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My current Work in Progress (WIP) is the first novel I have written entirely by the seat of my pants, or less crudely, organically, without any sort of outline to guide me.

When I started the manuscript, I knew a few key things. I knew I wanted to write a story about supernatural occurrences tied to silver nitrate motion picture film, that there would be some sort of ghost involved (my favorite horror genre), and that I would be using a fictionalized version of San Diego’s Ken Theater.

I had planned to create an outline for this book, but before I had completed much research, I felt my enthusiasm flagging, and waiting on the research would likely kill the project. So I dove straight into it with just those elements in my head and a very vague notion of how to make it work in a five-act structure.

Now, some 73,000 words into the project and with the end, if blurry, in sight, the experience has been interesting, particularly with respect to the characters involved.

I have a host of diverse characters—gay and straight, white, black, Asian, young, and old—but it’s two that have caused the theme to leap forward.

Dave, the protagonist of the novel, is the white gay man who owns the independent Kensington Theater, which he inherited from his father, along with a sizeable passive income that allows him not to worry about such banalities as a regular day job. Dave’s father always acknowledged his son’s sexuality with love and acceptance. Dave never faced serious bigotry, even in middle or high school during the 1970s. He has never wanted materially or even emotionally for anything essential—in effect, a charmed life. Dave pays this back by not only being accepting of others who walk a different path but also by making sure his theater is an open and safe place for misfits, geeks, oddballs, and the socially different, particularly during the midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Terrance, originally introduced to further the cursed film plot, has developed into a gay character with a quite different backstory. His family did not have the financial resources that Dave enjoys. Adding to the troubles is that Terrance’s father believed in socially dictated gender roles for men and found his sensitive boy a terrible disappointment, which turned to outright hostility at his son’s preference for men over women as sexual partners. Terrance’s mother, retreating from an emotionally distant and abusive husband, left her boy without the affection children desperately require. By his teenage years, Terrance had already begun self-medicating with pot and beer, and in his aborted college attempts, he discovered harder drugs and attempted to fill the emotional void in his heart with anonymous sex in public parks and bathrooms. In order to cover his emotional wounds and project an acceptable self-image, Terrance became a person expert at putting on a public face, making him an excellent salesman.

While Dave thrives in and fosters community, Terrance has none and suffers from silent isolation, making him easily manipulable by the supernatural forces unleashed.

The themes that have arisen organically from the writing are the importance of community and that we are not just who we choose to be but also what the world has made us. I wonder what other new things will appear in the final chapters and the coming serious revisions.

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So, I have posted that the ‘E’ on my keyboard turned bad and I lost a couple of weeks of writing, first because that letter is so required in English and then by waiting for the repairs to be completed.

When I got the laptop back, I thought I had regained the forward momentum on this novel. The scene I was in the middle of when everything went off the rails I completed easily, setting up the next twist in the story.

And then my creative sailboat became becalmed, and I was stuck.

I knew that I had to switch to the antagonists of the tale. At this point in the narrative, there were two groups of them, not working collectively and with goals in opposition to both the protagonist and each other. However, their deficit of knowledge left me puzzled as to either group’s course of action. My fingers refused to write the next scene because my brain refused to tell them what it was.

Now, some writers deal with this by jumping ahead and writing some other scene in the story, and then they backfill the bits in between. I can’t do that.

One, since I am ‘pantsing’ this to the extreme, I don’t know what the future scenes are, much less what to write in them.

Two, I have never been able to do that writing out of order trick, even when I have a detailed outline that provides the future scenes. As a writer, I need to experience the scenes as they happen in the text. This greatly informs how I write and how the emotions of the scenes impact me and, hopefully, the reader.

Friday night, after I affixed my CPAP mask to my face and climbed into bed, the answer flashed into my head. The next morning it stayed with me, and I told part of it to my sweetie-wife as we did our 2-mile morning walk by the San Diego River.

Yesterday I began writing the scene, and the words flowed freely from my brain to the keyboard. Sometimes, all you need is a little time.

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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.