Comedy used to be the whole game. The thing I chased. The thing that kept me moving. Then a handful of minor events—glitches, really—shifted the trajectory, and suddenly I was writing cyberpunk. It didn’t feel like a decision. More like a system re-routing itself.
I’ve never been good at staying still, in life or on the page.
My early influences pushed me toward humour: Spike Milligan, the Goons, Python—ancestral ghosts of absurdity. I learned the mechanics: hyperbole as architecture, the hidden voltages in the mundane. I put in the hours.
I did alright.
Blog posts, dozens of them. Little bursts of absurd logic that made me laugh, made my family laugh. Enough feedback-loop to keep the whole process humming.
Eventually I understood the truth: comedy isn’t funny when you’re writing it. It’s precision work. Structure and pressure. You hunt for the story, then you make it land with a laugh. Harder than it looks—harder than most things.
The rhythm mattered. Beats like a score. Jokes as timed detonations.
And somewhere in that process, something cracked open.
The best material came out of a kind of controlled free-fall—stream-of-consciousness, unfiltered, raw signal. I kept leaning into it. Daily writing. Drabbles. Characters lifted from real life or soldered together from fragments.
Then I added drawings. Or rather, prompts masquerading as drawings. AI did the rendering. And out of that mix—comedy, sketches, stray neural sparks—cyberpunk started drifting up from the substructure.
One night I dug through lists of cartoon styles. Cyberpunk was just a word on a screen, but it snagged something in me. Bladerunner resurfaced. The Matrix too. Old circuitry lighting up.
It triggered a twitch in the matrix of whatever passes for my writer-brain.
I wondered: could I actually write cyberpunk?
So I tried. Three idiot characters, stumbling through a dystopian future they couldn’t interpret. Cyberpunk comedy. A weird fusion, but it worked—for a while.
Then another twitch.
I picked up Neuromancer again, after years away. Fell straight in. Gibson’s prose—ornate, serrated, luminous. I don’t write like that. I don’t try. But the stories? The atmosphere? That stuck to me like static.
And the ideas began to cluster. Fast. Relentless.
I abandoned the comedy blog, left it like a ghost page on an old server. Built a new one—neon-lit, grimy, off-world vibes. Started dropping short stories every few days. And underneath the output, something bigger was forming.
One night I started a new story. Didn’t finish it. Didn’t publish it. Next night, picked it up again. Same story. Signal still strong.
Twenty days later, I had a novel. Ninety-one thousand words. Full-spectrum cyberpunk.
That’s the path—how comedy bent into neon dystopia, how a glitch in my process became a book. How I wrote it that fast? I’ll break that down soon.
And the stream-of-consciousness thing? That’s coming too.