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Fortune Cookie Throw Down: Episode One and Only?

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Why Fortune Cookie Throw Down? Because instead of reading my fortune, saying to myself, “Self, this is absolute nonsense,” and then throwing out my fortune like a normal person would, I keep all my fortunes. I find them in the pockets of my work shirts, in my computer bag, and in crevices of my apartment that I clean out maybe every two years. They’re scattered about the top of my bureau like dead leaves.

And yet, I still can’t throw them out. I put them to the side when I’m cleaning. I collect them in tiny boxes and bowls, which I then forget about. I’ve been decluttering since before decluttering was cool, but even that does nothing because they’re so small they escape into crevices like papery little centipedes. My entire apartment is infested with mystical fortune cookie nonsense.

But a few years ago, this looked like it might change. Back in the early days of this blog, I had tons of ideas for features and series of posts. Most of them involved me going out of my way to do eccentric activities, and then write about them. Thus, like a twisted emperor of meaningless scraps of paper, I decided that my fortune cookie fortunes must prove their worth through combat. Pitted against one another on this very blog, they would win based on wisdom, humor, uncanny accuracy, or my fickle whims of the day.

Somehow, this made more sense to me than throwing them out in a cold-blooded sweep.

I initially started fortune cookie throw down in my art journal. Which looks about the way you’d expect the art journal of someone who can’t throw out a fortune cookie and used to collect My Little Ponies to look.

Fortune One vs Fortune Two

“Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it’s enough.”

The first fortune is pithy advice with a sensible caveat. Actually, I like this one. I don’t believe that intuition, or gut feelings, are some mystical, magical thing, or that intuition needs to be opposed to logic. Rather, I think that intuition is basically an impression you get from things you’ve noticed, but not necessarily verbalized. But no, it’s not enough, because one bad thing can color an impression if you’re not willing to think about it logically. I live by this.

“What makes an apple fall to the ground?”

The idiocy of this question can be summed up by one word: GRAVITY. Or possibly kids with sticks, or extreme over-ripeness. But it still comes back to GRAVITY, doesn’t it?

Obviously, number one is my winner.

Fortune Three vs Fortune Four

“One is not sleeping, does not mean they are awake.”

Being judgemental, New Age style. And that’s about it. It’s not profound in the way that people who believe this think it is. Also, it loses points for grammar. Although grammar isn’t the point here, I was so distracted by the mismatch between “one” and “they” that I didn’t immediately notice that the entire thing is a grammatical hot mess.

“Curiosity kills boredom. Nothing can kill curiosity.”

Except for sedatives, electric fences, and unwanted answers. And also the knowledge that if you look up your symptoms online, it will send you into a panic, which is probably far worse than some imaginary tingling in your leg that seems to go away as soon as you put on Star Trek or otherwise occupy your mind. Curiosity does kill boredom. Other things can kill curiosity, and swiftly.

Number four wins this one. Three is judgemental, but not helpful. While my response to four was glib, the fortune is still more true. I rarely get bored, and am always am trying to learn new things. Curiosity can be killed, but like a comic book villain, it never stays dead forever.

Fortune One vs Fortune Four

To recap, Fortune One is “Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it’s enough.” Fortune Four is “Curiosity kills boredom. Nothing can kill curiosity.”

As I said above, I live by Fortune One. If that hadn’t already the case, Fortune One might have been good advice for me. Number Four has been brought down by its second sentence, and by the fact that I’m a smart ass.

Fortune One advances to the next round!

While Fortune Cookie Thrown Down was kind of a weird thing I found on my hard drive and I no longer intended to turn into a series, I had fun typing this up. I enjoy poking holes in common cultural wisdom, although much of what one sees on fortune cookie fortunes doesn’t really match that description. You might have noticed in the art journal image above that I had glued down four more fortunes. At the very least, I’ll have to write about those. This may not be Episode One and Only after all.

