Planet Terth. Enter Patricia Wattsolder and Stevie Rogophaff.

 

Patricia and Stevie

​

     "What have you got, Patricia?"
     "The heck if I know! Creative writing by a writer at various stages of his life. And a mandate. I've got to get it in a book along with a conversation between you and me, before midnight, or the Jantukrak Necromancer slobbers on over to devour us. It's you and me building a book out of fragments and wholes that don't always fit together, see? Because you and I are smooth, we're to make the book whole, real, and smooth."
     "And who are we? How do we introduce ourselves?"
     "Oh, that's easy. We're just tryin' to advance literature, and we've got this writer named Nick Pinch. He's published some books, but the world has so many people, nobody has heard of him. We don't want to make him famous. We just want so he's not completely abandoned (so he doesn't perish or quit, so he can make a living or at least get by). He has years, nay, decades of writing, and is drawing blanks on new material, so he aims to pull from the files of years ago and put his collection in a novel entitled Myron Eberley. And we want to have something to do with our time, since otherwise what the furniture would you and I be doing, Stevie?"
     "Playing cards."
     "No, I don't think so. But it's good and useful to save ourselves and bring a guy into the light, so let's do it. Let's rock. I turned the radio on."
     "All right. What do we have?"

 

Nick Pinch

 

     Hi, I'm Nick Pinch. I'm the writer Patricia and Stevie are talking about. I am not anybody else.
A guy whose name I no longer recall, though it may have been the Jantukrak Necromancer, said I needed to release a book in less than four weeks or I'd die and go to prison, where I'd be paid almost nothing to sew up mattresses. What?! Absurd! And in the wrong order the penalty! My desk faces a wall, I have no ideas, it's all spirit. I live in a place where a criminal clown has seized power and instigated violence and unrest in every corner. A morbidly obese, horribly regressed jerk and demagogue who wants enmity, racism, xenophobia, anarchy, environmental destruction, kidnapping, bullying, lies, insults, sociopathy, treason, paranoia, failure, rottenness, bluster, laziness, bad television, ugliness, fraudulence, recklessness, homelessness, lawbreaking, stupidity, smirking, and shouting to be the rule of the day. A sex-obsessed, egomaniacal, disgusting, irascible, cowardly, unprincipled wrecking ball of a fool.
     He is a philologist of Liemore, the only language he knows, but communicates chiefly by shouting and gesturing. Such is the guy who seized power and began at once to build a path towards the permanent installment of himself in office. And he's got a pet Snarfle, the monster known far and wide as the Jantukrak Necromancer, whose only benefit is that it tires out the dictator from misdeeds so much that he is reduced to picking up small objects and trying to teach them the language of lies before going to bed.
     But I will write my book.

 

Patricia and Stevie

 

     "Patricia, Nick's comments are hardly the stuff of fiction. What he says is, in part, an opinion on what, and who, must be stopped. Do we leave it in?"
     "Absolutely. We have many pages to fill and my hands are bleeding."
     "What happened?"
     "Not sure. I think I was pounding a wall in confinement a long time ago, and the memory came back. What's next?"
     "False Start," said Stevie.

 

False Start / Nick Pinch

 

     I'm writing my next book. I must be, because I've got the page on the screen and I'm tapping in the letters. A sentence lands on the page. Lands isn't the word, but what is? And something else. What was it? Oh yeah. An outline. I have no outline, but every time I start a book I tell myself I'm going to have one. I also tell myself I'm not going to write myself onto the page. But every time, you guessed it, here I am. Causing trouble. I set myself an impossible goal: finish the novel in a month. How the hell do I do that? Hell isn't the word I want, but no word fits. What do you do when you're writing a sentence and you come to a blank where no word belongs? You stop. You put in the wrong word, cross it out, put in another word, hell in this case, and it doesn't feel right, but if you don't put something you stay stuck. I analyze. I start to say something, but edit it out because it's So and So and his idea, and I'm inventing my own thing. So I overthink and do the things I forever tell myself not to do.
Only later do I see that I was on the right track.
     Yesterday I thought of a title for the book, but I'm old and forgot it. Failed to write it down in time.
I must be invisible, because as soon as I tell somebody about my writing, she faints. I go on like this every time I start a new book and when I'm stuck. I'll discard these pages. The story begins after ten pages of bullshit. 
How do you write when nobody reads or acknowledges you? I read my writing. When the book is done, when it arrives at my door, I look at it in sudden wonder.

 

Patricia and Stevie

 

     "Whoah, Patricia. This is ridiculous. Nick Pinch has no story to tell, all he's got is process. He just wants to talk about it. We're quite likely going to have to reposition this whole part of the book further in, so that our beginning will be nice and catchy. We need to hook readers, not lose them faster than bananas."
     "You make a compelling argument, Stevie, but let's see what happens anyway. Next up is 1."