Ghostwriter, by Lissa Bryan
Published by The Writer's Coffee Shop
Available on TWCS Amazon and iTunes.
ISBN
Paperback: 978-1-61213-121-4
Ebook: 978-1-61213-122-1
Chapter One
~.~
It wasn’t getting any easier.
Sara sat transfixed, staring at the white screen before her with the flashing cursor over on the left margin of the blank page.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
She shoved her hands into her hair and gave a groan of frustration. Writing a biography shouldn’t be so hard, damn it!
Sara pushed her chair back, went into the kitchen, and found herself doing the same sort of staring at the paltry contents of the refrigerator. She noted her problem was similar: Just like she couldn’t make a meal out of scraps, neither could she make a glowing biography out of the sparse details she’d been given.
Sara was about to give up all hope when she noticed there was a jar of pickles in the back. She opened it and fished out the contents: two limp dill pickle spears of indeterminate age. They could have dated from the time Richard still lived here, though she didn’t remember buying them. Sara wasn’t particularly fond of pickles, but they were just about the last edible thing she had. The rest of the refrigerator’s contents were mainly comprised of desiccated takeout leftovers waiting for trash disposal day, and a permanent colony of rarely used condiments in the refrigerator door.
Sara checked her wallet again, as though the Money Fairy might have made a deposit overnight, or she might have somehow overlooked a wad of cash in the corner. She found only the eleven cents it had contained yesterday. She wouldn’t be able to make it to the end of the month with only ketchup in the refrigerator, but she couldn’t keep breaking into her emergency fund. Sara had carefully calculated each month’s expenses, down to the last dime, yet she was always running short by the third week of the month. She sometimes felt like she was living in a sitcom because every week a new crisis popped up, and it would end up sapping her dwindling savings.
She had a small advance from the publisher, though her rent would quickly eat through it. Her apartment had been affordable when Richard had paid half the expenses, but Sara simply couldn’t handle it alone now. Tomorrow, she was going apartment hunting again. It was her new weekend occupation. Every place she had found thus far was either too expensive, or was in a questionable location. It felt like an exercise as futile as staring at the blank, white screen.
But Sara didn’t have to go hungry. She could turn to her mother and ask for help. The only drawback was the grocery money would be served with a large helping of humble pie. She could see her mother’s smirk already. She’d told Sara she was going to fail and she was right.
Sara decided on the limp pickle spears.
She put her meager dinner onto a paper towel and went back into the living room. Her computer stood on the card table, the white word processor screen’s glare seeming almost accusatory. For two weeks now, she’d been doing the same thing. In the morning, she would wake energized and determined to pound out a chapter or two, and by midday she’d erase it all. She was the literary version of Sisyphus.
It was ridiculous. In her short and uncelebrated career as a journalist, she’d had many assignments she disliked, yet she’d managed to sit down and grind out the necessary word count, even if she did so while gritting her teeth or rolling her eyes.