And so…

Next time, on Fortune Cookie Throw Down…

Principles, convictions, schedules, and being wronged duke it out! Don’t miss it! Coming soon! Or at least in the future. Eventually!

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Income tax, vigilantes, and other things I didn’t know about Prohibition

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I assumed that renting a six-hour documentary when I have a toddler was a ridiculous act of optimism. Surely, in these tiring times, my partner and I would lack the mental energy to watch a history documentary instead of the same episodes of 30 Rock for the billionth time. Surely, if we managed to start it at all, we would manage about 45 minutes. Then we would return it to the library, making sure not to do anything to invite a conversation with the librarian about our documentary-watching failure. I had high expectations about Ken Burns’ Prohibition, but I still didn’t expect it to be so fascinating that I would be motivated to finish it well before it was due.

The surprising twist of Prohibition is that one of these items turns out to be illegal.

I learned so many interesting things about Prohibition—and especially the social conditions leading up to it–that I have found myself telling people about it all the time. I don’t know how many unspoken social conventions I’ve broken by blurting out Prohibition stories in the middle of a conversation, but here are some of the ones that have stuck with me.

Income tax is just over 100 years old.

Since I never learned otherwise, I always assumed that income tax has existed since the start of the country to satisfy government greed and also to birth the energy vampire known as TurboTax.

Nope! Well, probably a little bit. But income tax was also related to the fight to prohibit alcohol—one of the things standing in the prohibitionists’ way was the enormous amount of tax revenue generated by the alcohol industry. With income tax passed in 1916, that gave the government an extra source of income to draw from, and struck a blow to the alcohol industry.

This is part of the reason that Al Capone was taken down on charges of tax fraud. Watching the documentary, I kept wondering why he didn’t just hire an accountant, when he was clearly rich enough to hire an entire team of accountants and maybe even pay them to fight tigers or make him sandwiches out of tiger baloney. Income tax, at that time, was still not well understood, and so it ended up being a weak point for Capone.

Alcohol totally took the rap for capitalism and patriarchy.

One of the chief complaints about alcohol, especially by the 19th-century women’s groups who initially sought to make the United States a dry country, was about husbands who would drink and then come home to abuse their families. Hand-in-hand with that was the idea that the men needed to go to the saloons on a Friday night after a hard work week. Their lives in manufacturing jobs were so tough that it was their right to unwind. Sounds like patriarchy to me—with a bit of capitalism for spice.
In other words, alcohol became a scapegoat for what was actually a feminist issue, and a workers’ rights issue. Ultimately, banning alcohol couldn’t solve these problems.

Empowerment means awesome vigilante stone-throwing.

In the 1800s, there was a woman named Carry Nation, who was the head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Kansas. Alcohol had screwed over not one, but two of her marriages, and after a number of ineffectual marches, she heard the Voice of God and turned into a crazed vigilante. She was especially pissed because Kansas was supposed to already be a dry state, but it sounded like there was a saloon every couple blocks. Kind of like Dunkin Donuts in modern day New England.* The morning after hearing god, she hid a bunch of rocks in paper wrappings, then went to the nearest saloon and starting chucking the rocks at mirrors, bottles, and all the other breakables. She then went on and did this at a few more places. She was arrested so many times that we lost count while watching, but every time it was the same story: she would be released from jail, and then go grab more rocks and break saloons. This sometimes happened multiple times in a single day. Eventually, she upgraded to a hatchet.

It’s possible to be so nice you lose all sense of morality.

One of the era’s big bootleggers, George Remus**, murdered his wife after a short stint in prison during which she had an affair with a prohibition officer. This apparently occurred while he was on his way to their divorce proceedings. Remus acted as his own lawyer, and decided to play the temporary insanity defense, which was a maverick move back then. The jury declared him not guilty because they knew he’d had a rotten Christmas the previous year, and wanted him to have a better one this time around.

So even though he took a life, the jury decided to give him a break for the holidays. That’s some Christmas song material, there. It’s better than Christmas Shoes, anyway.

