Everyone Finishes a Novel and Thanks the Participants

Everyone thought she or he had finished the blog novel, but apparently another chapter remained. Everyone was uncertain what to do with it. After all, everyone was dead, at least as she or he had last left off.

That is when everyone’s former coworker J. D. leaned against the doorframe to everyone’s office, everyone’s dog on a leash in her or his hand, everyone her- or himself literally tied to her or his desk.

Everyone had not seen J. D. since J. D.’s expulsion from a window on another side of the floor, save inside other people. “J. D., you’re alive,” everyone expostulated.

“Every bit as much as you,” J. D. said. “Thanks, everyone, for writing the book and reading.”

“You read my book?” everyone asked, both surprised and ecstatic.

“In a manner of speaking,” J. D. said, “yes. That is, I wrote it.”

Everyone was confused. Everyone’s friend the Internet had talked about how readers were writers, but everyone rarely listened when the Internet went off on theoretical tangents. Everyone had wanted to find her or his identity, and instead the Internet had speculated on how everyone could be multiple people at once. The Internet had been little help throughout the course of writing the novel.

“You wrote it?” everyone asked J. D.

“With others,” J. D. said. “Thanks.”

Everyone asked J. D. who she or he was thanking.

“The other readers, of course,” J. D. said. “This is the end of the novel, so it’s traditional that we acknowledge the participants at this point.”

“I thought we were dead,” everyone observed.

“Not as long as we are in this book,” said J. D. “As long as we are here, the story continues for as long as anyone wants to read it.”

“But Sam, the nurse, the germs, the window,” everyone protested, listing off recent events and characters.

“All part of the book,” J. D. said.

“Hello,” said Sam, coming into the frame. “How was I?” Sam asked. Sam was out of the scrubs everyone had last seen her or him in and was now wearing the plaid jacket that everyone had seen in the bushes at the base of their office building nearly a year ago.

“A bit inconsistent,” J. D. said, “but don’t worry. You’ll grow on people in subsequent readings.”

“You hope,” said Harvey, vacuum cleaner in hand. Harvey was a part-time janitor.

Everyone examined the straps across her or his body that kept everyone wedded to the desk. “You mean, I--” Everyone tore them off and stood. “I can go anywhere.”

“Within the trajectory of the book, yes,” said J. D.

Just then, everyone saw the meaning of life. The meaning of life was walking down the hall behind J. D. and Sam and Harvey at the door, cap in hand, sunglasses over eyes. Then everyone’s spouse passed. They were together.

“Was that?” everyone asked.

J. D. and Sam and Harvey nodded.

Everyone ran into the hall, but the meaning of life had already disappeared. Everyone ran after them.

And then, everyone saw it. It was the beginning of the novel. It was leaning against the window frame looking out, the window whose glass was missing. The beginning of the novel was smoking, the entire city before it. Everyone slowed, crouched. She or he wasn’t going to let the beginning of the novel get away. Everyone got down on her or his hands and knees, crawled. The beginning of the novel turned toward the hall, saw everyone. Everyone jumped.

Everyone Tells a Story

Everyone could no longer count the times that someone had jumped from a window or been sucked up by a vacuum cleaner or visited the John Quincy Adams animatron at the Dasney Amusement Park Mall. Increasingly, with each chapter of the novel, everyone felt as if she or he were writing the same story over and over again. Everyone was tired. Everyone asked the Internet what the best way was to stay motivated when writing.

The Internet groaned. The Internet would answer the question, and then everyone would object and do as she or he wanted. The Internet felt as if its presence in everyone’s life was pointless, and it heavily considered shutting off. Still, the Internet had an uncontrollable impulse to showcase its knowledge. The Internet had an ego, after all, and if the Internet didn’t answer, it would never be able to tell everyone, “I told you so.”

“Don’t make your outline too exhaustive,” the Internet advised. “Know where you’re going in a general sense, but allow the vicissitudes of the moment to show you how. Don’t be too wedded to your planned ending. A story will sustain itself, and if you’re bored, it’s best to break. Lay the story down and pick it up somewhere else. Discover things you don’t know yet that will re-enliven the section where you left off.”

