“She Cuts Herself” finished!

Over a year ago, over the winter break, I fell into a brief doze on the bus, on my way home from grocery shopping. It was only a half-sleep, and only for a minute or two, but what came to me was a strange image that was entirely visual: a line, drawing itself down over an upward-scrolling white background. Every so often, the line would somehow open up, and a new line would come out if it, continuing the old line whole still being something new.

It was an image that stuck with me, and as I sat with it, I realized that the line was somehow a person. A person that kept emerging from another person.

And, yes, I do realize that that’s how people work, but I don’t mean like that! This was a person emerging from another person, who was in some sense the same person. But. Not.

So, yes, it took me a bit to figure out from that what exactly was happening.

I spent the next week off and on writing what I thought was going to be a maybe a 4k word story. And I kept writing. Soon I was at 14k words… and it wasn’t finished. But it took on a certain shape as it iterated through a loop, a story made of nested stories, and that shape was almost finished. Finally, I got to the final iteration.

And I had nothing.

I knew what had to happen, but I had no idea how it was going to happen. The loop had to end, and I kept coming up with possibilities, but none of the endings that came me were the right one.

So I put it on hold. For a year. This winter, I came back to it, and it finally clicked. Finally I had it. And now… She Cuts Herself is done!

Thanks to the magnificent Ryn Rehnard for including the first part in her Guest Writers feature, and Arashi S. Young for her help!