Last night I finished writing a short story I’d been slowly working on for over a year (wrote the first bit of it right after I got back from Chicago). I added a short epilogue today, and typed the whole thing up. It’s about 7,000 words – 17 single spaced pages. I’m pretty sure it’s the longest thing I’ve ever written. It’s also the first piece of fiction I’ve finished in years.

It’s still incredibly rough. Far too rough for me to share even the smallest of excerpts here. And I need to write a couple extra scenes yet. But it feels really good to have written a story from beginning to end.

In the end of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch adaptation, Bill Lee gets stopped by the border patrol as he’s leaving Interzone and they ask him what his business is in the next country, and he tells them he’s a writer. And the cops ask him to prove it by writing something.

I haven’t much felt like a writer recently. But finally having even the roughest of drafts of a story proves it again, if only to myself.