Out of Ink
Two years had gone by, and James still didn’t have a fresh story idea . His plan to write a novella about The Nine Paragons of Fame never progressed beyond pieces on a legal pad. Still he felt as if he was on the cusp of something big.
His editor had stopped calling. He hadn’t seen his friends for months. They didn’t seem particularly worried either… they’d stopped calling as well. Even the cat seemed afraid to catch whatever it was that was causing this episode of unprecedented stagnation; at night he now seemed to prefer the drafty windowsill to James’ lap.
A trip to Venice with his mother had only helped remind him of how desperate his situation was. While there, he ran into his editors former assistant, in town to research her second novel. Wasn’t it she who failed her Creative Writing course and blamed it on the Professor’s male-pattern baldness? She had never been inspired enough to pass his phone messages on, now she had a book advance?