Snail's progress...

So it takes all morning to fix up two paragraphs then knit on a few more sentences. Writing is slow, you could say ponderous. Then at lunch my son says, Why not just write something trashy for the fun of it, something outrageous, just to make money? Something "controversial," was how he put it, meaning something completely out of my zone, i.e. something compellingly untrue. A la James Frey's notorious drug addicted imprisonment.

Yeah, right.

No, I said, Writing is so torturously hard that it has to be something that is true for me. Or that starts from something true for me: something meaningful, that's what I meant.

My son backing off once he realized that, by association, having a mother who made up nefarious stuff might implicate him too.

It's a small town, right?

A small continent. A small universe. Too small for telling lies to gain notoriety.

A novel much too deep and dark a space to be stuck inside a faulty web.