I introduced you to Balfour two weeks ago. He is, and is not, Robert Louis Stevenson. I don’t plan to explain that here; you’ll just have to read the book when it comes out.

Writers write about writing. It’s inevitable. I have mostly avoided the temptation, but it finally got to me through Balfour. This — somewhat modified to remove references that wouldn’t make sense without context — is Balfour struggling with inspiration.

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Balfour got out of bed and went to his desk without bothering to dress. He took paper and pen, and stared out his window at the street below. Everyone in Outer London was going to work. He watched them for a moment, caught up in the novelty of a daily scene he was rarely awake in time to see, but then his eyes moved back to the blank page before him.

An hour later, the page was still blank when he rose to make tea and put on his clothing. It didn’t bother him. There was not one scratch on the pristine paper, but he was weary already with the work he had done.

There weren’t any words — yet. Words would come later. There were not even concepts yet, only inchoate pictures moving behind his eyes. No matter. He had been here before, and he had faith in the process which he had begun. The pictures would sharpen, the concepts would explain themselves to him, and then, finally, the words would come. Most of the early words would be discarded anyway, but that was all right too. It didn’t matter how long it would take, as long as the journey had begun. And it had.

Again. And it had been so long.

It was like filling his lungs with air again, after being trapped underwater until he thought he would not survive. Breathing again, after thinking so long that he would never breathe again.

He was hungry for food, but hungrier still to continue working. He sat the cup of tea on the table beside the still pristine paper and took up his pen. After a while, he put the pen down again and sipped, then took it up again. If you had asked him later where the tea went, he could not have told you. He stared out the window as the day unfolded. If you asked him later who had walked by on the street below, he could not have told you.

It will not be the story of an event. It will be the story of a man.

Who?

For now, just call him the nemesis.

What does he look like?

There was a picture in Balfour’s head. It was mostly the ruffian he had met last night, although he had already begun to morph into something universal.

The picture was clear in Balfour’s mind, but he could not write it yet. It was not wrong, but it was incomplete. His pen moved across the page and he tried a few lines, then impatiently scratched them out.

Balfour stared at the picture in his head and it became more fearsome. The eyes became blacker; the soul became blacker. The creature’s hands moved. They were powerful, like Snap’s hands were, but these were not the hands of a builder. These were the hands of a destroyer.

Looking at the picture in his mind, he knew that he should feel fear. But he didn’t — yet. The picture was fearsome, but it was only a picture. Until Balfour could understand this nemesis, dive deep into his soul and find the source of his anger, his writing would be superficial.

Until he knew this creature well enough to actually fear him, he could not do him justice. But how do you learn fear? Where do you search for it?

In memory. Yet in the clean, ordinariness of Outer London, there was no room for fear, and little enough room for memory.

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Poor Balfour. He doesn’t know that he has already written the story he is struggling with, in the Before, when he was actually RLS. If that seems confusing, hang on. There are two more posts coming, which will carry us to Halloween.