In December, I got an idea for a novel. I down a bunch of notes and ideas. Good news, I think I've got enough for a full plot and cast of characters now. Maybe too many. (The document of notes is around 14,000 words.) I saw key scenes in my dreams. Part of me wonders if that's normal. More of me doesn't care, as long as I remember to write those pictures in my head down when I wake up so I don't forget.
One of the key things I've got to think about is when to set the book. I decided to start it in 2012. This was a time of relative optimism in the United States. However, for many of my age, we'd seen over a decade of warning signs that everything was starting to crumble. The Columbine school shooters were just a year older than I was.
I want to write about a group of people from their mid 20s to early 30s who learn the hard way that all the goals people my age were told to strive for didn't provide what we expected even if we caught that illusive dream. Picking a year that's around my age at the time makes sense.
The novel is the first big, ambitious dream I've had in five years. Ideas hit me suddenly and coming up with what I think is a coherent narrative arc has been surprisingly easy. Of course, I've got to be able to execute and write the thing! But I wrote around 90 pages of my PhD dissertation in a month while teaching a 75-person class.
Hope is a hell of a drug. That's why put all of my notes on the shelf for a month and probably will for another month to work on other projects. It's important to think about whether I still like these character and plot ideas before I commit to writing them.
Before really digging into the novel, I want to write about how my hope died and what it took to come back, because that's what I think my characters are going to experience. On some level, I think it may be what lots of people are experiencing these days.
It may surprise some folks that I'm not going to write fantasy, even though my main writing for the last several years has been Dungeons & Dragons adventures. I fell into writing D&D adventures for conventions after only a year of playing the game. Normally, the way people got to write for conventions is playing D&D for a decade or more, making the right connections, and getting a buddy to hire them. Or they'd organize the convention themselves and take adventure writing as a perk.
I got a tip about a small convention hundreds of miles away that needed a writer and submitted a writing sample. I've never met anyone else who got in to writing D&D adventures for conventions based on a writing sample that was an hour long section of an adventure.
Before my first adventure was ever published, I made a few connections with good people and out of nowhere I was going to help write an exclusive Acquisitions Incorporated adventure for PAX Unplugged, one of the biggest tabletop gaming conventions in the world. Acquisitions Incorporated was the first hit recorded tabletop roleplaying game for audiences to listen to or watch their games. I was going to the lead writer for the main adventure for others to play in their world at a convention. For the 228 players in the room, the adventure was a smash hit.
Despite the insanity and increasing cruelty of the broader world, most of life got better and better for me in 2019 as compared to much of the decade. I was ready to branch out even more in 2020.
Then Covid happened. if I'm being completely honest, it was much easier for me to adapt to lockdown life than most. I'd spent most of my life doing most of my work from home. Lockdown lifestyle wasn't that different than dissertation lifestyle. Tabletop gaming was a booming industry because people couldn't go outside.
My hope didn't fade after months of Covid. It didn't die when the hospitals in Los Angeles were so full of Covid patients at the end of 2020 that they had to send ambulances away. I didn't question my faith when my father got cancer the first time. Or when his cancer came back. No, I lost my faith when I saw a leader in the convention gaming space hire someone I had reported over a year beforehand for homophobic and transphobic sexual harassment.
My harasser was the only queer person I saw in person on a regular basis, the person who kept posting on social media about helping other people come out. But as soon as I showed signs of coming out in my mid 30s, they turned on me and threated to sexually assault my D&D character.
I had dealt with the harassment as well as I could. A friend saw the tip of the iceberg and got me away from the harassing DM. I focused on writing other adventures and feeling out who could be a safe friend in the broader gaming community that was blossoming during Covid.
When Covid started, I was one of the leading experts on how to move your D&D game online and regularly DMed public games online despite having one of the worst Internet connections in America. But once this person got hired to write the next big adventure for this type of gaming, I quit. I became a shell of myself. All I wanted to do was spend time with my close friends and hide from the rest of the world.
I thought I was pretty hardened to despicable acts. My Master's Thesis focused on how George W. Bush called a press conference to try and justify torture after the US Supreme Court had ruled against him and how he deflected hostile questions during that press conference. I kept delving into some of the darkest corners of politics and how they become (or don't become) news stories.