And the number one thing that stuck with me from Prohibition?

A handful of slippery, vague ideas about how people act and opinions form. It’s a slow process. Then, as now, people tried to solve problems by attacking convenient scapegoats instead of the root of a problem. People keep saying that we live in politically divisive times. I think that’s true, to an extent, but the way that citizens of the 19th and early 20th centuries divided into wet and dry camps looked familiar to me. Movements rise and fall on the tide of opinions and ideas. That hasn’t changed today.

That’s comforting and depressing at the same time.

*If that was the case, then clearly, law or no, Kansas could not get rid of the saloons. How would anyone give directions?

**I don’t know if he has any connection to Romulus and Remus, or if he could turn into a wolf.

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Depression is a hole

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Depression is a hole, and it sucks you down again and again. Sometimes subtle, sometimes slow, you wind up in a hole so vast you think it’s a landscape, and you can’t even see the shadowy watercolor of sloping walls at the edges.

Depression is a hole, and specifically, sometimes it’s the small, jarring shock of a pothole that your smooth ride crashes down into when you were driving home in the dark.

Depression is a hole, but sometimes it’s also a pit trap, and it fucking comes out of nowhere when you’re only trying to eat some cherries you saw sitting on the ground.

Depression is a hole, but sometimes it’s also a bunker, and you think it’s pretty cool with the generator-powered TV and VCR and the stacks of Digimon episodes you taped in 2002 and the excuse to eat ramen noodles all day. It’s all glory days until you realize there’s no sunlight.

Depression is a hole, and sometimes you let it dig itself when you know better, you KNOW BETTER, and you watch while a bunch of shovels gleefully fling away the dirt like wizard Mickey Mouse’s animated brooms, and you think it’s all going great because now that there’s a hole you’ll have a far-fetched idea to plant an edible forest garden with lingonberries and chives, and then you realize, “Oh shit, I can’t plant anything in this hole when I’m stuck down here.”

Depression is a hole, and you can walk your way out. You can accrue miles step by step, walking in circles and circles around the bottom, wearing a track until at some point you find a little niche big enough for your toe. And then the pressure of your toe opens the whole thing, and what was a niche is a wide off-ramp-out-ramp, and it curves away up the walls and out of the hole, and you can walk your way out.

Depression is a hole, and you can write your way out. Even though the first few words are hard and heavy, eventually you can scrawl recklessly and type in mad clacking waves, until your hundreds and thousands of words pile up one upon the other, until eventually there’s a hill of gravel. It grows and it grows and you slip and slide as you make your way up, but eventually it fills the hole and you can stride toward the ocean as it collapses into sand behind you.

Depression is a hole and you can draw your way out. You can scribble and scratch, doodle swirling, idle abstractions. Or you can take the time to observe, watch the curve of a line, your eyes flicking up and down from your subject to your paper. You can add shading and find that a bridge pops out at you. And when you let your hand go free and draw the things that aren’t realistic but maybe are needed, you find you have drawn trampolines lining the sides of the hole like mushrooms on a tree trunk, and you jump your way out like a video game character, until you pop up in a meadow, and you walk out and down a cobbled path into a town you saw once in a dream.

Depression is a hole, and you can declutter your way out because sometimes the hole is filled with moldy old furniture like 1970s yellow couches with mysterious stains on tweed fabric. And sometimes there are also old ashtrays and books with worn corners, salad spinners and coin sorters, and you can shove them into boxes, not once or twice, but repeatedly, strategically, until they form a teetering, tottering stair that you can step up precariously until you climb up over the edge and walk out across tiles that shine pearlescent if you don’t look too closely, into an empty mall where you find the fountain you threw pennies in as a child.

Depression is a hole, and you have to engineer your way out again and again, but you can.

And you have to remember that.

