Dancing In The Dark

It’s one thirty in the morning, and I’m sitting alone in my living room watching Mad Men. Friday night has been and gone, and my company for the evening is a laptop and a six pack of beer. I think about how well Bruce Springsteen captured this feeling in Dancing in the Dark. Welcome to frustrated inertia. I’m tired and bored of myself.
     So, the life of a single guy in his early twenties. After a point, circumstances force you to spend the party nights by yourself. After all, leave school or a well-established job and suddenly you find that you and your friends all have different schedules. And that kind of sucks.
     But there is something good in all this. I’m restless and I’m pacing. I don’t know what I want, but it isn’t what I’m doing now. I open my laptop, unsure of what I’m looking for, and I catch sight of a word document tucked away on my desktop. The Silhouette and the Sacrifice. The unwieldy title of the forth book in the series I have been working on for over a year. The last couple of weeks I have taken a bit of a break. But there’s a feeling in my chest that tells me things might be about to change. I stand up to get another beer and suddenly I know there’s someone else in the room with me. And the excitement is mounting. Just out of my line of sight, Boone Shepard, the bespectacled, neatly dressed intrepid journalist who sits at the heart of my series, is leaning against the wall, arms crossed, eyebrow raised, and a slight smile on his face. As he always is. I don’t hear him ask the question, and I don’t need to; I know what the answer is.
     ‘Yeah,’ I tell him. ‘Time to get back to work.’
     I turn around, open my laptop and our adventure continues.