The flashing black cursor continued to taunt him by blinking non-stop against the blank white page. How long had it sat there, immobile? How long had it waited to fly across the screen trailing a line of text behind it, prose to inspire, words to live by, or even just something to pay the rent? Julian Soul didn't know. He knew it couldn't have been long—maybe five or ten minutes—but time was doing its disappearing trick, slipping into that vortex making it impossible to know for sure.
It wasn't writers block per-se, just a complete inability to put hands on keys and start typing. Anything would do. At this point he'd have been thrilled to type a page of complete gibberish as long as his fingers were moving, his keyboard tapping with that musical quality all writers love to hear, and the damned cursor would stop flashing, waiting for what came next.
No, this was a special kind of writers block. This was the focus issue.
He knew the story he wanted to tell, knew it well. Had a title, even knew how it would end. Yes even the great mystery/romance author Julian Soul, the master behind Soul Glow, Heart and Soul, Night Heat, the soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture Naughty, and fifteen other consecutive New York Times bestsellers, occasionally went into one of them not knowing the ending. But this one hadn't eluded him—hadn't left his mind like a lover slipping out from the sheets before dawn leaving nothing so much as a rose behind—it was still there, front and center in his consciousness. He was just unable to write it. He suspected that if he had the first line, if he forced it out like starting a brand new ketchup bottle, the rest would flow easily. But even that rational rang hollow. Julian knew his problem wasn't so much of what he wrote, but where he wrote it.
Like the old joke said, it boiled down to location, location, location. He couldn't focus in his home office, the apartment complex was being renovated, and trying to write to the sound of jackhammers was impossible. He'd tried all the usual suspects; coffee shops (too cliché), the library (too noisy, believe-it-or-not), bookstores (sure, just like Stephen King could show up at the local Barnes and Noble and write his next book without interruption). There was even an ill-fated attempt to use the quiet room at First United Methodist, but somehow writing erotica in a church just felt... wrong. It had given him another idea for a story, but still... He visited parks, cemeteries, the food court at the mall, bars, restaurants, the university, anywhere he thought he could sit and write. And all those places were fine, except...
Julian Soul was a people watcher.
He'd never realized it before, but somewhere along the way, he'd become an avid follower of people. People doing things, walking, talking, eating, it didn't matter. He sat with rapt attention hour after hour watching them. Occasionally his subconscious would make up little back stories for them, little scenarios that would explain why they were, where they were, when they were.
But none of that translated to the flashing cursor on the blank page.
His current attempt involved house sitting for a friend and his wife who'd gone out of town for week and needed someone to keep an eye on their pair of tabby cats,a request Julian couldn't take seriously.
Maxwell and Prudence (the cats, not the couple), were named after a couple of the Fab Four's songs. And while their names were all Beatles, the cats' attitudes were pure Metallica. They were easily two of the meanest felines to come from the species, and Julian suspected the only thing he was really required to do for them after they'd spent a long night caterwauling was to open the front door for them least they knock it down. But still, he'd put out their food and water as Glenn and Holly had requested, treats in the afternoon if he was in, even the occasional quick scratch behind the ears, just to show he wasn't completely emasculated by them. Otherwise, he gave the pair a wide berth.
Tonight, after setting them free to roam the neighborhood and wreak havoc, he'd grabbed a beer and moved his laptop upstairs to a small roll-top desk in the attic. This proved to be far enough from the wireless router to prevent him from getting on line, (something about the copper pipes that crisscrossed the attic floor, he suspected) and far removed from the distraction Glenn's XBOX ONE had been the last three nights. Tonight, he was going to write, dammit. Tonight he would force the opening line out of his mind and onto the page at last, and the rest of the story would surely flow.
But the cursor stubbornly remained where it was, blinking "failure" in its harsh Morse code.
Julian sighed in frustration and popped the top on the beer. He'd promised himself no refills until something was on the damn page, so starting on the brew so quickly in the evening was dangerous. He was distracted from the cool can by an inhuman scream (to call it a noise simply doesn't cover it) from outside. Probably one of the cats, but what kind of sitter would he be if he didn't at least check?
He moved to the rear of the attic and threw the shade up over the window he'd opened earlier this evening to allow the attic to air out a bit before he sequestered himself. It overlooked the rear of the house, the back yard and the backs of the houses on the next block over. Glenn and Holly's side of the street was uphill from the rest of the neighborhood, and their back yard sloped dramatically to the fence line, but the downhill lie kept going. From his vantage point in the window Julian could see over the fence, into the neighboring yard, the back of their house, and if wasn't for an ancient elm in their front yard, the next street over as well.
And there on the patio in the adjoining backyard was a naked couple. Julian did a classic double take; the beer, the writing and even Maxwell and Prudence temporarily forgotten. The couple was younger, fit and sexy even from a distance. They were sitting together in a chair on their patio—or rather, he was sitting in the chair, she was sitting on his lap facing away from him with her legs spread on either side of his. The scream must have come when she lowered herself onto him, an act she was repeating again and again.
The man had short spiked blonde hair and from what Julian could see, a physique like a Greek god's offspring. The woman was shorter, with short dark hair that looked almost blue-black in the moonlight. She had small perky breasts and even perkier nipples, for the weather had taken a turn for the cooler this week. Occasionally the man's hands would travel up her sides to caress those breasts and nipples, but always guiding her body back down on top of his. She moaned again, and Julian confirmed the wailing earlier was certainly not a cat.
He stood a man torn. One part wanted nothing more than to give the couple their presumed privacy and get back to writing. But another part, a more primal part of his brain needed to see this. How often do you get this kind of opportunity? How many times did you wish and pray for something just like this when you were a kid? To open your bedroom window and see a naked woman, let alone a naked woman in the midst of what sounded like a really good screw? Fuck the novel, this was people watching!
