Let me start by saying this much: this is my second to last week at my first-ever job, and it has been quite busy.  I finished my second of three 3p.m. to 10p.m. shifts in a row, which is a lot more tiring than I’d expected, and so writing’s been minimal at best.  Really minimal at best.  There’s an idea, drifting about in my brain, for a short horror story.

That much out of the way?  Good.  Thank god.  I hate whiny, personal-blog-stuff me.

I built a very large chunk of the world in “Joshua’s Nightmares” tonight at work (in my trusty red Moleskine notebook, actually).  It’s evolving into this big, amazing, surreal thing that I’m slowly falling in love with, which is dangerous for a writer because there’s always the risk it’s actually not nearly as good as I think it is.  However, I do have the good fortune of getting universally positive feedback so far.

Building worlds, when my brain permits such activities, is one of my favorite bits of writing (the top favorite being writing villains, which may very well get an entire series of posts dedicated to it and by may very well I mean it actually just will).  Sometimes the environment takes a backseat, like with Death at Teatime.  The location was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, so there were just little glimpses of it with the bigger focus on the characters.

There’s just a tremendous joy in building something massive out of what could’ve started as a tiny detail, one little point in a vast landscape, and just going from there.

The Sleep State of “Joshua’s Nightmares” is turning into this massive, and hopefully highly-varied, mix of different locations that I hope will encompass the vast, bizarre realm of dreaming quite well.  A taste, just to tease readers of my blog with: there’s an entire landscape that exists in the sky of this world, linked to dreams about flying and such.

At any rate, I hope to get some writing done should I survive the remainder of the week.  And by the remainder of the week I mean the insane sale that’s going on tomorrow and Friday.