One Hundred Words On Why God Must Surely Exist
Embracing constraints to kickstart a consistent practice with my writer friend
A few months ago in February, I was invited by fellow Saner, Susie, to join her on an excursion to the other side of town. We were going to listen to a friend of hers talk about his new book, The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story.
WARNING: This is a very long story about writing a very short story!
The invitation felt timely and apposite. More than two years ago, for a few months there, Susie and I had started writing together, one morning a week, with ambitions to make our practice more frequent. On a Tuesday (usually), one of us would call the other at 9:30am, agree to write for a set period of time and then call each other back to read out what we’d just written. It really helped to have someone to write for, and also to read to. But then we stopped, oops I mean took a long pause as some urgent activities took priority.
In my case that was founding Sane Francisco and in hers, many Sane-adjacent or Sane-overlapping activities (we just happened to agree on what constituted Sanity). The absurd medical mandates compelled us to mobilize our fellow Sane Franciscans. Both of us understood the importance of bringing together as many people as possible to fight the stupefying situation we denizens suddenly found ourselves in: that of being coerced to accept that an injection must penetrate our bodies, a so-called “vaccine” that contained an untested, experimental, pharmaceutical concoction. For without allowing that jab, people were told they could no longer go to work, school or college, nor enter a gym, restaurant or bar…
Wow, they were going there… they were really going there!
By then many of us had guessed that our wannabe overlords would soon be presenting the masses with that dystopian scenario. Nonetheless, we were stunned to see that they were really trying it on.
We were living out that phrase:
Shocked but not surprised.
Action stations! All hands on deck…
And thus, with an urgent, unprecedented, situation to deal with, we naturally fell away from our writing routine.
But this past February, the week of her friend’s book launch, after several months of our saying to each other “One day, very soon… we will make time,” we had finally set a date for resuming those mutually invigorating sessions.
How about next week? Tuesday morning at 9.30?
Yes, let’s do it!
After spending so long battling an enemy that was, mystifyingly, apparently only visible to a portion of the population, it was beginning to feel imperative that we focus on telling a different kind of story again…