He wrote frantically, obsessively.
He wrote from dawn to dusk.
As of last count, he had over a thousand pages of manuscript in tight longhand that not even he could actually decipher sometimes.
“Won’t you send this to the publisher?” Darnell, his best friend, would ask, concerned as he was because of this frantic, almost suicidal, behavior on the part of the writer.
“Authors just don’t send manuscripts to the publisher dear Darnell,” the writer would mumble,”they nurture them, appreciate them, love them first.”
Winter set in and the writer was nowhere near sending the augmenting manuscript to the publisher.
One snowy morning, Darnell arrived at the writer’s apartment with some cakes and chicken in mustard sauce prepared by Mrs. Perkins, but there was no answer to his repeated knocks on the door.
The constable was summoned, the door was opened, and, there, the writer was, motionless, slumped over the manuscript, his pen still clasped in his hand.
No foul play, the constable concluded, just deadly obsession.