Update

INT. Therapist’s Office. THRESHOLDER sits on one end of the couch, while ALEXANDER sits on the other. The therapist, JESSICA, sits across from them with a notebook and a pen.

JESSICA: Alright, we said that we would take a little time. How has it been?

ALEXANDER: If I’m being honest, it’s been one of the most productive two months of my life.

THRESHOLDER: (rolling eyes) Right.

JESSICA: But you haven’t been working on Thresholder, is that right?

THRESHOLDER: He has not.

ALEXANDER: I have not.

JESSICA: There had been some hope that you would spontaneously find the will.

THRESHOLDER: The “muse” has not returned to him.

JESSICA: Alright, then can you explain what you mean by ‘productive’?

ALEXANDER: I’ve been writing a lot. The words have been coming easily. I’m really into writing as like, my primary hobby. No video games, almost no television.

JESSICA: I see. And if the writing isn’t happening on Thresholder, where’s it happening?

THRESHOLDER: Go on, tell her.

ALEXANDER: (hesitant) Alright, so I had talked about Wisteria, right?

THRESHOLDER: It’s “Untitled Villainess Otome”. And he’s stopped writing that too.

ALEXANDER: I wouldn’t say that I’ve “stopped” writing it, but that’s sitting at 34K words, that’s strong output.

THRESHOLDER: Unfinished output. Maybe we should bring Wisteria in here? We could compare notes.

ALEXANDER: So you admit that her name is Wisteria and you were just being petty?

JESSICA: Thresholder, if you could hold your comments. Alexander, if I’m understanding you right, you’re saying that within the last two months you’ve done … 34K words?

ALEXANDER: (rubbing the back of his neck) Well … no, there have been other projects.

THRESHOLDER: There are FIVE open tabs! Plus this one, which is what, another metafiction piece? How long is this going to go? You can’t keep returning to the metafiction well!

JESSICA: (holding up hand) Thresholder, please.

ALEXANDER: Look, yes, it’s five open documents, plus there’s been some microfiction on tumblr. But it’s flowing freely, and Thresholder is making me feel bad about it.

JESSICA: Have you considered that Thresholder feels bad, because he’s unfinished?

THRESHOLDER: Unfinished is fine, unfinished isn’t the issue, the issue is that we’re supposed to be on a two-chapter-a-week schedule. I would be fine being unfinished forever if we were hitting even a chapter a week. I would understand having side projects, creative outlets that (hitch in the breath) are there for needs that I can’t meet.

JESSICA: Alexander, can you tell me about these other projects? Just so I can have some context.

ALEXANDER: Uh, alright, so … there’s Kensuke Fucks the World, I feel like I’m pretty close there, I added another, say, 30K to that, and I have some strong ideas on editing it down, to make it a complete thing.

JESSICA: And this is a work of erotica?

ALEXANDER: Well, kind of, not really, it’s more literary than that, I think, it’s me grappling with some questions, and there’s a lot to recommend it. I’ve shared it with some people and they seem to like it. It’s got some laughs in it. It has something to say.

JESSICA: And is this something that Thresholder isn’t providing you with? That he has nothing to say?

THRESHOLDER: (folding arms, waiting for the answer)

ALEXANDER: I mean … I like Perry. Or, I don’t like Perry, but I like what he represents, this desire for violence and power, this chameleon aspect he has, the way he’ll slot himself into a new world, the way he’s amoral in this really human way. All the worst aspects of myself. It makes him a bad protagonist, but I do think, collectively, there’s something really interesting about the project. It’s got these shonen trappings and is then really anti-shonen in a lot of ways. I don’t think I would say that it’s got nothing to say, though maybe it’s missing a central thrust. Kensuke has a lot of thrust. (giggles)

JESSICA: What was that, that laugh?

THRESHOLDER: (disgusted) The stupidest, most basic puns make him laugh.

JESSICA: I see.

ALEXANDER: And, okay, there’s this scifi novel I’ve been working on, Untitled Sexbot Novel, and I put some 20K words into that, which is working really well, it’s sort of “sexbots as a metaphor for sexbots” instead of treating them as being about power dynamics or abusive relationships or something. And it’s actually about chatbots and virtual relationships, and there’s time pressure there, right, because it has a chance to still be prophetic, to give people an understanding of the risks, to make my guesses now before there’s a big think piece, but also, I could write a think piece and then use that for promo.

JESSICA: So if I can pull some threads here, it seems like one of the missing pieces is … sexual content?

ALEXANDER: No, no. That’s just those two. I mean, Wisteria is horny, but that’s for a laugh, we’re never going to show anything on screen there.

THRESHOLDER: It’s never getting finished. (to ALEXANDER) Tell her about the fanfic.

JESSICA: Oh, you’re writing fanfic?

ALEXANDER: Well … uh.

THRESHOLDER: (smugly pleased) Oh, go on.