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Tomato soup for the morbid and depressed

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When I was little, I would float saltine crackers on my tomato soup, then nudge them down slowly into my bowl, watching the tomato lava well up into the crackers’ holes. “Stay on the raft, stay on the raft,” I would whisper in the voices of the doomed adventurers on the sadly absorbent raft. I don’t remember if my poor little soup adventurers managed to jump to the rim of the bowl, or if I was a morbid enough kid that they perished descending the crater of the Campbell’s Tomato Soup Volcano.

Tomato soup is as essential to my childhood as the sound of softballs hitting aluminum baseball bats and the hot, righteous tomato-red anger of yelling that it was Greg’s fault, not mine, slamming the door, and pulling at my own hair while scream-crying.

I figured I should add the last part because I always worry about sounding sappy, which I thought might happen after writing a list of childhood memories that turned out to be only one thing. Apparently, I also already forgot* that I lead with the tragic deaths of the tomato soup explorers.

Everything I do is overkill.

Anyway, speaking of scream-crying, this is exactly the brand of depression I was experiencing one particular night when it turned out that my partner would be working late and it would fall to me to provide dinner. This is the type of mental anguish which makes even searching for a tomato soup recipe overwhelming. The search was frustrating to begin with because, somewhere, we have a good recipe from when we first made homemade tomato soup back in 2007.

Back in 2007, tomato soup was still a mysterious thing. I had only ever tried it from a can, which is weird because I didn’t grow up eating a ton of processed food or stuff made from mixes. But Campbell’s tomato soup was a pantry staple. It was not a food composed of other ingredients, but a substance unto itself, a dull martian red liquid that could be listed as an ingredient in other recipes, such as meatloaf and hamburger pie. How many other soups can be listed as ingredients? There are no recipes that call for “an extra cup of tortilla soup, added at the end” or “corn chowder, added to the desired consistency.”

The only other soup that doubles as an ingredient is canned cream of mushroom, but I don’t know if “doubles” is the correct verb because I’ve never heard of anyone also eating cream of mushroom. It goes in green bean casserole**. That’s it. Then back in the corner. And when I say “corner,” I mean “dank dungeon with one of those giant, pendulous scythes.” I hate, hate, hate mushrooms, and for this reason, created an extremely factual infographic as a service to the world.

Back to the tomato soup. Combine a missing recipe with scream-crying depression, a baby I am responsible for taking care of, and the fact that I can’t chop onions anymore because of how quickly and painfully my eyes tear up. I can’t even chop a shallot, which is the size of the flesh at the base of my thumb. The weight of responsibility for cooking a meal–normally not one of my household chores–came to weigh on me like a couch being carried up two flights of stairs.

Why didn’t I order food out instead? I can’t remember why that wasn’t an option. Maybe I didn’t have the mental energy to dislodge the idea of tomato soup from my brain. Whatever the case, I arrived home from my parents’ house with a few tablespoons of dried minced onion and and some garlic cloves to get me started.

I sauteed the onion with butter, and burned it.

Luckily, I found that we had not been out of dried onion after all. I sauteed some more, and burned them again while focused on chopping the garlic.

But then everything clicked into place; I stopped burning things; the baby played nicely, banging jars on the floor and trying to sweep our filthy kitchen.

I prefer loose methods to recipes.

Here’s the tomato soup method I came up with:

Start with allium component–onion and garlic, in my case.
Add tomato component along with other liquids: water or broth.
Season while the liquids heat. Throw in a bay leaf, some Italian seasoning type stuff, if not Italian seasoning itself. Black pepper and crushed red pepper.
Add dairy component–milk or cream, plus some Parmesan for the umami.

And here’s what’s in that:

A few tablespoons of dried minced onion
A couple of tablespoons butter
3 cloves of garlic
One 28 oz can of crushed tomatoes with added basil
Italian seasoning, or similar
Bay leaf
Black pepper
Crushed red pepper
Salt
A teaspoon of Better than Bouillon, veggie flavor
A cup of water
A little over a cup of milk

Serving suggestion for tomato soup topped with Cheddar Whisps
Sounds like my cheddar Whisps are volunteering to go on what will surely be an ill-fated rescue mission for the Saltines that have been lost these long years.

