By Monica, to whom wicked things will soon be done.
Here’s the gig.
1. Delve into your blog archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions. Ponder it for meaning, subtext or hidden agendas…
5. Tag five people to do the same.
Well — this is the ENTIRE 23rd entry:
2611 words
Done for the night. And I like what I got today.
It seems so simple, doesn’t it? So complete unto itself. Writer gets good words, closes up shop for the night. How Tao.
Not.
It was written on November 5th, 2001, and the book I was working on at the time was Closer to Chaos. Haven’t heard of that one? That’s because on the 25th of November, a mere twenty days hence, I would discover the book’s actual theme, and realize that I had to throw away more than 280 finished pages, and start over with nothing but the first chapter. At that point, I would retitle the book The Wreck of Heaven (link is to the Wreck of Heaven category). This is the book that would kick my ass through a brutal three-times-through first draft and a grueling revision that would not die.
So while on the surface this looks like a happy, writer-progressing-nicely entry; underneath the shark that was going to devour about 60,000 words of work was already circling. I was doomed. Doomed, I tell you. And there I was, paddling through the open sea, carefree and happy, thinking things were going well.
Which, if you want to look at subtext and such, was a small fractal shard of a much larger picture of that year and the next three. Think Jaws: The Career. In the end, the book became something I loved. Ditto my career. But getting there …. oh, mama!
Just the sort of thing you want to think about on your birthday, too, lemme tell you.
So — passing on the madness, I tag:
Zette
Heather
Jean
Carter
Margaret
(I would have tagged Sheila, too, but she’s got three deadlines this week, and I don’t want her to hurt me.)
Leave a Reply