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Writer's Blockhead
Featuring characters created by Douglas Adams and Dan O'Bannon & Ronald Shusett.
Resemblance to any actual persons, living and/or dead or imaginary, is coincidental.
Several hours into starting the assignment, Josh could only claim to have discovered new ways to stare at a blank screen. The paper was due in less than two days and all he'd done the week prior was absentmindedly consider what it might be about. He had a premise picked out, and even named a few characters and charted some witty dialogue, but upon sitting at his computer and remaining there until about 5:00 PM, he had yet to type a single letter, save for his name, the course number, and the date.
6:00 came, and still nothing. He could swear the computer was starting to make weird faces and obscene gestures at him. A tall order given it had neither a face nor hands.
Of course, the screen could represent one big, rectangular eye, while the mouse somewhat resembled an ambiguous apendage. One need only image the keyboard as several rows of teeth, and...
It took several self-inflicted slaps to the face to derail this train of thought. An ADD sufferer, Josh knew all too well how prone he was to going off on tangents.
He tried turning off iTunes to see if concentrating on writing the paper rather than listening to the music in the background might help. It only made him want some ambient noise to relieve the monotony, and all that emanated from outside his room was Sasha's sudden string of meowing; no doubt she was in the middle of the hallway, yowling her little brains out like she was lost in the middle of the woods. Edward's meows he could handle - at least she had a cute little squeak of a voice - but Sasha's were not only shrill, but they carried to all parts of the house with ease. Josh wondered how his mother could sleep through her own snoring and yet be woken up by...
There he was, letting his mind drift again.
He looked at the clock in the corner of the screen. Only two minutes had passed since he last checked the time.
He went onto the internet for a few minutes and checked his favorite websites; it being the holiday season, movie news came to a screeching halt, and the webcomics he read regularly would not be updating until later in the evening. He checked his favorite message boards; as usual, nobody had anything of consequence to say. He checked eBay for the sixth time that day to see if anyone had placed a bid on the winged piggy bank he made in his ceramics course; not a one. Finally, he checked a few websites his mother were be horrified to find him exploring were she the type to barge into his bedroom unannounced, or he the type to leave his door open for anyone to do so. Thankfully, neither she nor he were those respective types.
The few minutes spent on the internet went by quickly and soon stretched to half an hour's passing.
At last Josh decided a moment away from the computer was in order. To the cracking of his knees, he got up and hobbled to the bathroom for the usual private duties.
Upon reentering his room, he saw on his bed a raven-haired women, fit and curvaceous, dressed in a leather catsuit so tight it might have been painted on, lying demurely across his bed, casually twirling a throwing knife in one hand.
"Why don't you write that story about the female assassin that you thought about last week?" she asked. "You've got a way with writing strong female characters, y'know."
"I don't even have a name for you yet," Josh replied as he sat back down at the computer, "let alone a story to write you into. Besides, you're probably just going to come off as another clichéd woman warrior type, and I think my instructors have seen their fill of those. Besides, real-world scenarios were never my strong suit."
The next time he looked in her direction, her wardrobe had changed drastically. Her catsuit was replaced by a revealing red ensemble; a precise entwinement of cloth circling her chest, a long loincloth suspended from a gold chain at her waist, armored gaunlets with matching knee-high boots, and a massive sword strapped to her backside.
"You did consider making it a fantasy character," she said, her voice inexplicably acquiring a British accent. "Themes can carry over to different genres, after all."
"Which doesn't change the fact that I don't have a story," said Josh, "and the best characters in the world can't save a flimsy story."
A thick, sticky droplet of saliva suddenly dripped from the ceiling and splattered on his shoulder. Josh eyed it angrily and looked upward at the H.R. Giger creation crawling about the ceiling like an oversized cockroach.
"The teacher loved that last story you did about the movie Aliens," it offered. "Maybe you could do another one like that."
"Absolutely not!" Josh refused. "I swore to myself when I started this paper, no more fanfiction! Granted, I've gotten away with it in the past, but it's only gonna get me so far academically. No, I want to do something original here."
"Like you know anything about originality," a voice from the corner spoke up. Josh turned to see a scruffy young man, mid-20s, in a T-shirt and blue jeans tipping a beer to his lips. "Your so-called 'crowning achievement' of creative writing is based on a goddamned Eagles song, and you haven't even touched that one since August."
