okay, here comes a really long post

that is cumbersome and confusing at times, and yes, it reflects a desperation for words, but it also reflects what this month has taught me, so I'm going to share:

Only 2110 words to go, and that’s barely more than a normal day, that’s so tangible and manageable and reachable and able, that’s the theme, I’m able to meet that! I can’t wait to put this into a drawer, to forget about it, but not for good, don’t worry, but to put it away and let it breathe, and let myself breathe, and then to come back to it and to form this raw clay into a story, and I’ll need to expand, and I’ll need to refine, and I’ll need to take the raw clay and still form it in many places, but that’s so fitting since it’s really a story all about creation, all about taking clay and feeling its warm and sticky heft in your hands, between your fingers, but I don’t think this clay is meant to be baked and hardened, but yet to remain pliable, which of course means that a good rain could destroy its shape, but that’s the chance you take, and it’s not natural to create stone boys, but flesh boys who can move and perhaps melt with a good rain, and now I’m really just blabbering but the blabbering counts for words, and what’s the point of reaching a word count if I’m not really adding story, but I think I might push through a mental block if I can say that I finished 50,000 words, the rough draft of a novel, and I’ll be okay to admit that it’s really a rough, rough draft, but if someone says, “what do you write?” and I can say, “Oh, mostly short stories, and I’ve got some published in small literary magazines, but I just finished the rough, rough draft of my first novel,” and you see even to be able to say something like that changes the feel of the word “writer” when it rolls off my tongue and I use it to describe myself, and if I’ve written the rough, rough draft of a novel that’s serious business, and that’s commitment, and that’s dedication, and that’s purpose, and that’s passion, and that’s something that doesn’t allow yourself to go back to constant questioning and second guessing, and that’s something that doesn’t allow yourself to spend years and years on one story about a single stupid tomato or anything else, and it’s something that frees you up to send stories out and not pin all your hopes on this one or the next one, because you are going to keep creating, and you’ll have stories upon stories, and when you have so many children it doesn’t matter if you swallow one or lose one at the zoo, because there are always more to replace it, and you can always just get knocked up again, and then when I apply to grad school I will have a novel excerpt that I can send, maybe with some completed shorter stories, and I can say I wrote a novel in a month, and I want to be able to say I’ve just finished my first novel, so the long and short of it is, get those words however I can, because this rough, rough draft is only for me, and the mental effect that it will have is also only for me, and isn’t this all about pushing through, and growing as a writer, and growing as a person, and changing somehow, and if I hadn’t changed at all in this month then what was it for, and the way my fingers are freely going now is certainly change for me, but so is the way my fingers can just type what’s happening in my head, and right now that’s not story, no, but it’s also not being censored; I’m just typing what’s there, and this is the practice I need to type what’s there when it is story, and not think first how to put it into words and then send those words to my fingertips, but instead just to feel the feeling in my chest and the weight at the back of my head, like I am now, and just to trust my fingers to write it without needing my brain to translate.