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I am thinking of George Franju: "What is artificial ages badly and quickly. Dream, poetry, the unknown must all emerge from reality itself...What pleases is what is terrible, gentle and poetic."

Currently, there are a dozen people on stage and one of them in particular is of perfectly good character in many lights, but made of plywood. You can hardly tell except when it's important. When he moves, his limbs vibrate like plucked strings and wood shavings cascade through the spotlight. His conflicts are not that of son and lover and hero but puppet versus bundles of straw.

I'd say I'm not sure why, but that would come from the same place my character's shortcomings are generated: fear

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How the drafting process works:

1 "He gave her a diamond"
2 "He gave her a 16-caret, swing-beveled, dazzling blue diamond whose bezels shone with grace, and he did so generously"
3 "He generously gave her a 16-carat, swing-beveled, dazzling blue diamond whose bezels shone with grace, and he did so generously and with much forethought."
4 "He gave her a dazzling blue diamond."
5 "He gave her the clap, generously and with much forethought."

I'm somewhere between 3 and 4 right now.

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A year ago today, I was holed up in a hotel, working on a pivotal scene, and when I finished, I wrote this:

I am a little sad as if from a parting of ways. I feel loss, and resolve, and aching, and knowing that nothing will ever be enough, but that in itself is enough: it is good to want. Desire is what makes us accomplish things, it is the way we move through the universe. There will be this small burst of chaos wherever I go, the unknown, the ways I could not know so many things -- where are the limits, what do I not know about the life? It is safe to want. It is also dangerous to want. I am awake. Because the point isn't fulfillment but desire, alive.

This goes counter to the Taoism I needed to embrace to write before. What happens when you wake up to ego and desire?

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And I never thought those numbers would end up looking so complex but really, they're working for me.

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You know what's really good? Absinthe.