This made enough for two dinner-sized bowls of soup, and a couple mugs leftover to have with salad the next day.

Between the ingredient list and the directions, it ended up being a proto-recipe, one lacking in specific ingredients. Or does that lack make it a method? Either way, it’s something to throw together without finally-tuned spice blends, and in less-than-ideal conditions.

*If it makes it better, I don’t write in order.
**And even that’s a stretch. It’s pretty easy to make a quick sauce of broth and cream instead.

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Stars Will Fall Out 100,000 times: books are not babies

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Between Vaffeldagen, taking care of a flu-stricken toddler, and subsequently becoming a flu-stricken adult, I forgot to brag about passing the 100,000 word mark on my current novel. Although this has been as frustratingly slow as walking behind someone at Walmart, and although I still have probably 25,000 words left to go, I want to mark this moment in my life. That I have been fixing problems in this manuscript for 100,000 words now, even after I might have killed it a couple times, is an accomplishment I’m immensely proud of.

There’s a common metaphor of writing a book being like having a baby–you gestate it for months and blah blah blah. But you don’t have to make time to be pregnant. You do have to make time to write a book. It’s not like you say, “Well, I have a couple hours to be pregnant on Thursday morning,” then shoot your fetus some nutrients via umbilical and go get an ultrasound. Pregnancy is only as active as you make it. But if you’re writing, you do have to set aside those Thursday mornings and whatever other spare morsels of time you can grab.

Also, once your book is “born,” it doesn’t then spend the first several months of its life requiring literally every spare minute of your time to hold it and breastfeed it and change it and sooth it down to sleep. Having a baby to take care of is the writing discipline equivalent of someone upending a table. In an episode of the Dear Sugars podcast (I don’t remember which one), Cheryl Strayed refers to writing with young children or toddlers as “writing on slow mode.” This is what I’ve been doing.

A stack of white and colored index cards.
My weekly writing timecards, which I kept from 2010 to 2017.

Like the secret stash of candy bars under my desk*, writing has become something I sneak in small bites. I no longer keep obsessive records of every minute I spend writing, because that itself takes too much time.

The novel will probably not be named Stars Fall Out or once I sit down and brainstorm a more fitting one, but it inherited the title from an earlier iteration of the story and from a Simple Minds song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlWOu7iWq9U

Even without a toddler, this novel has had a hell of a lot of obstacles.

In fact, I have grown this story from the corpses of two short stories and two unfinished novels. Or five unfinished novels, but they aren’t all corpses, depending what happens when they get smacked with the defibrillator of future rewrites.

Here is the strange and cannibalistic writing timeline of Stars Fall Out:

Short story one
Barely more than a scene about a girl jealous of her younger sister and feeling trapped in relationship. Something about a unicorn. Something about stars falling out of the sky. No idea how to end it.

Short story two
One girl, living in a small town in our world, sees another girl sink into some river water, seemingly on purpose, and be snatched under the river water. MYSTERY. Who is the girl? What role will the dance night stoners play? No idea how to end it.

Stars Will Fall Out, first attempt, in 2007
I smash the two short stories into a single novel that I assume will solve the ending problems I was having. Now, the girl being sucked down the river is one and the same as Jealous Girl who feels trapped in her relationship, only now she lives in a secondary world and works at a bakery and uses a magic vial as a means of escape to our world. There is a mad professor of magic. No unicorn.

Abandonment of Stars Will Fall Out in 2008
Smashing the stories together didn’t work. I decide I will not be continuing to write my novel because it’s a mess, the worldbuilding is godawful**, and Small Town Girl has no business being the main character. But, hey, at least I learned something.

Circus of Thieves, in which I take on worldbuilding
In my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel, I develop a secondary world (Fyaan and Kirosz) living in the realm of steampunk and fantasy, depending what time and place I’m writing in. It’s kind of a Moll Flanders type story but with a fake circus and a horned bear and a mystery machine.