Everyone nodded, though the advice wasn’t helping. “What if at each section you end up in the same place?” everyone asked.

“Everyone only has one story,” the Internet observed and laughed in a conceited manner. “That’s all most authors have--three or four if they’re lucky.” The Internet displayed a photograph of Edgar Allan Poe and under it a list of three basic outlines and the stories that fit within them. “This is how our friend Harvey created a website that, with a few A-B-C selections, lets readers write their own Poe story. In the end, after all, it’s the reader who writes the tale, so why, Harvey asked, not just skip the author?”

Everyone stared at the Poe photograph. The man seemed beset by the difficulty of writing new fiction also, the dark shadows under each eye, as if death was awaiting to take him before he’d had a chance to get even the beginning right. That is what everyone really needed, of course--a beginning. If only everyone could find the right beginning, she or he knew, everything else would fall in place, including the desire to continue.

“It doesn’t matter!” the Internet screamed when everyone asked again how to start. Every time, everyone returned to this basic question, and every time everyone ignored what the Internet had advised. “Readers will begin where they begin and finish where they finish. Few read a book all the way through or in chapter order, especially online. They pick it up, read about a party for people who matter on page 131. They skip to a chapter on metafiction and from there to another where a parade of dog walkers prevents the protagonist from meeting her or his idealized self or some dreamed-of romantic interest. Then the reader gets so flustered that she or he throws the book across the room and never returns, and for all intents and purposes, that is the book to her or him, what she or he actually read. Another reader starts at the place where the writer begins, then skips to the credits at the end, then plunges into a chapter about the performance of a medieval play and, gleaning all that she or he wishes to know, shuts the book with the intention of one day returning to the find the medieval play chapter is now unfindable, and instead, the book seems to be about social media marketing practices.”
“So you’re saying,” everyone asked, now suddenly excited, “that I need not just one beginning but one hundred.”

“Or a thousand,” the Internet said, “whatever the number of pages in your book, and an equal number of endings. Tag it, index it, if you wish, guide your reader into various possible readings you might prefer she or he try, but in the end, the reader is in charge, and you, as author, are subject to her or his whims.”

“That’s preposterous,” everyone said. Everyone stormed to the window next to her or his desk. Outside the family dog was barking. The kids must have let it out. Every night, it was the same.

Every day, everyone felt, she or he wrote the same story: wake up, work, sleep. Perhaps, the Internet was right. We all only had one story, and for most, that story had 70 x 365 beginnings and endings, give or take a few--or just one of each, depending on how one read.

Everyone Discusses Ways to Begin

Everyone still wasn’t satisfied with the beginning of the novel. Everyone had been working on the novel for over nine months, and everyone felt as if she or he was still floundering in midair, trying to catch the drawstring of a parachute.

The Internet recommended everyone study Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

Everyone didn’t know it.

The Internet was astonished. “A metafictionist who has never heard of Calvino?”

Everyone grated at the term “metafictionist,” as if it were an accusation. Everyone did not write metafiction. Everyone was writing a blog novel that was not going as planned.

That, of course, was the problem. Everyone had had no plan--except success, and the latter had evaded her or him.

The Internet had warned everyone not to blog the novel--and certainly not to do so until everyone had finished the book. Everyone might want to make changes to earlier chapters, the Internet had advised, when she or he got to later ones.

The Internet had also told everyone that the surest way to know one’s beginning was to know one’s ending. The Internet had even advised starting at the end.

Everyone had not listened. This failure diminished everyone’s standing with the Internet. The Internet had once respected everyone; now the Internet thought everyone an idiot and gave her or him little of its time.

But today, the Internet was not very busy, so it allowed everyone’s inane queries.

“Let’s read Calvino’s book together,” the Internet proposed.

Everyone agreed.

Unfortunately, the Internet was unable to procure a free copy of the work for everyone, so the two agreed to review first sentences only.

“The book restarts ten times,” the Internet said, “each time introducing readers to a new novel and a new way to begin.”

