Genius: one percent inspiration and 99 percent inspiration.
-Thomas Edison
The Great Fingernail Incident of 1981:
My friend Amber asked me to hold her 10-speed bike by the back wheel so that she could put the chain back on. As she went to do so the front wheel turned, the bike twisted, and my fingernail – my left ring finger – got caught in the spokes of the wheel.
For the rest of the summer, I watched a new fingernail grow underneath the old one – the old one had black, flaking dry blood between it and the new one that hurt to shave off with a nail file — which I religiously scraped for months until all I could see was fresh new fingernail, with pink underneath it. To this day, that fingernail grows faster than the other nine.
There are several novels that could float from my fingertips fully formed. Easily made, their stories would be familiar, and therefore either stand the test of time or … float away like so much of the flotsam and jetsam we have today.
Those novels could look like regular fingernails. Since they might turn out something like a woman’s version of Run, Rabbit Run… grow like them, act like them, eventually be clipped right off of the end of a reader’s mind like them.
Or… they could, with their black blood between the old and the new, apply pressure. Pressure for growth, change, expansion. One percent. Just one percent.
