Word Count:\u00a0 426<\/p>\n

I sat there reading the words I typed the previous night. Another late evening into dawn weaving stories of people I don\u2019t even know, maybe have passed for an instant on the street. Or buying fat German sausage and sampling the slivers of cheese at the butcher\u2019s. But the words tell of lives I don\u2019t remember.<\/p>\n

This character, Jenny, I told of her sadness. She lost her lover to a woman he met at a diner. A woman he saw sitting in a back booth holding onto her coffee mug as if it was her entire world. She was crying and he went over to ask if she was okay. I left Jenny at her kitchen table, crying into her tea. But in the morning I read that she\u2019d gotten a phone call. Her lover begged her to take him back and she did.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m savvy enough to know you don\u2019t write happy endings. They don\u2019t sell. Readers want to escape their own troubles by believing that someone else is worse off. Yes, there are still some people that want romance to last forever, even if it isn\u2019t their own. But most people, most of them don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Each day I\u2019d wake around noon, read what I\u2019d written. But by mid-story I was lost. It was my style of writing, my voice, my short sentences and wrong punctuation but the story, it wasn\u2019t my own. Every day, the same thing would happen. Eddie got his job back, the Smith\u2019s baby survived. Somehow while I was sleeping, their lives had been turned around.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d rewrite them, with the ending I knew I\u2019d originally planned. By morning they\u2019d changed back again. At the end of each night I\u2019d backup onto a flash drive. The flash drive rewrote itself too.<\/p>\n

Last night I wrote a personal story. About a writer whose characters took control of their own paths. Made their own choices. Lived, as cliched as it sounds, happily ever after. And he, the writer, me in fact, made more than a living off book sales. Was featured on talk shows, his stories carried to beaches on Kindles to read.<\/p>\n

This morning I rush to the laptop, start reading, and am relieved to see all of my words are there as I remember them. Until the last paragraph and I\u2019m reading in horror the end where the writer dies in his apartment as the building blazes in an impossible fire.<\/p>\n

It hits me then, what\u2019s happening, as the awful black smoke wisps in like a shadow under the door.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Word Count:\u00a0 426 I sat there reading the words I typed the previous night. Another late evening into dawn weaving stories of people I don\u2019t even know, maybe have passed for an instant on the street. Or buying fat German … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18,15],"tags":[25,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susangibb.net\/blog3\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susangibb.net\/blog3\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susangibb.net\/blog3\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susangibb.net\/blog3\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susangibb.net\/blog3\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1551"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/susangibb.net\/blog3\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1553,"href":"https:\/\/susangibb.net\/blog3\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551\/revisions\/1553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susangibb.net\/blog3\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susangibb.net\/blog3\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susangibb.net\/blog3\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}