Writing Scraps

Appendix. Write or Die! | Aborted Draft

So without another thought, I scrolled down towards the bottom of the letter and saw two links, REPLY and DON'T REPLY, then clicked REPLY.

That was the biggest mistake of my life.

* * *

Someone once said that "Hell is full of good wishes and desires," and every day since I joined the challenge has proven this proverb beyond a doubt.

In fact, just after I clicked the REPLY button, a knock came at the door, followed by my dad barging into my office space like it was his very own office depot to replace more spent batteries in the battery charger. Then he rummaged through the basket full of light bulbs, grabbed one to replace yet another faulty light bulb in the lamp just above the front entrance of the house (I'm sure of it), and pretty much obliterated my train of thought. The interruption only took five minutes, but those minutes dragged on my patience to the last nerve ending.

Here I suppressed my indignation with a sigh and prayed to God to get him out of the room without another outburst, but my hopes were dashed.

"What?" he said, taking notice of the slightest hint of annoyance on my part. "I'm just getting my stuff. You know it's just an in and out thing; I try not to take too much of your time."

I rolled my eyes, sighing once again at his inexplicable refusal to leave when I wanted him to leave AT THAT MOMENT! "Please, just leave."

"Come on, I'm just passing through, that's all."

"That's the point; you keep passing through my space, taking up my time EVERY time I sit here to write. I'm sick of it, Dad! Why can't you just put your stuff some—?"

"HEY! Don't talk to me like that, you hear?" And he punctuated his threat by thrusting his finger at me, as though her were disciplining a dog. "I own this fucking house, and I can have you thrown out of it if you keep up your whining!"

And with that, my dad stormed out of the room and slammed the door on the way out, leaving me agitated and unable to concentrate on my writing. It's another day of writing lost to anger, another day of creative juices spilled to the floor. It was a short skirmish, no where near as drawn-out as my other more heated shouting matches with my dad; but for that day, the battle was over, the damage done.

Word Count: zilch!

* * *

As bad as my dad's constant interruptions got, my mom's visits proved far worse. Her visits were no where near as frequent as my dad's, thank God! But when she interrupted my writing sessions, she always dropped a humungous bombshell that would obliterate the creative juices for days at a time. Sometimes the dry spell lasted for a whole week, during which I pined away the hours staring at my computer screen in abject silence without a word coming to me. During times like these, I found myself walking about the office with whole movies of crappy horror running through my head, my self-defeating mind rejecting them out of turn for the one idea that would lift me out of my slump.

Thankfully, with the exception of that first day, I hadn't had any interruptions for the first week of October. I had three days' time in which my mom didn't visit me with a calamitous obligation, and if my luck held out through the weekend, I might be able to get a good start on the challenge.

So between going to school, homework, eating and sleeping, I hammered at the start of my story for four days and found myself sputtering words. For four miserable days, I found myself writing and rejecting the first lines and paragraphs of my story, grappling with words that came out in constipated spits and spatters. In the moments I found enough clarity to write down more than a thousand words, I'd go to bed satisfied at the result only to return the next day (after school, homework and dinner) with contempt over the drivel I'd written. Then I found myself deleting the contents and starting over with a new idea, thereby repeating the cycle. It proved an endless cycle that was hard to break, continuing towards the end of Saturday night.