# I Am Not Terry Pratchett, a Doctor, or a Morning Person: An AMA

[Alex Eos](https://substack.com/@alexeos)

Jun 15, 2026

**First and foremost, I am not Terry Pratchett, Thom Yorke from Radiohead, or David Spade. I am also not someone from Depeche Mode, though I never caught which one.**  
Two tourists from Germany bought me drinks in a bar in my early twenties, convinced I was Thom Yorke. I am fairly certain that is how the plot of _Hostel_ begins.  
As for David Spade — I once signed a wrestling event’s worth of cocktail napkins as David Spaid, deliberately misspelled, to defuse a situation involving one very drunk individual and his friends. This felt like the responsible choice at the time.  
With that disclaimer out of the way, thank you to everyone who DMed me questions, and to the people I apparently know in real life who had opinions and nowhere else to put them.  
If your question wasn’t picked, I want you to know I read it, felt things, and made a choice.  
Anyway. The questions.

# **Craft questions**

#### • How do you decide whether to outline or draft by instinct?

**AE:** My first book _[starforge](https://phoenixvoicespublishing.com/starforge)_ was written with no plan whatsoever. I started it when I was in college close to a decade ago. I finished the book with the help of cannabis, caffeine, and sheer stubbornness. It was only afterward — once I realized how much I loved the world, the voice, the characters — that I understood future books would need a map, even a rough one. Something to keep track of what I’d built.  
For other projects, the outline is a conversation I have with myself before the real conversation starts. It tells me where I think I’m going. The draft tells me where I’m actually going, which is usually stranger, better, and slightly alarming.  
Think of it like this — the outline is the quest marker. The instinct is what happens when you ignore the quest marker and walk into the wrong cave anyway. That’s where the good stuff lives.  
I have never once regretted following the instinct. I have absolutely regretted ignoring it to protect a plot point I was sentimentally attached to.

#### • What do you cut first when a chapter feels bloated?

**AE:** I don’t really delete anything. I just shuffle it to another document. Anything that doesn’t move the chapter forward, or an extra point of view that can be shelved for later.  
A lot of my jokes and cameo appearances get reused in other projects. That’s one of the many advantages of working within the same universe. I understand why Terry Pratchett did this now.  
Even if I don’t use it, I can reference it in another work. I have a character with an obsession with Yaoi and soft-boy aesthetics who has appeared in exactly one spin-off and one main book so far and refuses to leave my head. He’ll find a home eventually. They always do.

#### • How do you know when a character is complex versus just inconsistent?

**AE:** Complex characters lie to themselves constantly. Take my Hentai/Yaoi*-obsessed character — I put him in a situation where his dirty laundry gets aired in front of everyone, including his mother. He looks her dead in the eye and says, “That isn’t mine, I’m holding it for a friend.”  
That’s complexity. He believes it a little, even as he says it.  
Inconsistent characters just forgot what they believed three chapters ago.  
I stress-test my characters the same way every time: given everything I know about them — their history, their damage, what they want, what they’re afraid to want — can I explain why they did this specific thing in this specific moment? If yes, that’s complexity. If the answer is “because the plot needed them to,” the plot is writing the character instead of the other way around.  
_(
*Please do not Google this. NSFW.)_

# **Personal questions**

**• What fictional character do you wish you had written?**  
**AE:** Harry Du Bois from _Disco Elysium_. If you haven’t played it, I genuinely do not know what to tell you. I have an older iMac and limited patience for technical workarounds, and I still found a way. That should tell you something.  
Every contradiction Harry has is load-bearing. He’s inconsistent in every surface way and completely coherent underneath all of it. That’s the whole argument about complex characters.  
He woke up with no memory, and you build his personality through ideology and emotional damage like you’re assembling a person from the wreckage outward. Which, now that I say it out loud, is just characterization. We’re all just doing that.

**• What kind of scenes do you love writing most?**  
**AE:** I love writing scenes with strong emotional irony, humor, and a huge payoff somewhere later down the line. Scenes where humor and darkness are sharing the same body. I love cheesy film noir dialogue and unlikely heroes.  
Dialogue where nobody says what they mean. That’s not subtext, that’s just people and human nature.