It was easy for me to laugh at everyone's ineptitude in the Washington DC press corps. No one I knew form my journalism background who actually worked for a living instead of being a stenographer to power was surprised. Most of my students were cynical enough to get it.
The harassment was far worse. No jokes there.
I think part of why it's important to talk about that moment of my life in brief, here, now, is to maybe not put something that heavy into the novel. It's one thing to have antagonists. I wouldn't worry for a second about putting in an antagonistic homophobe or gross capitalist stooge. But betrayal hits the audience differently because it's built on a basis of trust and letting people into our lives where they could hurt us deeply. I had played with other misogynistic and homophobic people before, but I could blow them off because it was one game and I'd never see them again.
Around half a year later, my mood got a bit better as I started running the game for my main D&D group. The old DM went on paternity leave a few months ahead of the birth of his second child. But my vision started blurring. In retrospect, this was a major waring sign of how my blood pressure was climbing. I didn't know that. I just accepted that for some reason, the lines of tiles in my shower started to look blurry and I couldn’t straighten them. I was terrified of going out and doing anything.
You might ask yourself "How could I let this happen?" I barely managed to move on from this abusive relationship that, as far as I could tell, was intended to scar me at my core. Cutting all ties kept things from getting worse but didn't help me move on. The wisest thing I learned from therapy is that forgiveness doesn't have a damn thing with the other person doing something to warrant forgiveness. We forgive because we want to move on from the traumatic memory we keep of the other person. Something worth bearing in mind as we head in to 2025.
Forgiving that abusive person and no longer thinking about how they treated me personally was the easy part. The one thing I wanted to remember about this person was their broader hypocrisy, because it was such a message about how to treat people. They'd go on social media to demand more representation of queer folks like them in D&D. They pounded the table when I was running a pre-written adventure on my birthday, demanding I recast a character as gay. But they never put happy queer people in the D&D stories they told; all they wanted were traumatized gays.
Even worse, they never spoke up for anyone but people like them. Lots of people go through unimaginably terrible things in life. There are all kinds of disadvantages we face. One of the biggest lessons I learned is that if someone can only speak up for people like them, with no empathy for people from other walks of live suffering similar burdens, they've got something rotten deep down. If a character shows this type of behavior in my novel, it's going to be my tell that this character will eventually betray the protagonist.
I started having PTSD flashbacks whenever I saw people banging their virtual fist on the keyboard, demanding people only focus on the plight of folks like them. I had it again earlier this month when some people in gaming who went out of their way to misgender my nonbinary soul as "just another man" were acting up again just a week before Trump took office.
If you have spent time on social media, you can guess how bad these flashbacks could get. But during lockdown times, Twitter was one of my main social circles, so I stayed on.
(I had to include some college football reference because the progressive parts of the college football internet have been the healthiest community I’ve been part of the last four years and had the most cisgender people going out of their way to try and support trans people. Turn the iconic audio clip on. It’s more important than the video. We can laugh about it now because I got better about social media and USC went on to lose.)
I lost my fight or flight instinct when my PTSD was at its worst in 2020. I just didn't feel either reaction. I didn't even realize how much my brain was fried until I heard an alarm in a shop under construction one day in late Spring 2021 and felt the taste of adrenaline in my mouth. That's when I realized my fight or flight response had gone silent for I'm not sure exactly how long. Over half a year.
My prior experiences with doctors as an adult had been incredibly traumatic as well, full of judgment about my weight and completely devoid of caring. You know those very large guys in a football game who stand in a line in front of the quarterback? I look kind of like them, without the muscle.
Additionally, my therapist used to counsel patients that there were real risks of moving forward too fast and I already felt some of that friction in trying to realign my values and day-to-day behavior to end the PTSD. I put the PTSD to rest, but that was all I could do. I was right about this; my blood pressure spiked to its worst when I put too much pressure to move on as a 2022 New Year’s Resolution and I've got to live with the permanent health consequences from that spike.
Put it all together, and I've got a deep pool of experience to draw from about certain kinds of self-destructive behavior based on all of us, as human beings, having limits to what we can do in the world. That's probably why the novel idea that came to me wasn't fantasy. I’ve done fantasy worldbuilding before and I want to explore personal relationships and emotions instead of build a world this year.
