𝙡𝙖𝙨𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙤𝙪𝙨 | 𝘵𝘬.

𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘤𝘪𝙫𝙞𝙤𝙪𝙨

Dear Mr. Jeon,

The New York Center of Publication is reluctant to to deliver bad news, but your piece does not seem to fit the jurisdictions and guidelines selected for your specific genre of publishable works. Please reread the guidelines regarding maturity and try again within the allotted time.

—The New York Center of Publication, head of  the editorial department

—Z.W.

. . . ♔ ♔ ♔ . . .

Jeongguk sighed, pearly white teeth worrying on his bottom lip while his fingers, equally as fidgety as the rest of him, tapped against the polished oak of the library desk in an unrhythmic (and irritating must I add) series of clicks. He'd been promptly rejected for the fourth time in the span of the last month or so, his avid practice of artistic literature with the much needed help of a dictionary getting him absolutely nowhere in the writing industry.

He worked endlessly for hours and hours, pouring his heart out into a convenient document stored within the technological safety of his laptop. With the grace of an artist his fingers moved delicately to craft the masterpiece of his emotions, each clack of his keyboard adding to the spillage dripping directly from the depths of his heart; his regrets, his successes, and his romances making their debut as digital ink against blaring white paper.

Jeongguk put everything he knew into his writing, his experiences, his thoughts, his wishes, his dreams appearing in an abrupt series of powerful, deeply meaningful words. Like paint splattered to a blank canvas his symbolism was sharp, a burst of wildly imaginative color against the blanch, graying claims of aging literature. He was convinced he'd gotten it down, that he'd figured out how to finely create the new generation of tangible entertainment, a book you'd never want to put down—and yet... the numerous publishing companies he'd contacted had yet to believe the same.

Jeongguk had been trying again and again with fruitless results, to write an erotic novel.

His knowledge came from pure experience as well as a handful of stealthily borrowed erotic films that he's spent much more time than necessary analyzing. As far as first hand experience goes, all of his came from mediocre one night stands on drunken nights of stress in which alcohol and another equally as intoxicated human being were the only provided solutions. He never felt true ecstasy during any of his intimate encounters. Sure, they felt good enough to wash away the sands of anxiety that continually fogged his brain with "what if's", but he'd never been deeply satiated either.

It seemed satisfaction made up a large percentage of the purpose for intimacy, but no matter how many of those erotica CDs Jeongguk watched, he could never exactly pinpoint what brought each individual  pleasure. It certainly didn't help that it was scripted, making it much less realistic than required for Jeongguk's research purposes, but he didn't wish to delve any further than necessary into the realism of it all either, so it seemed he was at an undeniable stalemate.