Looking at the blank pages in front of me I thought to myself, what was I doing here. My palms felt the cold table beneath them and my pen felt heavier than the burden of being an uninspired author that I had carried for over a year now.

I'd like to call myself gifted.

You know, how kids are born with various talents and gifts, some are athletes, some have crazy academic skills, some are born artists and can work wonders with paint and other artsy stuff; my talent is unique, I am an amazing liar.

It's true, I wasn't always aware of my gift and may have really chiseled it to perfection over time but nobody gets as good as me even under all the right circumstances. But the thing with lies is the constant fear that the web that you've weaved overtime will fall apart and hence the constant need of maintaining this web. Although all that maintenance comes at a cost. The fear starts to consume you. You start pondering over every minute detail, details that would've never mattered in a real life situation but you have to get them right, nothing in no way should ever come back to you and prove you wrong. Whatever you say or do has to be spot on and over time you are not just lying about something, you start living this lie.

So far I have been amazing, planning each step and just being great while making sure it's the people I lie to who live my lies and not myself. Like I said I am indeed talented.

I wasn't always the same. I believed in the truth, the rights and wrongs, the living of life on set rules and principles and standing up for them. At least that's what my old man wanted me to believe, and he left no stone unturned in making an example of his own life. But as time went by I realized why in the world would someone think that's sensible. I mean there are people out there literally waiting to be manipulated, manipulated for love and happiness.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Come to think of it, love and happiness are both concepts that I never really could understand. I wrestled with these concepts, these emotions, trying hard to interpret their meaning. My first book was definitely a reflection of my thought process. The character really struggled to come to grips with what life was throwing at it and had a hard time understanding what it was that made him truly happy. Unlike my life I threw in a cheesy cliché novel ending where he realizes his true love was always close to him and happiness was a state of mind and they end up living happily ever after. That's where my talent comes in handy. Five rejection letters later a publisher finally publishes it et voila I become a best selling author.

It obviously didn't end there. The fame and recognition could have been easily avoided if I had stuck to my guns and published under a pen name like I wanted to but was advised against. My father's honest roots and the name that he had passed down to me, Anon Vernon Castling, seemed more of a best seller than what I was trying to inspire in the masses.

My style of writing touted me as one of the best in the country and turned out to create quite the stir in the market. I had to face a lot of hatred for churning out entertainment content for the masses rather than writing good literature that was truly inspirational. My father even suggested shifting my focus to biographies entirely even after the widespread success I had seen in the national and international markets for the minimalistic brain energizer that I had dared to call a novel.

As I sat thinking about everything else I could've been, pondering the critical acclaim I received and the criticism I doled out to myself constantly, lowkey blaming my upbringing, I heard the gushing of wind.

I had made sure that every window and door in the house was locked before I assumed my place in front of the  blank sheets of paper.

I debated getting up to check if everything was alright before I had the sense to scribble down the first word that came to head. I wrote 'Guised' and immediately got up to look for the whooshing of wind that had finally moved my pen.

I made my way out of my study and went down the passage to find the window pane in my hall cracked and a shard of glass lying on the floor. The glass hadn't shattered hence there was no noise but the winds had been raging outside shaping up quite the storm, and for me a spectacle I couldn't have imagined.