The Remnant, a second trip into Fyaan and Kirosz
Five magicians with connected relationships take opposing sides in a war for a variety of reasons. One of them, a disgruntled ex-patriot, sides against her homeland. I write a bit of her backstory one day, and oh! She’s River Girl, also known as Jealous Girl, also known as Bakery Girl. I decide that I will go back and write her story in the Fyaan and Kirosz world without any of the stuff about Small Town Girl.

What I don’t realize at this point is that my first attempt at Stars, with the ill-fitting main character, was like dipping the story in egg dye. I took away every trace of that character, yet the story is a different color.

Bitter Machines, the reason I am writing Stars Fall Out now
I don’t go back to write Bakery Girl’s story yet because it’s too much work. Instead, in 2012, I write the second book she will appear in. There are spies and powerless royals and imperial occupation and a weird cult, and holy shit, every time I look at the draft I can’t believe I wrote it myself. I love it.

Stars Fall Out, second attempt
After a few years thinking that I need to write this story so I can get to Bitter Machines, I sit down and tackle Stars itself and figure out what would make it awesome for me to write. If I’m going to maintain the motivation it takes to write it, it can’t just something I’m getting out of the way.

I begin rewriting with new, better worldbuilding and Big Events and empires and some stuff about shadows, but maybe not stuff about stars.
I remove the word “will” from the title, which seems like a big difference at the time.

I take a break to publish Pumpkin Goblins and Spirit Notes Fading in 2016. When I return to Stars, I keep plugging away, but am miserable writing. That’s a whole other story. I stop writing for four months that feel like an entire year.

Stars Fall Out, third attempt
At some point, a question pops into my head: “Where do you go when you escape?”

In my rewrite with the bigger and better worldbuilding, I had forgotten what interested me about Bakery Girl in the first place: she has a stolen magic vial, an extremely powerful artifact, and she uses it only to escape her own life.

And so, on slow mode, I return to the story. This time, first and foremost, I’m asking myself where Tyatavar goes when she escapes. It’s been less than a year since my most recent start, and I’ve done most of the work in that time. But it’s been almost thirteen years since I wrote Short Story One. Nothing about this process resembles pregnancy.

*I guess it’s not much of a secret now that I’m posting it on the internet, but it was only a secret before because my partner repeatedly forgets about its existence.

**There was a character named Dwardley Gryphon, and he owned a tavern. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s lazy and default-ish, and more importantly, I didn’t love it. Also, the characters wear “timebands” instead of watches because, I dunno, that makes it different?

By the way, I decided that her girlfriend is not her mother.

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What if her girlfriend is actually her mother?

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I enjoy the sensational, daytime talk show-esque nature of this question. But as it happens, it’s neither an episode of Jerry Springer nor a mythological Kullervo* or Turin** situation. It’s a possible solution to a couple of my own fictional characters who are each either vitally important or completely extraneous, with cases to be made for either option, but almost no middle ground. In short: it’s a decision. And I’m bad at those.

All characters are potentially:

  • Expendable.
  • Replaceable by any other character.
  • Replaceable by wind-up automata, golems, and holograms; they all need to fear that their jobs will be taken by robots. Whether their purpose is emotional, logistical, thematic, or plot-devicey, they can be replaced by another character who fulfills the same role, possibly better.

One of my characters frequently runs away from the family bakery to meet her secret girlfriend in a shady part of town where they take care of a stray dog. The girlfriend sees and says things she isn’t supposed to, and occasionally threatens to hijack my entire story with her possible homelessness and constant spying on the main character’s family, until I turn from her power and write some other scene. Or this blog post.

