As I near the end of my latest pleasure read, and as I'm two weeks into my hiatus from working on the novel, the past forty-eight hours have been filled with a lot of consideration of authorship, and the prospect of a new project, or, really, just writing something not to do with James, because James is breaking my heart. (It's unintentional, I forgive him.)

     So I decided this morning to begin writing a little bit every day. All in one Word document, headed by the date, the time at which I began, and to what music I was listening, then footnoted with the stop time and a couple dashes to segue to the next day.

     The first sadness was that I've written so little as of late that Microsoft Word was gone from my Start Menu's catalogue of most used programs. But once the software was open and the blank page stared me back - the first blank page I've seen in a long time - I wrote for sixteen minutes. It doesn't matter what I write, and it won't matter if tomorrow what I write has anything to do with what I wrote today, or the day after that, only that I write. Exorcise those particular demons. The words untold. No matter how unfitting they are, how dirty or neat, how responsible or bratty, how melodic or caustic. I realized a while back that I could live the rest of my life perfectly content if I were never again published. I don't even possess the desire to market those manuscripts I have completed and of which I remain proud. Just that they're written, and exist, and are whole outside of me. I don't expect the novel to be any different whenever I do finish it. I just need it to exist.

     But I still need that existence to be the nearest thing to perfection of which I'm capable.