About a week ago, I had met with a good friend of mine: Christine. It was a short meeting at a coffee shop, but I remember what she said: “You need to stop overthinking your story. You just need to write.”
The sky was a beautiful gray, matching her eyes exactly. She looked at me while she drank her coffee or latte or what ever the hell the serve at a coffee shop. I drank some coffee which tasted a week old and stale. It wasn't even hot.
“I heard about your last book.”
“Yeah?”
“I heard it was awful.”
“Did you read it?”
“I didn't want to waste my time.”
"Thanks.”
The book was crap. I knew it, she knew it, my publisher knew it. Why had I even written that book? It was about corruption in capitalism or some sort of political or economic satire. I had lost focus about a page into writing it, but I finished it anyway.
“You know, I liked what you used to write about. Horrors, mysteries. I liked those things.”
“Thanks Christine.”
But the truth was, I didn't want to write about those things anymore. The mystery was always predictable and it was frustrating trying to always come up with different plot twists.
“You need to wake up.”
“What?”
"You need to face reality. People don't want political satire. They don't want hard to follow plots.”
“Then what do they want?”
“That's what you need to figure out.”
I woke up. It was ten in the morning and the sun shone bright in my face. I rolled over and tried to go to bed again.
Ouch. At least Christine's honest. Will we see more of her?
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