like eating spicy pickles

After churning out a scene over coffee, I set off for the farmer's market to keep to my Saturday morning routine. I visited the usual stands, but my sights were inevitably drawn to the pickle stand. If you've ever heard me talk to my parents on the phone on the weekend, the conversations go a lot like this...

Mom/Dad: Did you go to the farmer's market?

Me: Yes! How can you ask me that? Don't you know me at all?

Mom/Dad: What'd you get?

Me: Oh honeycrisps, spaghetti squash-

Mom/Dad: You didn't see the pickle man?!

In France I had a cheese man, but in Baltimore I have a pickle man. And it's like, somehow, my life is not complete without a weekly visit to the pickle man. But the pickle man is, admittedly, the stuff of legend. He makes the spiciest pickles and packs so many into that small container, I could swear it has an extendable charm a la Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In short, the pickle man is a wizard. But back to the pickles themselves. These things are devilishly spicy. Now, I really love spicy things, but the first time I had them there were tears. And this didn't stop over time, oh no. My roommates still regularly come across me in the kitchen, hunched over the counter, popping them in my mouth over and over despite the tears running down my face. It's literally painful to eat them. But oh how I love to do it!

Day three into NaNoWriMo and I have much of the same sensation. Today I thought to myself, well, I have all this time so I might as well double my daily goal and get ahead. Despite having "all this time," it's not been quite as pretty as I hoped (my lunch break may have involved an impossible-to-twist-off-salsa-lid that resulted in my screaming at the jar and crying for a live-in pickle man who makes the impossible deliciously possible). I'll bullet point the sequence of events in a scene before I start writing, which is incredibly helpful, but then I have these characters who have alarming minds of their own as they come alive on the page. So everything goes out the window. But you know what? It's ridiculously exciting! Sure it's a bit painful, making my mouth burn with curses and my eyes water with tears, but I am l-o-v-i-n-g every minute of it. I just can't get enough! This writing with reckless abandon business has done wonders for driving my story forward and making cool discoveries. I've got to say, I'm impressed. Now back to it! Nom nom nom...

P.S. And yes, Mom and Dad, I did get spicy pickles from the pickle man today!