My character also has a mother [OR DOES SHE?!?!!?] who has come and gone from different iterations of my draft, drifting away like vapor only to turn up again more vibrant than before: a woman as wise as she is muscular, kneading bread and doling out life advice. The father and the family bakery drive some important plots, so her conspicuous absence has become more and more irritating, like a hole in a sock that you keep putting through the wash only wear it again after forgetting about the hole. By unwritten rule, all first draft mentions of the mother must include a dramatic, bracketed, all-caps statement, a note-to-self for my revision.

“My chance had arrived. “You don’t need me, do you father?” I asked casually. Casual, with just a hint of sweetness. The lemonade of asked questions.


And sure enough, he waved a hand to the door. “No, no. Go see your mother.” [IF SHE HAS A MOTHER]

When combining the two characters occurs to me, I am typing away at an especially small and sunny Dunkin Donuts. I sit with a mess that has been made in seven minutes, although I only have an hour to write before work. My backpack on the table forms a wall defending a sprawl of index cards, laptop, bullet journal, project notebook, an iced cold brew the size of the Argonath, and a squishy croissant sandwich.

On this morning, the Dunkin is solely populated by pairs of old men. Two talking about the comings and goings of local businesses, two talking about music and the capo on a particular guitar. Another pair is made up of one talking sports to his companion as though he’s reading a bedtime story while the other frequently interjects with a hacking cough that sounds like a rottweiler.

WHAT IF HER GIRLFRIEND IN ACTUALLY HER MOTHER? The thought slams on some kind of mental caps lock, startling me into locking eyes with the man who is the living memory of failed northern Rhode Island businesses. Does it make selfish Vilari more sympathetic if she’s sneaking away to see her absent mother? Do I want her to be more sympathetic? What about the spying plotline—wait, is it more poignant if it’s the mother? Is it now appropriate rather than annoying that this character, Fya, has a name that rhymes with that of the main character, Tya?

Writing fiction requires a lot of decisions, and I can’t understate my awfulness at making decisions. I spent a week—fine, two weeks–refreshing the page for these reusable baggies every time I came across that tab in my browser, paralyzed and unable to decide what color I wanted. Would the smiling octopus make me unhappier on depressive days? Did I like the watercolor pattern or is it a little too suggestive of a girly floral? Should I spend the extra dollar to get the patterns I like best because they will make me happier, or will I stop noticing the pattern after a few weeks anyway?

My challenge with the story is to find the story’s true north in a sea of infinite choices. It’s like the old Lucky Charms commercial where there are suddenly a bunch of Lucky the Leprechauns, and none is obviously the real one until you acquire some gizmo from the cereal box. 3d glasses? But I don’t have 3d glasses to pick the right character, and there is no GPS to tell me my way—I would need to input a destination I don’t know. All I can do is squint at the horizon, try to figure out if the purple smudge is a mountain, and then try to figure out if I am full-on ready to go to a mountain right now. Which reminds me that I have lived my entire life in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and never earned a “This car has climbed Mt. Washington” bumper sticker.

All I have to go on is the strength of my own taste, and my own concept of what I want my story to be about.

An index card with
Why the giant flourish? No idea, but it clearly prevented me from effectively writing other things on the card.

Ultimately, I did the right thing: I didn’t let the decision derail me. I’m procrastinating on figuring this out so I can avoid procrastinating on the meat of the story: all the stuff with the bakery and the dreaded wedding and how my main character is basically using the most powerful magical item of her time as a poor coping mechanism for depression. I wrote my question on an index card to carry around in my pocket, in the hopes that this will be like a program running in the background of my brain, working on cobbling together a GPS out of 3D glasses.

________________________________


*SPOILER ALERT. In the centuries-old Finnish mythology collected in the epic The Kalevala, Kullervo falls in love with a woman who turns out to be his sister.

**DOUBLE SPOILER ALERT. In decades-old Middle Earth mythology written in The Silmarillion, based partly on The Kalevala, Turin falls in love with a woman who turns out to be a sister, and it’s maybe a dragon’s fault. I forget. It’s been seven years since the last time I read The Silmarillion.