oh okay yes ! i usually forget to do the ones i am tagged in but i really like to speak about writing so i will do this one. it will be long so that is your warning

marvellous adventures in asadon and everything that came after it happened because i could not sleep one night. which is when a lot of my good ideas happen including this one (my best i think). i wrote the first little bit of it without knowing who half the characters were. they were just names on a page with dialogue coming out everywhere. quite messy ! and it felt really very spooky in a way like it was coming from a place outside myself. then i went to sleep because i was quite tired and when i woke up i started working backward to figure out who everyone was. some of the people i realised i had been painting or drawing for years leading up to that night (like seroquel and helen) and some i had to look much closer inside myself to figure out more information about (like gabapentin). slowly i was able to make them more real with words and pictures and then i had friends ! which was nice because i didn’t really have any at that point in my life. i was working a job i really didn’t like and i would get fifteen minutes a shift to eat lunch or sit down and i would work on marvellous adventures on my phone with swipey type. in the manuscript itself (though not on substack) the text is formatted in a skinny line to replicate the shape of my phone screen. eventually i went back to college (had dropped out) to finish that book and so i sometimes wrote on my computer so my professor would not think i was on instagram but mostly i still wrote on my phone in spare moments often when it was loud and people were around me doing something else. it flowed very easily and i did not jump around at all just wrote it all in order and only edited to take things away, not add them.

i think of that book as being written the way i talk. the life and times of gabapentin alphabet on the other hand is written the way that i think which is much harder to translate out of my brain and so it is going kind of slowly. i write on a laptop because i am addicted to caesurae (so need the tab button) and i typedeleterespaceundo rather obsessively. it can take me hours to write one page but it can also go a lot faster especially if there is a lot of dialogue. i also jump around a lot between time periods in gabapentin’s life and jot down unfinished things that i expand later which i am not used to doing (feels like i am cheating). i still write when it is loud around me just because i don’t have a lot of time to myself but i prefer when it is quiet.

my visual art is also quite important to my writing like a feedback loop but there is not room to talk about that here. most important though is to have experiences. i would recommend it