I have a question for all. What do you do when what you're writing puts you in a bad place, dredges up hard memories, and you have to put those hard memories to paper, and it's painful?

I can't get the cloud to stop following me around, like that egg in the Zoloft commericial. I'm alternately angry, embarassed, and sad thinking about some of the harder lessons in fandom. I feel like I'm drowning in insanity that I had filed away in a junk drawer years ago, and I'm moving out of the house that fandom built, and I have to organize that shit in that overstuffed drawer with the broken hinges, and finding pictures of people who hurt me, finding crazy notes I wrote to crazy people, and so on.

And I want to stuff it all in the trash and incinerate, but I know there's a section in there that needs to be written, and I've put it off for a long time.

I just am having such a hard time admitting it all.

Hell, I could care less about the length. This just wants out.

Oh, man, does it want out...

I just am having such a hard time admitting it all.

That's what I'm writing at the moment. Every fucking WORD is like being stoned, and I don't mean pass the pipe stoned, I mean Shirley jackson "The Lottery" stoned: jagged little rocks, thousands of them. I've been alternately shaking and exalted since I started letting this thing out. It hurts like blue fuck.

Only two ways I can cope, for what it's worth: I let myself understand that the pain is good stuff, in the sense of lancing an infection. Hurts sometimes beyond bearing, but it's letting some of the hideous pus out of the wound, in this case, an old, old one with a lot of scar tissue and proudflesh built up over it.

And the other thing, quite brutally and simply? I ask myself whether the fact that it hurts is going to produce the honesty that produces better work. If the answer is yes, I suck it up and bleed internally, if that's what it takes.

DG,

Bleed, lady.

If is better work or not does not matter.

It is about the work.

Gus, you're beginning to spook me a bit. Truly.

Mundane question:

Which of the following options looks correct?

And her last words to her husband had been, Just go.

And her last words to her husband had been just go.

OR

And her last words to her husband had been, "Just go."

I'm kinda leaning toward the last one, but I'm not sure.

I like the last one, because there's no ambiguity.

I like the first one cause I like italics. But the third one is fine too.

And Allyson, FWIW I'm not a good person to answer your question, because I'm not consciously writing about my own experiences. So when I notice a parallel with my life, I'm all, "So that's how my subconscious is representing my college Christian fellowship group's wacked-out teachings on sexuality these days. Huh. That's kinda cool, actually."

Susan, I like this best:

And her last words to her husband had been, "Just go."

I noticed that you didn't have it in quotes, in the section you had me beta, but I didn't mention it, because it felt like a personal style thing.