snippet of...something...
She looked down at the ink covering her hands. It had been a strange few days. In just the past week she had lost her job, lost her scissors, lost about half her clothes due to a garbage-bag mix-up, lost three backup disks, and lost about five pounds. Eating was secondary when you were working on the book that needed to sell big so that you could buy food. In fact, eating was tertiary, when weighed against the big needs: writing, sleep, and sex. Thank god sex was free. One thing she hadn’t lost this week was her libido, and her husband was caught off guard; in the shower, while making breakfast, while cleaning up burnt eggs, watching sitcom re-runs. They hadn’t done it this much since they first got back together.
The sex was great, but mostly served as anesthetic. The book that wasn’t coming together had her mind in a vice-grip. Outline after outline, character sketches, chapter structures, ideas scribbled on index cards, post-its stuck on the wall in the bathroom. Nothing was really driving the story forward. Her protagonist just sat there, waiting to be animated; like a marionette without strings. It was as if she had been lobotomized, and her brain had been replaced with a thick but entirely clear substance in which her characters were suspended, unmoving, unthinking, and entirely perplexed.
The sex was great, but mostly served as anesthetic. The book that wasn’t coming together had her mind in a vice-grip. Outline after outline, character sketches, chapter structures, ideas scribbled on index cards, post-its stuck on the wall in the bathroom. Nothing was really driving the story forward. Her protagonist just sat there, waiting to be animated; like a marionette without strings. It was as if she had been lobotomized, and her brain had been replaced with a thick but entirely clear substance in which her characters were suspended, unmoving, unthinking, and entirely perplexed.