thief.

I would have liked to have written you something more substantive tonight. I've been working on a story about a thief that lives alone in a little hovel deep within the forest. Kind of my attempt at fantasy, for once, but with more of a focus on the interior life of a specific character like in a Le Guin novel. He's reflecting on family, lost relations. There are moments in his life that are seemingly protracted in his mind, but as he explains them he realizes how prosaic it all sounds and wonders why he chooses to linger.

There are some works by Clarice Lispector where the protagonist is basically a loose stand-in for her and she's alone in a room and describing her thoughts and feelings in a very abstract way as she navigates through this and that about what steps in her life as a writer led to that moment in time in which she felt as she must write. (“I write and therefore rid myself of me.”) The prose never feels overwrought even as it seems like she's talking simultaneously about so much and so little.

So, like that: somewhat confessional, peeling back what he's thinking and what he chooses to belabor. He's writing for someone in particular, as am I, as I'm realizing all the more as I write to you.