Characters!

Friday 1:44 p.m.
I was lying in bed today thinking about the writings. This is why I thought I should pack it in, the writings, I mean. I'm supposed to be lying in bed thinking about emptiness.

You have characters in books. I have a wee problem with human beings having characters. I know you can describe people as being virtuous or being right rotten basturns, but there's something solidly independent and autonomous about describing characters somehow. I didn't have this problem before being convinced that there are, at the end of the day, no sentient beings. Perhaps I'd like to see everything simultaneously arising, abiding and declining in mind. In any case, I think I'm supposed to be moving my view from the concrete towards insubstantiality.....

'yet living beings collect karmic seeds, experience the results, and take rebirths according to their previously collected karmic seeds and the presence of spiritual distortions within themselves.' Tsongkhapa. The Wall.

So you must be able to write about the progress and development of 'characters'. Thank god for that!

I might be hard at this stage of the mind game to write fifty thousand words and not mention once that the entire group of characters are going around with their heads stuck up their backsides, and would have no worries and loads of the bliss if they weren't just too dumb to meditate.

What I'll have to remember is that whatever I'm going to write has bugger all to do with real life, or only a tenuous connection; that it is really just an alphabet on a contrasting background, and you can do with that what you bloody well like as long as you don't expect anyone to buy it off you.

I should start writing something just now because by next summer my secret agent will have no one left to reject the current proposition, and then it might be nice to have something else on the go.

So not only will I have chapters, paragraphs, full stops and commas, but also characters.

Be easy to write something about a character who thought there were no sentient beings really; that flatheids were a waste of human beingness and would be endlessly reborn anyway; that human emotions were ridiculous ... at least, I could empathise with that multiple murderer. And even if I don't know anything about bullet wounds and guns and stuff, I do know about digging holes up the allotment. Also, you can murder folk using spades and scythes and that.