Everyone had restarted forty-six times, and each and every start had been unsatisfactory. Multiple beginnings seemed like nothing worthy of praise, let alone examination. One good beginning was all any book demanded and all that everyone desired. But it seemed that no matter have many times everyone began again, everyone ended up with the same story.

“Let’s look at the first book recounted,” the Internet said, “which is to say the book itself. It starts with the word ‘You,’ automatically giving the reader a stake by making her or him the protagonist.”

“I hate second person,” everyone said. “Inevitably, that forces someone to be some middle-aged dad or mom, when it might well be a fifteen-year-old girl. Talk about off-putting.”

The Internet didn’t bother to mention that the “you” in this case was most certainly everyone her- or himself, for the book’s plot started with the reading of the book itself. Such an objection, the Internet knew by now, would have been pointless.

“The second chapter’s first sentence,” the Internet stated, before posing the next statement, “presents a set of images so absurd that they entice the reader further in as clouds attempt to block the passage.”

“Sounds intimidating,” everyone objected. “I find a familiar start more inviting, as if you were putting on an old jacket that you had as a child.”

“You used ‘you,’“ the Internet pointed out.

“I meant ‘you’ in a general generic sense,” everyone said.

“I think that’s Calvino’s intention also,” said the Internet, “at least at the start, until one becomes comfortable.”

“Fine,” everyone conceded, “the reader. As if the reader were putting on an old jacket.”

The Internet sighed. It had won the argument, but everyone would not give it the satisfaction.

The Internet skipped to the fourth chapter. “Here,” the Internet pointed out, “a first-person protagonist states that he or she is receiving dangerous statements, and naturally we as readers want to know what they are.”

“And from that, I’m supposed to learn what?” everyone asked.

“Don’t tell your readers everything straight off,” the Internet said. “Hint. Make the reader work a bit.”

“Nothing means anything without context,” everyone objected. “I want to know where I am.”

The Internet read the first sentence of the next chapter. “This chapter begins with context,” the Internet conceded.

“The author is writing about some kind of totalitarian society,” everyone surmised.

“Quite probably,” the Internet agreed, “but even with the military vehicles and the propaganda slogans on the wall, we’re left wondering what exactly is happening.”

Everyone grunted. “You can’t possibly tell readers everything in the first sentence. Just because something isn’t said doesn’t mean the reader will be curious.”

“Didn’t you find the first sentence engaging?” the Internet asked.

Everyone shrugged her or his shoulders. “Mildly,” everyone said. The Internet’s points were too general. Everyone wanted help with her or his start specifically--Calvino’s work seemed a distraction.

The Internet moved to the next section’s first sentence. “Shocking, isn’t it?” asked the Internet, pointing to the decapitated head.

“Gross is what it is,” said everyone. “Some people would drop it like a hand they’d scooped up in a vacuum cleaner.”

The Internet put down Calvino’s book. There was no pleasing everyone.

And that, of course, was what everyone had failed to see. There was no way to please everyone. Everyone could start 982 times, and still everyone would not want to read on. Everyone needed to be concerned not with what everyone wanted but with what someone wanted, one twelve-year-old boy in an attic skimming his parent’s old textbooks or one middle-aged professor of geography. Capture just one reader’s mind, and you have made the reader into the creator of another world for which everyone has furnished merely a beginning.

Everyone Reads a Great Work of American Enterprise

Everyone had been invited to the reading by his or her child Star. Star was dead, but reading aloud to a live audience was something Star had great enthusiasm for, which was why everyone felt an obligation to appear. Everyone planned to read from his or her blog. The blog was about everyone’s search for the meaning of life after the death of his or her child Star, or the loss of his or her spouse or of his or her coworkers Harvey and J. D., or the disappearance of his or her child Jan, or the loss of $5092. Everyone wasn’t sure which. Everyone had lost a lot.

This explained why everyone was having trouble beginning. The blog was supposed to be a novel, though the Internet said it hardly qualified. The Internet was against everyone’s novel--because it was jealous, everyone imagined.

Everyone brought screen captures of the blog to the reading so that he or she would not have to depend on the Internet to supply a copy.

