Innerfolk (100 words)

Die or emigrate? They chose life. Shrunk to micron height, millions were injected into Glorious Leader. There they cleaned his arteries, regulated body chemistry, sustained life. They received regular supplies and enjoyed freedom.

The recession came. With no money for shrinking machine parts and medicine, they were told: tighten your belts.

But the Innerfolk weren't self-sustaining. Facing death, they chose again.

The clot was positioned millimeters from the innermost brain. Fools, said Glorious Leader; you cannot hold me hostage forever. True, said the Innerfolk.

Glorious Leader will donate blood to his heir. As the dynasty lives, the Innerfolk shall too.

WEDAY Stats: October

Word Count: 36019. As I promised myself, I limited myself to around 1000 words on average per day, as a kind of vacation to keep myself from burning out.

It's not working. I'm sick of doing this every day. I'm missing out on time with my family and friends. A lot of the joy of writing has evaporated. Every day it gets harder to sit down and write.

It doesn't help that I am very busy at work, and I'm in the middle of a power transition that will leave me, to a very great degree, in control of the day-to-day operations of my company. This is both stressful and is consuming many of the spare cycles that I allocate to writing.

I still have ideas. I'm grateful for that. But putting the butt in the chair and banging on the keyboard every day has become a chore. I'm going to finish -- I'm going to make it to December 31 having written every day, just as I promised myself that I would do. But I don't think I'm going to like this last stretch much. At the end of the year, I think this laptop is going to die a ritual death.

When I started this, I thought it would be much harder. I was pleasantly surprised by how great it was to write all the time. I am now experiencing the way I thought I would feel at the beginning. So, in a way, I'm grateful for the ten months of happy writing that I got. Now I just have to finish.

Sorry for how whiny this sounds. But in part these monthly updates are notes to myself about this yearlong process of discovery, and I'm not doing myself any favors if I whitewash over the bad stuff.

Please keep reading. I'm going to do my best to write good stuff the rest of the way. Thanks for your support.