A beginning.

Okay.

16,062 words for the new story.

It's not a draft yet. The words are sort-of loosely hint around the story idea; I mostly wrote without thinking, without any kind of respect for the linear or the sensical.

I feel slightly giddy, having pushed my way through it. It's the longest thing I've ever written, outside of November.

I just thought about it, just now, that I've written three novels, the past three Novembers. I've never allowed myself to put it to myself in those terms; I just think about them as "the things that take up my time each November," and I've never thought of them as living breathing works that might one day have a life outside of my apartment.

One day, when I'm brave, I'll go back and read them.

But for now, I'm going to print out 36 pages and come up with a plan for knocking this into a series of events that might make me feel something, anything...

j.

And once we start, the meter clicks...

Hi.

Words are magic, you know.

Writing is magic. It really feels like magic.

This may or may not be true for you. But it's true for me, it's the truest thing I can think to say at this moment.

I have been struggling, struggling with a short story forming in my head. I've logged about 6000 words on the story, writing like it was November. I fashioned and re-fashioned the first few paragraphs, to show to a friend from writing class, still not 100% sure it's right.

This *kills* me, this uncertainty.

In November, I'm writing too fast to acknowledge it. But here in real life, the days are stained with it.

I hate writing when I don't know where the story will end up. I feel like I'm walking with a candle in the dark, blindfolded. Either I'm going to fall off a cliff, or burn down the forest. In either instance, nothing good can come of it.

I took a break from writing tonight to read. I've been reading short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. Very prosaic style, Jhumpa. I would have said that I prefer a much more lyrical style, a Toni Morrison. But Jhumpa gets the job done, lays her words out there, one after the other, and by the end of the story, I feel like the wheel has turned.

I then pulled out The Writer's Notebook, a book of essays on writing put together by Tin House. Read an interesting essay by Aimee Bender. It's hard to say exactly what it's about, but, by way of a Flannery O'Connor essay, she basically says that the sum of a story should be more than its parts, and it's okay if you're not sure what the sum (or the parts) are. It's okay not to know everything about your characters, it's okay to leave things hanging in the air.

I read the essay through and nodded to myself.

It's okay not to know. Yeah.

And then it came to me, where the new short story will go.

I don't know if the lock unclicking was related to the reading of the essay, but it feels like the two are related. In a way I don't understand. In a way I'm not meant to understand.

Magic.

j.

I do about two things a day.

Spring finds me slow. It's hard to act without a deadline, I actually bought a plane ticket going to the wrong airport yesterday.

I do what I can, I have been spending inordinate amounts of time staring into a screen.

Going to read Toni Morrison's Love now.

j

Not

Things are not right.

Not.
Right.

Not.

I'm trying to focus, trying to obsess. My mind is in about twelve different pieces at all times.

Low blood sugar doesn't help.

I am looking for my Passing Strange to save me tonight.

j.