Writers reading this know that there is really no such draft as a final draft. It may be printed, distributed and praised, but in another read-through, we'll still find something we would have done differently if we'd held onto the work for one more day. Sometimes, you just have to release it as is. But not today (ha). This one is still in progress. The last sentence definitely won't make it, but it's time for lunch, so I'll leave it for now.
Never edit on an empty stomach. Never drink on an empty stomach. Never keep anything you wrote while you were drinking on an empty stomach. Just saying.
I have yet to learn to drive and, judging by the way Parker is maneuvering her grossly oversized vehicle onto the parkway, neither has she. I would find it a tragic twist that after surviving years of emotional neglect and physical abuse by my mother, I’d be killed during a premature and ill-timed lane change on the Takemeback Expressway. I tell Parker this and she tells me to shut up. Which, of course, I do since she needs every ounce of concentration for the task of not killing me and her dog while merging onto the Wayback. That part, I keep to myself.
I entertain her with the explanations of the Wayback and the Takemeback. “How did I end up way back here?” asked many a lost and drunken soul when the town was mainly dirt, grass and trees with one paved road. Stumbling upon the one paved road: “Oh, this road will take me back.” It did and both names stuck even as the path and the road were built into thoroughfares.
“If there were a Vegas of Trivial Pursuit,” she says, not really impressed, but nothing ever really impresses her, “we’d be speeding toward it, Rain Man.”
“Wopner at three o’clock,” I say, very pleased at myself for catching her easy reference. Doesn’t happen often and probably won’t happen again for another 500 miles.
No comments:
Post a Comment