Of course, without medical intervention, my health kept getting worse until I was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. I waited 15 hours in the ER before being rushed to intensive care at 5:30 AM. They woke me up a few hours later for breakfast, my first meal in close to a day. Then I was largely warehoused in a hospital room. No contact with the outside world as my faulty cell phone battery died. 15 minutes of interacting with medical staff per day as they did a few tests and then just waited for meds to kick in.
I was alone with my thoughts in the hospital. My life didn't flash before my eyes or anything like that. Instead, I felt trapped. Trapped by my body. Trapped from the doctors' neglect. Trapped because they wouldn't let me stand to go to the fucking bathroom, so I had to pee into a reusable container like you'd use for apple juice then wait 30 minutes for it to be collected while I had to keep the pee bottle near my meals.
I thought I'd never get out of the hospital. In the end, they lost the discharge paperwork for hours.
The funniest part of their incompetence was when they wrote down the wrong apartment number for me somehow. I never received a bill. Just bill collectors eventually hounding me for not paying. When I asked where the bill was sent and told them that was the wrong address, then paid within days, things got better.
None of the doctors or nurses told me that I could have died. But they told my father, who told me. That's probably a real kick in the ass for most people.
It didn't fully sink in for me at the time because physically I was just a shell of myself. After being in bed for a week, my legs were like cement. The first wave of meds had incredible side effects. I was dizzy just sitting in my chair, let alone trying to walk to the bathroom. But I had to learn to walk again to be able to get my meds since I lived alone. I pushed myself to walk just nine minutes with the room spinning in my head. For my follow-up, the doctor gave me an additional set of meds that put me to sleep for two hours after each dose, three times a day, until I adjusted. It's much better that I was too out of it to fully process that possibly dying thing. Gradual processing was far healthier. It was harder for my dad because he had the sudden shock.
We got rain in late April 2022, very rare for LA, around a month after I got out of the hospital. I opened my door and just started crying my eyes out. It was like a string snapped. I cried a little in the hospital room. But when I heard and saw the rain, I realized I was afraid I'd never get out of the hospital to feel the rain again. My emotions came pouring out like the heavens above.
Feeling the rain was a sign of hope. If I could live long enough to feel the rain again and be able to walk outside to feel the rain, I could make the next step. Some of this is a uniquely Los Angeles experience. I didn't think I'd feel rain until December. After a month of barely eating and sleeping 12 hours a day, December felt so far away.
One of the biggest things that I'm taking away from this whole extended four year ordeal is how it's often the little moments that spark hope, as long as we're ready to recognize them and kindle the spark. Having the right people around us helps kindle that spark.
That random rainy day was my big emotional outpouring. Out of nowhere, it was the right time for lots of that trauma to come out and flush from my mind. For the most part, it flushed fast. My dad had lots of big feelings at other big events like holidays, but I only had big feelings at the one-year anniversary of my hospitalization.
My priorities changed. In-person convention gaming was coming back. After almost dying, I was able to mostly let bygones be bygones because I needed some way to see people in person again. It became a ray of hope.
Getting the body and the mind to cooperate? That was a far more arduous task.
My hospitalization was so traumatic that for the next six months, I woke up promptly at 7 AM: hospital breakfast time. For the first few nights, I woke up flinching, either punching at the sky or trying to shake loose from the blood pressure cuff I was attached to in the hospital 24/7. The first time I was in a store and heard a PA call, it reminded me of a hospital code. I suffered a panic attack and didn't recover until I vomited in a trash can. I've had a few panic attacks since getting out of the hospital and vomiting made them all better.
It took all my energy early on just to get groceries and prepare and DM that weekly D&D game for my friends. I only missed one week of running the game after getting out. On the last day of that first local gaming convention, I was so tired by the end that I lost my travel case of meds in my backpack, right where I had intended to store them. I had limited cognitive capacity until the start of August, a good four months.
