The best course of action Ashewyck could come up with when facing writer's block was to essentially grind the story he was working on; he approached his work like begrudgingly leveling up a character, which, in a way, is exactly what he was doing.  He preferred to work in spontaneous bursts of creativity, which could be sparse.  Somehow, he had come up with a way to artificially kick-start his creative drive.  He opened the file he kept as an encyclopedic reference and read down the list until there was any sort of feeling he had about any of it. 
	Sometimes the feeling was true inspiration.  Usually it was an obessive need for things to feel complete.  A character might only have two lines describing her, so Ashewyck would have to flesh her out.  Sometimes it was a more methodical process.  He may have written about an idea during a creative peak, only to find reading back over it, that it didn't make sense.  He would toss it around and turn it over and ask himself what he meant.  When he had his answer or an approximation of one, he would add notes.  His files were usually a jumbled mess- a testament to his creative process and likely a reflection of why he got so little done so regularly.
	Another part of Ashewyck's conflict with writing was his need to have permanent names before some characters, places, and books could be realized in any depth. While he might have the idea for characters, their names gave them weight and agency within the story.  Stellan Thomas was just a victim until she was given a name.  Her family didn't exist.  She didn't have thoughts or feelings.  She was merely a plot point.  Such was the power of a name that it could bring to life everything that made her a bright little girl and would more fully illustrate that her death was a tragedy.
 	A devastating blow to his interest in the story occured when Shannah, his editor, had told him that she was calling his new novel The City of Dead Cubs as a working title.  He knew from that moment he couldn't call it anything else.  As tacky as a name as it was, the book was named and anything else would not be the name of what he was working on.  Again he was trapped working on a project that stifled him.  He felt a certain obligation to finish The City of Dead Cubs before starting on anything else in earnest.  He also had to write it the way he would want to read a book with that title.  A further complication was that he didn't want to read a book with that title.
	The die had been cast, there was no going back.  So Ashewyck had to throw himself into the absurdity and perversion of it all.  He had to drown himself in it.  He would have to become a slave to deviance and degeneracy to get more words down.  There was a lens forced in front of him, tinting his art with shades of wrong.  It was nauseating to him to know that no matter what he did to move forward, he could never make this work be the gleaming idol he aimed to create.  There would always be a filth on it; he was working with copper that had a permanent patina.  It couldn't be scrubbed off, it was now intrinsic.
	In his workshop, the wizard opened a massive volume.  It was brown and grey and tan in ways that defined the archetype.  In its many-thousand pages it detailed in cryptic writing the secrets of the world.  One such secret was the source of all suffering.  However, the red fox did not need to scour and research those chapters.  He knew from his aged centuries where the sour notes of existence came from - his search was for anything that could stop it.
	"Evil can only be quelled by proportionate sacrifice," he postulated.
	The closest thing to an answer he found were allusions to hints of secret magics.  This was common, but the depths at which the answers were hidden seemed to scream that they were buried, not to be found - not even by the enlightened.  So far into allegory and connotation were the rites that the wizard began to assume that the key was not even in the words, but in the spaces between them... even in the spaces within each letter. When he had devised a way to read the nothing that was there, he came to call the practice Voidscrying. 
	Ashewyck stopped.  He needed a moment.  In all of his notes and web of text files as reference material, those notions were nowhere to be found.  He switched which window was active and added 'Voidscrying' to it.  It was going to be an entry that he'd come back to, needing to understand it.
	He had some vague notion of an antagonist that acts parallel to Ransdell Alderwood, but what the wizard seemed to be doing was trying to prevent something far worse.  The dalmation thought for a moment about what such a great evil could be.  He drew a blank.  He could not imagine the details.  However, there was a figure from his middleschool high fantasy days that stuck out.  The TechnoLich.  Ashewyck scrubbed the notion from his mind.  It was too plain.  It reeked of the simplicity that a middle school writer would think is cool.
	A note to his future self was made.  The primary antagonist would need to be figured out soon.  Enough beating around the bush had been done.  As it was, Shannah would be right about her assertion that the wizard was evil.  She might corrupt the story, but she was not about to condemn his characters.  The wizard was good and benevolent.  His actions were to save the world, at least for a time.
	"If for a time, then why not for all time?" the author sighed, typing in the digital encylopedia.  "Because the wizard is good.  His actions are to stop the greater evil.  There is only so much he can do before he starts to feel like a monster.  While wizards can often be morally grey, Alderwood at least attempts to stay ethically pure, probably for self-preservation.  If enough people wanted his blood, he'd be unable to stop them.  Not necessarily that they could do anything directly to him, but if they found someone who was incomplete in their learning, they could cause any number of cataclysms." 
	Ashewyck read back over the most recent part of the manuscript.  It was a happy accident.  It brought a smirk to his face.  He made something in his world that was so hidden that it could only be written about within the spaces of each letter.  It was ridiculous and extremely wizardy.