Ferdie wondered if he was ever going to look at anything more than a blank screen. It was three weeks since he had written anything and his editor was starting to get really quite aggressive in his demands for material. Ferdie was not sure that it was okay for anyone to threaten to remove each of one’s fingernails with pliers if you did not deliver a blog article.

He had tried everything; drinking, getting high, sitting outside in the dark looking down on the lights of the city, smoking cigarettes and driving around the Venice streets looking for people that he used to know… Anything to find some inspiration, but nothing was working, and there was nothing there every time when he did one of these things and then reached in to try and find some inspiration.

There was nothing that had not already been said, nothing to believe in any more and it had been this way for almost exactly three and a half weeks. Why was this? Anyone could have guessed that it was because Vicky had left, but he could not see it.