A thing I haven’t thought. This is what I’ve been itching for in my writing in the past month or more. Not having it is likely the reason I’ve recycled my meta on Charming and Partly. But I’m thinking this thing I haven’t thought is a red herring. I think it’s a brought flower off the main trail of my half-promise to plot several things this year. I think it’s an excuse to shield me from digging in to anything. I need to find a way to tell it to go fuck itself. What better way to do that then to write the things I promised to write?
Sigh.
I just re-read the plotting I did for Partly to remind myself. Overall I like it better than I thought I would—possibly because I didn’t recognize some of it. I need to make Bogdan an enforcer for the Priests.
Is hard to know the end of your stories. Real stories have no cataclysm, no satisfying denouement. Just…just more life. But usually beginning easy enough to find.
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Hulked on a barstool in one of the more backwater of backwater beer-doors in Terminus sits a man who named himself Cyril Rockandhammer. He wears a gray canvas jacket because this beer-door—like all beer-doors on Acetylene Avenue is unheated. And it’s cold tonight. He’s about to be on his ass.
“Would like to buy to beer as apology, friend,” said a short man who had forced himself and his belly into the narrow gap between Cyril’s stool and a third man’s.
“Dude, what?” Cyril thought he’d heard the man offer to buy him a beer, but something about the invitation unsettled him.
“I am sensitive about my height, and you are very, very tall,” said the short man.
This was true. Cyril was tall maybe even very, very tall by some standards, but that didn’t seem like something he had much control over. The promise of free beer seemed to be fading. He said, “OK.”
“Is not OK. You slouch at bar trying to be small.”
This was also true. Cyril did have some control over his height after all. He usually exercised it in the form of shrinking himself to fit in with others. At a diner he might slump in a booth. At a bar he might—was—slouching on the stool. Standing around talking in a group he often leaned on something or outright squatted.
“I am my height. You should not be.” The short man bent down to the floor and jerked the stool out from under Cyril Rockandhammer.
427 words on day 767