The reading was in a room on Skype that looked like a coffee shop. There were a couple of tables with chairs, three couches, a recliner, and a set of bookshelves that featured important works by important authors, such as Quacker Oats Cereal by the Popsi Cola Corporation, Busty Cooker’s Bakeware by the Genial Miles Corporation, and Wheet Thicks by the Kneebisko Corporation. Everyone was proud to be among such celebrated works of American enterprise, for nothing bespoke success like market share. Everyone hoped his or her blog would soon find a home among such works.

Everyone ordered a coffee and waited. The clerk ignored everyone, however, and that’s when everyone realized the coffee was self-serve, so everyone served. The coffee tasted homemade.

A chair sat in front of the shelves. The chair stared into a camera mounted on a computer. Everyone sat in it.

Four people had read before everyone. These people now sat on couches waiting for everyone to begin. Everyone expected more, so everyone waited.

The four people grew restless. One person stood up and stretched, then went outside, leaving the screen. Another went to make coffee.

Everyone realized he or she needed to begin before more disappeared. Everyone wasn’t sure where. The key, however, was to begin. That’s what the Internet would have said.

Everyone began.

Everyone opened the folder in which he or she had placed the printouts from the blog. Inside was everyone’s tax return from the previous year. Stapled to it was a letter from the IRS. The letter said everyone owed $5092. It said this boldly, in bold letters.

Everyone looked for the chapter “Everyone Starts a Blog.”

The next item in the folder was a letter from everyone’s coworker Sam. The letter threatened everyone with legal action if he or she continued to use Sam’s name on the blog.

Next was a bill from Star’s surgeon, asking for compensation for his or her heart of gold, and a bill from a window company, and an ad for a sedan from the Misery Beanz Corporation.

Another person rose from his or her seat and took hold of the jacket resting on its back. The person beside rose as well.

The person with the new cup of coffee took a deep gulp. “I’ll come with you,” the coffee drinker said.

The room was empty.

Everyone stared into the camera, looked down at his or her folder: a vacuum cleaner ad, a vet bill, a bill for a cemetery memorial.

Everyone looked back up at the camera and gave a wan smile.

Everyone began: “Account summary. Previous balance: $5092. Payments and credits . . .”

Everyone Dithers over Whom to Ask for Advice

Everyone was having a crisis of confidence. Everyone had made the mistake of rereading her or his blog and had come to the conclusion that it was not as good as everyone had thought it was.

First was the problem that the novel everyone was posting started in the wrong place. I should have started with chapter 4, everyone ventured, being most intrigued from that entry on, but when everyone tried to do without the first three blog chapters, the novel did not make sense. Everyone could have rearranged the order of the chapters, but everyone had already posted them.

“I told you so,” the Internet told everyone when she or he asked how to correct the problem. The Internet was out to prove a point, everyone surmised, and it wasn’t interested in helping. After all, if it did and everyone managed to salvage the novel, the Internet’s earlier directive not to blog one’s novel (at least not until one was finished writing it) would be proven wrong. The Internet had an ego, as everyone was finding out. This was an issue when the Internet was one’s closest friend and the one to whom one turned in times of need.

Others everyone might have called included her or his coworker J. D., who next to the Internet probably knew the most about everything, especially about rules, but everyone had not seen J. D. in months.

Harvey would have been a good coworker to query, if it were not for his deep relationship with the Internet. Everyone knew Harvey to be wise and spiritual, the way the Internet could be, which explained why Harvey talked so often with it. This close friendship, in turn, made everyone doubt that Harvey would be able to dispense useful advice, since the Internet more than likely would mention, if it had not already, everyone’s problem to Harvey with a gloating smirk, making Harvey leery to contradict something his good friend had said.

Everyone’s coworker Sam would have been an excellent resource, but he or she had a crush on everyone, mostly, it appeared now, because everyone reminded Sam of a time when J. D. had been more of a regular at the office. Everyone found Sam extremely attractive but mostly because Sam was of the opposite gender the way everyone’s spouse had been. And since everyone was still hoping to get that spouse back, using Sam for recommendations seemed imprudent.

