It's National Novel Writing Month! A bunch of @freewritehouse's freewriters have bravely (or foolishly? Only time will tell...) accepted the challenge of writing an entire novel in one month. These are: @amelin; @botefarm; @felt.buzz; @grow23; @improv; @kaelci; @kaerpediem; @linnyplant; @mariannewest; @ntowl; @stinawog; @carolkean; @byn; @kipswolfe; @bennettitalia; @aislingcronin; @nonsowrites.

Aaaand... I'm one of them.

50,000 words total, which breaks down to 1,667/day.

I find myself experiencing a bit of panic at the moment to be honest. 50,000 words. In one month.

What was I thinking?

I wasn't, that's the problem. Impulsivity.

Ah, but this is one sure way to things get done, isn't it? You sign up for it, and then you have to do it!

That sounds like a reasonable motivational tool in theory, but in practice, it doesn't actually have teeth. Because even at this late date, I'm fairly certain that the amazing, kind-hearted people at @freewritehouse would let me off the hook, if I asked them nicely. Probably without even sending goons around to my house to break my kneecaps.

Probably. But that's not the point. The point is: I want to do it! In the past eleven months I've left how many episodic freewrite series unfinished? Let's see: "The Strangeling"; "Old Scratch"; "Maintenance"; "Poison"; oh, at least four or five. I'd love to get back to those stories and continue them, but so far I seem to have experienced some kind of block. Maybe it's because, when I first came to Steemit last winter, I was a poet and a songwriter, but not a fiction writer. So those little one-part fiction freewrites have never been too far outside of my comfort zone, because they're really not that much longer than poems or songs. But the series... for some reason I've found myself at a loss after a certain point. And I'd like to change that. So for me, doing NaNoWriMo is like forcing yourself to board a rickety looking rollercoaster when you've got fear of heights. And speed. And faulty engineering...

With the idea of facing those fears and working through them.

Never mind, I'm sure it'll be fun once it gets going. Who knows, maybe if I force myself to not bail I'll start to get comfortable with the ongoing twists and turns and crazy loop-the-loops and free falls. And if I build up enough momentum, maybe I'll even make it to the finish line! So.

Here.

We.

GOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

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Read and comment on my #freewritemadness posts for a chance to WIN SteemBasicIncome shares! For more information, click on the first banner at the end of this post

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In case anybody's wondering, this is my 78th 5 minute freewrite. (Disclaimer: even under normal circumstances, these usually take me significantly longer than 5 minutes to write and edit. And given that November is novel writing month, "significantly longer" has taken on a whole new meaning 😉).

Today's prompt is "cross-eyed".

Word count for this installment is 1,787

Come join in the fun at @freewritehouse! Lots of contests and other fun stuff for both writers and fans 😃🎉

Many thanks to the incomparable @mariannewest for hosting this wonderful daily freewrite :) https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-377-5-minute-freewrite-thursday-prompt-cross-eyed

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https://unsplash.com/photos/ACt2UZwHsIk

The Perfectionists

Chapter 1

Zelig

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She was, to him, that rarest and most precious of creatures, a woman who not only has deep-seated daddy issues, but knows that she has them, understands the complications involved, and accepts them, and herself. She didn't see her personality as something broken that needed fixing. She saw it as something broken that was beautiful just the way it was.

This made her amazing to be with. Spontaneous and honest and uninhibited. Because she didn't see him as a 'fixer upper' either. He wasn't a work-in-progress, a project for her to take on, provisionally, contingent upon his willingness to be molded into the man of her dreams. He already was the man of her dreams: broken and perfect, just like her. There was not, nor would there ever be, any need to apply plastic surgery to his soul, nor to hers. They loved each other. They were happy together.

So why did it feel like something was missing?

"...Like something was missing?" Come on. Are you actually an acclaimed novelist - you huckster, you fraud - or are you just pretending? Because this is some weak tea right here, Zelig. You're writing like a high school emo kid who goes to poetry club and secretly has a crush on the queen of the mean girls but he'd never admit it so he spends all his time shoegazing instead. Which, no, is not a good idea for a novel by the way. It's a fucking atrocious idea. Who are you writing for, Disney? This is embarrassing. Get a fucking grip.

He sighed, highlighted the entire passage, and hit the delete button. Gently, because he didn't want to break the keyboard. Lame. He could only speculate as to how much more satisfying this process must have been in the old days, when you got to rip the paper out of a typewriter, crumple it into a little ball, and hurl it at a wastebasket with excessive force. For the umpteenth time he thought that he'd been born in the wrong decade, although he could never quite settle on when 'the right decade' would have been. Sometimes it was in the (relatively recent) past, sometimes in an imaginary and ever-changing distant future.

Whatever. He was going cross-eyed from staring at the screen for too long... all day actually. Again. With nothing to show for it. He took a long pull from the bottle of water sitting at his elbow. Whiskey was the traditional writer's drink, but... fuck whiskey. He hated whiskey. He hated the way it tasted and the way it made him feel and the things it made him do and worse, the way it made him write. Like an inmate at a nineteenth century lunatic asylum trying to convince the doctors that he was sane, that there was really no need to apply whatever torture stood in for a cure at the time.

Again. Wrong fucking decade.

