One of the best ways to continue procrastinating on finishing any creative effort is to go through and organize all of your unfinished ideas. Apparently in early 2013 I'd jotted down, "modern retelling of The Snow Queen." About six months later, Frozen came out, and today, I still write press releases for a living.
About three times per year I have a dream about committing murder, or to be more specific, getting away with murder. The victim—my victim—does not have much meaning to me in the dream. It’s just someone who got in my way. I killed her (is it usually a female? yes, an older female, let's not psychoanalyze that), and she has been hidden effectively, buying time. I have gone over the scene carefully, wiped off all my prints. The police are on the way, and I am running. I will not be discovered, not at that moment. The sense of relief at having gotten away with the crime gives way to a dawning realization that now I am a new person, a murderer who has gotten away with it, and that even if I am never caught, I will know. I will know and it will eat away at me for the rest of my life.
That is what you get for reading Poe early in life.
I read once somewhere that there are an “infinite number of stories waiting to be written.” That isn’t true. What you realize, if you think about it even for a moment, is that the number of stories you will experience in a lifetime is finite, just like the number of sunsets, orgasms, and teeth cleanings. Of those stories, about half of them have already been written. Of the rest, you are suited to write perhaps only forty percent. And of those, you will perhaps write half of them well, if you are a writer at all.
I work for a small company that makes documentaries and television segments for British television, which is based in a small house in the suburbs. The owner, Nick, is a pleasant, addled man in his late 30s with a lovely young wife and a burbling baby upstairs. He agreed to take me on as an intern five years ago. Now there are three of us: me, associate producer; and the new intern.
“You’re giving away all the best parts of the show!” Nick was crying into the phone when I got in. It was a cool day smattered with rain and pink petals from the cherry blossom trees, but already in the basement office it was close and smelled eggy.
“Why don’t I just not give you the video then? How about that?” He was fighting again with our channel’s website people. “Well, are you contractually obligated to take every bloody bit of suspense out of my show?”
He hung up and pursed his lips at me.
“I told them only to use the bit with the cows and then the buggies on the road and then the interview with the boy. I told them.”
Nick just shook his head. I went silently over to my desk. Either way, no one was going to convince him that you really can’t ruin the suspense of a documentary about Amish country by putting the wrong clips online. It’s kind of something you’re going to watch, or you’re not.
The baby wailed upstairs. Nick sighed. The rain pattered on the window.