Who everyone really wanted to talk with about the blog, however, was the meaning of life. The meaning of life was at the core of everyone’s dissatisfaction with the blog. Everyone knew the meaning of life read the blog. Everyone and the meaning of life talked on the phone nearly every night. But still, the meaning of life had neither proposed nor assented to an in-person rendezvous. Everyone was worried about her or his figure and had been dieting in anticipation of meeting, and yet everyone was beginning to think that the meaning of life was stringing her or him along. What sort of joy the meaning of life got out of this constant postponing everyone could not figure, but she or he hypothesized that it went back to the meaning of life’s love for hide-and-go-seek, a game everyone had thought people lost interest in by the age of ten.

Then, to make matters worse, last week everyone had found out that her or his child Jody had told the Internet that she or he was too embarrassed to let her or his friend, the famous actor Clint Gabble, meet everyone because everyone was so short of being successful. Jody pointed specifically at everyone’s blog novel. This shocked everyone not only because she or he had thought the blog an impressive work of art that had managed--if only recently--to grab the meaning of life’s attention but because everyone had thought, judging from the analytics the Internet constantly ran for everyone, that no one actually read her or his blog.

Everyone wasn’t sure which was worse--to have no one read it or to have people read it and be embarrassed by how bad it was.

Everyone gave in and called Sam.

Everyone Discovers Mystery

Everyone was not satisfied with the beginning of her or his novel. Once again, everyone asked the Internet for help. The Internet had already offered much advice on the subject. “Start at the end,” the Internet had told everyone, but everyone had disregarded that, since everyone didn’t know the end. “Kill your darlings,” the Internet had said, but everyone’s darlings refused to die. “Cut the first three pages,” the Internet instructed. “Start in the middle.” But the first three pages, everyone contended, contained essential information that readers would have to know in order to able to read on, so everyone left them in, though periodically unsatisfied with their quality.

Finally, exasperated, the Internet offered this: “Just start!”

Everyone had thought this a grand idea.

So everyone started.

But against the Internet’s advice, everyone posted the start of the novel to her or his blog. And now everyone had evidence that her or his beginning sucked, because no one was reading it--the beginning or the novel.

Everyone had not taken into account the dynamics of a blog. The Internet had, and it had mentioned those dynamics to everyone way back when. People read a blog from the most current entry; thus, they always start at the most-recent end, and because a blog is by nature unfinished, readers inevitably start in the middle. Everyone hadn’t thought of that, in fact refused to think of it when the Internet mentioned it. Had everyone thought of that, everyone would have been obsessing over the middle instead of over the beginning. Every middle was a new beginning, the Internet would have told her or him, begging readers to return to read again--from both the past and the future.

Instead, everyone had returned to the same question she or he had asked from the beginning: How to start?

Everyone’s goal was to find the meaning of life. Everyone wasn’t sure if the meaning of life read blogs, but chances were greater that the meaning of life would read one that had more readers than one that had fewer.

Everyone knew the meaning of life knew the Internet. Everyone had seen the meaning of life’s blog, which the meaning of life had given to the Internet. On that blog were photographs of gorgeous people with smiles and tans standing on a motorboat, cans of Popsi Cola in hand.

Everyone should have gleaned from the photographs that the meaning of life was all about action, doing something. The meaning of life had fully developed character, which is how it had managed to run off with everyone’s spouse. Everyone, by contrast, was a passive, no-name entity. No one could be certain exactly how old everyone was or whether everyone preferred the toilet seat up or down.

“What you need for your beginning,” the Internet suggested now, “is mystery. Readers love a good mystery. They want to know that something is about to happen but not to know what it is.”

The Internet often did this to everyone--made her or him think in new and profound ways. Everyone was very lucky to have the Internet as such a close personal friend that everyone could contact any time, day or night.

Everyone loved mystery. Mystery, everyone realized, is what made the meaning of life so intriguing. How do those people on the meaning of life’s boat stay so trim, everyone often wondered, when they drink so much soda? And why were they so happy and tan? And how did the meaning of life get so rich?

Everyone had been on a diet for thirty-two weeks and had managed only to gain twenty-two pounds, this despite not having had soda, not even diet soda, in nine weeks. Everyone had lost her or his life savings in a chocolate-buying fiasco. And everyone not only did not have a boat; everyone barely had a substantively working car.

