They said I could be a writer, so I tried

"The whole history dwindled soon into a matter of little importance but to Emma and her nephews: - in her imagination it maintained its ground, and Henry and John were still asking every day for the story of Harriet and the gipsies, and still tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original recital."

-- Jane Austen, Emma.

Fiction, written with an austere pen trying too hard to be a debonair, has taken over my life. It always begins with some kind of expedition to uncover some kind of small truth, and always, ends in a smothering, woolen fabrication (never free-size), marked with a price tag.

I think what I'm trying to say is that I suck, but I do it anyway. Shucks.