a kind of gain-giving, as would perhaps trouble a woman

This story is partly true. And it is partly a speculation on a fiction that is rapidly approaching a deadline for an arbitrary word count, for the which I have lost a direction and completion.

Kind of. Not really. These words and ramblings should really be streamed through the conscious of a character. And maybe they will be. Or won’t. We’ll see.

So, like I said, I’m doing this nanowrimo thingamajig. I had a stellar weekend last week, churning out scene after scene. Then I had to take a night off for work. And another for an all too necessary visit to the central regions of Massachusetts. And then momentum died. I found something… again. And now eh, I’ll finish it. But I’m not loving it.

The playlist I created for this project is on my iTunes. What comes on but the song that fuels it all – Bookends. Cause, you see, this thing is about friendship. Friendship between women. And yet, ugh, I so want to avoid cliché. I don’t want to write Beaches or Steel Magnolias. I don’t want to employ the traditional formulas and instruments in said story. You know… the sisterly bonds, divided by men. Okay, sort of had that in there. Sort of. Sort of. But this is me. And it’s out of sequence. And I try to think outside of the box, so to speak. But you have to have tragedy that brings it all back together. Except that’s where the story begins. But conflict is inevitable. Especially between women friends. The more they love each other the more they hate one another. Yikes. Do I get anti-feminism points for that? Oh. Whatever.

It’s not Beaches. One of them is not going to die. Or get sick. And no one is going to live happily ever after with the other person’s kid, preserving her memory. Blah. Blah. Blah.

But, seriously, that conflict… necessary tool. And truth.

The more we love one another, the more we feel at liberty to hurt one another. The day’s events have led me to think about how we hurt other people. Not just in a physical way, injuring our bodies. In an emotional way. We break one another’s hearts – and in some extremities – souls. Without trivializing the things that happened in the setting of my real life, I thought again of how a friend of mine theorizes if we could see the emotional hurts we cause one another as physical abuses, well… that would be an alarming thing. Wouldn’t it?

So I think of this as I contemplate how to hurt my characters… and mend them. I think of how often times the injury is intended malice, but unintended permanence. It is so easy to say a thing, to cast off a word and expect it to disappear with the sunlight of the day. But then… it sits in the memory of the person who hears it, who feels the strike against ego down to the very core of her being.

And sometimes those words said don’t resonate in the present. A few hours pass and it’s all right. But then, then a day later the sting of those words sits in the mind. The fact they were said at all indicates an underlying meaning. But maybe the fact they were said is a good thing. Honesty is better than saying the thing behind a person’s back, no? Things like that never hide for long. It always rises to the surface… and people always get hurt.  Then wonder… if this person thinks such a thing… how can she really be a friend? Why bother giving kindness and time if she can say, let alone think such things? Is friendship merely the decision to not be alone for a few hours a few times a week? Or is it actually paying attention to how one can hurt the other?

So now how will I put this musing into my plot? Good question.

If I haven’t lost you yet, I guess you like the emotional delving of chic lit. But, hm, sometimes I wish I decided to write action adventure for this dang challenge. ARGH.