An Unfinished Story(28)
His agent had said, “Let’s worry about more money now and travesties later.”
Whitaker responded to the man on Facebook’s post with: Imagine if Pat Conroy had written The Prince of Tides, Part II: Tom Wingo Goes to Disney World. No, not going to happen. Before he officially posted his reply, Whitaker realized he had no business comparing himself to Pat Conroy. Instead, he retyped his response: Have you ever seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Two? Me neither.
Not quite ready to tackle his next masterpiece—and not for the first time—Whitaker tossed around title ideas for a sequel. Napalm Trees and Turquoise Waters II: Hunt for a Cool September. Whitaker smirked, enjoying a moment of flexing his creative muscle, which seemed to thrive more in the absurd. Or better yet: Agent Oranges Dangling on Citrus Trees. Even Jack Grant would laugh at that. The title was almost good enough to write a book around.
Whitaker came up with one more that satisfied him: Napalm Trees II: Attack of the Viet Cong Snowbirds. Considering snowbirds and the Viet Cong both came from the north, Whitaker decided that he did indeed still have some wit left in him.
With that out of the way, Whitaker opened up I Hear Thunder. He scrolled down to see how far he’d made it: 543 words. Three days of work. An amateur effort.
“Saul Bellow could type five hundred and forty-three words while he was brushing his teeth,” Whitaker mumbled.
He looked at the cursor flashing on the new line. The engulfing white space below. “Just start, you damned typist. One word after the other.” The cursor taunted him with each flash, like a big middle finger telling him he had nothing important to say. “C’mon, Whitaker,” the cursor said. “Are you scared, you little weenie? Do I put the fear of God in you?”
As if he were stabbing a flag into the top of Mount Everest, Whitaker brought his index finger down onto the “R” key with a triumphant, thunderous jab. The cursor revealed an r and then moved to the right, flashing once again.
With the little bastard taking the upper hand, Whitaker sat back in his chair and laughed at the idea of writing for a living. Even if. Even if you could get past all the doubt in your head and put together enough letters and words to make up the necessary word count for a novel, you still had to create compelling characters who either grew or were broken by their choices. And the plot needed to grip the reader like it was grabbing their testicles or their female bits. Above all, the story needed to move quickly. Pacing, pacing, pacing! People didn’t have the attention span they used to.
Even if you’d done all that once, and succeeded, you had to do it again, but better. The readers expected every sentence to sing. No such thing as trying to make the new one as good as the last. You had to do better. You had to one-up yourself.
Feeling a rush of anger at the cursor, Whitaker hit the “R” button again.
He jabbed it several times in a row.
rrrrrr
“How about that, you twinkly little shit? I’ll r you to death. You’ll be singing pirate songs all the way to the landfill. Rrrrrrrrr, you ugly blinking bastard!” He mashed the R key again, this time holding it down.
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
“Damn, that feels good!” So satisfying that his other fingers wanted to get involved. He set them free.
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“There’s your fucking word count! Let’s keep going.” He let his fingers dance again, another burst of word graffiti.
A staccato piercing sound came from the other room—two chirps. Probably one of the smoke alarms. Ignoring it, Whitaker took a deep breath and reread his work. There was no gold to be mined from his burst of inspiration. His agent would shake his head. His publisher would shut the door. His dad might spit on him.
One last irritating chirp sealed the writing session’s fate, and he pushed away from his desk. No way would he get anywhere with this nonsense screaming at him. Barreling out of his room in a fit, he opened the utility closet in the hallway and was surprised at his organization. Amid a stack of cardboard boxes crammed into the closet, he found one labeled “Batteries and shit . . .”
In the living room, Whitaker eyed the fire alarm above the sofa. A bag of Doritos had been left open on the coffee table. The zombie game he’d been enjoying lately was frozen on the television. He hopped up onto the sofa and changed the battery on the alarm. With a green light and chirp of acceptance, the fire alarm seemed to be satisfied.
It was too tempting to collapse onto the sofa for a quick few minutes of game play. He unpaused the game and dropped back into an alternate reality where he was a meathead Special Forces soldier well equipped with several futuristic guns, trying to save the planet from the zombie apocalypse. He moved to the edge of his seat as he rained down terror.
The guilt of not reaching his writing goal hung over his head, and he eventually paused the game. Returning to his office, Whitaker faced the mostly blank page again.
“I don’t get out of this chair for five hundred words. Period.”
Another chirp from the living room.
His teeth ground against each other, and he resisted the urge to slam his fist into the keyboard. “Now I truly know that there is a God. And he’s a sadist who likes picking on writers.”
Whitaker looked up through the ceiling. “Are you enjoying yourself?” Thinking of Russell Crowe in Gladiator, Whitaker raised his hands, palms up, and asked the popcorn ceiling with all the fury he could muster, “Are you not entertained?”