A Pilgrim’s Digression

No title today. First time in…years? Probably since I began this blog in 2003.

I feel titularly exhausted today. A rule of writing I have always tried to abide by is titling everything, but today…no title. Maybe I don’t need that rule anyway; but I like it, and it gives me satisfaction to be able to provide a good title to something I’ve written.

Another installment of my fiction is available over in the fictions blog; this piece is titled, awkwardly, What’s in a name. Not particularly original, but then these are titles of convenience. I don’t intend to keep them.

I figured I’d better return to World War II in this fragment, if only to satisfy the requirements of my working title “World War II story.” At the same time, I worry about giving the impression of order. I don’t want the reader to become accustomed to a shift forward in time, followed by a shift backward. Or vice versa. Or whatever.

I wrote to a friend yesterday that when I think about what I would ideally like to write, I think of emptying my mind out into the ether like spilling a jigsaw puzzle from a box onto a table. One would have fragments of dialogue, fragments of action, fragments of exposition, all of it utterly random, but related. It would be the reader’s purpose to discover the relation.

Why do I suddenly long for complete incoherence?