The One Who Authors The Author

Ink splotters my fingertips

Somehow having drawn dots of ink upwards from the pen's tip

Defying gravity every bit as much as the central plot has eluded me

Through four drafts of this chapter alone

Pummeling characters into submission

Adding adverbs, punctuation, and description

At a rate that one would think I was paid on a per word commission

This guy right here

He has nothing centrally driving him

When hungry he eats

Tired, he sleeps

Horny, has sex

He isn't a complicated person

So something primal should be found to push him somewhere

A love, a death, anything

But he doesn't seem to want to
I throw an alien abduction at him
And he says he just doesn't have time for that kind of thing
The corner store has a special on steak
And his tummy is a rumbling

A long lost love from gradeschool contacts him
And he just shrugs it off
Muttering something about gas prices and a M.A.S.H. marathon
A box of Cheez-Its that'll go stale
And that relationships are hard so he'd much rather jack it off

A heart attack
And he says, "Nah, I'm fine"
A great flood from a busted dam
Only to find he's prepared for that too
With modified grades and sandbags
And a double wide fully stocked fiberglass canoe

Nothing fazes this guy
And I'm beginning to wonder just who is writing who
Because I'm acting a little more stressed and crazy every single day
I'm beginning to suspect that he is a writer too

I begin poking around my manuscript
Under mattresses and piles of trash
Until I find what I'm looking for
A pile of handwritten pages in a steamer trunk false bottom stash

It is a story of a writer
Who isn't really very good
That is trying to write a novel
And his characters just won't behave
Which is when I fully understood:

I am the character
These are my strings
And I'm only doing as I should