Milkwood Dash 280913 Banal

The prompt was “Banal”, which is not a word any writer wants to hear, and a hard one to use as a prompt. I opened a blank Word document and stared at the empty page. That moment of dread at the sight of the blank page provoked an idea.

 

A white screen.

Blank.

Devoid of content.

The scariest thing I know.

Perhaps it would look better if I changed the font. Something a bit more interesting than damned Calibri. Does that make a difference?   Maybe. Dammit these margins are all wrong. Gods, I am so bored with this wallpaper. I’ll get a new one from APOD. An exploding supernova pictured by Hubble. Yeah, that will do.

But the screen is still blank. Maybe I should fire up the music player. Yeah, that’ll help.

…

And the screen is still blank.

Maybe I could look at some old files. Work on something I already started. File, Open, browse to folder… Yeah, that one. Haven’t looked at that one in a while.

Now the page isn’t blank. But, damn all those green underlines.

Gods! What was I smoking when I wrote this? If this was a slice of bread, I could use it as a carpet tile. Stale, stale, stale! Yeah, yeah, autosave it. Waste a few more kilobytes. Ye gods, this is dull. That character is one you recycled twice already, and it wasn’t worth it the first time. Stick a deer-stalker hat on and it would be Sherlock Holmes, only with pointy teeth. Like that’s never been done before. Delete, delete, delete. You will be deleted. Gods, now I sound like a fucking cyberman. Maybe I should make him an android. Can androids be vampires? An android detective? Nah, that was done in a TV show you watched years ago. Come on, think, there must be an original twist somewhere…

Delete, delete, delete.

It’s a white screen…