Gemotions

Maya stared at the half-finished novel on her laptop screen, the words swimming before her eyes. The deadline loomed, a monstrous presence in the corner of her mind. The plot had become convoluted, the characters felt flat, and her inspiration had vanished. She longed for the blissful escape of blank pages.

A message pinged, a notification on her social media feed. A link to another writer’s blog. Curious, she clicked it. The blog post described a novel, the plot points, the characters… it was eerily familiar. Then she saw the excerpt. The words were the same, or nearly so. Her breath hitched. The exhaustion she felt morphed into shock. She wanted to scream. Instead, she just turned off her laptop, and fell back on her bed.