Use as many of the following words as you can in a 10-minute freewrite. Any form of the word is acceptable.

neither, necessary, nothing, nanosecond, neanderthal, name, negotiate, nitwit, nevertheless, Nashville, knight, knuckle.


My knight in shining armor is in Nashville playing knuckleball with his Neanderthal friends. I'm sure he's not given me a nanosecond's thought. Nevertheless, I hope in the morning he can remember his name long enough to negotiate a decent contract. He's not a nitwit, but those friends of his...well they are neither necessary nor upbuilding, but they're his and he's mine, and what am I going to say--them or me? We might get there someday, but not now.

So my parent are wondering why I don't give this up now. Or why I didn't go along. Well, this is the deal. He has opened up a whole new side of me. It's amazing in a way. I knew nothing about the world he floats about with the comfort I float about on an air mattress in a pool. It has made me wonder, for the first time, how much of the world out there I have yet to discover. I never realized how tiny my circle of reference was.

Then I took a job as a temp, and voila--something new every week. First I was just a typist. Then I was a person who separated and counted seeds for a university agronomy department. Then I was part of a landscaping crew and somewhere in between stocking shelves at the Flash and Go, (They really should change the name of that convenience store! It makes me want to do really, really stupid things.) and filing papers for Barnes and Curliew, Attorneys-at-Law I was hired by an organization firm to help clean out this songwriter's office.

How can you not fall for a guy who writes songs? And what's even cooler is that he writes songs you'd never dream he'd write just looking at him. He looks like he'd rather tear apart a car engine than pluck a guitar or plink at a piano. But there underneath the piles and piles of papers (it was incredible!) was a baby grand and a hand-made Charlie Christian arch-top. I wish I could explain the way he transforms when he picks up that guitar. I'll never forget the first time I say it. It was like someone's fairy godmother coming in and sprinkling dust of some kind, and he turned from Bubba Red to Clint Black, only better.

I couldn't help myself. I found his work fascinating, and that hidden core of him just drew me like a heavy-duty magnet. It's still there and still holds me strong. I know that while his buddies are on this trip with him now--as was planned before I came on the scene--that I am going to be part of this for a long time to come. I feel it.

And so the fiction flows....... :)

Ding! Ding!