Writing Scraps

Appendix. Write or Die! | Aborted Draft

For instance, in my second week of unproductively (a Friday on October 11), just as I finally decided to write my story after spending a few hours doing my homework, I heard a BEEP sound from somewhere in the kitchen, followed by my dad cursing his head off.

I headed down the hallway and into the kitchen where I saw the deep fryer full of cooking oil and the fried dumplings drying in the oven pan, with my dad checking out whatever damage he'd caused. It turned out, when I looked at it from his angle, that he'd forgotten to shut off the deep fryer when he pulled the plug, causing a spark. I could still smell the waft of burnt metal and plastic, and I saw a flash ring of black around the socket where he pulled the plug.

"Did you forget to turn off the deep fryer again?" I said.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. I fucked up. Now keep quiet; I'm hoping this thing still works," he said, plugging in a nightlight in the socket to see if it glowed. It didn't. "Aw, fuck! God damn it! Now I'm gonna have to shut it down to reboot it. Corey, open the garage. I'm gonna have to reset the power to this socket to get it up and running again."

I did as I was told, and then headed to the my computer room to write my story again. But just as I got it out of sleep mode and opened a fresh word document, just as I was about to type the first few words into the blank sheet, the computer shut off with everything else in the room!

I almost banged my head into keyboard. In my mind, I wanted nothing more than to punch the computer screen, but I resisted the urge.

Then there followed a series of events that included walking back and forth between the kitchen and the control panel outside the garage, informing my dad about which area of the house was off, and which stayed on, checking and rechecking. This took up almost two hours of my writing time. Then there followed the menial task of resetting a dozen clocks in all the rooms of the house. This took up about half an hour. That's two and a half hours of my time wasted because my dad forgot to turn off the God damn deep fryer!

Adding insult to the whole mess, just as we concluded dinner about two hours after my dad got everything up and running again, just as my dad took off the nightlight from the socket and to place it into another socket just above it, it sparked again with a BEEP, followed by the smell of burnt metal and plastic.

It was pure hell all over again. At that point, I wanted to shoot myself. It felt as though Murphy's Law set it's sights on my little corner of the world to fuck it up! After the whole process got repeated for the second time, it was 10:30 p.m., and I was beat to hell. By the time I finally turned on the computer at 10:30, waiting for it to boot up and opening up the word document again, I just looked at the page with my fingers poised over the keyboard. Nothing came out, no matter how hard I tried. With every sentence I typed, I kept hitting the backspace key, disgusted with my words, disgusted with EVERYTHING!

And so, closing the word document and putting the computer to sleep, I resigned myself to defeat, brushed my teeth and went to bed.

* * *

For the next week after that (the third week of October), a whole confluence of events between circumstance and coincidence fucked up every chance I had at writing my story. I mean, seriously, my dad repeated that incident with the deep fryer again on Monday, for Christ's sake! That's when I knew that I had to take another route with my story. I'd have to write my story down with pen and paper while I was away from the house.

So I took out two dozen sheets of printer paper, got a few pens, pencils and mechanical pencils, stuffed them in my backpack and went to the school library, where I spent much of my lunch periods every day writing everything out. It was hard, let me tell you. The lead in my mechanical pencils either broke or slipped; the lead in the regular pencils didn't break as easily, but whatever I wrote down got smudged and rubbed out when I took out the sheets from my backpack; and the pens I got from my computer room spat ink when I wrote and left big blots over the words, skipped and couldn't write for intermittent periods of time, and finally on the Wednesday of that week, all my pens dried up completely.

So I resorted to picking up pens off the ground around the campus and using them. This did the trick for me; none of the pens skipped, dried out or sputtered ink. Unlike my own pens, these ones weren't infected with whatever juju inhabited my own pens. As long as I kept finding pens off the ground, I'd be golden and on my way to completing the story. So for the rest of that week and throughout the next week, I wrote word after word, sentence after sentence, and paragraph after paragraph of my story.

By the time I finished the manuscript the next Monday (October 28), it turned out to be a lovely 4,000-world story. All I had to do was to type it up.

At first, I refused to type it up at my house of horrors, because I knew that my parents would somehow fuck up my efforts if I gave them even half the chance. So I decided to type it out in the library computers instead, then email the story in the word box along with a word document attachment to cover all my bases. After that, I'd copy and paste it into my reply, click submit and be done with it.

* * *

On the last Tuesday of October, just sixty hours away from the Halloween deadline, I turned on the computer at the library, logged on, opened a fresh word document and began typing. I was completely absorbed in the act of typing; I didn't even notice the guy next to me on another computer. With every word I typed, I felt the burden of the deadline lift from my shoulders, felt the horrors of my growing paranoia shrinking beneath my gaze. Everything started going my way again. It seemed that nothing would go wrong.

As it turned out, it didn't work that way. Just a third of the way through my story, the mouse cursor started moving erratically all over the screen. Nothing I did with the mouse brought the cursor on the screen back in line. It just went all over the place, zooming every which way in confusing stops and starts. When the mouse didn't work, I then tried typing on the keyboard without any success. Then I tried banging on the keyboard, and that didn't work. It was futile. Some way or other, the curse of my household had reached the sanctuary of the school library!

Then, with my mind flooded with horrible coincidences, I realized something else. I'd forgotten to save my file!

"FUCK!" And I punctuated it by slamming my fist on the table.

The person next to me jumped. "Jesus, man! What the hell was that for?"

"Sorry about that," I said. "I didn't realize you were there."

"What's going on?" the librarian yelled, ***

FRAGMENT

(To be continued...)

A/N: This is an aborted draft of a short story that I wrote a few years ago that just didn't get complete, because I ran out of steam on it. It's a flop, like the other previous flops in this sorry collection. It's included here to remind me of how far I've come since writing this.