Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Sandwiches, Faces, and Blinking

Dear Imaginary Readers,

It is time once again for the bi-annual update of Coincidental Fishsticks.  This update is sponsored by Boredom™.  When there's nothing else to do, choose Boredom™!

Tonight's insane, rambling diatribe is inspired by National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.  For those poor few uninformed, this is a month in which the nation, as a whole, sits down to write a novel.  The best of these get self-published.  The worst are burned while their authors fight to be the one survivor of the Thunderdome (Fun Fact: on the weekends, the Thunderdome is home to high school football tournaments).

It is also a time in which amateur authors are encouraged to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard to create a piece of fiction out of nothing.  The act of conjuring up a world is the closest man can come to magic*.  Fifty thousand words which existed before are being reorganized in a way never before seen to create something completely new.  Nobody has ever seen this thing you've created before, because you just created it.  "This is my story," you will say in unison with your writing brothers**, "There are many like it but this one is mine."

This is both liberating and debilitating.  I find it completely numbing, and not in the fun way you get before dental work.  The options are, if it is possible, too unlimited.  I need boundaries, and this blows them away.  I salute those who can look the open prairie in the metaphorical face and wait to see who blinks first***.  I look forward to completely ignoring your novel the way I do most things.  For now, my steam has run out and I never did figure out if I had a point or not, so I'm going to end here.  Now, where's that sandwich?

*Unless you're Criss Angel.
**And sisters.  Geez, we get it.  Ladies can do anything fellas can do.  Now be a doll and make me a sandwich, yeah?
***You will.  Metaphors don't need to blink, because of their state of being not a physical object.  Use a dog or small child instead.

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