Isis’s Reviews > The Flowers of Buffoonery > Status Update

“This novel was doomed from the start. All posture and no substance. Whether I write one page or a hun-dred, it amounts to the same thing. Though I knew this from the start. Call me optimistic. I assumed that in the course of writing, I would stumble upon some redeeming quality. I'm a hack, it's true. But who says that a hack job can't have some redeeming quality?”

“What part of what you see here is carefree?
If only you could understand the sadness of the ones who grow the delicate flowers of buffoonery, protecting them from but the slightest gust of wind and always on the verge of despair!”

“He was prepared to be unsatisfied by absolutely anything”

“Frankly, I’m losing faith in my abilities.”

“All manner of forces swarmed his heart. Haughtiness. Sloth. Flattery. Guile. Vice. Fatigue. Ferocity. Murder. Despair. Fragility. Deceit. Infection. He came this close to letting them spill out. But instead, he played the role of the heartsick man and groaned.”

A poetic line with a familiar ring, straight from the gates of the inferno, but I had thought it might work well here, as a glowing opener. I have no other defense. Even if this one line spelled the downfall of my novel, I’m afraid I wouldn’t have the guts to cut it. I might even put it this way, for good measure: deleting that first line would mean erasing my entire life thus far.