“Reality is not want you think it is, it’s nothing more than a perception your mind is trained to accept. The truth? The truth is far greater than you could ever imagine. That flicker of movement in the corner of your eye. The shadows cast by nothing. A patch of darkness in the night which seems to move. The sounds in the lost hours that have no cause. A glimpse of faces in the abstracts of half-light. Catching your eye for a moment, and sending a shiver chilling down your spine. Raising the hairs on your neck in response to some long forgotten memories passed down through time from the caves of your ancestors.  Yet all these things are but a glimmer of a truth your mind will not, cannot accept, but is a truth all the same.“

So I stumbled across this pretentious prose while throwing some OU files onto my kindle to read later. A small passage (there’s about a page in all) that I wrote some time ago. The some time ago being, well I have no idea. The file says 2011, but that just the last time it was saved, or I read it then edited a bit, or when I put it on my kindle with some other files from one of my pc’s. To be honest, you see, I have no idea when I wrote it, or where it was going, what it was part of, and if I had a wider plan of where I was taking this bit of work. 

It not alone, I have hard drives full of bits and bobs. Half-formed ideas that were played with then dropped, scraps of stories. Character sketches and dialogues. 

I normally know what they were about, where they fitted. I know if they were thrown away for something else, or morphed into another story. They are seldom just forgotten. 

And if they are forgotten they are seldom as intriguing as this one. Enticing may be a better word. This feels like a story waiting to be told. It also feels like the introduction to a story I have told. It would slip perfectly into The Passing Place as an introduction as part of a longer piece, or just that paragraph alone, a small opening paragraph to set  readers mind alive. To set them up for the ride they are about to take. 

But here is the thing, I know, with absolute certainty, that this was not my intent when I wrote it.  Which is not normally an issue. the passing place is full of bits of ideas that were written originally as something else but found a home there because it turned out that was where they belonged. 

This piece though feels different. yet at the same time, it feels right. 

I have no idea what it is about. What its story is, and I would have to write it to find out. 

I guess that is the writers curse. 

Sometimes there is a story you really want to read, but your the one who has to write it. 

As +Neil Gaiman  has been known to say the process of writing is more or less put one word in front of another then do it again.    I guess to find out what this is, I’ll have to just do that and see where it takes me. 

#writerscurse