Stuck under stories

The door protested with a loud squeak when the Story Crafter returned.

A layer of dust covered all the surfaces, including the latest story, “Cursed Kiss”, which was supposed to be a short and fun way to try her hand in writing a romance. It was fun, but it wasn’t very short. At 30K it was the second longest story she ever wrote. Not quite the novel length yet, but with the changes she figured out by now and with and actually adding the descriptions she was too impatient to write in the first time, she knew it would be.

Not that she felt like working on that now.

She scanned the pile of other first drafts. And an outline of another romance novel that she promised herself that she wouldn’t start writing until she self-edited the other stories.

But did it really help her? Sure, life happened and that was the biggest part of not being able to write lately, but what if her desire to be a responsible writer and finally finish something had something to do with that too?

She made some space on the desk and prepared a blank page. She reached for a quill, but she fiddled with it instead of writing.

It did feel like she just didn’t have any ideas - a foreign feeling that she discovered in the last few months. But she knew it wasn’t true. Apart from the stories she wrote, she had plenty of stories planned for later. She could just pick and tinker with one of them.

But the unfinished stories simply took too much space. Not only on the desk, but in her mind too.

She sighed and put the quill down.

Wrapped in her warm cloak, she squeezed through the small door on the other side of the room.

The ground was covered in a fresh layer of snow.

When she reached the clearing, she ignored the market stalls and the big building on the side, instead she continued through a narrow path to a cabin hidden in the woods.

Bright orange light filtering through the windows let her know that at least some of her friends were in.

She shook the snow off of her boots and went inside.

The writers sat on the armchairs around the fireplace, some looking through their manuscripts, some just sipping tea and looking into the fire.

“So, is anyone writing the Christmas short stories this year?” One of them asked.

“I wish, but I couldn’t write anything in months.” Story Crafter shook her head, sitting on one of the empty spots with her own cup of tea.

“Yeah, I don’t think so either.” Another writer said.

After few minutes of confirming that none of them could do it, they started coming up with ideas.

“Actually,” the Story Crafter joined, “I could figure out something with the characters from the trilogy I have planned…”

She picked up one of the blank pages and a quill from a cabinet, and wrote the first sentence.

“Yay! I finally wrote something!” She smiled, working on the next sentence. The words did not come as easily as they used to, but they did come.

She took the page to her writing haven and continued, not every day, after all she got Christmas to prepare at her own house, but every few days.

It was short, but she did finish with a few days to spare.

The day before the Christmas Eve she wandered back to the cabin and spent the day exchanging the stories with the other writers who absolutely would not be writing any.