It is so difficult. :(

I don't want to speak too much about the writing subject, but...

Maybe I will read your story, but very slowly, only when I feel like it. I am very bad at reading other person's stories.

As for myself, I should now start the chapter number ? in the story, and I have no idea whatsoever what I should put into that chapter.

That chapter is in a way easy, because it has nothing to do with the basic allegory of the story. It is just a filling, a calm place in the river. The main character must now calm down and get rid of the paranoid feelings that have already filled his mind; only then will he -- hm, only then will he continue with the story. (Better not to say anything definite here.)

So it is easy, because at this stage I don't have to think of the allegory that is hampering me at every other point and making the writing very slow. Writing is very slow, if you must write to express a pre-existing allegory and every point of the story has been preplanned very minutely (was this a good word?) But on the other hand this chapter is difficult, because I have no idea at all what the main character will do at this point; the chapter is just a filling, but at the same time it must sound very natural and fluent.

You know, if you have been pondering on the same allegories in an obsessive way for a long time, you do not pay any attention to those insignificant parts of the story that have no allegorical contents. You think they will be easy anyway, and it is true to some extent; but when you start writing in earnest you notice that they are quite laborious after all.

Okay, I will work on it a little every day, and I will get through it, to the next chapter that is again very difficult.

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When you concentrate on the same story, same allegory for a long time, it is natural that you sometimes get doubts: is this worth anything after all? But I know that it is worth something.

Sometimes I have an irresistible urge to write the story for the Internet. That would solve several problems: I would be 100 per cent sure that the story will be published; I would be able to emphasize some secretly passionate nuances and points that have clearly something to do with girl love (otherwise I must repress all such elements as well as I can, which does not matter much because it is not a girl love story); I could talk about all those dark, strange underworld hints of Alice that I saw in hotel and bar names in the east as early as in the eighties; and so on. Writing for the Internet would give me much more freedom than writing for something else.

But, alas, there is one formidable obstacle: if I wrote it for the net I should write it in English. I am not able to translate my own text into English. Whatever languages I have learned or whatever languages I am currently speaking, I still write best in Finnish. In one Plyushkin story I had the words "autereinen, heilimÃ¶ivÃ¤" in mind, two rare, long, pictoresque words put together, and my poor English translation was "hazy, hay-flowering" -- really very poor compared with the original. And what if I should translate not only one sentence, but a whole book, two or three or four hundred pages? Hopeless, I say, totally hopeless, if I want to translate my text into good English -- as good as the original text. A really formidable obstacle.

Okay, that much for it. I posted this to get more inspiration, new inspiration.