I think too much. My excuse-for-a-novel creeps along, page by page and word by word. It started out promisingly, with a vivid description of Halloween�s pagan beginnings, and then focused on a witch in medieval England who propagated Halloween, and then widened the scope to include an innocent, a local maiden who just wanted to have a little fun. She is beautiful, and I base what she looks like on Nina, though Nina is German, French-Canadian and Hispanic in origin and certainly wouldn�t fit into any medieval English town.
But it�s been stalling. The maiden seems to have a mind of her own, and never goes where I want her to go. Something about the computer terrifies me: that I can sit and let my fingers go and they�ll be the ones tapping out a story, navigating a foamy plot. As of now, I�ve already introduced about eight new characters, each of which I fall in love with but can�t use nearly enough. This thing needs serious editation. I might make a few cameos, though, like Alfred Hitchcock.
The magazine took the short stories I wrote out. They�ll be printed up for their January edition, and I can�t contain my excitement. They sent me $200, and I don�t know what to do with it. I think maybe I�d spend it with Nina, but I think we entered Awkward High School Lovers Stage Two, which involves embarrassed bouts of avoiding the other. I feel kind of like just going up to her, but I remember Stage Three well, and I think we should press on with this. It�s kind of like role playing, except this is unintentional and, well, sometimes painful. I miss her, even though I can hear her downstairs folding laundry. This is a weird world.
I write some more. The maiden meets a blacksmith (no! no more new characters!) but I erase it and move on to the witch. She�s a lot more sympathetic now: less prickly and more approachable, almost. I loosened her, added flashbacks and got rid of her cats. A little too clich�, and besides, cats weren�t popular pets in England at the time. They were eaten, lots of times. Hm. Maybe I could reintroduce them and have her eat some of them. It would be messy, but interesting, and I�d been noticing a distinct lack of evil in the witch of late.
So I bring the cats back, and she eats them, but I can�t get the descriptions right. It comes out fake, and stupid, like those cotton strings kids buy to look like cobwebs on Halloween. I use the word �cackle� like eighteen times. It�s embarrassing, but I can�t delete it because I need it. I need something evil in here, even if it�s the clownish kind of evil that has a large, twirly handlebar moustache. I count repeated words and substitute things from the thesaurus. It comes out like this:
The witch cackled, the malice in her screech clearly visible from the cat�s point of view. It tried to scamper away but Agnes caught it with a guffaw. It wriggled in her strong grip and tried to scurry, but it couldn�t. Agnes prepared the cauldron, hooting shrilly over her sweet meal-to-be. The cat mewed while writhing, and looked up at her with large, innocent eyes. Its fur was fuzzy and splattered with water from the bursting bubbles of the boiling vessel. It looked very sad.
�Hah!� chuckled Agnes as the cat tried to move about free again. �You won�t get away from me, cat!� She added oregano to the mixture and waited for it to boil again. Dropping the fidgeting cat into the urn, she could not resist another chortle.
I shudder, once and then shut down the computer for the day. Singlehandedly writing the worst two paragraphs in the history of authorship is a tiring and depressing task.