1. Michel finished in the morning the book he had started reading also that morning. He sought the phonebook, in the phonebook the number and in the number some courage. Upon dialing the publisher, he couldn’t get even a simple “no”. “Some nutcase wasting our time,” he heard in the background, before being disconnected. He had inquired politely whether it would be possible to buy the same volume he had read, but in blank… Of a book like that, it was important for him to measure the weight of the text.
2. Angelo is an experimentalist writer who resorts to techniques that are, at the same time, modern and primitive (or, some might say, blatantly inadequate). He always starts by laser-printing a completely black page. Using the finest sandpapers, needles and paper knives, he then proceeds to remove all the excess ink. In that way he frees the text that was, from the start, imprisoned in the darkness. A misjudged graze on a comma has the potential to ruin many hours of work. He writes little, naturally.
(Contribuição para um desafio do Global Writing & Storytelling Group do Internations em Novembro de 2022.)