"Hey, Hotel California is gonna be the greatest work of my life!" he defended himself. "Once I finish it, they'll practically be shoving me onstage to accept Best Original Screenplay. I just can't work on it during the school year, is all. Now be nice or I'll leave you stranded there forever!"
"You wouldn't," the young man challenged, dropping his beer.
"I could also retool the fight scene in the final act and have you thrown off the cliff instead of your abusive drunken father," Josh retaliated. "Now sit down and shut up."
Raising his hands in surrender, the young man reclaimed his beer and sat down at the feet of the scantilly-clad assassin. He eyeballed her from head to toe and gave her a wink. She rolled her eyes and sat up, scooting over toward Josh.
"Okay, so fanfiction is out," she said. "You can still take influence from something else. You've been doing that since before you started college. What if you wrote something about one of the books you read in class?"
"I didn't read half the books we read in class," said Josh.
"Then how did you get through the discussions?"
"Same way I get through discussions in all my classes: I sit in the corner of the room and never say anything. And when I do have to say something, I BS it."
"And you're passing how?" the young man quipped.
"Quiet, you!" Josh snapped. "So outside of in-class reading, what can I look to?"
All of a sudden, a middle-aged man in a dirty bathrobe with a towel in one hand and a cup of tea in the other burst into the bedroom and frantically shut the door behind him, a rabid chorus of animalistic hooting and hollering erupting from behind him.
"Mr. Gilbert," said Arthur Dent, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who wish to speak to you about the script for Hamlet they've just worked out."
The alien lowered himself from the ceiling by his serpentine tail and made a "gimme" gesture toward the assassin. "Pay up."
The assassin groaned and slapped a couple dollar bills into the alien's clawed hand.
"What's this about?" asked Josh.
"We bet you couldn't go five pages without making a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference," she droned.
"A couple more paragraphs and I wouldn't be smiling," the alien giggled, showcasing his freshly-won cash.
Arthur Dent then discovered another in the long list of unexpected uses for his towel; he stuffed it inside the alien's mouth, silencing the slimy being.
"Perhaps an entry not necessarily related to Hitchhiker's Guide," said Arthur, "but written in the same style as Mr. Adams?"
"It's a thought," Josh admitted with uncertainty. "I mean, I did that once for another class, but looking back on it, I think I really overdid it. It's hard enough to emulate Douglas Adams, but once you've got it, it's too easy to take it too far."
"Oh no, you don't!" a slurring shout interjected from the hall. The door flew open, and the rampaging simian scribes parted for Arthur's friend Ford Prefect, who came stumbling into Josh's bedroom reeking of Ol' Janx Spirit and waving a copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy like a disciplinary paddle. "You're not bloody writing about me again! The last time you tossed me into one of your recycling-bin scribbles, you wrote me as a booze-lusting buffoon with no concern for the well-being of his best friend and travelling companion!"
"Captured you that well, did he?" Arthur queried, slyly taking a sip of his tea.
"He had me talking like bloody Captain Jack Sparrow, for Zark's sake!"
"I saw Pirates of the Caribbean right as I was getting into the Hitchhiker's series!" Josh crossed. "Is it so wrong you remind me of Captain Jack?"
"Either keep me in character," said Ford, "or don't write me up at all, saavy?" He clapped a hand over his mouth as the rest of the room's occupants burst into laughter.
Carving his way through the bedroom door with a highly-decorated glowing sword, a well-built but otherwise average-looking man entered, dressed in a decidedly non-human suit of armor with foreign runes carved into its surface. The monkeys had scattered and retreated in his presence, and the alien on the ceiling shrank backward into a shadier corner of the room.
"Town meeting?" the armored man asked.
"Writer's block," the entire room answered.
"I'm a little busy here, Matt, what do you want?" Josh demanded.
"Uh, here's the thing," Matthew Morrison replied. "The other cast members and I were wondering when you were gonna start writing about us. You've got characters, names, and a story - it's very compelling, we all agree - but you haven't even spoken a word about us yet."
"Oh, so you've got names and a story for them, but not for me!?" the assassin barked, jumping to her feet and drawing her oversized sword.
