Today, I justify my writing.

Yesterday on Twitter someone asked for the last sentence written in a WIP. Mine: “When I was a boy, I saw a woman die of tetanus after having a tooth filled.”

Strange how encouraging it is for me to read that line in the twitter thread. Why does it make me happy?

As a writer, the discouraging voices in my head start in the late afternoon, when I go into the kitchen and decide what past-the-best-by-date can I’m going to open for dinner tonight. “Who’s going to read your crap?” I hear, as I chop an onion or smash a clove of garlic.

“You are old. The world is ending. Why are you wasting your time?”

“Shut up,” I think.

My novel is fantasy, but there are no dragons, no sexy vampires, no massed armored cohorts gathering for battle. That rules out, not only readers who dislike fantasy, but an entire subset of fantasy readers.

It is set in the past, and my characters operate within the means, beliefs and assumptions of their eras. Even those characters who question the prejudices of their time do so, not as 21st century liberals or radicals, but as the liberals or radicals of the 1890s, the 1920s, the 1950s… Scratch off another swath of readers, who would not just put the book down, but throw it across the room, possibly even post an angry tweet about it.

There are fight scenes, but not many. Bye-bye another chunk of readers, who will get bored.

I write about magic, but as my story unfolds, I realize much of what fascinates me is how alienating magic would be, how terrifying even to those who think they believe in it.

A man makes a wish. It is granted. Magic is at last proven before his eyes, and he falls to his knees in horror. It’s not that a dirty trick has been played on him in the usual manner of three-wishes stories. The granted wish will, indeed, avert a tragedy, and save lives. What bad may come of it he already knows and accepts.

He is weak with fear because, from now on, the very ground he walks on will be questionable.

And what is magic to the magic-makers? What would make them fall to their knees? What tales would they tell for their children to grow out of, to say to themselves as they gain an adult’s understanding of the world, “Of course, that could never happen”? What power would they fear and barely understand?

Time. Nothing is more relentless. And time is what I write about even as I fight it.

I am not young. What will happen if I die without finishing the story I want to tell? The odds increase as I age. CV-19, or the heart problems that plague my family, or cancer, or accident, or worst of all, dementia. “Poor Jinx,” (heads shake). “She wasted her life writing stuff nobody will read.”

But I wrote. I write. I will keep writing. And I have the diamond-hard ego that keeps a writer writing. When I was nearing forty, I made the decision to tell the stories I wanted to tell, because I imagined myself at the age I am now, looking back on what I’d written, leafing through mounds of advertising copy, technical documentation, feature articles on boutique olive oils and finding barely a paragraph I enjoyed reading. I’d have to comfort myself with the depressingly small amounts on the checks I got for them.

I’d get more satisfaction from an opinion piece posted on the public forum that gets me not one penny — only a suspension and a warning note from a moderator.

Maybe I will never finish my novel. Maybe nobody will ever read it. Maybe it will just be one more chunk of debris for my husband, my siblings, my nieces to clean up after I die.

But it will still be mine. And when my body is gone, I will be what I was proud to have written, the story I would have wanted to read, the things I wanted to say, as well as I could.