The title, borrowed from Nine Inch Nails, has nothing much to do with the novel itself. Throughout the writing process, I was listening to Depeche Mode and even now, during redrafting, I need that music in order to access my protagonist’s habits, quirks and entire psychology, such as motivation, self-contradiction and unreliability. It’s funny writing about someone who you’ll never be and after all, that’s all you are – your alter-ego. I’ve been working on this novel since 2007 and after all these years I am still trying to track down the origin of this pursuit that made me venture into something so big – bigger than I’d ever want a dream to be. In 2007, Nick, my tutor in Prose Fiction, asked us to do a writing exercise illustrating a connection between character and object. He gave us a list of objects, which weren’t ordinary objects, but tainted objects with a history. I chose the ‘blood-stained plaster’ to pursue a yet to evolve imagination. It was there in the back of my head, slowly bubbling outreaching my mind’s quixotic surface of genuine lies. Although those were only fragmentary images I knew that the energy anticipated was highly influenced by Bret Easton Ellis’ grotesque and sex-induced madness which would lead me towards my own version of a yet undiscovered territory of fragile insanity. The result of that writing exercise involves an obsessive-compulsive doctor who is subject to taking blood samples of herself as well as all her patients. When on a date with a non-patient, she deliberately causes an accident that hospitalises him just because an examination of his blood is essential for future decisions. I received a full mark for that piece and I had only received a full mark twice at BCUC and I have to admit that I was incredibly proud. Nick had not only inspired me to that but had also supported me in pursuing my other novel Single, Fused & Separate, which is an undeveloped, science fiction-based novel that I had left untouched since September 2007 after the dissertation deadline. During the course I was mostly reading science fiction literature: Asimov, Dick, Siodmak, Cook, Gibson, etc. Nonetheless, I was struggling with the actual destined path of that novel and realised that I was not yet ready to walk it. Despite the lack of identity and conscious progress of that novel I received an acceptable mark for my final dissertation; I was 9 points away from the full mark. With that achievement, I still lacked the motivation to continue a piece that was not about...
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