Well, more like a virus, really, don't you think? A sort of infection, but there's no shot you can get to cure it.

Quantity is rarely a problem for me. If I could silence that part of my brain that cares about quality, I'd never stop typing. As it is, I rub the Lamp of Quantity and the Genie therein delivers bushels full of words. I pick up a pen to write them down...and two seconds the Quality Monster starts screaming that the first four words are a cliché, the next two are in French and they're supposed to be Italian, the vocabulary is wrong for the narrative character, and that last one is a really stupid line by anyone's standards.

I hate my brain.

(In fact, if it doesn't start being nicer to me, I'm taking it off my Christmas list. I could replace it with my pancreas which, to the best of my knowledge, has never given me any problems at all. )

(I'm a little fuzzy on things like pancreatic location and function, but that's as it should be. If we were meant to know what kinds of icky things our organs do, they wouldn't be stuck where we don't have to look at them.)

(Also, they wouldn't be purple and squishy. Because ick, okay?)

I'm considering drugs. Not illegal ones, mind you, but there must be some balance of legal substances strong enough to quell the QMonster without also silencing the Genie?

Caffeine and nicotine free up the Genie but they also liberate the QMonster. Enough caffeine and I...start actually hearing them talk, so that's not the solution.

There must be some other ine available to me. I've tried cursing, but the QMonster just swears back and it has a meaner vocabulary than I do. I've tried promising that I'll go back and fix it later, but the QMonster knows me better than that.

The only other 'ine' I can thing of at the moment (a moment I should have spent in productive work, I might add) is codeine and I don't have any.

Besides, it makes me dizzy and then I fall down.

I was probably going somewhere sensible with this when I started.

Anyhow. Last night, the QMonster took another little break (to go with the one he must have been on this past weekend), and the SEN grew perilously close to completion. Exactly how close, we won't know until I grit my teeth, sit down, and key those twenty or thirty handwritten pages into the story file, but perilously close. Like, two scenes left to write.

Considering the amount of editing and re-writing I've done already, I find myself wondering how long the editing process is going to take. It may be that I need to lay it aside and ignore it for a while, then come back to it with fresh eyes.

That idea appeals to me because, speaking of dribbles, drabbles, and stories. I wrote another one. Dribble-thing, I mean. DS again.

If all of these grow into stories, I'm going to look amazingly prolific. Not talented, but prolific.(*)

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* In truth, the LESS are shaping up to be much better than the SEN.

First, they have the advantage of being short. Second, instead of basing the dialogue on a story, I'm basing the story on the dialogue. And a ridiculously pointless gimmick. I like to think I'm at my best when I'm ridiculously pointless.

Everyone has a talent. I think that may be mine.