B1C3

Lisa

Real life is boring. Real people are boring.

Real people don't murder anyone. Especially not with convoluted plots, unconventional murder weapons, elaborate alibis, etc. Real people read the room, try to blend in, and mostly commit murders of passion and/or convenience.

A murder mystery about real people would be boring. What makes a murder mystery fun is a big cast of characters, any of whom could have done it. All these people need to be a little kooky to be believable murderers.

One thing I struggle with while writing is making my characters kooky enough. I am an extremely reasonable person and I like my characters, so I want to make them reasonable too. I constantly have to fight this urge to make my characters do what people in real-life would do, and instead crank up their kookiness to 11 so they are fun to read about.

I lost that struggle when revising that chapter. In my initial draft, when Lisa goes to Paul the night of the party, she acts completely unhinged:

“Do you like me,” Lisa, or rather, the alcohol sloshing around her brain, asked suddenly. The stiff silence ripped apart, leaving in its wake an uncertain pause.

“Isn’t it obvious?” 

“Then why haven’t you asked me out?” 

Paul looked at her, not smiling anymore. He looked more serious than she had ever seen him. He thought for a few seconds and then nodded slowly. “Will you go out with me? Dinner, this Friday. We could go to Five Horses Tavern.” 

“And why haven’t you kissed me?”

That last question is so weird. Getting drunk and asking someone you're not in a relationship with, straight up, why they haven't kissed you, is so so weird. When I was revising the chapter, I couldn't keep that in. I had to get rid of it because my secondhand cringe for Lisa was too strong. But to write a good book, I'll need to get better at ignoring that instinct.

The "good characters are unreasonable" trope shows up in other places too. For example, television characters as assholes to their friends. In real life, it's fun to gently poke fun at your friends, but on TV mere ribbing is too boring; writers crank it up to 11 until Jerry is setting George's hair on fire or something.

Other similar phenomena: stage makeup and clothes are absolutely ridiculous and unsuitable in any other context; fictional couples put each other through way more grief than is acceptable in any healthy relationship.

Free bleeding in the autumn rain

Lisa's dream (quoted below)

She dreamed of a world on fire. Only, when she got closer, the flames were not hot. They were actually autumn leaves, falling down in a lush torrent all around her. She bent down to the ground to pick one up, but as she held it, it turned into blood on her hands. 

is inspired by the lyric "free bleeding in the autumn rain" from the remixed version of Everything is romantic by Charli xcx and Caroline Polachek.

If you haven't heard the song, it is half a list of romantic things like "Walk to the studio soaking wet" and "Late nights in black silk in East London" and half a list of random shit like "Sleepyhead 'cause all the fucking foxes kept me awake last night" and of course, the above.

I listened to the song again this morning, and I was struck by, why autumn? Why not summer rain, or unspecified rain? The best guess I have is that autumn leaves are red, like blood. And then I simply had to write down my theory somewhere, so I put it in my book.

AI

Claude failed yet again to help me with a coding problem. I was trying to structure my website so that each page only loaded the code relevant to that page. Unfortunately, by default, the tools I am using bundled all the code together, so chapter 1 would load the code for chapters 1 through 26, when it really only needed a fraction of that code.

I actually didn't even think of using Claude for this, and spent days trying to figure this out with mere Googling. This is the worst type of question to Google, because I didn't even know how to phrase what I was asking for. "Bundling each page separately" is close to what I wanted, but that brought up a lot of advice that was much more suited to people building complex Facebook or Twitter-type websites, and not my simple blog. I had an intuition that this should be a one or two line solution, but it took me three days to figure out what those two lines should be.

Turns out, the concept I was looking for is called "lazy loading." Once I figured that out, the implementation was easy.

Out of curiosity, I then asked Claude for how it would fix this problem. It told me on the first try that I should try lazy loading, which made me feel incredibly stupid for wasting three days. However, the exact code it provided was wrong (in big ways in that it didn't work for me, and in small ways in that it broke basic coding conventions). I asked Claude a few times to fix its errors, but it kept getting more and more wrong until I gave up.

On the other hand, Claude has been helpful for answering my "tip of my tongue" questions like

what's a word for someone who takes risks?

and

what are words to do with water? like "splashed"

Claude has also made researching background information pretty easy. For example, instead of wasting time reading medical articles or papers, I could just ask

can we currently predict which cells will become cancerous?

I hate doing research, so this is a huge game changer.