To further reveal my dorkiness

...I made sims of my city characters. What can I say? I tried to email pictures of them to myself to get them on this computer, but I could only get one of Nilay. Still, it's pretty cool.

Nilay Kala is a young Indian man. He’s lived in the city his whole life, but his parents emigrated from India. Both of his parents, his whole family, in fact, have been taken. He even had the bad luck to be there when he mother fell to the illness. So no, he’s not insane. But he’s still pretty messed up. So yeah, his backstory.
He’s an artist, actually. There isn’t much to make art with, and the colors never seem as bright as they used to, but he sculpts with twisted metals and shells of cars.
Nilay lives in his family’s old van, which is decorated with pencil sketches, and he’s made very comfortable. He’s scooped out all the engine parts to use for storage, and taken out the back seats for a sleeping area. He’s scavenged all sorts of bits and bobs which he collects and displays on or inside the car. The reason he’s living in a van and not, say a house, is because it’s been taken over by one of the roaming gangs that’s popped up. He drove the van to escape them and parked in an empty lot when he was about to run out of gas. He’s lived there ever since.

Do insane people use run on sentences?

I've been thinking about mental illness. Y'know, for the city, where there's an asylum on every block. I mean, it is going  to be some sort of made up insanity, but is there a disease I should work from? I don't want to seem like I'm grossly exaggerating or making fun of a serious mental illness. 

Y'know, I've been thinking I won't even write anything that goes on in the "madhouses". They could just be these... buildings. People go in, but nobody comes out. People won't be, like, killed in there. It's just some sort of prison. But nobody outside is sure. I think they'd be... creepier that way. 

Okay, I should probably be paying attention right now. I will consider this more later.

Happiness is a warm gun...

I have one more thing to say before I bid my computer good night. 

I have an actual really cool (in my opinion) idea for a story. Wow. I'm thinking it'll be a collection of short stories on this idea, because I have a short attention span, but that could be cool, right? 

It came to me in a dream. I just love dreams, don't you? They always give me inspiration, even when they make no sense (which is usually the case). The dream was about this city, old and crumbling yet modern-ish clockwork at the same time. The people in the dream (no one I knew, they were sort of just the dream ghost people that follow you around) were continually referencing "the madhouses", which in this context meant insane asylums. The whole city was close to empty, though not deserted, because the majority of the population were in "the madhouses". It was all gray and dusky, like post-apocalyptic without the apocalypse, like Gotham before Batman, like a horror story where all the horror is locked away. But why? I intend to find out. 

I'm going to be exploring this city, writing about it. 

A city of tarnished brass and crumbling stone. A city with an asylum on every block. A city where anything already HAS happened. 

The city.