i don't want you to pity me. least of all that. because in the end i've had a good life which is a hard thing to wrap your arms around. your life, that is. all its pieces, none of which fit together, and yet somehow i've to get my arms around them without them slipping through the cracks. because each piece counts. today, for instance: i am writing this on a desolate thursday morning, cloudy and gray with a thick fur layer of snow covering the ground, and i can't recall anything so beautiful. i am somewhere upstate though i do not know where as i read on the bus the whole way up here and then hitched a ride with one of the locals to the campgrounds. it was a long drive from the bus depot, and even my driver had difficulties finding this place. he asked why i was coming up here, and i said it was a writers' retreat. he said we don't get many writers up here, and i said exactly, that was the point. i was stuck, i said, and needed to break through.

the troll came my first night. it slunk into my cabin while i was sleeping, and waded over me with its hot stinking breath, punctuating my sleep with the grumbling from its stomach and the gnashing of its teeth. and in a former life, i would have succumbed. i would have allowed it to eat me, to take me in, take me down. but somehow i got purchase of my fears and flew out of bed and grabbed the nearest thing i could which was the broken handle of an old ax collecting dust against the walls. and i beat the troll back. blood was spilled that first night, though not all of it mine. i chased it back to the tree line where it finally conceded and slithered back into the dark, returned to my cabin and waited for daylight.

no one is set to come for me until the week is out. there is no reception up here. i could make a go of it, but at least here in the cabin i've shelter and power, though the generator is not the most reliable. i was sent here to finish the book, now nine months overdue. my agent said they were threatening to back out of the deal. if i didn't finish it now, there wouldn't be another one. but they didn't understand. no one understood. i quit my job as a corporate accountant to write speculative horror. it was a gamble sure, but it seemed a clear break, so i took it. i made a run for it. and at first, everything was going great. the first novel was a smash hit, and i signed for another two books. but then paralysis hit. a victim of my own success, and nothing i did could move it along.

but then last night happened. holy shit, the adrenaline rush. i bathed in the cortisol that rushed through my body and shook from the excitement of it all. i still haven't slept. instead i returned to the cabin right away to work, writing through the night, past the breaking point till dawn. i sweated over the page, i bled onto it, i wiped away tears and years of lost opportunities and missed chances. i thought back to my mother in her last days, her failing health, her sad mind, the way it took her without warning, almost overnight. the list she made in those last few weeks of all the things she wished she'd done and the places she wished she'd gone. how she handed it to me and made me promise to do them all, go to them all. all that safety just made me safe. all the comfort just made me comfortable. we never get out of life what we put into it. we get out of life what we're willing to risk, put on the line.

i've six more nights to go before i'm saved. i've fashioned the broken ax handle into a spike and barricaded the doors and windows with the moldy old furniture. though part of me doesn't want to keep the troll out. i need to let it in.