This is the creative process to a tee except that the crying starts right when the work begins and ends only after you meet the deadline, at which point your mentally and emotionally dehydrated body has become physically incapable of producing tears.
Screw you, water, I don’t need you. That’s what you’re thinking as you down two stiff Manhattans and chow down a couple maraschino cherries even though they’ve been bleached yellow in a solution of calcium chloride and sulfur dioxide and then marinated in vats of high fructose corn syrup and something called Red #4.
Minutes later, you fall asleep in a fetal position and have nightmares about writing the maraschino cherry of novels, hunting for the tears whose absence haunts you, and subsequently being arrested for murdering the creative process in cold Red #4 blood, which you surely would have done by now if it were a person.
