I've been struggling to write this winter. Eventually I broke down and started creating little apparatus* to generate writing independently of my shivering ego.

On the kitchen counter, I have a pile of yellow notepaper with the top folded over and cellotaped into an increasingly tight and sticky roll. In the morning (when I remember) I write a line on each of four sheets, finishing with the first word of the next line, which is always the same word, so that I have four more or less identical sheets. Then I scramble them and try (usually with success, I am faintly alarmed to admit) to forget what I wrote. The next day I take up with a line of something completely different, ending on a new word.

I had no conscious sense of creating continuity -- tried actively to disrupt the possibility of picking up the same story from line to line on the same sheet. Still, order manifests, or my preoccupations do.

I thought it might be time to open one. The tape gave me some trouble, but here is a vaguely gothic fragment from January:

The young man rolled his ghostly eyes and blew out an intricate latticework of smoke. Should I tremble feverishly as he opened the envelope -- so badly that the paper slipped from the government. I turned it over in my hands. I knew I should open it, but someow doing that I mean what I say -- or else what is left for me?" He struck himself violently in the chest bound in brass sitting in the middle of the floor. Its lock was shaped like a crescent moon. A sudden panic gripped the dog -- some sort of wordless existential horror. He barked, but rather than enough time to discover what you feel. What is your answer? My God, what is it you want?"

But he was silent.

{rf}

*I wanted to put apparati, but apparently that is bad Latin and the plural of apparatus is apparatus, or apparatuses.