POST YOUR NOVEL EXCERPT HERE!!!!

[jynxgirl.livejournal.com]

POST YOUR NOVEL EXCERPT HERE!!!!

Please keep it relatively short, and only in this thread. Thanks!

No more than 4000 words, and please no multiple posts!

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[bluemoon02.livejournal.com]

My rendition of the 'To be or not to be' soliloquey:

To be, or not to be. To be or not to be. To be or not to be to be or not to be.

Tobeornottobe!

Rhythms and rhythms of questions in my head, centre around tobeornottobe.

Slings and arrows and torture and pain, isn't that all that life is? That's what the Buddhists say. Biddhists and Nietzsche -- who'd have thought they'd ever agree on anything? To suffer, to be courageous, the old British stiff upperlip. It's noble. Or, at least, that's what we grow up to believe. Noble to suffer, and cowardice to save yourself.

It just sounds passive to me. Stand with your face lifted to the rain, the wind, the hurricanes that batter at you every day. What idiot would do this, when there's shelter to be had? Cheat nature, cheat the pain. Cheat God! And why not?

To die?

To sleep?

To be or not to be to be or not to be tobeornottobe?

To sleep perchance to dream -- aye! There's the rub of it. The grind that carries on when the body shuts down, whirring and pounding, ever moving but never changing. Again and again my father visits me, until I can't tell his true ghost from the ghost in my mind. Jung had a lot to say about dreams, but nothing to do with the ghosts, the shadows, the living dead, the tortured souls that inhabibt my head. They scream for redemption, for revenge -- but who am I? What am I? A boy, a child. What can I do? And all of this, when I'm still yet living. I don't know, yet, what lies beyond the grave, nor what dreams will torture my rest when the body shuts down forever.

To be or not to be.

Stop and breathe, Hamlet. Pause, just a moment.

There's a man in the village says he's waiting for his telegraph from the queen. Only another eight months to go. He's shriveled and miserable to the eye, with numerous untold ailments and diseases, I'm sure. But what makes his life so pitiable? Surely the length of it. I, eighteen, bemoan my sufferings. What suffering has he endured, a man five times my age?

The pain of birth first, that ripping from the safety of the womb, the knowledge of the pain you inflict on the innocent incubator of your life; Then growth of mind and body, so fast in those early years, a language learn from scratch in all of eighteen months -- so quick, that acquisition of knowledge, and then so long and lingering the stumbling loss and forgetfulness that follows; then childhood, where one is forced to mix with other children, a species who lives to find fault in its fellows; then my own age which, surely, can only be defined by the discovery of the grandest pains: of death, of love, of finding fault in that which we thought perfection. The pain still left to discover I can't imagine, but I'm sure that old man could enlighten me. And to top all this, the weariness of simply living, the exhaustion of breathing in and out, the constant thrum of the heart, the eternal thrum of the pulse. Exhausting.

Time scorns him like it scorns no other.

Then there is that something -- or nothing -- after death. A lost land. We live in a time when the world is mapped, is photographed from high above the earth, and we begind to map other planets, below the earth's surface, to decide on the make up of things so small we cannot see them. Death is the last mystery -- and it scares the shit out of every last one of us. That's the reason: we toil and travail, assert courage and nobility, simply to hide from that looming, inevitable mystery.

Better the devil you know?

Now *that's* cowardice!

Their -- (our) -- hue of 'brave' resolutiong is all muddied with the sickly pale cast of fear, and life, this great enterprise that's really the pith of moment, exists only to distract the sheep-like masses from their shadowy end.

The loss of action. The domination of mind.

To sleep perchance to dream.

To be, or not to be?