Intermezzo: Deadlines

Since the great danger of immortality is the insanity of boredom, it's only natural to work a job or ten. Or thousands over time. Oh, you can spend years unemployed and unfed. No danger in it at all, you're wet, roofless... and you live. That happens. (Then certain especially gifted and responsible werewolves take care of you to ensure you don't stand out among humans... but that's another story.)

Harper, fishmonger, account executive, scribe, slave, traveling merchant... Jens had tried a few. He didn't remember everything he'd learned - werewolves have no more room in their heads than you or I - but he still had a good few skills.

You can fail and live as a werewolf and then succeed again, if you know how. Jens had learned how, and it helped him stay sane... by his measures. Usually. His experiment in being evil - not the adjective but the noun - at the camps had shaken him, but he was trying to move on.

It was the twentieth century, and it was still an easy time to forge an identity, to become an unagingly middle-aged bearded professor from somewhere else that no-one asked too much about. Had Jens already become a mountain hermit, or not yet? He wasn't sure... his self-hate had left his timeline with an upset stomach, machine-gun fire rumbling against cabinet files.

He was addicted to dying as most are to living, but in the meantime he had to pretend to live. Literary criticism was a good pastime, a good present to his sanity. And it had deadlines, life-bringing deadlines with their adrenaline.

"Mr. Piper’s notes," he scribbled - eschewing his useful but still-unfamiliar typewriter - "are therefore an indivisible complex. In them we do not differentiate between literary texts and 'non-literary' documents; the theme might be enforced either here, or it might be there. It might spring up in correspondence or in reading notes - and it can be evinced more clearly in a draft than in a finished work.

For we do not differentiate the biographical author and the subject of the work, but rather we understand the authorial person as the originator of writing act, a hand stretched out towards the theme.

In the early phases of creation, the author, a human personality bewitched by individual shimmering images in which the theme is illustrated, gives his strongest consideration to these images, and not to the reader or the mediation models that are connected with the mechanisms of publication.
Approached this way, the authorial subject corresponds with the manuscript record—not the text."

It was only the rough draft of the first half, but his head was nodding - he had bored himself to sleep, that innocuous little death. And he still had tomorrow morning before the deadline.

He dreamed about writing a plotline, about writing himself out of his story.