Author's Notes: This story is silly. This is a semi-autobiographical account of what its like to work on a novel for almost twenty years. This is dedicated to Nadia, eh, who said I should "write and publish something."

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*The Beginning*

Ramora stretched, long fingers pressing into the padding of her cell, the imprints of her hands made so quickly were slow to flesh out. The squishy substance covering the walls of her cell reflected the Dawning light, but the transition was slow and bearable, giving her tired eyes a chance to adjust. A panel bleeped once; a warning that the gravity adjusters were about to kick in. Ramora, still sleepy from her long night in the Catch revelled in her last moments in zero Gs, relaxing her muscles as much as she was able.

But, like every Dawning before this, the gravity would kick in, and she would, once again, find herself floating back to the padded floor of her cell, her heart racing and her muscles straining against the slow press of false gravity. And, like every Dawning to come, Ramora would huff for a moment under the sudden change, then push herself forcibly from her cell, to start the day as every day had begun before.

The Dawning lights in the hallway were still muddled and sluggish; an approximate and rather unconvincing attempt to recreate daylight on Earth. The lighting would have been more convincing, perhaps, if it had a central source, instead of the screens running through atmospheric colors. There was no sun in Ramora's sky; there hadn't been for many, many years.

With a sigh, she bounded to her bathroom, shaking off the last of vestiges of sleep with an act of pure will; today would be long, just as yesterday had been long. She had so much to accomplish, so much to change. The routine, the work was endless.

Endless and empty.

* * *

I don't think I ever sat down and thought, "Hey, I should write a novel today." The process began long before I was aware there was a process. I like to tell strangers, when they ask, that I began with a perfect artistic vision, a dream maybe, like Stephanie Meyer, or some kind of massive influence that drove me to years of slave labor, outlining and editing until it was perfect.

But, the whole thing wasn't that cool, or that calculated.

I merely looked up one night, and started writing what my typical day in space might be like. I still have the original draft of my novel; it is framed and on display, like a teenager might hang his shinny new diploma on the wall. The entire original draft was done in several different colors of crayons, the descriptions slightly jumbled and interrupted on a semi-regular basis with doodles.

There was a unicorn in space with me, in the first draft, named "Pony." An intelligent creature from the planet Unicornia.

Pony was cut from the later editions.

The story progressed in middle school, becoming an emo kid's visions of destruction on a massive scale; when Ramora took out the Space Station, she got the rest of the world all blown up in the process; a nice package deal.

At the beginning of high school, writing wasn't cool enough for my pretty friends, so I merely dreamed of possible edits for the future, instead of actually accomplishing anything.

Around 2000, when I heard about the first pieces of the International Space Station being shot into space, I was furious and a little scared; had NASA been reading stuff from my hard drive? What else did they know? I hoped they never read my AIM messages to Carly; if they did, many sincere apologies to Kenneth Bowersox; I didn't mean a word of it.

College saw a complete revisiting of the story; refurbished and all spiffed out, I barely even recognized my own creation. It looked to me like if you asked the school tomboy to the dance and she showed up at your house all made up and wearing something pink and frilly and slightly revealing (though she'd still probably still be driving her 1950s clunker of a Chevy, insisting that she drive and growling at you when you held the door for her.

It's been more then a decade since I began this little project; I say "little project" in the same way someone with a brain tumor might pet name it their "little headache." This all-consuming, fluctuating, angry blob of an idea was a Face Sucker to my creativity, raping and planting its seed inside of my head, only so its little demonspawn could grow inside me, bursting from my chest at the most inopportune of times.

This is my relationship, as it stands, with my novel.