The bit from page 123 file 23

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Via Counterbalance:

Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven’t gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven’t gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.

I don’t know where pages 23 and 123 are located in my project. I’m a bit scattered, you see. So I opened the twenty-third file in my folder to the first page, as this section is only nineteen pages long. Here is the first whole paragraph.

(P.S. Consider yourself tagged, writer, if you’re working on a long work, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.)

Shirley— A quiet morning, with a hint of a siren stuck in traffic. I am in the very center of the universe, I think. And yet— How I hate where I’ve ended up, on this unclean street that makes me gag at the smell of ink. For no reason today I stood outside the bookstore next door—holding my breath or else I might smash through their window to knock over the ink display. The urge, I understand, is wholly unjustified. I have become a hoarder of ink myself, and of paper and books and pencils of several colors, as well as blank canvases that are not for me but for my assistants who serve me on my floor like a pack of starved weasels. So you will discover in my room, if not already discovered, what has occupied me for the past week and from which I must escape, if not now then very soon. The ink keeps overflowing from their little wells. I’m not sure how this is happening. The papers on which the inkwells sit sometimes shift when I’m not looking—mice? roaches?—and then great films of ink darken the papers, stopping short at the beveled edge of my desk. And the smell of the ink in this room is devastating my senses; I’d thought that the brands I’d brought over from Taiwan would surely keep, but they are worse than the bookstore next door, forever a reminder of my shortcomings. I embellish, I create untruths—the smell is not so bad anymore. It’s a strange world to live in, when I think about it—that is, when I have the mind to think about it, and even then my analysis never carries me very far, always disrupted by a large hole yawning open in the path before me, and sometimes I think I can reach a certain enlightenment before giving in to the mercy of the hole. Oh, to dive in, Shirley, and forget. But I did not lie about the need for cataloging the books—it is a necessary and most welcome task, and will collect you a good sum from the hotel when it comes to an end—but perhaps I haven’t been entirely forthcoming, either, about the timing of the enterprise. And doesn’t one require honesty when encountering a room like mine?

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