Try To Make A Change

So I haven't touched the book since the beginning of the month, and my resolution was to work on it a little every day. Done in October.

Take inventory.

Have:
1 story near its final form
1 story that needs major reconstructive surgery
1 story that needs life support
1 story that needs a ventilator
1 story that needs a face
1 story whose death I refuse to call, even though it's not responding anymore

Need:
to establish the mother before she dies
to hire a better writer to write this book for me

I tried to work on my closest-to-fine story this morning, but it took me an hour and a half just to read through it to the part that needs to change. When I got to that part, a plane hit a building here in town. My fiancé came home from work and made me a bagel. 1) Open mouth, 2) accept food, 3) chew and swallow. Repeat.

I have to quit for today. I have work I am supposed to do so I can get paid. Besides, editing and proofing is easier today than creating people out of thin air. Or RE-creating them in all their perfect, hellish beauty.

Here's one more attempt:

She found a crab claw on the beach when my brother and I were kids. She would use her fingers to make it talk like a puppet.
She'd make it say, like Señor Wences from the old kids' show, "Joo want to talk to my crab?"

At first we wouldn't want to, but then we'd laugh and laugh and forget whatever we were angry about: that dad wasn't picking us up that weekend, that everyone at our new school called us "loners," or that the new jerk she was seeing sat on the couch watching "The Judge" all afternoon and made us miss our cartoons.

She was funniest when everything was miserable.
"S'alright?" we'd ask.
"S'alright," went the claw.