What's even scarier is I don't feel like I got back to something close to a full energy level for two and a half years. I had years where it felt like my brain was operating at full capacity for a few hours a day or a few days out of the week, but not a majority of the week. A good deal of that is the physical recovery. When you've got to nap for an hour after a trip outside, you're not going to be doing as much. A good deal of that was learning to accept my limits, because pushing past them to get that one great idea out of my head can wear me down for days. Some is as simple as losing all sense of when I needed to drink water after the 2024 election. I just felt dehydrated for days. Now I'm much more vigilant about hydrating.
My health issues are unique. But there are tens of millions of Americans living with various disabilities. That's why I want to make sure one of my main characters is dealing with disability. It's going to be a potentially life threatening one. Write what you know!
Put it all together, and it's like I have been kind of gone from the world for the last four years. Sure, I was alive and subsisting but anything more than that was kind of just luck along with some persistence. First came all the emotional trauma where I needed to shield myself away from others. Losing my fight or flight response then PTSD flashbacks several times per week after getting it back will do that. Then came the declining health, hospitalization, and long recovery.
Now that I feel most of the way back, it's spooky to see just how many people have moved on.
My withdrawal from the world came in phases. There was one group of friends I tried to keep in touch with in 2021, but they didn't really want to talk about the PTSD I was having. We weren't that close. They showed their true colors when I got out of the hospital, as none of them said a word of concern or well wishes. Everyone in this group of friends was a freelancer in D&D or other roleplaying games. They dropped me for other folks who could help advance their careers. That was rough in the first couple of months coming out of the hospital when I slept most of the day and didn't really have the energy do anything for anyone. I'm pretty sure they got their first big hit, but I haven't heard a thing from them in two years.
When I moved off of Twitter to BlueSky months ago, I looked for them a little. I was willing to let bygones be bygones if it seemed like they'd had even a little emotional growth. Coming to grips with almost dying will do that. But I haven't seen them post much. I hope they're doing well.
Looking back, I was also positively surprised by who showed sympathy when I got out of the hospital. There were some folks from roleplaying games, some from undergrad and grad school. I even got some thoughtful comments from friends from high school. I fled high school as soon as humanly possible and only restarted the barest of connections on Facebook a decade after graduating. Those small messages were incredibly uplifting in the beginning when I could barely walk to the restroom.
My close friends? My D&D group? When I was out of contact because my cell phone died in the hospital and I didn't have a charger, they started making calls to local hospitals for me.
I know some of what I've gone through is unique. Very few people have to take a 20-minute nap after they get angry over something outrageous and horrible happening in the world (or a truly bad opinion on the Internet). After being in the hospital, my body still has some truly bizarre defense mechanisms to keep my blood pressure under check. My sleep schedule in January has felt like an Escher painting.
At some point during LA's major fires, I reached out to a couple friends who had been very close in 2019-20. Some got back to me. Some didn't. That's sad but far more common than we'd think. Back when I was in grad school, I read an article that proposed each of us can only keep around 10-15 truly close relationships in our lives at once. Anything beyond that takes too much time and energy. People grow closer and further apart for all sorts of reasons. We realize when we're getting closer to people. That can be intense and emotionally intimate. But we don't put the same kind of energy and intentionality into relationships that drift further apart.
Then we see something: a photo of us together, a pin they gave us, a social media post showing just how much their life has changed. All the memories come flooding back. For some people, that might be all positive if life has continued to trend for the better. If you're like me, ready to start moving forward again after life hit you in the face over and over again, it's a tough reminder of what could have been.
I think that's the second act of the novel. Several of the lead characters are going to drift further apart as they pursue their professional dreams and new people enter their lives. It's going to be great for one, terrible for another, and in between for most. But the character who has it best is going to realize what he lost in a "chance" meeting with the character who has it the worst, arranged by a mutual friend to share a sunset at the Rose Bowl. Their heartwrenching reunion and the fallout will get the whole cast to reconnect.
I knew I wanted the third Act to have some problems but also be shorter and focus on the lead characters finding ways to be happy and accepting they couldn't necessarily get everything they wanted.
But my initial ideas took a sharp turn as I realized what we'd be walking into with the new administration. I needed an inciting incident to bring most of the web of characters together to start the third Act. I also have a character in the main cast who could easily be considered an accomplice to a murder in an accident gone wrong if corrupt politicians want to push the case. One of the broader points i want to hit in the book is how communities have to come together. It’s the most important part of surviving this era of American history.