“The Night Draft”

Dawn was a curse.

Julian Blake had tried every productivity hack known to the internet. Sunrise alarms. Blue light blockers. Coffee with butter. Cold showers. Accountability partners. Morning pages. Apps with timers and badges and smug notifications.

None of it worked.

From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Julian existed in a state of conscious paralysis—awake, but incapable. He would sit at his desk, surrounded by all the trappings of a writer’s life—fountain pens, notebooks, an antique typewriter he never used—and feel nothing but dread.

He wasn’t lazy. He wasn’t blocked. He was simply… blank.

But at night—when the sky turned black and the neighborhood windows flickered out one by one—he came alive.

It began in graduate school. His roommates had laughed at his "nocturnal genius" routine until they saw the results: Julian would write three thousand words between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., then pass out with a satisfied sigh, while everyone else dragged their essays into existence with caffeine and despair.

Some people were night owls. Julian was a night creature.

After school, he tried to fight it. Got a job at a small publishing house. Tried writing short stories in the early evening. Drank green tea instead of coffee. Joined a writers’ group that met at 6 p.m. sharp.

None of it helped. His days were deserts.

So he gave in.

He quit the job, moved into a small apartment above a bookstore, and embraced his rhythm. Slept from sunrise to afternoon. Woke up when the sun was on its way out. Ate dinner for breakfast and began writing as soon as the clock struck ten.

That’s when the ideas came.

At night, Julian was brilliant.

He didn’t outline. He didn’t plan. He just… listened.

It was as if a hidden voice emerged from the dark—a storyteller only he could hear. It gave him plots, images, phrases that shimmered like threads in moonlight.

His debut novel, The Mirror Harvest, written almost entirely between midnight and dawn, became a word-of-mouth sensation. Critics called it "haunting and ethereal," "the literary equivalent of a lucid dream." He was called the next David Mitchell. The next Murakami. The next someone.

And yet… he could never explain how he wrote it.

He didn’t remember planning the twists. He barely remembered writing the ending. He reread passages and thought, That doesn’t even sound like me.

But it was him. Or at least, some version of him that only woke up after dark.

He called it “the Night Draft.”

Then came the silence.

After his second novel sputtered into mixed reviews, Julian spent nearly a year trying to write again. He kept the same hours. Lit the same candles. Drank the same bourbon. But the voice didn’t come.

He sat night after night in front of the glowing screen, staring at blinking cursors and half-sentences. The darkness around him wasn’t inspiring—it was suffocating.

Maybe the muse had left. Maybe the first book was a fluke. Maybe his brain had finally adjusted to being awake during unnatural hours and decided to punish him.

Whatever the reason, he stopped trying.

He worked part-time at the bookstore downstairs. Read voraciously. Avoided interviews. Let the royalty checks thin into anxiety.

Then, one night in early winter, something changed.

Julian woke at midnight to a sound—a faint tapping—like a finger on glass.

His apartment had no windows on the street side. The only pane was in the study, facing the alley behind the bookstore. It was narrow, and dirty, and nothing ever happened there.

But the tapping continued.

He pulled on a sweater, padded barefoot to the study, and opened the door.

Nothing.

The alley was empty. No wind. No branches. No rain.

He turned back to the room—and froze.

There was a single page on his desk.

Typed.

Not handwritten. Not something he remembered. Just… there.

His laptop was still off.

The page read:

“You built the door. You forgot the key. But it’s still here, waiting.”

He sat down, heart thudding. The font wasn’t his usual one. The style was almost… foreign.

But it sounded like the Night Draft.

That night, Julian wrote 4,000 words.

The story came rushing back. It wasn’t a novel he’d started. It wasn’t anything he remembered brainstorming. It was something other. A woman searching for a house that didn’t exist. A forest that grew out of memory. A mirror that only reflected who you were when no one was watching.

The voice was back.

Each night, another page would appear before he began. He never saw it arrive. Never caught it in motion. But every time, it offered a prompt. A sentence. A warning. A dare.

“This time, don’t look away.”

“She already knows your name.”

“Be careful what you rewrite.”

He didn’t question it. He didn’t care. He was writing again.

A few weeks in, Julian noticed something odd.

Some of the scenes he was writing—locations, conversations, small details—felt familiar. Not from books. From life.

There was a scene where the protagonist, Anna, finds an old man selling keys on a train platform. It wasn’t in any notes. But after writing it, Julian remembered something: when he was twelve, he had dreamed that exact moment. Down to the color of the man’s coat.

Another scene involved a photograph of a woman in a red coat, standing at the edge of a frozen lake. He didn’t know why he wrote it. But two days later, while sorting through a box of old photos from his parents’ attic, he found the image. Same woman. Same coat. No explanation.

The novel wasn’t just fiction.

It was… memory.

But whose?

The pages kept appearing.

Sometimes they were beautiful. Sometimes disturbing.

One night, the page read:

“She’s watching you now. Try not to blink.”

He wrote anyway.

But that night, he felt something behind him. A weight. A presence.

When he turned, nothing was there.

When he turned back, the page on his screen had changed.

Now it read:

“Too slow.”

Julian started sleeping less.

Not by choice.

The moment he tried to nap during the day, his dreams turned violent—static and mirrors and things clawing at doors.

He looked in the mirror and saw someone else’s expression.

His neighbor said she heard typing all night, even though he hadn’t touched the keys.

One night, he unplugged his laptop, locked the study, and left town for a friend’s cabin in Vermont.

He didn’t tell anyone.

At 2:47 a.m., he woke up with ink on his fingers.

There was a page on the nightstand.

“Running is a form of writing, too. But less honest.”

When he finally finished the novel—some 115,000 words later—he cried.

Not because it was done.

Because it felt like saying goodbye to someone he would never understand.

He named the novel The House That Writes Itself.

He sent it to his agent with no explanation. Just a file.

It sold in six days.

A bidding war. A seven-figure advance. Foreign rights within a week.

Critics called it his best work. “As if the book dreamed itself into existence,” one reviewer wrote. “Reading it feels like remembering something that never happened to you.”

He did interviews. Radio. Podcasts. Late-night television.

They asked him about his process. His themes. His inspiration.

He smiled and said what he always said:

“I write at night. That’s when I hear the story best.”

Now it’s been a year.

He’s moved to a new apartment. Different city. More windows.

He writes sometimes, during the day. Little things. Reviews. Essays.

But it’s not the same.

There are no pages on his desk.

No voice.

No Night Draft.

Until tonight.

At 3:13 a.m., he woke to a familiar tap.

The window. Not the door.

He rose, heart already racing, and found a single page taped to the glass, flapping gently in the night air.

He peeled it free, unfolded it.

No words.

Just a mirror.

Drawn in pen.

And beneath it, a note:

This time, it’s your turn to speak.

— J.B.

His initials.

In handwriting he didn’t recognize.

He walks back to the desk, turns on the lamp, and opens a blank document.

The cursor blinks.

And he begins.