Writing a Novel

Two desks away from me, a girl in a black shawl with her hair tied in a rough, disgusted, careless bun has sat up on her 5 pm chair, and I can see that she is working on modern inventions. I...

Spending nights in strange towns with strangers sound so ethereally lyrical, like it were an endless adventure which did not deviate from its promise of being infinitely fulfilling... 

The blinds are not fully pulled down in the next building. I am lured by all that could be happening there, in the right wing of the office, right now...

There were a series of coughs from different points across the hall, a conspiracy, the sensible ear knew.

Walk past terraces, the clothes lined up are telling of the thread within -- some of the daily, disciplined, disinterested chores, some of intimate stains removed, while others, they were striving to survive the pangs of ambition, or indolence.

"My child would never get to perform like them," thought the sweeper, who hurriedly cleaned the stage after Act I of the performance as the curtains went down. He could still hear the claps, something he knew his daughter would never know -- how a clap could feel, how it could fill one up.

Six fantastic beginnings over a scattered timeline confirmed her brilliance, a brilliance which was mostly overshadowed by her consistent inconsistencies, failed promises yet inspired efforts. Beginnings that never found an end, beginnings which remained a journey to be explored. Finally they found their way at the end of a novel, someone else's novel. Between you and me, this timely cunning in me was a masterstroke -- I sold her unfinished first lines exactly as they were -- unfinished collection of first lines. Of my character.

And that is how she could not write a novel -- the novel way I went on to write mine -- Coming Soon.