I’m a week behind on NaNoWriMo. 8169 words.
I am Terra’s self-fulfilling prophesy.
Last night, I couldn’t sleep. Probably because I slept until 2:30 yesterday afternoon. Regardless, there I was at 4, 5:30, 7:30am, reading and sketching out new possibilities mentally while I absorbed the novel resting at my breasts.
By 8am, I decided that I would have to scrap what I’d written thus far, all three days of it, and start fresh.
I don’t write fiction. It gets stuck under my nails and between my teeth, leading to the kind of creative decay that precedes root canals and the type of forensic evidence that points a reader directly to my crime: a lack of attention span, the violent struggle to maintain a story without just quitting it, a murder of compositional hygiene.
I can write fiction, I just can’t finish it. I can weave plots and characters on the fly, throwing in dramatic pretense and foreshadowing at what I think are the right points, starting chapters with the correct amount of hook necessary to pull a reader further.
Then I just stop. Loose ends flap in the breeze, characters fade and become as weak as the two-week old celery in my crisper. I’m done, even though it’s not.
So, I don’t write fiction because the only kind of failure I can handle is self-created; and if I wanted to create writing failure, I’d blog somewhat unsuccessfully for five years.
Oh, wait.
So, tonight, after my newly re-energized not-a-baby-anymore baby is sleeping, and while the rest of the world is, too, and I’ve put in a respectable amount of time on the work that actually pays bills and buys food free of wheat gluten, I’ll sit down to write, from the beginning again.
Fiction, that’s not really made up.