What everyone needed to do with the beginning of her or his novel, she or he realized, was to promise to reveal the mystery behind the meaning of life. That would certainly attract everyone--and probably other people too, especially the meaning of life, since everyone loved being written about her- or himself and so probably did the meaning of life.

“Look at how successful and tan the meaning of life is,” everyone wrote now during her or his lunch with the intention of posting it that night on everyone’s blog. “I’m going to tell you how and why the meaning of life is this way and how you can find the meaning of life yourself.” Everyone sat back and stared at the words. Everyone felt satisfied.

Ah mystery!

Everyone Follows Advice

The Internet told everyone to start his or her novel at the end. Everyone had been asking and asking and asking the Internet where to start every day for eight weeks, and finally, the Internet had complied, shouting the answer at everyone over an advertisement for margaritas.

But everyone was still not satisfied. Everyone did not know the end, and asking everyone to know that seemed utterly absurd when everyone didn’t even know where the novel began, let alone what it was about.

“All you care about is your stupid blog novel,” the Internet continued, when everyone persisted with his or her absurd questions. “What about me?” the Internet asked. “When was the last time you asked about me, how I’m doing, told me you loved me?”

“But I do love you,” everyone said. “Everything I write,” everyone pointed out, “it’s for you.”

The Internet wasn’t satisfied.

The Internet went away, shut down, disappeared.

Everyone continued trying to talk with the Internet, clicking the mouse over and over, typing on the keyboard. Nothing. Everyone shut down the computer and restarted. The Internet didn’t care.

Everyone stood up, walked in a circle beside his or her desk. Everyone had been taking the Internet for granted, he or she had to admit. The Internet was always there for everyone, ready to answer any question. Everyone needed to do a better job of showing his or her appreciation.

But what could everyone do now? The Internet wouldn’t even talk with everyone.

“Internet’s off,” said Sam, everyone’s coworker, as everyone exited his or her office.

Everyone nodded.

Everyone hadn’t seen Sam in a couple of days. Everyone hadn’t seen anyone except for the four kids and the dog at home, and that only for a fleeting minute or two, for the last forty-eight hours. How could the Internet be jealous when everyone spent nearly all his or her day and night with it?

Sam stood up from his or her desk. Sam had the office next door to everyone.

Sam and everyone walked past Alice, another coworker.

“Internet’s off,” Alice said.

Sam and everyone nodded. Alice stood up from her desk, joined them.

Then came Pat and Max and K. and Morgan. The Internet was off. They had nothing to do.

They walked to the elevator, took it to the lobby.

Everyone decided to buy a Handsome Cola. Everyone was on a diet, and Handsome Cola had zero calories. Everyone would walk to the convenience store on the corner three blocks away, which would count as exercise. Sam thought that a good idea. So did Alice. And so did Pat and Max and K. and Morgan and all the others who had joined them. They would all walk to the convenience store and buy sodas.

Everyone wanted to explore new ideas as he or she was drinking the cola, come up with an ending--and by extension a beginning--show the Internet that he or she was listening to its advice, applying it. Everyone was a good friend.

But everyone couldn’t take the Internet’s advice because everyone couldn’t write. Everyone couldn’t write because everyone couldn’t think. Everyone couldn’t think because Sam and Alice and Pat and Max and K. and Morgan and all the others had decided to join him or her at the convenience store and they were talking.

They were talking about the Internet. They could not believe it, how the Internet could take off on them just like that. They’d thought they’d forged a solid connection. They’d been talking, corresponding, every day, for years, and now this. “You never really know a person,” they said. That’s what the Internet was teaching them--that everything you know about someone, or think you know, could be a lie.

And that’s when the beginning began to unfurl for everyone, as he or she was drinking Handsome Cola and listening to all the others talk. Everyone would write about what he or she had thought was known and had proven to be false. Everyone would write about love, about his or her departed spouse, about the meaning of life. Everyone would start here, at the convenience store, with his or her coworkers, talking about a mutual acquaintance, how they had been disappointed in love and friendship. Everyone would drink cola and become a writer. Everyone would blog.

