elfs | I Think I Broke Through

This afternoon, I returned to the discipline of actually taking my lunch break away from the office with my laptop, and I sat down and I wrote 700 words. I had been having a heck of time getting Kaede and Eshi to actually talk to each other, and I finally got it, in a tearful and giggly scene where I figured out what it was they were trying to say.

With rare exceptions, when a character says, "I don't know what to say/do/think," it is in fact the writer who is admitting this. That phrase is a cop-out, intended to lead into some kind of segue where the author deus-ex-machinas himself out of his corner. I try not to do that. This last story, episode six, takes us back to where the episode one really began: in Irene's Bakery on Alphaville. And for days I have had the two women staring at each other, each trying to think of what to say. Well, now they know, and they're talking and making out like teenagers again and all is good.

I have a crisis moment coming. Since Eshi is a semi-biological robot, I'm going to crash her, HAL-9000 style, while she's pregnant. That'll be fun. And I think I know the conflict that'll make her wedge, too. Now I just need to figure out how to unwedge her.

But it felt good to be writing again.

I don't normally believe in writer's block. There's always something to write, and to write about. (Although arguing with snot-nosed socialists on Usenet about whether or not I'm really "a socialist" because I (a worker) own the means of production (my laptop) is not a good use of my time.) But in this case I've been forcing myself to spend time on this one story, and that's been hard, because all the other temptations to write (WTF? Janae wants screen time‽ She can wait.) have been coming to the fore.