possibly a stand alone piece, but hopefully something more...


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Jimmy sat at his computer, trying to write fiction. Where to start? Why so hard to not write prose? Why did he just use a split infinitive? Too many Star Trek episodes? Why is he asking himself such questions instead of writing? Because he doesn't know anything else but the questions. Because he doesn't have a story to tell. Because he feels perpetually pregnant but never able to deliver - filled with something he cannot express, cannot comprehend. Is it life? This is one of the many things Jimmy is unable to believe - that life itself resides in him ready to leap out and fill others and fill him too. If life is in there somewhere it must be heavily bound, for he cannot loose it.

And looking at his now aborted attempt to write fiction, he notes all of its flaws, such as it's non-fluent shifts in person. Was he narrating Jimmy's' story or was Jimmy telling his own story? It seemed all the same. And even his reflections on his aborted tale cannot escape this vacillation. And so, he stares at his lifeless work, and mourns for what might have been, for the relationship he might have had with it, at the damage he has done to himself by his own self-imposed constraints, by his destruction of his own creation. Not good enough. Not really fiction. Really autobiography acted out - self-hatred now tearing at his would-be creation and at himself for thinking he might be creative.