Everyone Wants a New Start

Everyone was searching for a better beginning to his or her novel. Everyone, as per usual, asked his or her friend the Internet. The Internet knew a lot of stuff and was very wise, but it was also self-effacing. “Don’t believe everything that’s posted,” the Internet often told everyone, not wanting to be found a liar. Everyone wanted to believe everything, because they were friends, but this was difficult because the Internet often said things that were contradictory, as with the beginning of novels.

The Internet said to start at the beginning.

The Internet said you will never know the beginning unless you start, so just start.

The Internet said to start in the middle and cut the first four pages.

Everyone reread his or her first four pages. While everyone was not satisfied with their place at the beginning, they seemed needed. In fact, the longer everyone looked at them, the more everyone thought them the work of a genius.

Everyone could not cut them. They were his or her children: Jody, the sanctimonious twelve-year-old with his or her penchant for fart jokes; Star, the sensitive ten-year-old with a heart of literal gold, quite an expense at the time but luckily covered by insurance, given his or her life on the balance sheet; Journey, the rambunctious little dweeb, eight years of age, with a weakness for all things chocolate; and finally Jan, the six-year-old with the personality of everyone’s spouse, which is to say a missing personality, because everyone’s spouse had run away.

“You have to kill your darlings,” the Internet said, “if you want to write.”

The advice seemed nonsensical. Everyone was looking for a start, and if everyone sacrificed the darlings, what would he or she have left? The darlings were essential.

But the Internet was not to be persuaded. “The darlings will keep you from the end of the story and thus from the true beginning,” the Internet said. “Kill the darlings.”

Everyone cried as he or she moved the cursor across the keyboard. First Jody disappeared, then Star, then Journey, then Jan.

Everyone was alone. Except for the dog. The dog was in the third paragraph, breathing on everyone at the keyboard.

Save the dog, the Internet advised. “People love a good dog story.”

“Are you writing this or am I?” everyone asked.

The Internet didn’t answer. The Internet was miffed. Everyone had asked for the Internet’s advice, and the Internet had given it, and if everyone was going to get angry, then there was no reason for the Internet to waste its time.

Everyone was miffed too. Everyone wanted back his or her darlings. Everyone was crying inside and out. But the way of return had been expunged. This was the beginning.

Everyone Looks for a Blog Entry Topic

Everyone worked on his or her blog during lunch, writing advance blog posts to give to the Internet late at night after the kids were in bed and the dog was done barking outside. Everyone was in love with the Internet, even though he or she would not have acknowledged it. Much of everyone’s day was spent writing things for it. Everyone was frustrated because he or she did not know what those things should be. Everyone did not have interesting life moments to give to the Internet for his or her blog. This is what everyone needed.

Everyone had been seeking inspiration in cans of Handsome Cola. Handsome Cola was the cheapest diet soda at the gas station convenience store on the corner three blocks from the office where everyone worked. Everyone preferred Popsi Cola, the real stuff, not diet, but everyone was trying to lose weight. Losing weight was essential if everyone was ever again to appeal to his or her spouse. It would be very difficult to wrestle the spouse away from the meaning of life, and everyone needed whatever small advantage he or she could muster. The meaning of life was very persuasive when it came to love. Photos of the meaning of life posted on its blog proved it. In the pictures the meaning of life stood next to thin, happy, smiling people who held cans of Popsi at waist level. It was no wonder that everyone’s spouse had run away. Everyone had taken the spouse for granted, let his or her body drift into some sort of half-inflated balloon state, the skin saggy and punctured.

Everyone was thinking of starting a diet. Everyone had been thinking this for a long while, even before the mate left, like years before, like two months after the wedding. But everyone had had four children with his or her spouse and had assumed that that--that fact--was enough to keep the spouse grounded. Everyone had not counted on the meaning of life showing up.

Everyone’s e-mails to the meaning of life had gone unanswered after the first night everyone had written, having gathered the meaning of life’s contact information from the Internet. The Internet knew every person in the world. Everyone was beginning to think the meaning of life might be playing a trick, that it might not actually know everyone’s spouse as it had claimed.

