It's fine to have a muse, but you ought to have a plan for when she's off having a cigarette somewhere

The monkey story, the first draft of which I finished over the weekend, had its genesis in a 277-word fragment that I tossed up onto my old blog back in 2005. I was casting about for something to write because I'd hit a dry patch with The Book, so I started poking around on the hard drive. That fragment turned into a short story of about 4,000 words. The interesting thing--to me, anyway--is that no trace of that original fragment remains. Once the story sprouted, it outgrew its inspiration, and I ended up cutting all of it.

I've got far more fragments and unfinished pieces than I do completed pieces. I used to regard them as evidence of my dilettantishness (new word! Dilettantocity sounded wrong). Now I treat them like little pokes in the noggin that might possibly lead to bigger things. When the creative well seems to be running dry, I just read through the fragments, and see if anything inspires me.

As it turns out, the second-person stuff went out the window along with the fragment, but while I was shuffling through other fragments last night I came across this, which I scribbled down at some point in 2007 and post here now in the spirit of The Orphan:

If I were to say to you, "This is your story," you would laugh, and deny it.  Because I don't know you, and you don't know me.  The idea that a stranger can tell your story is absurd.  That a stranger can tell your story, and that you are one among many readers of it, is beyond absurd.  It is impossible.  Nevertheless, I will be your narrator.  And when I have finished, you will know the truth of your story, and how I came to know it.

I am sitting across from you now, and writing this sentence about you, and you have no idea.  What will become of the two of us...what will transpire over the next eleven days...that is in our future.  When I wrote the first sentence of this paragraph, it was the present.  Now, it is in the past.  I have lifted it from my notebook, and placed it here, effective time travel.  There is no future, not yet, and when there is, and I place it here, it will once again become the past.

I'd love to know the rest of that story. If I ever figure out what it is, I'll write it down.