The 300

I started the New Year off with an unexpected urge to write again, which was a delight and a relief all at once. I’d tried several times since the last piece that I put up here, to complete a short story or even get back to writing a quick poem daily, but the blank page was proving to be an impossible adversary.

300 words.

It really isn’t a lot, but that was once my daily word goal. And it’s what I managed yesterday. From winter 2018 to spring 2019, I was between jobs, my 5-year job contract having ended, and so, while sending out applications for new ones, I figured — hey, why not dig into my novel more consistently? Thus the 300 word minimum was born. I resolved that, between waking and going to sleep every day, I would write at least 300 words; but I often wrote far more, if I was feeling particularly inspired. I stopped when I was hired at a new office and started putting more emphasis on reading and writing in Japanese (not that my use improved all that much!).

So. 300 words.

After so long struggling with writer’s block, yesterday’s 300 words felt like 3000.

It was also a lot more tiring to my brain than I had thought, because after laying down to read (The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith), I got through just 2-3 pages before I drifted off, mid-evening. Only to wake up just after 2AM.

ALICE NINE. have a song called RAINBOWS, and in it one of the lines is:

さあ行こう 2:00AMの革命
Yeah, let’s go to the 2:00AM revolution

That’s a slapdash translation, but you get the picture.

So for an ALICE NINE. fan, waking up at 2:00AM is always kind of a delight… It delights me, anyway! Everything was sort of thrown out of whack in 2020, and I’ll be the first one to admit that I didn’t handle things well. At all. In normal years, waking up early or going to sleep very late usually meant I had hit upon a well of internal productivity… this year it generally meant I was panicking about something.

Today? Hmm. The jury’s still out on that one. But here I sit, in my worn babydoll and fuzzy slippers (…seriously, my brother’s girlfriend gave me some for Christmas lol). And I am not only writing a blog entry, I’m waiting for my rice cooker to click so I can go sauté something up on the stove to go with it.

Instead of a 2:00AM revolution, I’m having a 2:00AM supper.

(It is actually past 3:30AM as I write this… shhhh)

The fuzzy slippers, by the way?

They’re pastel-rainbow colour.

So I thought to myself, “Excellent! I’ll be walking around on Mt. Fuji every day!”

Only family will understand that super dumb joke.

Ah. The rice is ready.