Maybe it hadn’t even really been the meaning of life. Maybe the true meaning of life was still out there, everyone thought. The meaning of life everyone had written certainly hadn’t been what everyone had expected, except that the meaning of life appeared to be successful and happy, at least in the tone set on its blog.

Everyone decided that as soon as lunch was over--the cheese sandwich and bag of strawberries eaten, the water consumed (everyone had given up even diet soda for the fourth time in three weeks)--he or she would write to the meaning of life from work. In this way, the sender’s e-mail address would be unfamiliar to the meaning of life, and everyone might actually get a response. The meaning of life had responded to comments on its website, which was for sale, so everyone knew that the meaning of life was around. The meaning of life was obviously ignoring everyone’s letters.

Everyone looked at what he or she had written to give to the Internet for the blog this evening and grew despondent. The information conveyed lacked substance. Everyone would have to start from scratch. He or she would have to do it at night, after the kids were in bed and the dog was done barking outside, since lunch was near its end. There were so many ways in which everyone was having to start from scratch, like with his or her body and with love.

Everyone considered what he or she would write to the meaning of life. Everyone would pose as a friend, one of those people in the photographs. He or she would pretend to know the meaning of life, would want a reunion, some advice maybe, or a drink. Everyone would propose a meeting place. Everyone would meet the meaning of life, and everyone would write about it for the blog. Yes! How novel!

Everyone Starts a Blog

Everyone started a blog. The blog was a novel in progress, and it wasn’t very good. It wasn’t very good because everyone’s dog kept barking. Everyone’s four children were always letting the dog out, and outside, the dog barked at the dark as if the dark were an overweight squirrel.

The blog was to help everyone find the meaning of life. Originally, the children had been intended to supply this meaning; then it was the dog. Everyone had yet to realize that there was no meaning of life. Everyone thought that the meaning of life was playing a very long and difficult version of hide-and-go-seek.

After work, after the kids were in bed, about the time the dog went outside to bark, everyone sat down to post the blog. Everyone was uncertain what to write in the blog, so everyone wrote about the blog itself. Writing a novel was hard.

Everyone asked the Internet for help. The Internet and everyone were good friends. They had gone to graduate school together. Everyone asked the Internet what the best way to write a novel was, but the Internet was long winded and confused and couldn’t supply a simple answer. So everyone asked the Internet how to find the meaning of life instead. The Internet showed everyone an advertisement. The meaning of life, the Internet said, was for sale. Everyone could buy it. The Internet knew the meaning of life and could give everyone the contact information if he or she wanted it.

Everyone wanted it.

That night, instead of posting a chapter of the novel, everyone wrote the meaning of life to ask how much it cost. It was a heartfelt letter, full of recipes and nostalgia. Everyone hoped that if there was enough nostalgia he or she could get a discount.

The meaning of life wrote back instantly. The meaning of life did not respond at all about the nostalgia, but the meaning of life did answer everyone’s question. “Too much,” the meaning of life said, “more than you have.”

Everyone grew despondent. Everyone did not have too much, just a $5092 savings account, a car that squeaked as it bumped into the dips in the driveway, and the dog and four children. Once, everyone had had a spouse, and everyone had thought that that meant something, but the spouse had run away, and now everyone wasn’t sure.

Rumor had it that everyone’s spouse had run away with the meaning of life. That was why everyone wanted to find the meaning of life, but he or she could not confirm the rumor because the meaning of life cost too much and was very good at hide-and-go-seek.

So it was nice to finally be in contact. It was good to have a friend like the Internet, because the Internet seemed to know all of humanity in addition to all knowledge.

“Do you know my spouse?” everyone asked the meaning of life.

“Yes,” the meaning of life responded. “I know him or her well. Your spouse is very good. I like him or her in the sack.”

This struck everyone as an odd statement coming from someone he or she had just met, and now things were awkward. Everyone was uncertain what to write back. Everyone thought about the spouse and remembered him or her. When everyone thought about the spouse, he or she did not think about the sack.

Everyone thought about the blog.