No, I’m not talking about painal.

For weeks I’ve been unable to write any fiction. It’s been really tough on me — the job searching, the blog post writing, the writing of new posts for LinkedIn to keep my engagement numbers up, and of course all the job hunting. But recently I was feeling better than I had in a while — maybe because I had two days of phone interviews in a row, right after a video interview at a virtual career fair — and I opened my Holiday Heat folder on Google Drive.

I’m not sure if I’ve talked in the past about this, and I’m too lazy to look it up, but I got my first set of bifocals early in the summer. I really needed them; my close-in vision was getting progressively worse. I thought about maybe writing a story about Bifocals at the Monitor Liberation Day, but I knew that, since I was starting to write December’s stories, I needed to get some closure for my characters. I started instead with National Christmas Lights Day, and I brought back Fred and Shonda for one more visit — one that included a particularly-hard spanking.

I felt like I was forcing the story a little bit, but sometimes when you want to get your writing kickstarted you just have to force it. I forced the first few paragraphs, and the rest of the story — all 2100-plus words of it — came tumbling out.

Thirty stories to go. A deadline of October 31. I can do this.

I damn well better.