Ralph Watkins stared at his mortal foe with hatred wrinkling his eyes. “Damn you,” he whispered to that enemy, knowing fully well that his words went unheard… his writing study was entirely empty, save for Ralph himself, his overheating laptop, and the miserable company of his ever-present adversary… the blinking, vertical cursor of his word processor.
“Damn you to hell,” Ralph repeated to the cursor. It blinked in taunting reply, still sitting at the top left of an open, white expanse. Page 1 of 1, 0 words.
Ralph wiped his sweaty hands against his jeans and then pulled at his fingers, savoring the crackling pops they issued. His attention wandered to scrutinizing the roughness of the back of his hands, noting a small scratch that he hadn’t before seen on the left one. His mind replayed through the day—the idle occupation that could pass as “a day,” at least—and he spent the next two minutes searching those memories for the offending moment, a possible source for the mystery scratch.
His watch buzzed, jolting him back to the present… he realized with a twitchy frown that his mind had been wandering yet again. He turned his wrist to check the display: a picture of a pillbottle appeared on the smartwatch’s display, triggering yet another curse directed at the blinking line. If the first two cursings were angry, this third was weary, the fight already fading for a frustrated tiredness.
As had become his ritual of late, the watch’s reminder meant the wadded baggie was yanked from his pockets, and the single, powder-white tablet was dumped into his hand. He swallowed it without water, shivering at the chalky path it left as it made its gentle fall downwards. As it settled, his eyes turned upwards to the ceiling: a drab, sepia-colored expanse that met sepia-colored walls. His desk was dark and sagging, and the corner’s plant, faded and wilting. A sigh rasped from his lips as he surveyed the sleepy bookcases, dusty shelves, and his desk’s yellowing succulent. His study used to be a place where stories would spring to life—where adventures unfolded, and new beginnings flowed like water from a tap—but now, the pills painted the room beige, same as they painted everything beige.
His stained-wood life was trying… truth be told, he found himself sometimes wondering if his status quo was any better than the problems the pills had been supposed to fix in the first place. They brought him calm, and they kept him grounded, but they also seemed to sap the creativity from his mind; his attention span was reduced to a hummingbird, flitting from distraction to distraction. He used to revel in deep dives of the web, reading whatever dense articles he could get his hands on… now, he hardly had the focus for flash-fiction and web novels, eyes always darting for the next distraction. He’d become chronically bored, and nothing could capture his attention in a world where nothing could thrill him anymore.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
The cursor blinked impassively, not even having the decency to acknowledge Ralph’s miseries. Ralph unleashed a barrage of swearing until he was sure the blinking cursor was sufficiently contrite. And then, in something of a rarity for Ralph these days, an idea came to mind… it was neither bad nor good, but it might have been enough to break him from the painful inertia of idleness. “Writing is a lot like peeing,” one of his old high school teachers had memorably told him. “You just gotta start the business, and then flow takes care of the rest.”
He opened his web browser to Regal Lane, one of his once-favorite writing communities. The notifications bell at the top corner of the page showed no updates for the past eight months, save for a three-week-old comment placed on a chapter posting: “whatever happened to WatTheRalph? Is this story dead?”
There were plenty of reasons to like Regal Lane: the interface was clean, and the community, pleasant… but more importantly than either of those things, it was the author–reader interaction he valued, like the comments left on chapters as stories were being weaved. Those comments were to be his salvation… the cure to the ailments of his cure.
He clicked the button for ‘new submission,’ and, in seconds, a warm smile came to his face as he fell back into familiar comforts. His fingers were clacking away, the keyboard’s rhythm like music to long-deaf ears. “Readers of Regal Lane,” he typed, “I turn to you in my moment of writer’s block… I’d like to try an experiment in storytelling. Here’s the way things will work:”
He thought for a minute, figuring out the best way to structure his plan. “Every time I write a chapter, I’ll wait a day or two for comments to trickle in… the comments you leave will decide what happens next in the story. Think of it like a poll-directed choose-your-own-adventure story, but it’s entirely open ended. Give +rep to the suggestions you like, since I’ll be using whatever gets the most votes.”
He cracked his fingers again before carrying on. “Whatever you propose, I’ll take totally seriously. Our story could be a super serious romance tale, but then, if commenters vote for it, a talking, sentient frog could enter the story as a legitimate love interest, with everything played entirely straight. The direction that the story goes is entirely up to you, dear readers.”
Ralph did a cursory scan through the text, ensuring there were no major typos. And then, with a shrug, he pressed the button to submit, wondering what writing hell he was signing himself up for… but knowing that, in the end, it was his story, and he’d still be able to keep things in control.
After all, it was just a silly story submitted online… how far out-of-hand could things really go?