Arthur Dent backed away and hid behind Ford Prefect, only for Ford Prefect to in turn hide behind Arthur Dent.
The assassin leaped at Josh's head and made a vicious downward swing, but Matt Morrison jumped in her path in time for his living weapon, the glowing sword he'd cut through the door with, to leap into the warrior's hand and clash with the assassin's.
While Josh managed to not even flinch in the face of his near-beheading, the room's other assorted characters squealed in fear and dove for cover as the nameless assassin and her opponent slashed and chopped at one another, their blows expertly deflected by each other's distinctive weapons. Piece by piece, the room paid the consequences for their rage; the bed was sliced in half down the middle; the bookshelves were cut to ribbons, and Josh's manga collection along with them; and the 1:1 scale Terminator 2 replica endoskeleton arm was knocked off the desk and sent flying across the room, punching its way into another wall, narrowly missing the face of Hotel California's lead.
After leaping across the room and back for several seconds, the combatants found themselves planted firmly in the middle of the room, their feet standing perfectly still five feet across from each other while their swords whipped back and forth in the space between them, sending sparks of energy in all directions and putting scratches of varying sizes in the walls.
As much as Josh enjoyed a good swashbucking spectacle, he realized had to put a stop to it before his mother noticed part of the house had suddenly gone missing. Grabbing the stylus from his graphics tablet, he stepped between the fantasy gladiators and thrust the pen forward, blocking their swords as they made a dramatic rush at one another. With a wonderful echoing ring of colliding metal, all weapons came to a stop, locked in place thanks to the surprisingly resiliant plastic pen.
"That's enough out of you two!" he commanded. "Weapons down and sheathed, please!"
With a sigh and a whine, Matt Morrison and the assassin retracted their swords and slipped them back into their holsters.
"Thank you," Josh applauded, setting the pen back on his desk. "Now then, we seem to have a pressing issue at hand here." He turned to the assassin; she pouted, crossed her arms, and turned away from him. "You're obviously feeling neglected because I've gone to the trouble of creating you, designing your outfit, and giving the strength to swing that...leviathan thing you almost took my torso off with, yet I haven't even given you the pleasure of having a name to call yourself or a fight to be fought."
He then turned to Matt Morrison, who stood up straight in respect to his creator, but kept one hand on the hilt of his sword just in case it was needed. "And you're feeling neglected," Josh continued, "because I've created you and a whole host of supporting players, given you all a story, and even planned a whole trilogy of screenplays, but I haven't typed a single word yet. Understandable concerns, to be sure."
He again addressed the assassin, who dropped the mopey teenager routine and gave Josh the deserved eye contact. "You have to understand that characters can be created and exist for years before anybody even does anything with them, so while I might not have anything for you today, that's not to say I won't suddenly come up with something tomorrow. And besides, assassins don't always have names, so that adds an air of mystery to you..." He sing-songed the last few words in order to further sell his pitch, and the assassin seemed to follow along in agreement.
"Hell," he continued, pointing to the scruffy one, "I purposely didn't give this asshole a name!"
The lead of Hotel California politely gave Josh the finger.
To Matt Morrison, he added, "And as for you, you know how busy and tired I get during the school year, so don't be surprised if I don't get to you before I graduate. Besides, I don't even have all the fine details written yet! What motivates you to redeem yourself in the eyes of an alien race that barely knows you? What happens once you've won the war against the armies of the undead? These are things I still need to figure out!" Morrison raised an eyebrow and nodded.
"So," he said, addressed the entire room, "before any of you start giving me crap about 'When are you gonna write about me?' 'Why don't you write about me again?' 'Stop making me do things that are out of character!'...consider, if you please, that I've got more on my mind than any of your fucking problems!"
A knock came at the bedroom door. Josh groaned and opened it a crack to see his mother standing outside his room.
"Is everything okay in there?" she asked. "I thought I heard someone shouting."
"It's nothing," he assured her. "I'm just, uh...acting out a story I'm writing for class."
"Oh, well, carry on then," she said. "Didn't mean to disturb you."
He closed the door and looked around the room. The gang of characters had disappeared, the battle damage had healed, and all was as it had been, right down to the still blank computer screen.
"Don't worry," he said, "I'm already quite disturbed."
