Flash Fiction: A Plea To All Writers No Matter The Discipline

I have had a terrible time reading continuously for three days. My drive for this is intensely painful but not pathological bibliomania.

Parentheses. Parentheses, brackets, quotation marks, guillemets. I urge all writers to wield these weapons well.

It started when I was reading my favourite philosophy blog. The writer, who shall be unnamed (unless you PM me), began a sentence with citation marks. No problem. Absolutely alles in ordnung.

I kept reading the article and realised that the quote was getting extremely long. I finished the article and there were no ending citation marks.

I thought nothing of it until I went to cook up a Nigella Lawson salad recipe. The watermelon fetta watercress one. Looking up the ingredients I had the nagging feeling I was still in the midst of the quotemarks. I finished my meal in an open ended manner.

The food coma took me to bed. I took up my reading book and the original quote continued. Even when quoted dialogue happened they felicitously ended with their own quotation marks like good editors ensure.

I only achieved a hypnogogia that night and for the following two nights. Reading anything was a delineated frustration! Mr Pawlik’s cf was never going to end (and that's a big oops.)

I tried reading the Daily Telegraph, the works of ee cummings, Nickelback lyrics, 30 Seconds to Mars lyrics, medieval writers like Christine de Pisan and Jean de Joinville to see if they could join the dots.

I had no luck. I'm into page 320 of Ulysses and want Daedalus dead. I've trawled google under the term Bibliomania, found the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Nothing about blog reading accident and emergency aetiology. The Journal of Negative Results lived up to its name.

In a last ditch effort I returned to the original article. I wanted to hack the page and insert the closing quotation marks. I left clicked and chose "Inspect Element." I didn't know what voodoo I was doing. Reading through the HTML enigma code a miracle occurred. Perhaps there's such a thing as badly written HTML. I found the closing citation mark.