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Monday, I got the call from my local Apple store that the repairs on Colossus (my MacBook Air) had been completed, and the laptop was ready to be picked up.

For pretty much all of September I have been unable to work on my novel during my lunch hour as the ‘E’ key on the keyboard had been behaving rather badly, enough to totally disrupt any writing. English has the nasty aspect that ‘E’ is the most commonly employed letter making it, in the case, the most commonly irritating. With every sentence possessing words either without ‘E’s or having far too many of them, I found it impossible to achieve the state of mind that let the creation of the world just flow from my brain to the document.

So, after getting the call in the morning I spent my lunch hour driving from work to the Fashion Valley Apple store. Luckily, I live and work in Mission Valley so all this transpired within a few miles, and I retrieved my laptop. However, with the lunch hour nearly exhausted I got no work done that day.

Yesterday proved to be a better day. Nearly 800 words completed during my lunch and the flow state, despite my apprehension that the interruption has killed connection with the story, had returned.

Perhaps this forced break in the writing of a novel without an outline as my roadmap has turned out to be a blessing from the muses. In the interim a few elements have fallen into place as my brain continued imagining and working the story. Some of the character’s backstory is now much clearer in my mind, the solution to a thorny problem, how will the character discover a hidden cache of vital importance in his place business is now in sight, and the central question of the story has appeared before me.

It has become, once you set aside all the horror, the ghosts, the evil cult of wealthy people, a story about two men, both gay, both in their early thirties but for whom life has been very different. One raised in an accepting environment and exposed to a wide library of arts who was never made to be ashamed of who and what he was. The other man subjected to emotional abuse and isolation from his homophobic family pushing him into a life of desperately seeking acceptance but unable to give it to himself, spiraling into a life of meaningless encounters and substance abuse. The supernatural events of the story challenge both men to ask who they really are.