After all. If God is some great consciousness that shapes our lives, what the fuck is that asshole thinking? Why does he grant Debra a parking space, but so many more suffer indefinitely? What’s with all these short, sad lives? Why does he listen to prayers at the beginning of football games, but not the pleas of children about to die alone?

For real, dude. Fuck anyone who doesn’t wonder that.

God has to be separate from consciousness as we know it, if It exists at all. In meetings I’ll be snarky with it–“I’d like to grant my higher power, who I choose to call mitocondria, powerhouse of the cell”–but I mean it, honestly. What comfort in the notion that cells are God. What wonder in the idea that it all gets bigger and smaller in one, and why the fuck would it stop with us?

Anyway. Inspiration was and is my God as well, and and like God, it is organic yet unknown, it is there yet elusive in thought, and it isn’t a fucking other person who screws me or rewards me according to whim.

Anyway. Pre-kids I had playlists of songs for each story. I had mood boards and podcasts for research and all kinds of sounds I needed there or not there.

Post kids, most of that is just too much outside stimulus for me to focus. That being said, if it must play, it must, and I’ll write anyway.

Children have taught me lots of things, most of those things terrible. They themselves–mine, at least–are dollops of wonder and chaos in this world, unsweetened condensed humanity, and what they’ve taught me is that life hurts and that I’d cut off every part of myself if it helped theirs be sweet and painless and good.

They’ve also taught me that I can do anything.

My mother used to say that, all the time. I have never said it to mine. I’m not that cruel. I have been honest with my kids, some say to a fault. Yet when my daughter speaks and makes sense, when my son understands what I mean when I say I need space and hand him something else to do, those same nay sayers go pensive.

I say I need space too much these days, maybe. I wrote over three thousand words yesterday. I have four and a half chapters left to write, and We Expected More is finished, complete, and ugly in a way that makes me faint in the head. I’ll leave it for a week, not touch it at all. I’ll start outlining Moon Bloom, then. And in that week, a select few will devour it, decide which parts are the most bitter or too sweet or have gone septic. Regurgitate it and write a fucking critique for my own personal to me local paper, and I’ll have to fix it.

In a way, I don’t want to finish. In more than one way, I am absolutely vibrating with the need to get it done.

So I write. I write right now, here because the words for them aren’t coming easy, and writing here tends to help with that. Beside me, my son slaps at a tablet that sparks up fireworks wherever his hand touches. Sonic blares on the television, and it is 4am, and I woke up at 2am so I could write.

I still do mood boards, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t need them. I don’t need anything, to work.

Even if it was possible to cut off every part of myself, sacrifice it so these babies never sufferred and I had, I’d still be able to make a story.

I wouldn’t be able to not.

Anyway. Here’s what I’ve got for Moon Bloom so far: