the first portion i wrote almost as soon as the WFC was announced. i had an idea of where it was going, particularly the theme of finite time and there therefore being a last time for everything. particularly a protagonist so caught up in noticing each event pass that he is unable to live his life.

and sex seemed the perfect focal point for this sort of detachment.

yet, i had trouble making it all come together. in my conception, the story was four scenes long: 1. the opening scene at the prison gate with the protag and his mother 2. a second scene shortly thereafter, again with the protag and his mother, where we get a little bit of a deeper glimpse into what it means for him to fear death, particularly an observation that him and his mother are the same age, because everyone who is going to die is the same age 3. a scene of the protag interacting with his girlfriend in what outwardly seems a reasonable fashion, though we get an internal monologue, she said style, that shows the reader just how fucked up the protag's thought patterns are 4. the final scene wherein the protag becomes so paralysed that he is unable to act as everything good falls apart around him.

but i couldn't figure out the exact structure of the second scene and i couldn't decide if the third scene was necessary.

so what happened was: it was an hour before the deadline and i was drunk and i remembered hemingway saying that it was hard to go wrong by leaving things out and so i just wrote the final scene without really worrying about the middle. of course, that is a terrible mistake. you can only leave out the middle if you know the middle.

and so counting down failed.

ah well.