write like you're running out of time

He needed to invent a plot, a story, a character, somehow words continued to spill onto the page but none of them succeeded in creating what the author actually needed to write - a short story of one thousand to three thousand words addressing one of five prompts.

One prompt stuck out as one he could use to create a sort of metafiction: Write a story about someone who’s running out of time. After all, the actual prompts he had wanted to address, someone being haunted or the perspective of a corpse, took time he didn't feel he had to write out properly - he would have to do research for the corpse prompt, although the three hundred some words he had already written for that were based on existing knowledge he had about death and decay from his forensic entomology class. 

Still, the writer amused himself imagining his life as a story, albeit one he knew would bore audiences if they actually read the day-to-day minutiae of what life was like as an unemployed twenty four year old university graduate with limited job prospects and statistics against him. Somewhere around 85% of autistic adults with Bachelor's degrees remained unemployed six months after graduating. The writer read that somewhere, though he doesn't care enough to dig up the source. Having graduated had made him more relaxed with citing sources, since most of the debates he engages with are against Redditors who won't read anything he links regardless of if he goes through the trouble of finding sources to back up his claims. Most of the time the writer doesn't bother.

 This writer has been unemployed from December through November - eleven months post-graduation, he's still unemployed. Job hunting, soul searching, the writer writes to distract himself from reality, from the truth that he has no idea what will happen next in his life. Sometimes his mom reads his tarot cards, as though those could truly predict the future. The future remained a blank page, but at least the current page blinking back at him didn't remain blank - he filled it with words, with too many dash-filled sentences about how he doubted he made protagonist material. Then again, don't most protagonists endear the readers by being flawed? Not too perfect? But having a boring life isn't exactly a flaw so much as it's a statement of how one's world currently is. 

Being unable to decide on a prompt to fulfil, invent characters to be haunted when the writer's life has been haunted, that's not so much a flaw as it is a sign of trying too hard. Still, time is running out to respond to the other prompts, to write decent short stories that fit the wordcount, and this story (if it can even be called a story, truly it's more a stream of consciousness) is not even halfway at the word limit either. The writer will continue to follow his mind's wanderings, hope perhaps it may lead him to a plot or inspiration of some sort. So far he's been typing and deleting sentence after sentence, this lack of inspiration feeling like a sentence. Maybe he's just trying too hard and this week the words won't come.

This week, the world falls. The season happens to be fall, which fits well with the author's mood, he supposes. Write about someone who's running out of time, that's this week's prompt, and I wrote another poem about fall in another document, about goldenrods and dead leaves. That poem I might send to a literary journal - I'm unsure yet. I have some more hope now, more than I did earlier today. My job coach sent me an internship with an application due in sixteen days. As per the prompt, I am indeed running out of time. I've written a cover letter but I'm not confident in it yet. 

Why is everything so damn difficult? Today is Thursday, and I am indeed running out of time to address any of the other prompts for this week, as well as not having enough words for this too. I'm just rambling. Today I will attend a chamber of commerce expo later this morning, wherein I will once more hope a job might materialize by handing out my resume, shaking hands, enjoying free business merchandise (probably enough free pens to last me another year), and also I believe this event is providing lunch. Free lunch! That is truly why I plan on attending (well, and it's a reason to leave the house and meet people). 

I've been writing a lot of possible literary journal pieces. Many had deadlines that have passed by now, but some are still in the future or accept pieces without deadlines. I just sent the one I wrote yesterday to a queer plant journal ALOCASIA. I log my writing on a website called Submission Grinder.

I've attended the chamber of commerce expo - as I expected, no leads on jobs occurred, although I did hand one drug testing company my resume. I'm running out of time to invent a story for this week's Reedsy prompt, to write enough to hit the word count. They did have free lunch, a pizza place catered it and one man was giving samples of his cannoli, which I made sure to both try and grab a business card from him to one day take my dad there. I also found a drug testing company that works with but not for one of the lab corporations I had already applied to, as well as an upholstery shop that again worked with a company I applied and did not get a job from. That shouldn't be surprising by now - all I ever seem to do is apply for jobs and internships and not get them. 

My grandmother said she has a good long term feeling about my career, and my mom read my tarot cards the other day and they said something similar, but hope hurts to maintain. I do it regardless, and I'll never know if I never try. I guess writing is a form of hoping too - hoping my future self will read this and laugh at all my past worries because they will so foreign to that version of me.