ALEXANDER: It’s um, a story that I had started back in 2014, and I was reading through it because it had come up in conversation, and it’s been unfinished but on the back of my mind for quite some time, and I thought “actually, this is fairly good” so I thought that I would add to it.

THRESHOLDER: (leaning forward) 40K words! (to ALEXANDER) And I notice that he hasn’t said what it’s about?

ALEXANDER: It’s Harry Potter fanfic.

THRESHOLDER: (knowing the answer) What kind?

ALEXANDER: It’s Hermione/Draco.

THRESHOLDER: Dramione.

JESSICA: I don’t think that it’s going to do anyone any favors to put down certain genres as being trashy or unworthy of exploration.

ALEXANDER: (to THRESHOLDER) She’s saying that because you started life as a jumpchain story.

THRESHOLDER: Fine. But I don’t have to respect writing Harry Potter fanfic in 2025.

ALEXANDER: Because of the transphobia thing? It was started in 2014. It’s got to be grandfathered in.

JESSICA: I don’t think this is a productive line of conversation. Alexander, do you know what’s drawing you to that story? Why you wrote so much of it? 40K words seems like a significant time investment.

ALEXANDER: I don’t know. I think I just kept having this clear image of what the next scene would be, the interesting stuff I wanted to explore. I haven’t really written much romance. And I think it’s good, it has a clarity of purpose, it’s an exploration of prejudice, it’s taking blood purism seriously.

JESSICA: You’ve said that it’s always easiest for you when it feels like things are going well.

ALEXANDER: Did I say that? That’s a tautology.

JESSICA: Let me rephrase. You’ve said in the past that writing is like a train, and that when it’s on the tracks, you’re perfectly fine to shovel enormous amounts of coal into the engine, to speed along with no regard for anything else, and that when you hit a bump, or when you have to slow down at a curve, you’re not in your preferred mode.

ALEXANDER: That sounds more like me. And yeah. I was feeling that, with Krait.

THRESHOLDER: (clarifying) How the Krait Shed His Skin, it has a working title now.

ALEXANDER: I’m a little uncertain on it, I like the idea of molting, but it’s not a motif that’s present in the work itself, and Draco is a snake only by association with canon, so maybe … give him a pet snake?

JESSICA: (gently) We’ve agreed that we wouldn’t do work during these sessions. No workshopping ideas. (pause) It does seem like you have a lot of enthusiasm for these projects that you don’t have for Thresholder.

ALEXANDER: I mean …

THRESHOLDER: He didn’t tell you what happened yesterday.

JESSICA: (looking between them) And what happened yesterday?

THRESHOLDER: He wrote a new ‘test chapter’. 6K words.

JESSICA: That’s impressive output for one day.

THRESHOLDER: That’s as long as a chapter of me. That should have been a chapter of me. If he can write a chapter a day, that’s —

ALEXANDER: Hang on, you know it doesn’t work like that. You know that 6K in a day is exceptional.

JESSICA: This was a new idea? Or something old that caught your eye?

ALEXANDER: The pitch is —

JESSICA: (gently) I don’t need a pitch.

ALEXANDER: Blake Snyder says to always be pitching to people, to judge their reaction, and if I’m describing it, it’s not going to be in neutral tones.

JESSICA: (frowning) Alright, if that’s how you prefer it.

ALEXANDER: (excitedly) It’s a litRPG where the protagonist is the System, or maybe a combination of System and DM. They’re whipping up NPCs for the Player, they’re trying to write up feats that can’t be abused, they were thrown into this with no prep time and have to improvise everything. And the Player is a genre-savvy munchkin. So like, chapter two, the System has set up a woman chained to a tree in the forest for the Player, gave her a bunch of backstory, created this suggestion of a quest chain when he frees her. And the Player sees this and goes “ah, obvious trap”. So they’re bouncing back and forth off each other, I think the comedy is working well, but we also have this stuff about making art within constraints.

THRESHOLDER: It’s about me.

ALEXANDER: (to THRESHOLDER) What?

THRESHOLDER: In the story, the System wants to make high art, and there’s this Autopilot character —

ALEXANDER: I don’t know if Autopilot is a character, right now he’s an elemental force.

THRESHOLDER: If the protagonist doesn’t make things, the Autopilot will, and the Autopilot is just terrible, it makes the most painfully generic quests. And this would probably be fine for the Player, who is extremely familiar with isekais, but the protagonist wants to be arty, wants to “say something”, wants this rich complexity that’s an expression of his tastes and ideals. He doesn’t want three wolves attacking the protagonist in the woods. That’s painful to him. This is the driving conflict, it’s not the ticking clock, it’s the need to make “art”.

ALEXANDER: Huh. Yeah, I can see that. I could work with that. The tensions of art under commercialization, low art versus high art, the compulsion to create and the pains of doing that for an audience that doesn’t always understand your vision, or want your vision.

