a cure to writers block

i've always loved writing, always as long as i can remember i was telling stories. i spent years with a fascination of hippos, writing stories about their hippopotamus families full of alliterating names like harriet and henry and hank. i evolved to stories of triplets (always triplets) and tragic fires and stolen identities - and finally settled into a dejected prosetry for years throughout my teenage years. i wrote myself through a depression that thoroughly rotted me to my core, and watched my flesh melt in the flames - and then one day i stopped. i could still wield the power, when i had to - but it made my skin crawl and i felt uneasy and unnatural and showing my writing to people felt like tearing my soul in half to give them a piece and i could never do it - and so i had stopped. i wouldn't, and i couldn't do it anymore.

and now i need to start again. because i can feel the life of words slipping out of my marrow, i can feel the way that this-could-be-talent-but-i'm-not-so-sure comments sit against my hips and they grow into me like trees and if i don't move them out of the way soon - then i truly will give up on writing, and then what use will i be? an identified writer who retired herself at eighteen? dead?

i've challenged myself to write fifty-two short stories this year. one for every week - there aren't really set lists, set challenges or set word limits but i want fifty-two by the end of the year, and they should not all be written in a slump in december when i panic. so instead i'm going to post one here every week when i've finished (hopefully).

today is january the seventh. and due to leaving this challenge so late, my story is only near-completed. it will live and it will breathe tomorrow, but today i have to sleep.

i hope that if anybody reads this, although the chance of that could be slim unless i share it with the small world in my repertoire, but i hope that you'd say something - anything, say nitwit, oddment, blubber, tweak!

(i hope i finish this, i really hope i do)

so for now, thanks for paying attention thus far, if you have. and i should be back very soon.
yours forever,
jessica.