I've found myself here once again. not knowing how I did it in the first place. The last story I wrote was unlike my writing in every way: short, lacking a true narrative, surprisingly dark in tone. My only explanation (and excuse) was that the idea came to me in a flash of mysterious inspiration and wouldn't leave me be until it got written. I was ready to, as it were, write it off as a one-time anomaly. Except now it's happened again, and I'm running out of excuses.

The new story, 'Baby Talk', is a little different. Not quite a monologue like its predecessor, although it does consist mostly of one voice, it has a more conventional structure. There's a little more ambiguity about the main character. But I think it may be the more confrontational of the two. And it's a risky one to have written, too, simply because the main character is a woman who acts in a way you might not expect a woman to act, while the writer is a guy who, well, is a guy.

As a would-be fiction writer, I support the idea that one should be trying to write from others' perspectives. That's kind of the point. If you only wrote from your mindset all the time it'd become tedious to say the least. I want to be able to talk like a mass-murderer just as convincingly as a noble revolutionary. In fact, considering a lot of the concepts that fascinate me, I'd have to let my life go to some pretty terrible places to draw from experience in my writing. That said, there are some things I'm just never going to do. I'm never going to give birth. I'm never going to breastfeed. I can't get post-natal depression. (This is not to say men can't go a little crazy after welcoming a baby into the world, but it's not the bio-chemical assault that some women have their bodies unleash.) There are some esperiences I can't own. Being a woman who toys with the idea of hurting her own baby is one of them.

The question, writer or not, is: what gives me the right? Especially for something as small as a thousand-odd words published on a website almost no one reads? Call me unoriginal, but I'm using inspirational flashes as my excuse again. The image, the shocking, nasty image, came to me without my consent  before I could do anything to stop it. And once it was there, I felt almost duty-bound to explain it. This mystery woman who'd appeared in my head must have had a reason for doing what she was doing, so I went looking for what it was. My hope is that by the end of the story even if you don't forgive Helen, you at least understand her point of view.

But I can still imagine - after making the leap of faith that assumes someone will be reading it - people wanting their backlash. At the end of the day the accusation that I'm writing about something completely beyond my sphere of experience is a hard one to argue. There's always a danger in attempting to fit yourself in a skin that's taking more of a beating than your own. But I'd like to think that if the character doesn't come across as a convincing one it'll be an indication that I've failed as a writer and not as a human being.