Somehow, and I know this is no coincidence, as soon as I realized I needed an ending for this book, the creative part of my brain cramped up and said it was done, and it headed off to take a steam and get a massage, which pretty much left me on my own to get through the rest of the month. Friday was pretty brutal, as I had no ideas and no time to write anyway, as my work schedule continued to grow in all kinds of new and interesting directions. I figured that I’d make it all up on the weekend. Who isn’t creative on the weekend?

Turns out, I’m not. Not this weekend, anyway. Too much to do around the house first. Then there was dinner out at the Cracker Barrel, where apparently Chinese Elvis works (don’t ask, because I was unable to get a picture, but if Elvis was Chinese and inclined to run a Cracker Barrel, this was him — though we all know Elvis is not Chinese and really works at the Waffle House, but sometimes it’s fun to speculate on such matters) , then a day of bills and emails and various other important online business, and before I knew it I was 3 1/2 days behind schedule, and still without a single creative idea to work with. Things were not looking good.

Eventually I forced my ass into my seat with the idea that I would write something, anything, and it would be good enough. So, distractions set aside, I opened my document, put fingers to keyboard, and wrote some crap. Big steaming piles of it for about 1,000 words. Bad enough to make me want to stop and spare the universe from such bad writing. It appeared that I had no interest in coming up with a way to wrap this thing up, leaving me the option of writing the word “gazpacho” 10,000 times and then ending the story with “A vampire did it.” Not exactly Hemingway, but still possibly enough to get me a movie deal at MGM.

Then somewhere during the next 2,000 words the creative part of my brain took pity on me and wandered back in, claiming it was just there to look for some old Spider-Man comic it had lost. It took one look at what I’d written, fell on the floor laughing, and when the laughs turned into heaving sobs, it took over and dragged me past the 40,000 word mark while also tossing in yet another mind-fuck for whoever ends up reading this story. Then as soon as it stopped typing it took off looking for the mystery bottle of Jack Daniels’ that may or may not be missing, leaving me to write this blog post myself.

Which probably explains a lot, come to think of it.

And now I find myself with a week left in this contest, a day and a half behind schedule, less than 10,000 words to go, and, at last, half a roadmap to the ending. I’ll take it.

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