May 3 - Writer's Block Party

Whenever she couldn't think of any new ideas (usually about once a week), Lucinda would announce a Writer's Block Party and invite the other writers from her apartment complex over to her place, where they would drink and talk about their latest projects and try to get their ideas flowing. But mostly they would just drink and hang out. There was Lucinda who wrote erotic horror screenplays, Maggie who wrote children's books, Fatima who wrote detective novels, and Rebecca who did inspirational writing.
Their gatherings had started out as more serious weekly meetings they'd called Write Club (The first rule of Write Club was you did not talk about Write Club.). Their intention was to do serious critiques of each other's work and offer each other feedback, but they had all individually come to the unspoken conclusion that none of them really had the heart/nerve/courage/whatever to give anyone else anything other than praise and encouragement for a piece they shared or a kind and understanding ear when they shared frustrations about rejection letters and the like. And so Write Club quickly (d)evolved from weekly meetings to weekly Writer's Block Parties.
Lucinda had just finished cleaning up after one Writer's Block Party. She was still hungry and there was nothing in her apartment besides spaghetti (no sauce), flour, canned yams, and a container of cottage cheese that had already expired but not so long ago that she felt she had to throw it away just yet, so she left it in the fridge and went down to the 7-11.
The cashier, whom she must have seen a hundred times in the last month, didn't register any recognition of her as he beeped her Combos and chili dogs. She was putting her change in her purse when she dropped a few coins. Bending over to pick them up, she saw a pen on the floor and grabbed it, too. She thought about asking the cashier if it was his, but then figured, Screw him. Guy doesn't want to recognize me, he won't get his pen back. And this made her feel pretty pleased with herself, and then she felt embarrassed that she was so pleased with herself, and by the time she got back to her apartment, she'd forgotten all about it. She poured herself another coffee mug full of wine to accompany her food, got in her favorite chair, and turned on the TV.
When she woke up (late) the next morning, it felt like God has used her head as a stress ball. It wasn't until after coffee, water, a couple of Advil, a shower, and a breakfast burrito that she found her journal on her bedside table along with the pen she'd found at 7-11. As she picked it up, she realized that she'd done some writing at some point last night. As it always was after she'd had a few drinks, her penmanship was erratic but legible.
Her drunken writing was occasionally amusing, but almost always worthless; however, this time around she was at first incredulous, then impressed, and then blown away with what she'd come up with: finally, the outline for an ending to Blood Lust. She'd been unable for weeks to finish her lesbian vampire screenplay sober, but apparently last night a drunken Lucinda had knocked out of the park.
Over the next couple of days, she fleshed it out (so to speak) and submitted it to her agent, who was very happy with it.
And the same thing happened after the following two Writer's Block Parties. She finished off the evening with Combos, chili dogs, and red wine, and then woke up the next morning with a debilitating hangover and a solid outline for whatever scene she'd been laboring to finish.
Like a superstitious baseball player going through a hot streak, she was obsessive about not doing anything to jinx it. Every week she followed the same habits religiously: Writer's Block Party, Combos, chili dogs, red wine, sleep. Yet she was also curious, as well as generous. And so about a month later, after several mugs of red wine, she tentatively shared her experiences with the rest of the group and divulged her theory that somehow--as ridiculous as this sounds and I would never say this sober--the pen was behind it.
Predictably, the others teased her about it, but they were also--after a few more bottles of wine--curious.
Maggie was the first to volunteer to take the pen home and try it out, but only after Lucinda made her swear on everything she held dear that she wouldn't lose it. She held her hand up with mock seriousness and swore. She also followed every word of Lucinda's instructions down to the pre-sleep menu of red wine, Combos, and chili dogs.
The next morning, Maggie woke up with two things: a soul crushing hangover, and a sloppily rendered yet masterfully imagined ending for Chicken Scratch, a children's book she'd been struggling to finish about DJ Feathers, a shy but but talented chicken who learns to believe in himself through the power of hip-hop.
The next week, Fatima took the pen home. And though--like the other women--she didn't have any memory of doing so, she apparently used it that night to come up with an ending for Dial M for Masala, the latest in her Raja Pradesh series about a retired Bombay police detective turned curry chef who is constantly called upon by his former colleagues to help them solve murder cases that always seem to revolve around food.
Rebecca was the next to try the pen, but she was leery. A devout Christian, she specialized in writing modern updates of Biblical parables for www.dailydevotion.com, a website dedicated to the retelling of the Bible's greatest stories in a more contemporary setting.
Over the last several months, she'd been struggling to find some--she didn't want to say inspiration--new ideas for her stories and according to everyone else in their group, the pen seemed to have all the answers. But she was hesitant about using it. For one thing, she thought the whole thing was ridiculous. But at the same time she was actually kind of afraid of the pen. She felt it was unholy, a manifestation of the devil (either literally or as a metaphor) tempting her with the easy way out.
Even still, she reluctantly took it home with her. Per Lucinda's instructions, she had a couple of chili dogs, some Combos, and a glass of red, and set it on the notebook on her bedside table. Then she tried to will herself to fall asleep, but she couldn't. The pen was too much of a distraction. After a second and then a third glass of wine, she threw it out the window and promptly fell asleep.
The next morning her notebook was empty, but in her miraculously hangover-free head, she had an idea for a(n admittedly autobiographical) story about not giving in to temptation. She wrote it up that morning and it was very well received on dailydevotion.
The rest of the group wasn't nearly as impressed with Rebecca's story as her readers were. In fact, it took them quite some time before they forgave her for throwing out the pen, but the process of forgiving was helped along by the continued inspiration the pen gave them in its absence:
Maggie wrote a spin-off of Chicken Scratch about DJ Feathers' friend Sasha, a young pony who learns to stand on his own feet and win the big race without depending on a supposedly magical set of horseshoes to help him along.
Fatima came up with an outline for a novel called Keema Karma which took Raja Pradesh in a very different, magical realism inflected direction. It roughly echoed the plot of Maggie's horseshoe story, substituting an enchanted curry recipe for the horseshoes and a cooking contest for the horse race, but the underlying message of believing in yourself was the same.
Lucinda changed the names and a few of the details of their experiences with the pen, and rewrote them as a screenplay for The Devil's Quill, an erotic thriller that debuted on Cinemax a few months later.
As for the pen, it landed intact on the sidewalk below Rebecca's apartment the night she threw it out the window. It's still somewhere on that street or down the block, waiting to be picked up again.