I wrote. I did. It started out being a piece for here. I've had friends writing me, telling me to stay on schedule, making me promise to write the once a week that my New Year's resolution demands. I have other demands, too, that work out to over 400 words per day. So a blog entry should be no problem, right?
Right.
But it morphed out of control, dragging me behind it, and finally broke the worn tether and ran away from me completely, turning into rancid graveyard nightshade, and broken, bloody fingernails clawing for drowning purchase against slippery midnight walls, chin-deep in muddy black water at the bottom of a dark well.
A thousand words. No. A lie. More than a thousand. A lot more.
Are you old enough to remember carbon paper, and how it looked after you'd used it again and again? Black, overlayered, reversed impressions you could see as curiously linear defects on the oily slick perfection of the page when you held it just right in the light, defects you could almost read like a familiar language you should know, but can't quite grasp. That's what it ran off and became; nonsensical, cryptic black on black, radiating a subliminal, thrumming minor-key horror-show dissonance, whispers that tickle the edge of sense, almost understood -- and it amounted to nothing I could publish. I can barely stand to read it myself.
I sat down here tonight to try to fix it, mellow it, sand down the sharp places, tamp down the cutting flame roaring so deep into the blue it's almost crossed into ultraviolet. Been working at it now for hours. Just re-read it, and it still makes all the short hairs prickle up along the back of my neck.
I hate this fucking thing.
But -- a keystroke, and it's gone, fed into a software shredder a thousand times more efficient and a thousand times faster than feeding pages into mechanical blades.
And, just like that, an empty page, a blinking cursor, Scrivener pure, clean -- waiting. I'll write something else for this space in a bit. And then I'll replace this, put it here for my resolution and my friends. But for now, just this.
A placeholder, and a promise.
:-)
ReplyDeleteSome promise. I want to read what you destroyed.
ReplyDeleteSome people live for the sharp places and the cutting flame. I knew a chick who loved tattoos because the pain reminded her she was alive. Well, she listened to too much Nine Inch Nails. Nor is that my gig. But still.
Not that I'm writing any. What would it be about? My adventures re-sodding the back yard of a house I neither own nor actually lived in? Yeah.