes he is.”

The child brought his hand up to the woman’s cheek, and she let him touch it. Surprised how his hand went through her, he let out a laugh, and touched her forehead this time, and laughed again. Her throat closed and her eyes welled up.

The man stared at the unfolding, revolving universe in front of them, with the child’s small hand nested in his rugged, tough palm. The dogs have calmed, and laid down resting below the child, tickling his feet with their fur. The shifting screen rearranged another message.

DEPARTURE
ONE MINUTE

The woman cleared her eyes and pursed her lips before she spoke.

“Little one, you are going somewhere else soon. You will walk and talk and run around. You will fall, and you will rise. You will love, and you will hate. We both will live on through you, but live for yourself. We cannot go with you, but don’t be afraid of the ride. There are many people waiting for you at the end. It is your beginning. You will be welcomed and loved there.”

She stroked his hand, and the man cleared his throat.

“Trust your hands, boy,” he said, and continued with a softer voice, “and never betray yourself.”

A tiny vehicle announced itself with the nostalgic brewing of an old engine. The woman hugged the child, squeezed him gently, and let the tears roll down.

“Listen to your parents, okay? Be kind to your mother, as you have been so far,” she whispered.

The man burst open the child’s head encasement, and glossy water poured down his small body. He tried to breathe, but there was no air. The woman planted a kiss on his forehead, and the man did as well, and for a brief moment, the child saw and understood everything. The boy comprehended all, and immediately forgot.

The car stopped in front of them, and they were greeted by a figure of changing colours, shifting black, grey and blue hues, underneath a pearly sheet. The man took the child’s hand and lead him to the car, picked him up and gently pinched the chubby cheek before he settled him down in the seat. The boy fussed and reached out for both of them, shattering their hearts, but they knew there was no time left for him here.

“We will always be with you, little one.”

And the car started back up and the sparkle trail appeared, and the child emerged from speckled darkness and into the light, and he breathed an overwhelming breath and screamed.

Or leave a tip

Written to process the grief of my child only having half the grandparents.
Hope he got to meet them beforehand.

So when I try to sleep, the fake scenarios morph into being interviewed about my book. The interviewer’s face when I mention my inspirations, and having to explain how an obscure meme gave life to the idea behind this obvious bestseller.

It is pathetic, frankly. There won’t be any book signings for which I would personally bake cupcakes, because even the traditionally published struggle for a physical audience. People won’t be wearing my “merch” (oh the cringe of writing this out loud). There will not be any weird fan-fiction of my story on Ao3. There won’t be a deal with some big shot studio to turn it all into a movie, or an anime, or a series.

And yet, the little optimistic gnome whispers in my ear.

“But it could happen.”

Realistically, no. Statistically, also no.

But he won’t shut up. He’s always there, sitting at my shoulder, and whenever my thought wander, he pinches the back of my neck and giggles with a stupid laugh.

“Would the cupcakes be double chocolate or blueberry vanilla?”

Truth is, I hate this feeling. Delusions of grandeur are not really my type of thing, usually. The usual would be hyper self-criticism, giving up if not instantly good at something new, and avoidance of a challenge that might seem too hard in order to preserve ego and pride.

Ah, but the gnome is relentless and annoying. The only way to gag him, or perhaps even temporarily incapacitate him, is to sit down and write. Writing is a wonderfully humbling experience. You realize that you’re actually really stupid, and that writing isn’t as easy as you thought. Or as everyone thinks, until they try.

Repeatedly having to murder the gnome has proven to be an excellent way to keep consistently writing. And I am deeply thankful for him.