Part of my morning habit has become to play Hurdle, which is like Wordle except you solve five words: The solution becomes the first guess of the next round, and the four solutions become the first four guesses of the fifth word — at that stage you have two shots to get it right.
I’m also a fan of Wordler, which is like Wordle except you can play as many times as you want, unlike Wordle and Hurdle where there’s only one puzzle per day.
The other day I combined the two games: I used the Hurdle solution to start Wordler, and then I kept using the solutions to start another game.
I could have gone on for a very long time, until the solution to one puzzle was:
WRITE.
Being a writer, to me this felt like a command from another plane of existence.
WRITE what? The possibilities are endless. I can describe the early autumn chill like the first bite of a cool apple, or I can describe the whine of traffic coming and going Doppler-like on the road up the hill from here, or I can describe the morning fog that I wasn’t sure was my eyes or the air.
WRITE what? I can work on tomorrow’s blog post or I can advance my science fiction saga or my Christmas story.
WRITE what? I can just pull a random poem out of the ether, or develop a random scene from any old where, or rage against the machine — that silly machine is always up to something worthy of a good seething rage.
The bottom line was pretty clear, however: WRITE something that fills the page with writing, because that is my calling, after all, and those who don’t heed their calling are, well, heedless.
And so I wrote, which was a better use of my time than an endless game of Hurdle, believe it or not.