**• What song, album, or artist tends to hijack your brain while you work?**  
**AE:** Boards of Canada’s “Olson.” Brian Eno’s _Music for Airports_. Aphex Twin’s _Selected Ambient Works II_. Orbital’s Green Album. “Dazzle” by Siouxsie and the Banshees.  
What these have in common is that none of them are asking for my attention. They’re not trying to be interesting _at_ me. They create a specific kind of atmospheric pressure that my brain apparently needs to do anything useful.  
Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, and Boards of Canada in particular do something I cannot explain medically. It sounds like a memory you never had. That’s exactly the register I want to be writing in.  
Orbital recently incorporated Mike Garry’s poetry in “Tonight in Belfast,” and it’s extraordinary. Look it up.  
“Dazzle” is one of my favorite Siouxsie and the Banshees songs — beautiful opening, strange atmosphere. It’s the one I put on when a scene needs to feel like something is about to go beautifully wrong and everyone in it knows it except the protagonist.  
Honorable mention: “Nylon Strung” and “Between Stars” by Underworld.

**Food / Bubble Tea questions**

**• What is your bubble tea order, and what does it reveal about your soul?**  
**AE:** 3 Guys from Coco. I know they put “Three Brothers” in parentheses now. Fuck that. I will always know it as 3 Guys, and I giggle every time at the name.  
The creator knew what he or she was doing when they named this drink, and I respect the commitment to the bit about three guys being inside you.  
I find juvenile wordplay funny, apparently at a cellular level, and I have made peace with this about myself. I am loyal to the original version of things. I will die on hills that do not matter and feel completely righteous about it. And I believe that whoever is making the thing — the drink, the book, the name — if they knew what they were doing and committed to it anyway, that deserves to be honored.  
That is either a personality or a problem. The bubble tea is delicious either way.

**• What food or drink feels most like your writing style: elegant dessert, dangerous street food, comfort meal, or something deeply caffeinated and slightly unhinged?**  
**AE:** Dangerous street food, obviously. The kind that comes from somewhere with no readable signage in a language only my partner in crime knows, costs four dollars, and ruins every restaurant meal you eat for the next six weeks because nothing lives up to it again.  
Also, bubble tea. Which, if we are being honest, is the reason you came to this newsletter, blog, writing diary, etc.  
The elegant dessert is in there too. Specifically the kind that looks deceptively simple and then does something unexpected halfway through. That’s the joke that’s also serious. The sentence that sounds light until you sit with it.  
What it is not is a comfort meal. Comfort meals are warm and familiar and leave you exactly where you started. I am not interested in leaving the reader where they started.

**• What snack has seen the most drafts?**  
**AE:** Nongshim Shrimp Chips Cracker Prawn Chips. Korean chips from my local H Mart.

**Process Questions**

**• What app or program do you use to write?**  
**AE:** Scrivener for drafting. I used Word before that, Pages before that. I prefer Scrivener because it keeps everything in one place — drafts, research, notes, the increasingly unhinged ideas I’m not ready to commit to yet.  
For editing, I use either Word or Google Docs, depending on which one freezes less when my editor is leaving comments. This is not a joke. This is my actual selection criteria.

**• Do you track word count, or do you work better by scene, chapter, or sheer spite?**  
**AE:** Well, ask yourself — as of this publication, has George R.R. Martin finished the _Game of Thrones_ series? If not, sheer fucking spite.  
I do track word count, though. Scrivener handles it well — you set a manuscript goal, it tells you how many words you need to hit that day. I aim for 2K. Some days that happens.  
I know that my life is unreal, unreasonable, and chaotic, so I write either in the morning on my way to and from my survival job on my phone on the subway, or I sit at the computer and write for an hour or two before bed.  
And on weekends, when I do laundry, I take my iPad to the basement where there is no Wi-Fi, no internet, no excuses — just me, the manuscript, and the timer on the washing machine.  
The dryer is my deadline. It has never once given me an extension.

**• What part of drafting feels easiest to you, and what part feels like pulling your own teeth?**  
**AE:** Random hooks and opening lines are the easiest for me. I write very absurd things to begin with, so I give myself the ability to play and write shitty lines.  
An example of this from my latest work in progress would be:  
_“Valentin had buried bodies before, under worse circumstances and better lighting. The trick tonight was getting past Kenny Marchetti, the townie cop from two blocks over who had insisted on a breathalyzer, declined to file a report on the grounds that his wife was in Diane’s book club, and written disturbance of neighborhood character in his notepad as if that were a thing.”_

Endings and sloppy middles are like doing laundry in a building with no Wi-Fi except you forgot to bring the iPad.

Anyway. Thank you for the questions, the silence, the chaos, and the continued support of my increasingly specific interests. The bubble tea report will return. So will the manuscripts. Probably at the same time.

Until next time,

**Alex Eos** 🧋