Do you ever try to write something from the intimate inner life of a character not of your gender? I mean really try to approach that person’s looking glass, turn your back to it and back up suddenly until you’re inside looking out? It’s hard enough if that character is merely fictitious, of the same gender, and you can lacquer on your own emotional reality without losing verisimilitude.

I’ve been working on a flash fiction piece called Monologue of a Woman Grieving. It’s about an older woman who has lost her husband, and how she’s faring in a vastly different emotional habitat. Adapting, or not.

Easy writing, it’s not.

Published here tomorrow (Wednesday), probably. With an audio reading, perhaps. In the mean time, here’s something to tide you over.

“In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.”

― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism