100 Posts!

Hey, you know what this is? This is my 100th post since the return of the blog. Since July 16th, 2021, you’ve come out here 100 times to read about whatever random thing I may have decided to grace your eyes with over your lunch break. And that’s pretty awesome.

I mean, it’s also pretty awesome that I’ve made it so far in such a short period, not to toot my own horn or anything, but here we are, 100 posts in, and things don’t appear to be slowing down.

In fact, I’ve got a few new ideas for things to do with this space that I’m hoping to be able to start enacting as soon as this crazy holiday season wraps up.

I feel like I should mark this special occasion somehow, but I don’t really have any good ideas. In fact, I almost completely missed this milestone, having a post that’s now been rescheduled to next Tuesday in this place until the very last second.

So, instead, I figure I’ll give you a little holiday treat. Something you may have seen before if you’ve been paying extra special close attention, but, well, since it’s been removed from the blog during the last purge of creative battles with myself, I figure it could go back here again.

It’s a little flash fiction story I wrote a while back about the troubles of being an author when it’s so darn easy to distract yourself today. Enjoy…

He sits behind his keyboard, staring at the screen.

“I’ve got nothing,” he says to himself as he decides to glance over at his Facebook feed.  He claims it’s for inspiration, but even he knows that it’s just to avoid the empty slate in front of him.

Three minutes later, he switches back to the white page of blankness, his mind again nagging at him to come up with something brilliant to put to the page.

His phone buzzes, causing him to jump to attention as he fishes it out of his pocket.  He presses the button on the side, to be alerted to a text message stating that his cell phone bill is due.

He briefly considers paying it before he remembers that pay day isn’t until tomorrow, and his balance is woefully low for such superfluous items.  No one calls him anyways.

He taps his fingers across the keyboard, just lightly enough to make the sound of typing, but not enough to actually press any of the buttons and make something appear on the screen.  At least he sounds productive.

DING!

Facebook!  Someone must have comment–nope, just letting him know it’s someone’s birthday today.

It’s always someone’s birthday.

“Maybe I should become one of those people who wish everyone a happy birthday when Facebook reminds me to do so.  But then I’d just be one of those sheep following what Facebook tells me and–” he realizes that he’s going through the same line of thinking he goes through every time he gets one of those notifications.

He returns to his open document window.

“I did have the interesting idea about a guy who could shoot paint out of his hands,” the writer thought.  “Not that I had any idea of what that would actually do, or, you know, anything other than that he shot paint out of his hands.”

“There once was a boy who could shoot paint out of his hands,” he typed.

He stared at the words on the screen.

“Am I writing a limerick?” he mused before deleting the words.

Again his moved his fingers across the keyboard to make a the noise of productivity, without causing any letters to appear.  It was how he thought.  Not that it often came up with anything useful.

“I am Painticus!” he typed, a smile crossing his face before he again deleted the words.

“I hate first sentences,” he growled inwardly.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” he typed, knowing it was an utterly stupid phrase to type.

He left it there.

“Why can’t it be a dark and stormy night?”

“And that’s when our hero arrived.  He wasn’t an ordinary hero.  He was PAINTMAN!”

Now the writer laughed out loud at his own ridiculousness.  And then he stopped.  His brain kicked into gear, and his fingers started flying across the keyboard.

“I was only fourteen the first time it happened, but I’ll never forget the look on my mom’s face when she came into my room that morning and found me laying in bed completely covered in red paint.  I don’t know who was more scared.”

“Not bad,” the writer thought to himself.  He sat back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.  “Not bad at all.”

He leaned forward again and his fingers disappeared into a flurry of activity.  He’d found his muse, and everything else had melted away.