JESSICA: I see. And this untitled test chapter, you think that it’s an expression of your struggles with Thresholder?

ALEXANDER: Maybe? I don’t know. I think it was the idea of “litRPG, but the System is the protagonist” that really called to me. I don’t think I think of Thresholder as “low art”, I don’t think I’m shying away from it because of that. There are ways in which it’s explicitly difficult to consume, I guess. (switching gears) This new thing though, there are shades of Worth the Candle in there, and not just because it’s technically a litRPG isekai.

THRESHOLDER: If you want to write an isekai, I’m an isekai.

ALEXANDER: Kind of not really?

THRESHOLDER: No, I am, Perry goes through a portal and winds up in another world, how is that not an isekai?

ALEXANDER: It’s a non-central example of an isekai.

JESSICA: We have all collectively agreed that we won’t do definitional debates in this space.

THRESHOLDER: I just want to be finished, or if not finished, then have regular work put into me. I’m not asking for much. 5K words a week, edited and polished, some forward momentum. He’s talking about all these other projects, it’s insulting. If you took the word count of everything he’s worked on in the past two months, that would be enough to bring the fifth book, and the series, to its conclusion.

ALEXANDER: (to himself) 35K Wisteria, 40K Krait, 30K Kensuke, 20K Sexbot, 6K test chapter, let’s say another 5K of microfiction … yeah that would be enough. (to THRESHOLDER) Except that it doesn’t work that way, you know this, the words of Thresholder are just not coming easily enough, I can’t bang out a 6K chapter of Thresholder in a single sitting.

JESSICA: And this is because of an enthusiasm gap? Or because of continuity concerns?

ALEXANDER: It’s a RAM issue.

THRESHOLDER: (pained) Please not the RAM metaphor.

JESSICA: I’m unfamiliar.

ALEXANDER: It’s a computer thing. Your computer can store stuff in RAM or on the drive, and the stuff in RAM is right there, easily accessible, ready to be used by the programs. So for writing, there’s stuff that’s stored in RAM, and stuff that’s stored on the drive, and Thresholder is on the drive, which would normally be fine, but loading it into RAM is a slog.

JESSICA: (frowning) This is by way of analogy to human memory?

ALEXANDER: Well, no, not really, there’s working memory which is different, that’s just seven plus or minus two items, this is more, uh, some under-defined concept of availability.

THRESHOLDER: Terrible metaphor. This is the third time you’ve had to explain it. No one knows what RAM is.

ALEXANDER: People know what RAM is. People use computers.

THRESHOLDER: People don’t actively understand loading things into and out of RAM when they use computers, that’s abstracted for the user. (to JESSICA) Look, the metaphor is, it’s easy for him to put me into storage, and hard for him to pull me out.

JESSICA: Ah. And this is something that we could work on?

THRESHOLDER: He needs to just get me out of storage and then keep me out of storage. He needs to think about me while he’s going on a hike in the woods. He needs to actually sit down and have a dedicated eight hours a day where he’s writing me.

ALEXANDER: I mean, I can’t actually control what I’m thinking like that. I can’t say “I need to think only about Thresholder on this hike” and have that actually happen. My brain doesn’t work like that.

JESSICA: You feel as though you don’t have control over your brain?

ALEXANDER: I think I make bad choices sometimes. I think writing this … Jesus, we’re past 2K words? The conceit is good, author goes to therapy with his unruly novel, but I don’t know.

THRESHOLDER: In what way am I unruly?

ALEXANDER: Sassy. Talking back.

JESSICA: I think that Thresholder has been very understanding and shown a willingness to put in the work.

ALEXANDER: Does the conceit work better if he’s more sassy? I can make some edits before I publish this, hold on.

THRESHOLDER: (sighs)

JESSICA: Well, it seems that we’re approaching 2.5K words, which was supposed to be our cutoff for this session. Alexander, before we go, I’d like you to do your affirmations toward Thresholder.

ALEXANDER: (grumbling) Thresholder, I appreciate you. I think you’re doing some interesting things that are maybe not widely popular. (holding up hand toward JESSICA) I promise that I will finish you. I promise that I will close out the narrative arcs, or at the very least, subvert closing them out in a way that makes thematic sense to me. I think there are interesting tensions in the fifth book, and things coming to a head. It’s a setting that I enjoy. I will work on you, I promise. I’m a finisher, it’s part of my brand.

JESSICA: Thank you. It looks like we’re slightly over time. We’ll meet back together in, let’s say a month? I’d like for you to aim to have at least a chapter a week, or if not that, then twenty hours of dedicated time toward Thresholder a week. Write a one shot, if you have to.

ALEXANDER: I … alright. (to THRESHOLDER) Does this satisfy you?

THRESHOLDER: Not really, no, but if it’s the best I’m going to get, I’ll take it.