1000 Days

I’m rarely grim here at 1000 Days.

Neither am I decisive.  A mental survey of stand-out bits of my writing over balance the scales toward cusp moments.  I introduce many of my main characters right before something is going to happen to them.  Others meet the reader just before they might do something.

Modern writing advice always includes the admonishment to begin a scene or a story as late in the action as possible.  I interpret this to mean I should locate the climactic element of they thread and then back off a step or two before I drop my words onto the page.  Gane heads over to Shanty, Kraite waits to pounce on his prey, you is about to assassinate an official, Mr. Johnathan Goffe heads out of town, Tyh’s been drug into the honga pit, Charnni, Franni, and Conni await the arrival of something in the trees, and The Grainmaster watching his people’s migration.  None of them idling; none of them not about to experience something next.  These almost-moments, these cusps before the crux, suit me well because they echo my own life embarrassingly well.

I wonder if I were to write the next.  To struggle past the cusp and then to successfully navigate the crux in my writing if that surety would rebound into my real life.

Day 377

If I had any sense of the world around me I’d do something about patriotism in general or the 4th specifically.  I don’t know what either of those possible bits of writing would be.  I avoid shoehorning my writing into the real world.  The pieces of work that appear to reside in this real world only appear so because I haven’t navigated around to inserting the fantasy or scifi elements.

Some day I expect I’ll need to overcome my fear of being here with the rest of you in a world so crammed with differentness and stories that speculative fiction seems fool’s errand, but for now I enjoy making believe.

Day 376