[Placeholder] (Complete) NaNoWriMo 2016

And Then There Was Kidnapping

"It's Day 2 and I haven't written anything! We're so far behind!" The Writer flailed into the nothingness living room and darted for the writing desk. "I can't believe I slept through Day 1, we're doomed! DOOMED!"

"You might have slept through Day 1," Simon grumped, refusing to get up from his comfy chair. The Muse had shown him the ways of the fanfic and he was busy wandering TV Tropes. "Some of us did productive things while your brain was on hiatus."

"Wait, really?" The Writer blinked and scanned through the notes. "Your name is Simon Simon... I'm not terribly surprised, actually. But you have a good point here with the opener. Whew! I thought I was going to have to start from scratch." She summoned her laptop from the mists and cleared enough room on the desk to set it up.

"We're an oddly effective team this year," the Muse pointed out from her Stargate themed blanket fort. "I still think you are writing him as cartoonishly Evil, but he's starting to grow on me."

"Thanks?" Simon shrugged, confused.

"Anyways, let's get some warm up Saturday Story Prompts out of the way and we'll get this story in gear." The Writer grabbed a pen and got ready to stretch out her imagination. "Be right back!"

There was a poof and the Writer vanished from whence she came.

"Why does she need to do prompt sprints, doesn't this count?" Simon looked around the proto-story fog in annoyance. "Can't she just, I don't know, write this place into a little more solidity?" He focused in on his chair, plumping up the cushions, and reupholstering it in worn leather with brass tack accents. "I know this place isn't real, but it couldn't hurt to hammer down the details if we're going to be here all month."

"Think of the prompts like stretching. The prompts have to be completely unrelated sentences in different genres and settings that all could start a story. This is going to be more focused, even if it doesn't seem like it." The Muse pulled a soda out of her cushions of her chair. "Patience grasshopper, you'll get used to the waits."

"I still think this is a horrible idea," he sighed, and went back to surfing TV Tropes.

~*~*~*~*~

It was a pleasant late autumn evening on Simon's side of the mountain. The fog that normally blanked the valley had rolled away and he could look out across the forests and all the way down to the hints of the river. It had been a long summer and the trees were only just starting to fade into the yellow and oranges. He had a feeling the first cold snap would happen long before they finished.

He was sitting at his writing desk facing a wide double-paned window with an awesome view of the forests below. He'd had the house built so the sunset was off to his left and the sunrise to his right, but never directly in through the window. It had taken some serious arguments with the architect who had wanted the house to blend in seamlessly with the landscape instead of standing kitty-corner along the ridge. But it was Simon's house and Simon's money and eventually that had won out over the aesthetics.

The rough outline of Simon's next self-help book was on the desk, surrounded with bookmarked references and printed out copies of web postings he needed to link to. His drink was slowly warming on the coaster, he hadn't taken a sip in a while, lost in watching the migrating birds clustering in the trees for the night.

He really ought to be working on the book, but he'd just turned in the final draft to his editor for the last one and he figured he could use some downtime. Every so often he thought that he'd finally run out of things that people wanted to be told how to do... and then his paid idea sniffers would come back with another list of things.