It was autobiographical, that was the problem. The approach he'd been taking. Waaaay too close to home. Like trying to watch a movie with your face pressed right up against the screen and the volume turned up to a hundred. "Write what you know" might be a cliche, but of course it's also the only thing that ever really works. Even when you think you're doing your level best to forget what you know. Which right now was: that he'd left her. Stupidly. Blindly. He'd run from her in fear for his life, begging in his panic to return to the safety of the familiar, to the confines of this tiny pied a terre, to the arms of one in whose eyes he was and would always be incomplete, defective, a disappointment. So much wasted potential.

Maybe he was here, and not there, because he was afraid to live.

Maybe he was a writer because he was afraid to live.

He grabbed his wallet and keys, slipped on a jacket, and stalked out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him.

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Without even opening his eyes, he could tell he'd made a mistake.

When, in spite of this awareness, he managed to force them open, and keep them open, letting the morning sunlight slide down into them like an assassin's knife insinuating itself smoothly between the ribs of its victim to find and slice into the vital organs beneath, he knew he'd made a mistake.

And when he rolled over and saw the bed's other occupant, a strange girl at least a decade younger than (and twice as pretty as) he was, he knew he'd made a really big mistake.

It had been several months since his last bender, and longer since he'd blacked himself out, and the reasons for this extended hiatus were all coming back to him now. This was not fun. Not even remotely. And the physical aspect was the least of it. Worse, worst of all perhaps, was that he couldn't for the life of him remember a single thing that had happened last night.

Melissa was going to be pissed.

Melissa.

Oh fuck.

What day was it? What the fuck day was it??

Phone.

He needed his phone.

He slammed a hand down on the nightstand, feeling around for it, knocking keys and a pile of change to the floor. Nothing. Scrambling out of bed, he found his pants lying on the floor, shoved his hands into the pockets, feeling around with his fingers as if the phone could somehow be hiding somewhere in there when it obviously wasn't. Then he froze. Somebody had inserted a key and was turning the deadbolt from the outside.

He hastily took his hands out of his pants pockets and began struggling to put them on instead. This operation seemed to take much longer than he'd expected it to. When he'd managed to get them buttoned and zipped he turned. Melissa was standing there, staring at him, oddly expressionless.

She swiveled and walked to the bathroom, without a word, staring straight ahead. She opened the bathroom door, walked in, and closed and locked it behind her. For the space of a few breaths, all was quiet. The charged atmosphere in the room seemed to coalesce, contract, solidify. Time and space bent around him as if he were standing at the center of a black hole, at the singularity. He was acutely aware, suddenly, that his mouth was dry, that the little hairs on his arms were standing on end.

The girl in the bed sat up abruptly, clutching the sheets to her chest. She looked around the room, then at him, blinking. But she said nothing.

Then, from the bathroom, came the first tentative sobs.

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Melissa's eyes felt like they didn't belong to her. Like two alien objects lodged inside of her skull. The crying hadn't made her feel any better. If she couldn't help crying, she wanted it to at least provide some relief. But she was beyond comforting. At least maybe she'd gotten it out of her system. Now she just felt exhausted.

Zelig, and the little girl he'd brought home with him, were gone, and Melissa was packing her things. There wasn't much that was hers here, really. This had always been his apartment, not hers. His life. Not hers. She didn't understand why he'd come back to her, why he kept coming back...

Abstractedly she rifled through the papers on his writing desk, looking to see if there was anything that belonged to her in the pile of notebooks and post-its and random scraps of paper graced with his trademark illegible scrawl. More like the doodles of some drug infused abstract expressionist painter than script. Indecipherable. But she could read it. From long exposure she'd come to understand what the markings signified, cracked the code, without even really trying, or meaning to... except that she did mean to, probably. She was, by nature, far too curious to let such mysteries persist in her immediate environment without delving into them, unraveling them, allowing them to show her their hidden meanings, even if only on a half-conscious level.

A notebook that had been sitting near the top of the delicately balanced pile slid and fell heavily to the floor. She picked it up, glancing at the page it was open to. Notes for his novel. The novel he'd been working on for months now. The novel that was a different novel every day, each an auspicious new beginning, a heretofore unexplored direction, an intrepid foray into uncharted territory, a cause for celebration. I woke up with the best idea, honey! But they never had legs, these ideas. These ghosts of the unborn he cradled, loved. He found each of them wanting.

Why?

There were only a few lines of text on the current page: "She didn't see her personality as something broken that needed fixing. She saw it as something broken that was beautiful just as it was." And then, further down: "no need for plastic surgery to the soul". Clearly, neither were about her. She knew what he thought of her. A teardrop splatted onto the paper and the ink from the word "surgery" began steadily bleeding into it.

Who was she kidding? She'd take him back. She always did. All he ever had to do was ask.

She furrowed her brow, wiped the tears back, sniffed emphatically. Enough now. Enough crying.

Switching on the little antique desk lamp, she opened his desk drawer and rummaged inside for a pen. Then she brushed the back of her hand across the page, as if to wipe away the one teardrop that had fallen, though it had already been absorbed, become part of the paper. She looked around the room, down at her suitcase. If there was anything left, anything she'd forgotten, she'd come back for it later. She was too tired to do more tonight. After this she would leave, walk out into the crisp autumn air. And probably walk the forty-seven Manhattan blocks to her apartment, to see if walking could do what tears couldn't.

Then, bending her head to the page where he had scribbled his songs of praise to another, she wrote:

The love I bear you is all I have
And if you take that love from me
What's left will be between God and I
And then what is to be will be.

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©2018 Bennett Italia, all rights reserved.

Horizontal rulers courtesy @cryptosharon

For a chance to WIN SteemBasicIncome just read and comment on my #freewritemadness posts For more information visit the @freewritehouse