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I’m trying desperately to write a gay Australian romance for a deadline that seems to be racing toward me. I need 15,000 words, I need them bad, and I don’t have a story. Oh, I’ve got a bit of a thing lying around, about 5700 words that are about as romantic as something that’s not romantic at all.

And it’s got to the point where I know I can’t keep going. I’ve failed, that story is a failure, I don’t like it, no one will like it, and if no one likes it there’s no point in my crashing blindly on like an idiot. I have to suck it up and start over with something entirely new.

But I’ve got no ideas.

Problem is, I think, that I’ve never written anything set in Australia, not since Harmonica + Gig/The Ghosts of Los Hellas (which were written in 2003, while I was still in college). I don’t have an Australian world to use in my fiction. I don’t have any Australian characters. I don’t even know where to start. I’ve been desperately pawing over the beginnings of some fiction from Brazza City, but I have nothing. Nothing!

I’m now at the point where I’m seriously looking over my Brazza City stories and thinking, oooh, maybe if I transplant Benoit from 17th century Totally Not Cape Verde Honest But Some Fictional Island Srsly and make him, I don’t know, a surfer instead of a runaway French Duc escaping Madame Guillotine… And by that I mean I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. I got no ideas, guys.

I got NO IDEAS.

But hey, I bet that writing a freaking-out blog post is going to help my writer’s block. What do you think? Yeah? If you’ve got an ideas of what I can do before going completely nuts, post ‘em in the comments.