How To Play The Game.

three - michael

Michael was stuck. Writing had always been something that came naturally to Michael, even when he was still in school, and while he was writing his first book things just came very easily. Maybe it was because it started out as a joke or maybe it was because Michael wasn't stressing himself out about exactly what to write. He didn't know, all Michael knew was that writing used to be easy.

Something must have changed, however, because Michael hadn't been able to sit down and write something for almost 2 years. He'd heard of writers block before, but Michael wasn't sure that it was supposed to last for this long. 18 months of writers block was too long.

He'd stayed awake almost all night, with his laptop open on his desk and a bag of chips next to it that he was eating constantly. Michael was able to write out a whole introductory chapter before coming to the realization that he really had no idea what he was doing.

It was a pretty simple idea. Michael had come up with it the night before when he was at the bar with his friends. His goal was to write a How-To guide for picking up girls, so that any guy could potentially be as successful as he was. It should have been easy, right? Wrong. It wasn't easy, especially when Michael hadn't written anything since his first book.

Michael sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes. He'd fallen asleep as his desk again, his head on the keyboard of his laptop. He could hear Ashton and Calum arguing about something in the kitchen. Michael stood from his chair and walked into the kitchen, finding Calum at the fridge and Ashton leaning up against the counter.

"I'm just saying that the least you could do is rinse the dishes off before you just leave them in the sink!" Ashton huffed, his arms folded across his chest. "Don't leave your disgusting dirty dishes on the counter for someone else to clean off!"

"You know, I thought you liked cleaning." Calum argued, emerging from the fridge with some pasta from their dinner the night before. "I thought I was being nice by giving you some extra dishes to do."

"I don't like cleaning your nasty leftover food off of the dishes that I bought for this apartment!" Ashton said, looking up at Michael and finally realizing that he was in the room. "Hey, Mike."

"Hi." Michael mumbled sleepily, running a hand through his dyed hair.

"What time did you get to sleep last night?" Calum asked. When the two boys had gotten back from the club last night (or rather really early that morning) Michael was still awake, furiously typing away on his laptop.

"I don't even remember." Michael shook his head. He knew that he definitely hadn't gotten a lot of sleep, that was for sure.

"Did you get a lot of writing done?" Ashton questioned. He was always very interested in Michael's writing, Ashton was the one that encouraged it in the first place, and often asked Michael if he was working on anything new.

"Not really as much as I wanted." Michael said, letting out a sigh.

"Really? You seemed so excited last night, I thought that you were going to come home and write the entire thing." A confused look spread onto Ashton's face as he spoke.

"Yeah, I thought I was going to be able to write the whole thing too. I guess not, though." Michael shrugged. He went over to the fridge himself, searching for something to have for breakfast.

"Well what's wrong? I thought that writing was one of those things that just came to you, why can't you just...write?" Calum asked, furrowing his eyebrows together.

"It's not that easy, Calum." Ashton snapped.

"Jesus, sorry." Calum snapped back, rolling his eyes at his roommate.